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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?"
What is the mathematical justification for using the geometric mean?
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.
I don't get the love for Chrome among geeks. Why would anyone willingly use a browser funded by a search giant who makes money off of scouring your privacy and already has a history of handing things over to the NSA?
Neat test but I think the summary could at least clarify that the test system is Windows 8 64 Bit. It doesn't really mean a whole lot to me when I'm running a 64 bit distribution of GNU/Linux. Also the tests are selected by Tom's Hardware as a suite ... some of these tests are fairly meaningless to me and I feel like something like cold start time should be more heavily weighted than, say, hardware acceleration performance. The wait time on start up affects everyone and is unavoidable where hardware acceleration is nice but also not something I focus on. Also, why is a topic like "security" included in a "performance" test? I think standards compliance and security should be separated out to their own scores.
Is anyone reading this actually using Windows 8?
My work here is dung.
I use it because it respects my privacy and freedom, not that i ever complained about firefox being slow, but speed was never the main factor of my decision to use firefox instead of chrome.
I regularly see my Firefox cracking a gig of memory. Then after a few days use it often starts getting weird. Then when I try to quit it the damn thing won't go away so I have to do a "Force Quit". I primarily keep using it because firebug is so good.
They like it for the same reason non-geeks do: it is very fast and stable, and it doesn't seem to leak memory like Firefox.
That said, I abandoned it because they got rid of their support for vertical tabs.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I cut back on Firefox because it froze up on me too many times on sites with Flash - even with Flashblock enabled and all software updated. I do most of my surfing on Chrome now.
However, the reason why I typically run three browsers at a time at work is this: one for my corporate ID (IE), one for web surfing and personal sites (Chrome), and one for my alternate IDs (Firefox). I know Google Chrome is capable of split personalities (i.e. Incognito mode); if there was one feature that would get me to consolidate to a single browser it would be the ability to run multiple instances as different personalities at the same time.
Geometric mean is useful for comparing when the expected range or units of values is different. For example, startup time is measured in seconds, but BrowsingBench numbers are things like the unitless 6646. The arithmetic mean would fail to "normalize" these values and give disproportionate weight to some over others; the geometric mean is one way of trying to account for this.
R.Mo
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.
On all my systems I start the system when I boot up and it stays running pretty much indefinitely. When I am done with the system for the day I just hibernate the system. I just care how well the browser works over time and that it doesn't go nuts memory wise. Since my laptop has 16GB of ram I worry very little about the browser.
I do like hardware acceleration a lot though. What I find is that it translates to better battery usage and the system runs faster while also running longer.
Overall I care about performance, standard compliance, security, responsiveness, and to some extent memory usage. At this point though it doesn't really matter if you choose Firefox or Chrome.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
Firefox has addons, several of which will let you disable js if that is your thing. NoScript is a popular one.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
They looked at memory efficiency, and Firefox was generally solid. For heaven's sake, RTFA before you complain.
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Chrome supports multiple "users". Each has their own set of cookies, bookmarks, sync settings, etc. I use it all the time to split my browsing between work and home.
TLS 1.1 support that isn't wrapped up in Internet Explorer for one and the DEV versions now have support for TLS 1.2. Firefox needs to get with the program (Firefox 23 will have TLS 1.1 support)
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Start up speed? It seems to be fast enough on any browser with a laptop from 2009, so I don't see it as relevant thing to measure. Or how many times per week do you restart a browser?
Get off of XP and onto Linux or Windows 7 or Windows 8 or OS/X for that matter. Stability problems with Flash are played out.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
It doesn't matter that much if one is slightly faster in Javascript or rendering when Firefox will halt up for 5-10 seconds rendering a new tab. Maybe it's faster than Chrome, but if I have to wait for it, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how much Firefox devs work on "UI sluggishness" if it's a single thing can lock up all input to the browser.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
It's not perfect but Multifox provides the ability to use seperate environments within Firefox. As an alternative you can manually create launchers for Firefox with the -P flag.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I still use FireFox as my browser but I agree, in the last two or three versions I've seen FireFox crashing and restarting much more than it ever did before and in the last six months it seems to me that FireFox is not as responsive as it once was.
Also I've seen at least once a day (most of the time 3 or more times) "the flash plugin has crashed" or "the flash plugin has stopped responding" and I have to click "Stop plugin" to continue. I'm not saying this is a FireFox problem as it could be a Flash plugin problem or a problem between Flash and the page I've looking at but all in all these problems just add up to an annoying user experience.
