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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."
One of these browsers, given it's history, is most likely optimised for X over other screen rendering platforms. Sure, the benchmarks concentrate on JavaScript, but ultimately this is going to result in manipulation of the DOM in any real world test and therefore re-rendering... Does this therefore boil down to how well these browsers optimise their performance on X, as opposed to anything else? Given the changing landscape (Wayland and alternatives) does this have much relevance?
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.
Lynx. It doesn't have to deal with all those bandwidth intensive graphics.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.
Chrome is Google product. Doesn't it continually report to the mother-ship? That would make *you* the product.
Said a marketer who does not understand what Linux users expect from their computing.
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.
Firefox syncs book marks in the way that I prefer over Chrome, so no matter how fast Chrome is I won't use it.
Plus if I just want to look up something fast I tend to use elinks/lynx/w3m.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.
Indeed.
Sent from my BSD desktop
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Dillo or W3M are the fastest web browsers. Dillo is a GUI web browser with only HTML/PHP (not sure about ASPX) & CSS, SSL support, cookies (change Dillo config file), and a simple wget GUI interface as its download manager. It does incredibly well for going to websites you don't need to view videos on. I even got it running on my Mac (couldn't get SSL support to compile). W3M is a web browser that runs in a command line and some terminals (not all) support w3m-img so even images can be shown as the background of the terminal. So, if it's only speed you're worried about, then this is all wrong. He didn't even look at Min or Midori. This review is great for cross-platform, but not if the main focus is for Linux users. He didn't even look at Chromium.
Google derives income by connecting the publishers of documents on the web with sponsors through services such as AdSense/AdWords and DoubleClick. When people find documents through Google Search, use other Google properties, or view a participating publisher's documents, Google gets a cut of the ad revenue. The more web browsing, the more money for Google. So a better browser is likely to keep people on the web longer.
Internet Explorer stayed a piece of shit for far too long. Then Microsoft actually got a clue and made IE 9 then IE 10. But by then, Chrome had already become commonplace in certain circles.
There are six browsers, not seven.
guess you never heard of uBlock origin.
Which is useless as it lacks the interface to block crap via URLs. Blocking via DOM is semi-good for visual elements only, what I want is to get rid of trackers first, decrapifying view being only a side effect (as every ad is also a tracker).
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
"WebXPRT: This is today's most comprehensive browser benchmark. It uses scenarios created to mirror everyday tasks."
Basically, Firefox is not the fastest at all things Javascript synthetic performance, but it's the fastest for real world web-browsing.
Based on that... I would actually recommend using Firefox?
I can guarantee that if you compile it yourself, with optimized CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS, that Firefox and Chromium will come out ahead of the poorly optimized builds that get released by the non-open source browsers.
Personally I use compiled versions on my Funtoo Laptop and Workstation. Yes they take some time to compile but if you only upgrade twice a year it's not so bad. Upgrading every release would simply be too much. My CFLAGS are nothing crazy: "-march=native -Os -pipe"
There is also the added benefit that I've never had a build crash on me since I started using builds compiled to my hardware capabilities.
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).
----- "Profanity is the one language that all programmers understand."
The summary is wrong that Vivaldi is a fork of old Opera (the Presto engine), it is in fact the same Blink engine that powers Chrome and new Opera, but with brand new chrome (non-capital, aka the interface around the engine) which is recreating the power-user features of old Opera rather than the cut-down interfaces that other browsers are working towards:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If MS were interested in market share they'd release an Android port.
username checks out.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
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.
>""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.
They have had a Linux build for ages and is in a lot of repos. I've been using it on my netbook (dual boot Win 7 and Puppy) and it works quite nicely in both Windows and Puppy, smooth and pretty solid.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The thing about Chrome is that is comes from Google.
I will not use anything from them directly (VPN rules ok).
They know so much about each and everyone of us yet still they want more.
The more Google know, then the more the Ad Agencies and As Slingers know about you, your life, your friends and your universe.
Google/alphabet == Big Brother 2017.
But who cares. It's security/privacy that I want. All the browsers seem just fine speed-wise.
You'll need a fast CPU anyway (Core 2 Duo and up), gigs of RAM and the patience to live without H264 hardware acceleration if your graphics are too old or unsupported (such as Radeon 5450 under Ubuntu 16.04).
