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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?"
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?
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.
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.
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.
Same here. It can get so large and complicated in memory that it takes 10 minutes to quit. This seems to be mostly limited to the Mac version. I'm a slave to vertical tabs, though, so I haven't used Chrome since they abandoned that feature.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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
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.
See "How not to lie with statistics: the correct way to summarize benchmark results"
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=5673
http://ece.uprm.edu/~nayda/Courses/Icom6115F06/Papers/paper4.pdf
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
Firefox may support a more robust extension model than other browsers, but it certainly isn't the only browser that supports extensions.
Firefox is funded by the same search giant.
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.
I think it's the pauses. This is mostly speculation, but from what I understand Firefox runs very quickly but much of it is still single-threaded (or in simpler terms, most of what it does is running in a single sequential order). That means Firefox might be doing important calculations lightning fast in the background, but while those calculations are running the graphical window in front of you pauses temporarily. Chrome is better at multi-threaded, multi-process execution, so the user interface is responsive while background work happens.
Both might take 12 seconds to render a particular web page, but Chrome might load one visual element every few tenths of a second for the entire 12 seconds. Firefox will appear to load half the page, freeze for 9 seconds, then load the last bits. Either way you're done in 12 seconds, but Firefox gives the impression of being painfully slow.
The good news is, per the article Firefox is putting a renewed investment in asynchronous operations: https://dutherenverseauborddelatable.wordpress.com/2013/04/10/announcing-project-async-responsive/ (same link as up top) and further up in the discussion someone mentioned that Firefox has decided to revisit their abandoned project to split individual browser tabs into separate threads and processes http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3929071&cid=44165865