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Which Linux Browser Is The Fastest? (zdnet.com)
ZDNet's Networking blog calls Firefox "the default web browser for most Linux distributions" and "easily the most popular Linux web browser" (with 51.7% of the vote in a recent survey by LinuxQuestions, followed by Chrome with 15.67%). But is it the fastest? An anonymous reader writes:
ZDNet's Networking blog just ran speed tests on seven modern browsers -- Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, Opera (which is also built on Chromium), GNOME Web (formerly Epiphany), and Vivaldi (an open-source fork of the old Opera code for power-users). They subjected each browser to the JavaScript test suites JetStream, Kraken, and Octane, as well as reaction speed-testing by Speedometer and scenarios from WebXPRT, adding one final test for compliance with the HTML5 standard.
The results? Firefox emerged "far above" the other browsers for the everyday tasks measured by WebXPRT, but ranked near the bottom in all of the other tests. "Taken all-in-all, I think Linux users should look to Chrome for their web browser use," concludes ZDNet's contributing editor. "When it's not the fastest, it's close to being the speediest. Firefox, more often than not, really isn't that fast. Of the rest, Opera does reasonably well. Then, Chromium and Vivaldi are still worth looking at. Gnome Web, however, especially with its dreadful HTML 5 compatibility, doesn't merit much attention."
The article also reports some formerly popular Linux browsers are no longer being maintained, linking to a KDE forum discussion that concludes that Konqueror and Rekonq "are both more or less dead."
The results? Firefox emerged "far above" the other browsers for the everyday tasks measured by WebXPRT, but ranked near the bottom in all of the other tests. "Taken all-in-all, I think Linux users should look to Chrome for their web browser use," concludes ZDNet's contributing editor. "When it's not the fastest, it's close to being the speediest. Firefox, more often than not, really isn't that fast. Of the rest, Opera does reasonably well. Then, Chromium and Vivaldi are still worth looking at. Gnome Web, however, especially with its dreadful HTML 5 compatibility, doesn't merit much attention."
The article also reports some formerly popular Linux browsers are no longer being maintained, linking to a KDE forum discussion that concludes that Konqueror and Rekonq "are both more or less dead."
Without AdBlock or NoScript, most websites are unusable to me.
I switched to it a few months ago from FF, and it seems much more responsive to me. It is especially better in startup-to-response time, where FF was taking 30 seconds.(no, I didn't have a ton of add-ons or customizations)
Speed really is only one piece of the puzzle. I was satisfied with the speed of chromium when I tried it for a while, but FF has the features I use. I much prefer the way FF does bookmarks, the bookmark toolbar, and tabs. That is why I have been very satisfied with Pale Moon... the features of FF I need without the bloat and dog-slow response.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Besides speed, standards, and features, there is also stability. Stability has improved, but at a snails pace and still the main factor in browser choice for me. Firefox still has occasional memory issues for me, and will sometimes try to grab large amounts of memory to the point the whole system crashes because other processes fail to allocate memory on a system with 16 GB (FF: "20 GB of ram please" Linux kernel: "Sure, no problem" Other processes: "10k please" Linux kernel: "Fuck off and die"). Chrome also has issues that seem to cause video problems eventually killing the windowing system (seen this under multiple window managers), but it is far easier to restart the X environment than to reboot.
Vivaldi is not an open source fork of the old Opera code base. That code base was proprietary. It is blink based. The confusion is that it was founded by the former Opera co-founder/CEO, and aimed to restore features Opera lost when they moved to Blink. It's more a fork in the Opera consumer base and is not a fork of the code base.
I run LittleSnitch on my mac, and when I open Chrome, it calls to several of Google's addresses: appspot-preview, gstatic, www, and fonts.. It also does that when opening an empty tab. It gets images and fonts and whathaveyou from those sites, (all unnecessary, BTW: the page functions just as well when all traffic is blocked), and it of course reports URLs for "malware" detection. That should give Google a nice bunch of data to work on.