Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.