Slashdot Mirror
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.
Does it have:
- Tabs on bottom option.
- Status bar option.
- Show title bar option.
Compatibility with:
- Imagezoom
- FireFTP
- Adblock Plus
I was a long time FF user years ago, but ended up switching to Chrome due to its speed relative to FF. I tried 57 when it came out, and love it - I am back to FF now and happy to say that it at least seems as fast as Chrome, but I prefer the FF experience overall. Hopefully they can port over these improvements to FF on Android since Chrome still seems to have a noticeable edge there. Plus... you have to admit that it is kind of bad ass that a lot of these improvements are resulting from Rust - a language Mozilla developed in part to bring better resource utilization and security to FF. It appears this v57 improvement was largely resulting from the Stylo component (written in Rust) - but their roadmap calls for more components to be swapped out - so the good times may keep getting better for FF - I hope they do because competition is good for us all.
The people who whine about slowness and memory leaks are the same ones who would leave their car running day in and day out then complain it's using too much fuel.
Err no. Like do you even analogy man? Fuel is an expendable resource. Your comparison would be more like a car that you start driving on a road trip, but about half way through it refuses to go more than 50km/h on the freeway, and you too would bitch about that.
Do I care which is faster Chrome or FF57? No. I'm just glad we finally got to a stage where we can genuinely ask that question without it being a foregone conclusion.