There's no other way around if feeding your computer with mounds of garbage to be parsed, interpreted, compiled and encabulated.
Fun fact : didn't PDF files use to be slower than web pages? Now it's the other way around.
Maybe we could make a "website" out of a PDF document with hyperlinks to other PDF files? (Just need a PDF reader willing to use gigs of RAM to cache rendered pages rather than re-rendering them constantly when you scroll the document). Or the same in ePub or other "ebook" format.
Haven't you heard? The desktop is dead! Everybody works on tablets and mobile phones now. There will not be a new photoshop for desktops, the next version will only be available on Android and iPhone. Because that's where the market is now. You insensitive clod, asking that companies like Apple or Microsoft keep pouring money into the dead desktop ecosystem... They have better things to do with their time.
I hear that when my company is going to change office later this year, instead of my two large monitors, I will be given an iPhone to run Visual Studio on (it will be running on an emulator, of course). Apparently once you get some experience with that tiny on-screen keyboard, you can work even faster than with a real keyboard and mouse, and compile times only suffer a little when you do it 'in the cloud'. And instead of a desk, I will get a plastic chair to sit on, since I won't need so much space for all that hardware.
You may not like it, but it's the wave of the future. Why, last night I went to the local IMAX 3D theatre, and we all sat there streaming the movie to two mobile phones (one for each eye). The experience just blew me away, it was so incredibly life like.
Really, nobody should be investing into desktops. Desktops are dead, and Apple and Microsoft should be applauded for seeing this early and not investing any shareholder value into a deadend.
BTW, can you tell us more about that grape picking position? It sound interesting.
Trump Supporters have small genitalia. Why?
Memory usage, not speed is the killer in modern web browsers. People often have many windows open, and each page could suck up a gig of memory, the system rapidly becomes unstable. Let's see some tests about memory and stability with large numbers of open pages.
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).
That only happened during the switch from 68k to PowerPC and from PowerPC to intel.
I doubt there is an Intel Mac out that does not support the most recent macOS.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Reading this on Chrome, AdBlock tells me it has blocked 53,805 ads since installed.
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).
I tried that too, at the beach. What kind of sun glasses do you wear? Mine where either to dark (to see the screen properly) or to bright (was still blinded by the reflections of the sun on the sea).
Bright future, indeed!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I use Chrome across all devices, because it enables me to take advantage of the Google-Android ecosystem, which is its main advantage for me.
Nonsense, uBlock Origin supports URL based blocking as well as DOM based. In fact URL based is the primary method it uses since that avoids loading the content at all. It also supports importing DNS blocklists with automatic updates, from a long pre-defined list of your own custom URLs.
uBlock Origin does everything AdBlock Plus does and much, much more, and is faster to boot. It's better, even on Firefox/PaleMoon.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You're missing the i686 Macs (dual core CPU half-way between a Pentium M and a Core 2 Duo)
Also, Core 2 Duo systems are old themselves (old graphics, old firmware) so I wouldn't count on them not being deprecated.
Haven't you heard? The desktop is dead! Everybody works on tablets and mobile phones now. There will not be a new photoshop for desktops, the next version will only be available on Android and iPhone. Because that's where the market is now. You insensitive clod, asking that companies like Apple or Microsoft keep pouring money into the dead desktop ecosystem...
Damn, that was brutal! Well played though.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I notice browser slowness much more on my ARM devices than even on Celerons. I think the biggest differentiator is who can multi-thread the best to take advantage of available processors.
Actually it doesn't matter which one is the fastest. ... ... and on the other hand, nobody selects browsers by rendering speed. People select them by interface, startup time and addons. This matters a lot more than if the page renders 10ms faster.
Browsers are optimizing since years and with each release they claim to be 10-30% faster. If it were true, pages would be rendered instantly
Therefore am surprised no one mentioned the Tor browser. It has excellent security performance.
On JavaScript benchmarks, all the browsers are within 5%. Nothing that the end user will really notice.
The only test where Firefox falls flat was designed by the web-kit team, and suprise, suprise all the other browsers listed are web-kit variants.
Really though servo is set to knock all the other browsers right out of thier socks.
"It's not fast, but the best at all the things you want to do." -- "So you should be using Chrome instead!"
Yeah, right.