Hardware acceleration gives you nice smooth scrolling. It is also vital for Firefox because they changed the way images are decoded in a misguided attempt to reduce memory consumption. Instead of decoding images are as they are loaded they are now decoded as they are displayed, so unless you have top-notch hardware with full acceleration scrolling judders like mad on pages with medium sizes images.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
So what's your theory on why Tom's Hardware would change their ranking system specifically to engineer a Firefox victory?
I know people joke about never reading TFA, but knee-jerk cynicism is no replacement for actual knowledge. If you're going to accuse someone of deceit, you really ought to at least check on who's making them claim in the first place.
Mozilla is taking the same direction that google is at this point. I used to love Fx, but now I tolerate it. With the asinine version number bumping, the UI tweaks for no particular purpose and them taking their eye off of the ball when it comes to real improvements.
Seems like I should just use Chrome because the Mozilla devs seem to want to turn Fx into Chrome.
>> Chrome supports multiple "users".
The "switch to different user" isn't quite what I'm looking for. I want something that allows me to be signed on to Gmail and other services as three different users (day job, personal, side business, etc.) at the same time.
The lack of a clear and rock solid standard for how to render the HTML/CSS combination is probably part of the problem of "never been able to draw webpages correctly". Shouldn't I get a pixel perfect identical display from the same web site content, on each different browser? If not, and left up to the interpretation of the browser developers, then expect crap.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
>> Damn, that's a 108% market saturation!
Makes sense to me. I always run at least 2 and often 3 different browsers simultaneously - even more if I'm using my phone to surf in front of my computer. (See earlier comment for reasons why.)
Damn, that's a 108% market saturation!
Hopefully they will do better in FF 23 when they remove the ability to disable Javascript. Oh wait ...
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
As always, you can disable it yourself within about:config. Or use an extension like NoScript, etc to disable it per-site. You likely knew this and were trolling as most folks who are whining about this setting change are. Mozilla is removing the disable JavaScript box from Options as a browser without JS turned on is pretty useless today. A ton of sites won't work right. Most web developers don't even bother to check for JS being disabled anymore, nor should they as JS exists everywhere and in every modern phone browser, too. And the 2m people running NoScript no enough to enable JS when a website doesn't work.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
That is the ENTIRE POINT of a geometric mean. Before you complain, try having some idea of what you are complaining about.
The Fx on my system has serious issues with start up time. I'm not sure what the problem is exactly, but it's gotten quite bad lately. I suspect that it has something to do with the large number of bookmarks I have as I don't have very many extensions installed and I'm carrying over bookmarks from years ago because I haven't bothered to go in and clean house.
The test with the biggest difference was memory usage, with Firefox using half the memory of Chrome. This matches comparisons I have done. If you ever have to use an older computer with 2GB of RAM Chrome is pretty much unusable while Firefox works fine. I have an SSD so I turned off virtual memory. With 8GB of RAM I would have to close Chrome if I want to play a game but have no problems with Firefox.
Perhaps you could launch IE 6 to refresh your memory. I think you begin to think about IE6 with nostalgia...
How many people used the "disable javascript" option? NoScript is so superior that most people that would use disable javascript have or should have switched to NoScript. An option that nobody uses or nobody should use is the very definition of an option that should be removed.
I think he's talking about Chrome, because Fx generally has one of the lowest RAM utilizations of GUI based browsers.
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I find way more useful extensions in the Chrome web store than I do in the Firefox store nowadays. In fact, Chrome's addons are what keep me tied to the browser.
Just set gfx.direct2d.disabled=true and the problem is solved. That's what the fix for the bug is anyway (they'll do it automatically with a hardware blacklist). It isn't like Mozilla can force AMD to fix their broken, abandoned drivers.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Firefox may support a more robust extension model than other browsers, but it certainly isn't the only browser that supports extensions.
No.
In fact, I've noticed quite the opposite on both of those points.
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?"
I see these sorts of "performance" comparisons all the time. As I type this I have both Chrome and Firefox open and in use and honestly I cannot see any meaningful difference in speed between them. I'm sure some benchmark suite could find a difference but in day to day usage it simply does not matter which I choose. Any difference in speed on my computers is basically insignificant.
I have had problems with Chrome's printing being flakey but it's not a speed issue.
Even Konqueror supports extensions.
There aren't any, but if there were it would support them.
How long ago was that change? I'm wondering if that might not be the cause of the clunkiness I've been seeing for a little while.
.
