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."

Comments

Beyond the threshold of fast enough.

[Mr307]

Once robust standards were being followed and browser speed went past some point, I stopped caring about which was the fastest. Care much more about interface features and plugins that I want. Next was the many other annoying things that I was able to customize to my taste, a menu item up or down on a list, a button I could or could not move, maintaining a familiar interface, etc.

Re:Beyond the threshold of fast enough.

[mysticgoat]

I've been using FF since it was new. I have occasionally looked at other browsers and several are faster than my FF, at least partially because the plugins and modifications that I use slow FF down somewhat. But FF is fast enough that changing to a faster browser would not improve my productivity. And I've got a nice set of plugins and extensions on it that I would have to put together from scratch if I changed browsers. That is, assuming other browsers offered similar features, which as near as I can tell, they do not.

Speed isn't the only criterion for measuring a browser's goodness. The ability to tailor it to your personal workload is much more important these days. And once you've got a browser tweaked to your best practices, do you really need to take the massive hit of finding, installing, and configuring the plugins of some other browser that would duplicate what you've already set up in your old FF?

If you really need a faster browser, most of us who have been around the block would be better off running the same browser and OS on faster hardware. But this doesn't apply to young'uns who have yet to establish productive work habits. Their best approach would be to talk with some older guy who knows what he is doing about which browser he uses, how he has it set up, and what his workflow is.

Re:Edge

[leenks]

I was seriously considering moving to a Windows 10 environment with my next hardware change. Seeing the Edge tooltips popup over the Chrome icon in my Windows 10 VM has changed that. I'll now change professions and pick grapes in France rather than continue in this field. Apple have killed the Mac as a serious platform by not releasing pro level hardware since 2010-2011, MS made leaps with Windows 10 and then killed it, and there is still little viable software for *professional* collaboration with non nerds on Linux (yes, I mean the Photoshop / Office / UML / yadda yadda stuff - sure, it works at a basic level but ultimately you need the real thing in a Windows or OSX VM to be compatible at a level that doesn't annoy everyone). Apple used to almost fill the "I need a Unix workstation with compatibility with the big commercial apps" space with OSX and the Macbook Pro and Mac Pro lines, but there's nothing now - Windows and docker/vagrant seems to be the way forward, and with more and more native Unixy support on Windows I suspect things are likely to change yet again. Lesson: don't invest in any particular platform in any significant depth - learn to read properly.

Have to rule out Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome is Google product. Doesn't it continually report to the mother-ship? That would make *you* the product.

Use Google's product! It's closed source!

[zedaroca]

Said a marketer who does not understand what Linux users expect from their computing.

Re:Edge

[aqui]

This solves your problem, but requires some work.

A Linux install with a virtual box instance running a nicely sandboxed version of Windows is the solution. If you run it in seamless mode you can even set it up to have dedicated VMs for different apps, and have those apps appear and behave on the linux desktop like regular applications. By setting up a shared folder and storing all data on the host (not on the VMs), and allowing clipboard sharing it becomes completely transparent that the app is running in a VM.

I run the windows apps I require that way, and with VTx the virtualization doesn't really suffer any performance penalty.

It takes a bit of work to set up but then once its running you realize you have the best of both OS worlds. No more rebooting... etc... all the pains associated with Windows, but windows compatibility. As a bonus you can snapshot the VMs, which means if something gets screwed up due to an update or patch you can just revert to the working snapshot and finish whatever work you need, and leave the patching issue to later.

Admittedly you need to invest a little time to learn how to use Virtual Box and set it up, but its worth it.

Plus as you said if the OS goes to pot, you can move your VMs to any OS that runs VirtualBox. I recently switch Linux distros, and migrating was fairly painless (I kept home intact), and used my existing VMs with the new distro without blinking.

I was a Mac User a long time but once the hardware became shitty (battery problems) and even more expensive, and with the OS only being supported for two cycles eventually forcing a hardware buy (the old hardware doesn't support the newer OS, and the older OS version is no longer patched/supported) I said good bye to Apple. I've used this Linux + VM strategy on several machines now and have never look back or missed my Mac since (in fact its running linux now too).

Konqueror

[StormReaver]

As a Web browser, Konqueror has sucked for a long time. While there was a time when I used Konqueror exclusively, its renderer fell increasingly further behind the other browsers. It needs to die as a Web browser.

As a file manager, though, it is still top dog. Its killer feature (aside from I/O Slaves, which are awesome) is the ability to split the screen into multiple panels. Dolphin is a brain disease that needs to die, just for its inability to do more than two panels, and Konqueror as just a file manager needs to resume its rightful place as the default file manager.

A second-best would be to have Dolphin be able to split panes like Konqueror does. At least then, Dolphin would no longer be the abomination that it is.

Spoken like a non-FOSS writer

[markdavis]

>""Taken all-in-all, I think Linux users should look to Chrome for their web browser use," concludes ZDNet's contributing editor. "

And maybe ZDNet doesn't understand Linux users. Many, perhaps even most of us, do not want a closed-source, closed-developed, semi-spyware, anti-configuration-friendly Chrome browser as our preferred browser.

Oh, and his main benchmarks: Speedometer is a "webkit-designed benchmark" and it surprises him that the webkit based browsers did considerably better than Firefox (the only non-webkit browser in his lineup)? Then a Google (think webkit again) based javascript benchmark, same result. Yet when he used Kraken and Jetstream, miraculously the browsers were just a 10% and 11% spread (with Chrome not winning either). BTW- he never ran Ooort, which Firefox seems to always win (and by a lot), and Peacekeeper, which Firefox usually wins.

My take: Firefox does just fine with speed. It is not the fastest, but the speed difference isn't as much as one might think, and it certainly isn't the only important factor when choosing a browser.

Lynx is the fastest...

[newbie_fantod]

But who cares. It's security/privacy that I want. All the browsers seem just fine speed-wise.