Firefox Takes the Performance Crown From Chrome

diegocg writes "Recent browser benchmarks are showing surprising results: in 'a geometric mean of all four performance-based categories: Wait Times, JavaScript/DOM, HTML5/CSS3, and Hardware Acceleration,' Firefox 22 'pulls off an upset, replacing the long-time performance champion Google Chrome 27 as the new speed king.' (Other browsers benchmarked were IE10, Opera 12, and Opera Next.) With these results, and Firefox developers focusing in fixing the UI sluggishness, can this be the start of a Firefox comeback, after years of slow market share decline?"

Comments

Adblock plus

[i kan reed]

Real adblock that stops unnecessary downloads makes more performance difference at this point, than any sort of rendering engine chances. It has the nice side effect of limiting how much tracking of you goes on too.

Re:Adblock plus

[Trepidity]

Another vote for Privoxy. I recently switched to Privoxy from Ghostery, and have found it much faster. The addon-based ad-blockers seem to have some overhead, because they have to traverse the DOM and generally interact with the browser's rendering pipeline. I found my RAM usage in Firefox significantly declined, and the browser got much more responsive, after I removed Ghostery. Privoxy does the same job in some fast C code that runs in its own process, outside the browser.

As a side note, it's the modern descendent of the Internet Junkbuster, so has been around just about as long as internet advertising has been.

Re:Sadly, no ...

[Anonymous Coward]

god-fucking-dammit how many freaking times do we have to tell you that firefox is not disabling that option, its simply hiding it from the options menu. You can still disable javascript through the about:config menu (javascript.enable) and addons like noscript.

Re:Sadly, no ...

[MightyYar]

Firefox has addons, several of which will let you disable js if that is your thing. NoScript is a popular one.

Re:Sadly, no ...

[squiggleslash]

There's nothing stopping you from sticking with Firefox 22. While later versions will have more support for more modern standards, if you're not going to run Javascript then it's not going to matter a whole lot what the new standards are.

In the meantime, understand too that while Firefox 23+ may not provide a UI to disable JS across the browser, it is still a low-level setting for now in about:config, and Firefox continues to be the only browser that supports extensions - meaning that options like YesScript, NoScript, and to a lesser extent Ad-block+ will always be available to provide the functionality you're after.

Re:Geometric mean?

[Trepidity]

To be more specific, the geometric mean has the property that a 5% change in factor A and a 5% change in factor B have the same influence on the result, regardless of their units.

Re:Sadly, no ...

[DragonWriter]

and Firefox continues to be the only browser that supports extensions

Firefox may support a more robust extension model than other browsers, but it certainly isn't the only browser that supports extensions.

Re:Why I cut back on Firefox, why would I use just

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, that's exactly what chromes profiles do. I've got 2 different chrome windows right now, both logged into their own gmail accounts. Now, if you want them in the same window, that's not possible. The only way to do that is with gmail's "switch user" feature, but that's gmail specific, and doesn't isolate all of your data (cookies, history, etc) the way chrome profiles do.

Re:Chrome? Why the love?

[flimflammer]

Firefox is funded by the same search giant.