At this point, if you are deciding upon which browser to use, perhaps the browser with the marginally highest performance benchmark numbers may not be the browser for you. Here is a difference that matters more to me: when I change the http proxy settings in Firefox, only Firefox is affected. However, when i change the http proxy settings in Chrome, the proxy settings for Windows are changed, meaning that other applications are affected. For this reason I use Firefox instead of Chrome, even though Firefox is a lot slower on a web page I frequent a lot.
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.
Maybe it's that javascript engines don't matter as much anymore? Chrome loads pages and responds so much faster than Firefox. I would like to use Firefox, but it's a dramatic difference in performance between the two browser. Can anyone explain why?
Even more specific, it's the nth root of the product of n numbers, but your example explains better why it's used in this case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_mean
Of course, the median is another useful indicator of central tendancy, less effected by extreme values...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median
Only the worst of Java-script heavy pages slow down on modern hardware with any of the browsers. 99.999% of the time the "slow" is because of AJAX queries to an unresponsive website, and there is bugger all the browser can do about that.
I tweak code performance beyond reasonableness, too. It's a "hacker thing." But it's not something the user can really see or notice once the first rounds of tuning are done, though. But there's an ego involved in producing the best and fastest code possible, even if no one else can tell the difference without a nanosecond stopwatch.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Wow, talk about an instant gratification society. You can't wait a WHOLE 3 SECONDS for a program to start?
Maybe you need to get off Windows. I run FF on my Linux system where I usually keep it running for weeks/months at a time. It takes maybe 3 seconds to get running and no OOM and no crashes (the rare crash is usually due to a plugin, and performance issues are almost always due to Flash/Java sites). My current desktop has had FF open for 9 weeks now and is using ~250M in RAM.
The rendering speed has been more than adequate for me, most of the wait time is due to network latency or graphics intensive pages that take time to display on my system (no hardware GPU) regardless of the app displaying them.
Plus I trust the Mozilla foundation waaaaayyyy more than I would ever trust Google.
As always, YMMV
To the people responding "But other browsers support extensions! You're an idiot!", yes, technically you're right, but I'm referring to the specific type of extension that would allow something like NoScript/YesScript to be viable, and I'm talking about mainstream browsers (no, Konqueror is not mainstream.)
Yes, I'm technically wrong, but in terms of the point I was trying to make, not in any way that matters.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
You can already do multiple Gmail users. Try https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1 and see what you get. I know you can get to multiple logins through Gmail settings, but the link works quickly for me. Increment the final digit for more. Your "other services" would still be a problem, though.
Although I can believe this to be true in the Desktop - at least in Windows desktop.
The truth is that on the Android platform the situation is quite diferent. You can check this link: http://www.cactusinception.info/2013/06/android-browser-benckmark-june-2013.html
The comparison is from last month, and if you read the iOS post about the browsers, you can see the testing methodology changed a bit. But still, using the new tests, Firefox still comes out in the back, altough in that case Opera surpasses Chrome. That part will be updated very soon.
Last time I checked, Safari wasn't available for Windows anymore. And Safari is very good on OS X, hence the reason why psergiu asked why it was left out. Maybe the next Firefox still sucks on OS X too. I mean, why should I care about Firefox for Windows if I don't use Windows?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Except that they're only removing it from the Options window, not from the browser? (e.g. it will be in about:config where all the advanced tweaks are)
about:config is the browser equivalent of the Windows registry or /etc/ files. Unless you're actually doing something a computer professional would need to do, it's a failure of user interface to require the user to do it.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Not that I'm a fan of any of the current offerings, but for the sake of information: Firefox has private browsing and image-in-new-tab ability (middle-click on "view image")
Firefox is funded by the same search giant.
not to mention there still are huge memory leaks. I had a fresh machine no addons after running for a week firefox was running really sluggish (chrome was running great). Firefox was using 1 gig of ram.. this with 10 tabs open. I quit firefox, restarted, reloaded the 10 tabs and it worked fine again
The median misses the point. There is an implicit weight of each score in an arithmetic mean (it has to do with the dimensions of the score). By re-scaling (say from milliseconds to seconds or hours), the relative importance of a particular score can be massively different. With the geometric mean, the choice of (multiplicative) scale for each score does not affect their relative importance. Unless you have some good reason to chose particular scales of each score, the geometric mean is the way to go.
And when do they make a benchmark for Linux and/or MacOS? Or with the debugging tools opened (firebug / chrome debug / ...) ?
Because both these factors will throw Firefox down the drain real fast in my experience.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Install and run NoScript.
Honestly, 90% of the websites out there are written by morons. Their javascript and flash are so convoluted and a mess that it even causes lockups on the browser.
