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Benchmark Battle October 2016: Chrome Vs. Firefox Vs. Edge (venturebeat.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the battle-of-the-fittest dept.

Krystalo quotes a report from VentureBeat: It's been more than a year since our last browser benchmark battle, and the competition remains fierce. Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge have all gained a variety of new features and improvements over the past year. It's time to see if any of them have managed to pull ahead of the pack. It appears that Edge has made the biggest gains since last year. That said, browser performance is improving at a very rapid pace, and it shouldn't be your only consideration when picking your preferred app for consuming Internet content. You can click on individual tests below to see the details:

SunSpider: Edge wins!
Octane: Edge wins!
Kraken: Chrome wins!
JetStream: Edge wins!
Oort Online: Firefox wins!
Peacekeeper: Firefox wins!
WebXPRT: Edge wins!
HTML5Test: Chrome wins!

You can also read all about the setup used for the benchmark tests here. VentureBeat used a custom desktop PC, featuring an Intel Core i5 4440 processor (6M Cache, 3.10 GHz), 8GB of DDR3 1600MHz RAM, a 500GB SATA hard drive (7200 RPM), an Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 graphics card, and a 24-inch widescreen LED monitor (1920 x 1080).

17 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Fuck Slashdot Subdomains by imgod2u · · Score: 2

    Chrome on mobile has a neat feature that takes certain web pages with a lot of text (articles) and allows you to choose a "mobile optimized" version. It is so much faster than the normal bloatware site.

    I wish there were a way to make it default.

  2. Firefox extensions still make it the best by realmolo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    uBlock Origin, uMatrix, Tab Mix Plus...

    I can't live without them. I worry that they'll all go away when Firefox abandons their extensions system in the future, like they are talking about.

  3. Re:Fuck Slashdot Subdomains by psyclone · · Score: 2

    Firefox also has Reader Mode that does something similar.

  4. Edge. LOL! by Chas · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Edge could have won EVERYTHING and I still wouldn't use it.

    --


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!
  5. Re:Fuck Slashdot Subdomains by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    So do we all agree that this "benchmark battle" is archaic? The ability to quickly render bloatware sites is fine, but the ability to remove the bloat is much more important. I hope that in 5 years that's how we'll be scoring browsers.

  6. Re: Fuck Slashdot Subdomains by corychristison · · Score: 2

    I was going to mention Reader Mode on Firefox but someone already beat me to it. Though it should be noted this feature is not just limited to the Mobile Browser, and is available on the Desktop version as well.

  7. MathML by Trogre · · Score: 2

    MathML: Firefox wins!

    Mostly on account of the other browsers not supporting it at all.

    --
    "Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
  8. Something's missing.... Flash! by theendlessnow · · Score: 3, Funny

    Where are the Flash benchmarks?

    Preparing to watch this post sink to the ocean floor....

  9. Vivaldi by vel-ex-tech · · Score: 2

    What about Vivaldi I'm wondering. I've been using it for a few months now on both Win7 and Gentoo, and I've been liking it.

  10. Re:Not surprised by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In normal everyday use, I have never had any meaningful performance problems with any of the major browsers. In real life use, you're more likely to have issues with a shitty Internet connection or a website that's a horribly designed shitshow. And all the performance in the world doesn't mean a thing if the UI of the browser sucks donkey balls. Palemoon FTW.

  11. Lynx wins! by dbIII · · Score: 2

    Lynx, the text mode browser, beats the lot in speed.
    How is that for an illustration that features matter and Edge needs more than speed to measure up to the web browsers that have been developed for longer.

    1. Re:Lynx wins! by dbIII · · Score: 2

      Yes I totally agree (I remember this being discussed when an attempt was made to build lynx for DSLinux on the Nintendo DS) but it's the text mode browser most people have heard of so that is why I used it as an example.

  12. Re:WHAT ABOUT MEMORY USAGE!!! by dbIII · · Score: 2

    Now what about the real issue, MEMORY USAGE!!!

    Chrome, the current Firefox and a few others are designed with the assumption that memory usage is not a real issue while speed is - hence all that stuff in tabs being kept in memory. Yes it sucks if you want to use anything other than their application at the same time or have an older machine with less memory than the maxed out dev machines, but those developers do not care about such a situation.
    The answer is an older version or a project that has a goal of a low memory footprint.

  13. Re:WHAT ABOUT MEMORY USAGE!!! by halfdan+the+black · · Score: 2

    I do use AdBlock, in fact, I would say that today's internet is literally unusable without AdBlock. Go to a page like cnn or nbcnews without AdBlock and about 500,000 adware, crapware loading scripts are running killing you with this taboola revcontent garbage. Ads have become so incredibly obtrusive that browsing without an adblocker is next to impossible, especially on a tablet with limited memory and processor power.

  14. Competition by markdavis · · Score: 4, Insightful

    >"The competition remains fierce. Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge have all gained a variety of new features and improvements over the past year."

    Isn't it nice to not have just one mega browser? Competition is a wonderful thing.... Edge is not multiplatform, nor open, so not sure it can count, completely. Chrome is not really open-source (the base is, as Chromium), but at least is multiplatform. Firefox is completely open and very multiplatform, but seems to be turning into Chrome for some reason (gotta piss off your user base, you know). But all three are winners in various benchmarks.

  15. It's mostly "Wins!" by a hair by Fencepost · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Most of the results (despite how the graphs are distorted) are actually really close.

    Sunspider differences were actually big with Edge 108ms, Chrome 190ms, Firefox 254ms

    Octane had Edge winning with 33489, Chrome second with 31839, Firefox last with 30307. That means Edge was about 10% faster than Firefox, with Chrome splitting the difference. Not huge.

    Kraken had Chrome at 938ms, Edge 1160ms, Firefox 1224ms, so around 25% slower for Firefox - enough to be noticeable, depending on what you're doing.

    Jetstream had Edge winning with 219, Chrome with 184, Firefox trailing badly at 154, so again a fairly substantial gap. Looking a little at the details, all had around the same throughput and whatever's being measured on latency was the driver for the differences.

    For the Oort WebGL graphics, Firefox was best with 10000, Chrome second at 9940, Edge third at 9920. Those are not differences that excite me.

    Peacekeeper (no longer maintained) had Firefox first at 4655, Chrome second at 4325 and Edge trailing badly at 3091 - not quite as lopsided as the Sunspider results, but quite the reversal.

    For WebXPRT (HTML5+JS), Edge won with 448, Firefox at 402, Chrome at 396. That's 10% faster for Edge, but margin of error for Chrome and Firefox.

    And finally for the HTML5 test Chrome had 499, Firefox 462, Edge 460 - again around a 10% difference between slowest and fastest.

    --
    fencepost
    just a little off
  16. Who cares about the benchmarks? Really, who? by QuietLagoon · · Score: 2
    Who are the people for whom the benchmarks are the most important thing about a browser.?

    .
    For me, my concern is more with the disaster that the Firefox UI has turned in to.That affects me whenever I use Firefox.

    How fast does a page load? They all load quickly enough, once I disable advertisements.