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Is Firefox 57 Faster Than Chrome? (mashable.com)
An anonymous reader quotes TechNewsWorld:
Firefox is not only fast on startup -- it remains zippy even when taxed by multitudes of tabs. "We have a better balance of memory to performance than all the other browsers," said Firefox Vice President for Product Nick Nguyen. "We use 30 percent less memory, and the reason for that is we can allocate the number of processes Firefox uses on your computer based on the hardware that you have," he told TechNewsWorld. The performance improvements in Quantum could be a drink from the fountain of youth for many Firefox users' systems. "A significant number of our users are on machines that are two cores or less, and less than 4 gigabytes of RAM," Nguyen explained.
Mashable ran JetStream 1.1 tests on the ability to run advanced web applications, and concluded that "Firefox comes out on top, but not by much. This means it's, according to JetStream, slightly better suited for 'advanced workloads and programming techniques.'" Firefox also performed better on "real-world speed tests" on Amazon.com and the New York Times' site, while Chrome performed better on National Geographic, CNN, and Mashable. Unfortunately for Mozilla, Chrome looks like it's keeping the top spot, at least for now. The only test that favors Quantum is JetStream, and that's by a hair. And in Ares-6 [which measures how quickly a browser can run new Javascript functions, including mathematical functions], Quantum gets eviscerated... Speedometer simulates user actions on web applications (specifically, adding items to a to-do list) and measures the time they take... When it comes to user interactions in web applications, Chrome takes the day...
In reality, however, Quantum is no slug. It's a capable, fast, and gorgeous browser with innovative bookmark functionality and a library full of creative add-ons. As Mozilla's developers fine-tune Quantum in the coming months, it's possible it could catch up to Chrome. In the meantime, the differences in page-load time are slight at best; you probably won't notice the difference.
Mashable ran JetStream 1.1 tests on the ability to run advanced web applications, and concluded that "Firefox comes out on top, but not by much. This means it's, according to JetStream, slightly better suited for 'advanced workloads and programming techniques.'" Firefox also performed better on "real-world speed tests" on Amazon.com and the New York Times' site, while Chrome performed better on National Geographic, CNN, and Mashable. Unfortunately for Mozilla, Chrome looks like it's keeping the top spot, at least for now. The only test that favors Quantum is JetStream, and that's by a hair. And in Ares-6 [which measures how quickly a browser can run new Javascript functions, including mathematical functions], Quantum gets eviscerated... Speedometer simulates user actions on web applications (specifically, adding items to a to-do list) and measures the time they take... When it comes to user interactions in web applications, Chrome takes the day...
In reality, however, Quantum is no slug. It's a capable, fast, and gorgeous browser with innovative bookmark functionality and a library full of creative add-ons. As Mozilla's developers fine-tune Quantum in the coming months, it's possible it could catch up to Chrome. In the meantime, the differences in page-load time are slight at best; you probably won't notice the difference.
It doesn't matter how fast either browser is, if they don't fix the memory leaks that they BOTH have. They both just slow to a crawl as they consume all the system memory. I switched from Firefox to Chrome because of this, then Chrome slowly got just as bad. Memory leaks are so 1975.
No package should autoupdate its systemwide binaries. Especially if You have five user accounts on a machine, or on a production or development machine. Besides, why would anybody want applications to autoupdate in the first place?
The obvious answer to Your dilemma is this: application should run with user privileges, and only an admin can install an update to a binary provided with the system.
...if you get people asking the wrong questions.
"Is Firefox 57 Faster Than Chrome?" doesn't matter. Firefox is free software (software users are free to run, inspect, share, and modify) and the basis for more free software browsers that do a better job respecting one's privacy than Firefox does by default. Google's Chrome, on the other hand, is nonfree (proprietary, user-subjugating) software published by a known spy agency and partner of the NSA (three cheers for Snowden for freeing the documents about what the American government and corporations are doing!). Using that program means literally handing Google as much control over your computer (including your browsing) as your computer account allows.
I don't care which browser is faster. It so happens that any recent revision of Firefox is fast enough to do the jobs I do. What's more important to me is software freedom; I care about retaining control over the computers I own and I think all other computer users deserve full control over their computers. So I recommend software freedom for its own sake even if that means an inconvenience on something as relatively unimportant as browser speed. Leave it to the corporate tech media, the corporate sycophants (readily found on /.), and people too naive about social issues to cultivate bad priorities like browser speed over software freedom.
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