Even slashdot has far too much JS in it for what the site is presenting.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Do any of the existing windows or linux browsers still use the same rendering engine? I'm not buying a mac just to test websites, and never had any luck with Hackintosh VMs.
It doesn't matter that much if one is slightly faster in Javascript or rendering when Firefox will halt up for 5-10 seconds rendering a new tab. Maybe it's faster than Chrome, but if I have to wait for it, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how much Firefox devs work on "UI sluggishness" if it's a single thing can lock up all input to the browser.
You do realize you quoted the part of the summary that is a link that leads to a page called, "Project Async & Responsive"? Here guys, I'll copy the link down here for you all, https://dutherenverseauborddelatable.wordpress.com/2013/04/10/announcing-project-async-responsive/ I can't believe how many mods didn't RTFA either judging from the mod points of your post...
How many sites have you visited with Javascript turned off completely? And do you toggle it on a regular basis or is it set once and forget? if 99.99% of the users don't ever touch it, then it's a good idea to reduce visibility and clutter.
Well, once you get past the tech savvy crowd which is like 1% of the browsing population, even if Firefox truly beats Chrome by a big margin, I don't think this is going to change things one bit for Firefox.
Chrome is bundled with Java, Acrobat and Flash updates, which ~98% of computers in the world have. Forget a checkbox in a hurry because you want to do something useful and Chrome is installed.
It is bundled with many PCs by the OEMs who get paid for it.
It is constantly advertised on TV and on Google properties like Google search engine and Youtube, especially to Opera and IE users.
Mozilla doesn't have the resources to do the above and,all this explains Chromes' growth among the nontech crowd more than just performance differences.
I have personally seen many folks for who I installed Firefox back in the day end up using Chrome. When I ask them, most of the time they don't have no idea how they got it. Google's been sinking a lot of money into Chrome over the years(even paying websites $1 per download they drive) and it makes sense because one more Chrome install they don't have to pay money to Firefox and Opera for being the default search for another user. Benchmarks are not going to change any of this.
And what is for the average user the relevance to speed by optional debugging tools?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I abandoned it over backspace = page back. Lost too many web app sessions that way.
But the firefox memory leaks really bother me. Every couple of days it's kill the process and restart.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Safari uses WebKit, but since Google made their own WebKit branch, there's no way to know. You could use an older Chrome version, though.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Don't know about deceit, but I do know that my Firefox's noscript blocked no less than sixteen (16) separate sites running scripts on TFA.
So if anyone has an interest in fast browsers, they have.
I mean, 16, what possible excuse is there for that on what is effectively just a news article?
if there was one feature that would get me to consolidate to a single browser it would be the ability to run multiple instances as different personalities at the same time.
firefox -ProfileManager
firefox -P
Maybe i'm reading your request wrong, but that sounds like exactly what you are looking for. I do wish it was integrated into the firefox browser window menu's themselves though (ie. it'd be nice to hit: File->New Profile Window->Profile Name).
That said, I end up doing the same thing but I divide them up a little differently based on "long running stuff that I'm ok with restarting all at once but don't want to be interrupted by other stuff - ex. gmail, calendar, etc in chrome, and actual browsing in FF).
I mean, 16, what possible excuse is there for that on what is effectively just a news article?
Ads.
Last year I think. Can't remember now.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I guess I could use Midori then. Seems to be the only PC (non-mobile) browser still using it, at least according to wikipedia.
Thanks.
Perhaps you could launch IE 6 to refresh your memory. I think you begin to think about IE6 with nostalgia...
More like nostockholmgia.
Who the hell cares if a page renders .02 seconds faster?
Lynx will always be the fastest!
I really think the Firefox people think of it like hiding an option to make your feet a valid target on a hypothetical "smart" shotgun. It's an intentional user interface failure because they actually don't want you to shoot yourself in the foot. Of course, if you're a professional who "knows what you're doing", then you can easily change a text file or install No Script.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
I don't think Firefox has leaked memory for some time, except for some add-ons. If you've read any of the last few Browser Grand Prix comparisons at Tom's Hardware, Firefox has become decent.
But there was a long stretch when Chrome was clearly superior, and even now Firefox occasionally has some pauses that I just don't see in Chrome. I just hope Firefox continues to succeed because I don't want "one browser to rule them all", even if that browser is built on an open source core.
How is it that all the other browsers can properly render text even with those "broken, abandoned drivers" on the exact same hardware?