To strengthen you point: if you want to use the same browser on desktop and on your smartphone, Firefox is the only one that has proper ad-blocking on mobile. Many other mobile browsers have ad-blocking, but none of the block those intolerable "related content" fake news bottom-of-the-page spammers. Only Firefox with ublock origin properly blocks invasive ads on Android.
The other ad-blockers on mobile (integrated in the browser or not) suck so much that I'm beginning to think they are all getting money from advertisers. And of course, google chrome does not block anything at all, which is very bad considered how much android malvertising there is. There is one Android browser called Yandex, that support desktop extensions, but surprise!, ublock and adblock plus are not supported. You are stuck with its built-in adblocker, which does not block anything.
I've tried so many times to use anything else that firefox on Android, but after two days of surfing the web in a minuscule square in the center of flashing advertisement, after being redirected to the play store to install stupid games, after too many pop-overs with a minuscule x, I always go back to Firefox.
To sum up: if Firefox is noticeably slow on Android, it is much less noticeably so on any decent desktop or laptop. Also, I like syncing desktop with mobile, to avoid having to retype password on the virtual keyboard, and to quickly find in the history a page I may have visited on my phone. So Firefox be it, on mobile because it is by far the best (even if very slow) and on desktop because it does not really suck that much, and it is the only one that sync with mobile.
But the day where Chrome or Opera support proper ad-blocking on Android (and Opera can do ffmpeg decode on Linux without going crazy), or Vivaldi releases an Android version, I'm sorry for Firefox, if it has not catch up on performance, its going to be retired.
this post contain no useful information, no need to mod it down
Nonsense, uBlock Origin supports URL based blocking as well as DOM based. In fact URL based is the primary method it uses since that avoids loading the content at all.
For third-party lists, yeah. But adding your own rules is uncomfortable at best. I might be a doofus, but I can't seem to find a way to provide a list of URLs requested by the page you're on -- ie, an equivalent of Adblock's "Open blockable items". The best approximation in uBlock Origin I managed to find is some "dynamic filtering" that apparently allows blocking by domain only. For that, I already have RequestPolicy which does that so much better, with a "default deny" rule on third-party assets.
If uBlock Origin has a way to show the full list of URLs referenced, that I have missed, would you mind pointing it out?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Thief
Click on the uBlock icon, and in the window that opens click on the icon next to the dropper. If you hover over it, it will say "open logger". Then you get a new tab where you can click the reload button at the top and see exactly what was loaded and what was blocked and by which rule.
You can use the dropper to select an element on the page. You can start with a deep one and then use the list it shows to walk up the tree, to find the highest element, or simply edit the rule to just the URL if you want that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Got it. Looks like that logger window is empty and doesn't even appear like it should have anything in it -- unless you manually reload the page you want to kill parts of, losing dynamically loaded pieces and so on.
You can't also just click on an entry to make a filter -- unless I'm missing something, on uBlock Origin you need to copy the URL, go to some other place several clicks away, manually write and edit the rule. On the other hand, AdBlock Plus takes you directly to a "new filter" dialog, with a few common variants pre-made ("subdomain.domain.tld/first_dir_part/", "subdomain.domain.tld/", "domain.tld") and editable full URL.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Firefox is really fast, depending on many factors ...
I upgraded from Kubuntu 14.04 to 16.04, and Firefox is the fastest I have seen in years. Maybe it is because Canonical have switched to the 64bit version, or something else. This is on an 8 year old laptop.
Regardless, you have to install the following:
- uBlock Origin (block ads)
- NoScript (Disable Javascript and Flash except from white listed sites)
- Cookie Monster (Don't accept cookies except from white listed sites)
- Classic Theme Restorer (Makes it look familiar)
- Auto Unload Tab (reduces memory footprint)
Optionally, you may also want to install:
- Session Manager (Never lose track of your open tabs)
- Add This (for easy content sharing)
I have Chromium, Opera, Konqueror and Rekonq on the same machine, and it used to be that Chromium and Opera are faster, but the former has a high memory footprint. But with 16.04, Firefox is the fastest.
Sticking with Firefox for the foreseeable future ...
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
dillo is very fast and it have a GUI also... it do not have javascript, but that is a feature for many people!
Higuita
http://arewefastyet.com/
Casteism