A geometric mean has that effect (unit-independent figures of merit) only if its constituents "poijt in the same direction". If you multiply opposing figures, a browser can put out 25% less work over a fixed time (as in fps) and take 33% more time for a fixed-workload test, and both changes would cancel out..
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
I guess rapidly increasing the Firefox version number to the point of meaninglessness actually did pay off. I await Chrome 20,000 any day now, and Firefox once again playing catch-up.
Liberty in your lifetime
But do people other than computer professionals actually disable javascript? Since firefox receives statistics on every button clicked, I'm guessing the usage is so low that accidental clicks make up a good percentage. At that point it's a failure of a user interface to provide extra options that are never used.
And by "Mozilla's stats" I am referring to their internal benchmarking using Kraken (Mozilla/Firefox), Sunspider (Apple/Webkit), and Octane (Google/Chrome). Mozilla owns and operates Are We Fast Yet.com and has a nice JS performance over time comparing each JS engine.
Do note that this is just JavaScript and not the whole shebang, but these days, they're pretty close. The JS section of Tom's review uses one of these JS tests and has similar results (though they discard its findings). Tom's does conclude that Chrome beats FF handily here.
I'm pretty surprised to see Chrome beating Firefox handily in JS and HTML and memory efficiency and standards and security yet losing overall. Perhaps too much weight was put into the hardware acceleration piece? Perhaps Tom's forgot that FF startup isn't so good when you load lots of addons (as most do)? My reading of those is that Chrome is the clear winner ... and I'm a Firefox fan (for usability, security, and privacy, mostly via addons).
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
I have Win8 installed, though I don't boot into it often. If you look back on previous Tom's Hardware Browser Grand Prix comparisons, they don't always use Windows. e.g. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-17-firefox-10-ubuntu,3129.html (Ubuntu), http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/macbook-air-chrome-16-firefox-9-benchmark,3108.html (Mac OS X), http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/android-web-browser-recommendation,3316.html (Android).
As the Anonymous Coward wrote, like it or not (and I definitely don't like it) Windows 8 probably already has a bigger share of the consumer desktop and laptop market than Linux. So it makes sense for Tom's Hardware to test on that platform.
As for the things that are tested, I think it makes sense to include all of their selected categories for two reasons. First, it can potentially show where the development team for a particular product is or is not expending resources. (e.g. If Internet Explorer 11 improves at the speed of DOM manipulation and nothing else, and DOM manipulation wasn't benchmarked, then it would look like Microsoft had done nothing for the new release.) Second, tracking and benchmarking the specific events that cause a slowdown or the impression of a slowdown in a browser is very hard to do. If Firefox and Chrome both take 7 seconds to load a page and Chrome loads it gradually while Firefox loads 90% in one second and then appears to freeze for 5 seconds and then finishes, most people who were not working with a stopwatch would report Chrome as being a dramatically faster browser.
I don't think so. Flash in Firefox crashed plenty for me on Linux. I finally switched to using two browsers at all times - Firefox for most stuff, and Chrome for Flash-intensive websites (mainly Youtube).
Don't know about deceit, but I do know that my Firefox's noscript blocked no less than sixteen (16) separate sites running scripts on TFA.
So if anyone has an interest in fast browsers, they have.
I mean, 16, what possible excuse is there for that on what is effectively just a news article?
News sites are by far the worst for that. The number of sites some of them them pull Javascript from is staggering.
No sig today...
The Browser Grand Prix tests by Tom's Hardware use a different platform with every test. e.g. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/android-web-browser-recommendation,3316.html (Android), http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/macbook-air-chrome-16-firefox-9-benchmark,3108.html (Mac OS X), and http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-17-firefox-10-ubuntu,3129.html (Ubuntu).
Windows gets the lion's share of testing because the lion's share of visitors to the Tom's Hardware website run Windows.
I don't have a problem on Windows, but on the Mac it definitely leaks. Not only that, once it has leaked, it takes perhaps 10 minutes to shut down when you've decided to quit it. It could be the plugins or the extensions - but I don't really care because those are the only reason I use Firefox, so I'm not going to disable them.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Funny, from the same article linked above Firefox had near the best start time of the browsers tested.
Of course, that was on Windows 8. What are you running?
I hate that backspace thing, too. They aped it from IE.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Opera has noscript, adblock, adblock+, ghostery extensions {plus other competing similar extensions} and it is mainstream enough that it was in this benchmark. So I'm not sure what you are getting at. Also I converted to Opera more than a decade ago for those features and tabbed browsing.
Or with the debugging tools opened (firebug / chrome debug / ...) ?
I don't really see a point to benchmarking with the developer tools open, but I would definitely like to see a competition where they determine the average number of extensions/addons for each browser, install that number of the most popular addons on each browser, and then run the test again. Hardly anyone uses stock Firefox, its major selling point has been extensions. I would like to see a test with the configuration of all browsers more closely aligned to what people actually use.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I can't work productively more than 36 hours continuously any more, so that's not a problem for me.
Firefox runs fine on all my systems with dozens of tabs open, no memory leaks that I've ever seen, even though I create and destroy tabs constantly.
You paraphrased the contents from the link located at "UI sluggishness" that you happened to quote from the summary.. The link that goes to "Project Async and Responsive." I'll copy the link below for you: https://dutherenverseauborddelatable.wordpress.com/2013/04/10/announcing-project-async-responsive/
The link talks all about how they are trying to offload things from the main thread, which causes things like the 5-10 second halt when rendering a new tab. It's all waiting there for you to read it....
Try GNASH if you're on Linux.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Unless you're actually doing something a computer professional would need to do, it's a failure of user interface to require the user to do it.
What? Mozilla is now requiring everyone to use about:config? I haven't had to do that yet, have they just not gotten to me yet? Will my family also be required to do it, or can I do it for them?
Oh, what's that? You only need to use it if you're disabling Javascript, or changing any of the other minutiae that only a super-user who isn't going to be angry or confused at seeing about:config would bother changing in the first place? Doesn't seem like such a problem to open about:config, type "javascript" into the search bar, and find the option to disable it, does it?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Got to admit... This isn't a big deal for me. IE is just terrible and no amount of Microsoft patching will fix that and Chome always tries to push sync on me when I have no intent of using and it's really rather pushy about it.
Firefox works. It's stable. It let's me know about it's sync feature. It doesn't beat me over the head with it constantly. These are the reasons I, and probably a great majority of people, use Firefox.
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
And since blocking Javascript is something roughly on par, in terms of rarity, with a modification that'd require Windows registry tweaking or /etc/ editing, I'd say it's fair. I cannot fathom why anybody would entirely block JS when extensions like NoScript allow much finer grained and more flexible control over it all in a convenient UI.
I don't believe other browsers use DirectX acceleration for text rendering like Firefox does.
Actually, Firefox handily beats Chrome (and everything else) for memory efficiency everywhere except memory release after closing tabs. They've done a lot of work there in the past few years and it shows.
It's also interesting to look at the breakdown of the score for things like the HTML5 test. Firefox loses points for not supporting MPEG-4 videos, which probably has a lot to do with ideology as well as implementation. There's also points removed for iframes, which I sincerely think are a terrible blight that should be removed. The biggest black mark is the lack of support for a lot of "advanced" form types like datetime.
For the CSS3 test, I'm noticing a few bits and bobs which are still tagged as "-moz-" properties, usually because the standard wasn't finalized when implemented. These aren't a problem in practice since web developers always prepend vendor-specific attributes for such properties.
Finally, it's worth keeping in mind that Firefox's biggest strength is its addons. NoScript and AdBlock+ together make Firefox the most secure browser I have ever used, and also dramatically speed up loading times on a lot of otherwise junk-ridden sites. No other browser can match its feature level there right now.
Debugging tools are not optional, they are build in all major browsers. Second, under Linux, Firefox with debugging tools opened is slow to the point where with my 4-core CPU it is actually *not* usable anymore. Try loading the home page of Amazon.com in 20+seconds, all pegged at 100% CPU. And the problem is that I almost always have a debugging tool opened in one of my firefox window. This makes me basically ditch Firefox most of the time and as a result I don't test on it anymore. Or less than before. This is all detrimental to firefox.
And saying the development tools are unimportant in a browser is about not paying attention. Sure it doesn't impact directly the public, but it does impact greatly the developers and thus, the users as well.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Time for a new utility. Call it "Get The Farm Away From My Defaults". You specify what you want on (like Do Not Track), what you want off (like Javascript or Java) and it makes the changes in Firefox, Chrome, IE, Opera, etc. all at the same time. Have it as a standalone EXE that you can run directly. Give it a custom short URL like tinyurl.com/GTFAFMDefaults. Maybe have a config option to auto-run it every time you boot up, for us belt-and-suspenders types.
I come here for the love
Geeks don't generally prefer Chrome. Sure, there's a good deal of chrome users amongst geeks, but I think we have a greater proporiton of firefox users than non-geeks have.
Neat test but I think the summary could at least clarify that the test system is Windows 8 64 Bit. It doesn't really mean a whole lot to me when I'm running a 64 bit distribution of GNU/Linux.
Why not? Are you assuming that either has lots of OS-specific tweaks that tilt that so much?
In any case, it's still relevant which is faster for average joe out there.
Also the tests are selected by Tom's Hardware as a suite ... some of these tests are fairly meaningless to me and I feel like something like cold start time should be more heavily weighted than, say, hardware acceleration performance. The wait time on start up affects everyone and is unavoidable
I only restart firefox after an upgrade, and that's the only time I close it. I'm sure as hell I'm not the only one.
Is anyone reading this actually using Windows 8?
Regrettable, yes, I've seen lots of people out there with shinny new laptops with win8 installed.
What browsers don't have backspace == back? I use it all the time (intentionally), and I've never noticed any browser not implementing it.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
IE and Firefox allow you to disable it without a whole lot of hassle.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
1 Gb seems high. I have 24 tabs open, run a bunch of plug-ins (Ghostery, Noscript, Adblock Plus, All-in-One Gestures, Nagios Checker, Session Manager, Download Helper, Brief, YouTube Rating Preview, Fiddler, Lastpass), add-ons (Java, Flash, VMWare Rconsole plug-in) and I'm hovering around 580 Mb.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
It's not the quantity, it's the behavior. I use so many tabs that I feel the need to run "Tree Style Tabs" (on Chrome there used to be a similar built-in, though hidden, feature). Every few days, Firefox bloats to such a large footprint that a quit takes about 10 minutes.
I could be using a "metric ton of bad addons". But the fact is, without the addons I'd be using Chrome. So whether it is Firefox's fault or not, Mozilla gets the blame.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I also feel the need for this.
I think that the browser could also have a "personality" linked to each bookmark, so that it would switch personality automatically when I choose to go a specific site.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
about:config is the browser equivalent of the Windows registry or /etc/ files. Unless you're actually doing something a computer professional would need to do, it's a failure of user interface to require the user to do it.
Which means its entirely the right place to put disabling core functionality, like a javascript engine.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
And Chrome uses less?
First off, how do you know whether it's doing anything correctly or not? Secondly, what's wrong with how it renders newegg.com? Keep in mind that newegg has more HTML errors than I can count.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
Firefox is funded by the same search giant.
Firefox getting revenue from Google is not the same. Certainly it's not helping anyone's privacy, but Mozilla isn't Google.
Long live the BSD license
Ehm. You make it sound as if Google owns Mozilla, which is clearly not the case.
Like all browsers, Firefox has a default search engine. Having search traffic directed from Firefox' few hundred million users is very appealing to search companies, who are willing to pay good money for that. This does not mean that the paying customer in any way owns, runs or controls Mozilla. Just like I don't own, run or control the shop on the corner when I pay them for a pack of biscuits.
In the last bidding process Google was top bidder and Mozilla extended it's contract with Google. After this contract finishes the contract will go out to tender again and perhaps next time Bing, Yahoo or Baidu is the highest bidder, who knows?
It could even be, if Mozilla at some point decides that Google's practices are not compatible with their own principles, that Mozilla dumps Google and does business with the second highest bidder. It might not even make a massive financial difference.
Of course that's not the case. I was merely poking fun at his statement "why would anyone use a browser funded by a search giant who yadda yadda privacy yadda yadda" when the same could be said about Firefox, having received the majority of its development funding from Google as a result of their search deal.
We took a lighting strike at my daughter's school a few years back, that struck dirt less than ten feet from the building in the middle of the night.
The server room UPS was turned into a smoking pile of fused plastic and metal from the ground surge. The network switches were fried by the UPS and every single powered-on system connected to the network (including the servers) was toasted. The end user PCs were a total loss, but we salvaged the HDDs from the servers and put them in new chassis, and the printers only lost their (replaceable) network interface cards. User PCs on switched-off power strips were completely unaffected by this event, even though several of them were closer to the actual strike than the UPS was.
So,
7) powered down computers are less likely to be damaged by lightning strikes.
Humans generally sleep about a third of our lifetimes. So I turn off my computer while I'm asleep and reduce many of my computing risks and costs by 30% or more.
I told you how to do it with existing DNS infrastructure.
We talked about the resource usage, where I showed that HOSTS file was more intensive. I also showed you repeatedly it was the best solution for me, on a small LAN.
Which again was also resolved in our original conversation.
Blah blah blah, doesn't effect me.
This is one of our many arguments, I don't know why you insist on me doing this all the time.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
You forgot click-tracking, cookie tracking, supercookie tracking, cookie sniffing, user-agent sniffing, silent browser redirects, JavaScript exploits, browser plugins, and flaky third-party site builder tools *cough cough* Wordpress *cough*
And that is just off the top of my head...
Should have read the thread I linked.
Should have read the thread I linked.
Should have read the thread I linked.
If you did, your reading comprehension is pretty bad.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
This may come as a surprise, I don't own that infrastructure.
Regarding your "P.S.": tl;dr.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I've already explained to you how I use TCP mode in that thread, no risk of DNS poisoning.
Why does this matter to me? I'm not a US company and if I was, I would have fixed it in a way that didn't require DNSSEC support. Such as via the method I mentioned in the thread. I also wouldn't be dumb enough to require the deployment of a hosts file to an entire organisation instead of blocking malicious traffic at the gateway.
Nope.
I already brought up how hosts file are slower, take up more memory, more space and likely more CPU to sort through such a massive list when wanting to block an entire domain because you need to generate every single possible combination in order to do it effectively. Which is in that thread I linked.
In other words, my method is less intensive and doesn't require you to litter memory with giant lists of hostnames since a wildcard can be trivially specified. It's going to be faster because the system doesn't have to look through as large of a table either to return a result.
If you read the thread, you would know this.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
All for one purpose: targetting the ads.
These 'overheads' do not effect the resolution of blocked domains at all.
Still nothing compared to a hosts file that has every possible subdomain combination bruteforced, just to block a single domain.
A few million lines in a hosts file to block a single domain because you have to bruteforce every single subdomain verses a tiny zone file.
Yeah, no. Hosts file is not smaller in this instance. I can see it being smaller in the cases where you want to block a very specific address like update.adobe.com, but certainly not when it comes to blocking entire malicious/unwanted domains.
Bruteforcing millions of lines for every single possible combination a domain can have to block that domain is going to make the file really large. Compared to just the zone file I wrote above.
In my examples, blocking entire domains with their subdomains etc. is smaller than hosts files and less intensive on the system to look up.
There is the added benefit that no IP address is returned, so the system doesn't even bother trying to connect to the address.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
If you want to make yourself more vulnerable to DNS poisoning, go ahead. Unlike the current workaround (the patches that don't use DNSSEC), this prevents spoofing entirely. If I am going to have to wait an extra millisecond, so be it. Regardless,still dfoes not invalidate my point that it does not effect the blocked DNS entries (since there is no resolution needed).
Lameness filter is forcing me to split up my replies.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Okay, I'm going to pretend I don't know what I'm talking about now...
I tried to generate a hosts file to block all of example.com and all it's subdomains using your wise advice that it's smaller and more efficient. Knowing that DNS hostnames are limited to 255 characters in length, I wrote a program that generates every possible character combination possible for example.com subdomains. I grew kind of bored after waiting two hours and the file had grown to 65.9 GiB and it was still growing, so I aborted mid generation since the hard-drive I was going to stick it on didn't have much space anyway. I then installed a fresh install of Windows, it worked quite well resolution wise.
Then, I added the hosts file, which should have no penalty compared to my DNS system on Linux as you say. However I discovered resolution stopped working entirely. Even after reboots, resolution would not work any more. The system also became significantly sluggish and I got warnings that windows was running out of memory.
Clearly I am doing something wrong, so please explain to me what I did wrong with the generation of my hosts file (grab a copy here) it appears to be significantly larger than my zone file despite the fact it is largely incomplete. My zone file (grab a copy here) on Linux is significantly smaller.
Lameness filter forced me to split up my comment.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
So FF finally overtook Chrome, but does FF finally sandbox properly now? I'm betting not... Chrome being *slightly* slower, with proper sandboxing, still keeps it #1 in my book (plus I like the interface and addons better...)
This has got to be the poorest reason to use any web browser over another. The only situation where this might be a valid reason is if both browsers are completely satisfactory, it's just this one browser has one default setting that I prefer over another. (Actually, I'm just assuming that Chrome allows you to adjust tab width too? It doesn't? Shame.)
You mean where I said
And then I got a response that didn't fully answer things and only workarounds that involve breaking the DNS cache.
I don't? You seem misinformed.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Again, I was pretending. You can even check the post, I did say that.
This has nothing to do with my setup.
My DNS setup lets me configure bypasses for other bad DNS setups. As well as blocking with wildcards, which by the way, you failed to address.
Go look in the mirror.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.