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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.
I thought it was faster than Chrome.
But honestly the huge amount of features FF has that Chrome doesn't makes the choice clear.
Switched to Chrome 6 months ago and never looked back. The Firefox bloat went from bad, to inexcusable, to infuriating.
says NO, it's the law.
Does it have:
- Tabs on bottom option.
- Status bar option.
- Show title bar option.
Compatibility with:
- Imagezoom
- FireFTP
- Adblock Plus
Without ad/tracking/script blockers installed by default the question is almost pointless.
NO browser is fast on the modern internet when you're not decrapifying everything first.
(Also, FF and Chromium don't send all your data and browsing history directly to google. Just throwing that out there).
Don't get me wrong I have no issue with change but a lot seems like change for change sake without adding anything useful.
Top sites is relegated to a thing of the past bar some tiny thumbnail icons that you can't edit. Only way around it is hacky and doesn't work as well as the old one.
Tabs are much larger now they incorporate the loading progress bar for no real need.
Changed icons that are no better at describing their purpose than the old ones.
Moving refresh outside the URL bar.
Slower initial loading of pages despite being faster when on it.
Theme not consistent dark theme has white scroll.
Updating without asking wtf.
Stop trying to shove pocket down my throat.
Great it's new and fancy but so much is just changed for change sake without adding functionality. If anything it's somewhat removed.
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.
It's really disturbing to see this nonsensical "Firefox doesn't send information to Google" myth being propagated again and again, especially here at Slashdot of all places.
READ FIREFOX'S PRIVACY POLICY!
The September 28, 2017 version of it states (with emphasis added):
It should be pretty clear to you now that Firefox very well can send information to Google, or otherwise uses Google nonsense like Google advertising IDs.
So don't give us this bullshit about Firefox somehow respecting our privacy. In my opinion it doesn't. In fact, I think it's worse than Chrome, in that it has tricked fools like you into thinking that Firefox doesn't violate your privacy by sending information to Google when, as Firefox's very own privacy policy clearly states, Firefox can send information to Google.
with browsers, or Linux distros, just look at the top 5 distros at distrowatch, that top #1 spot is highly contended for and competition for it is fierce, ubuntu was on there for a long time, and finally got bumped down by Mint and Debian which is the grand-daddy of both distros is #1 and ubuntu has fallen to #4, and once something loses that #1 spot it is hard to get back to the top
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
You'd have to be the kind of full-of-your-self "expert on using Internet" to actually think one is better, faster, and the other being "literally unusable".
QFT. None of these browsers are garbage, and it's pure silliness to say any of them are.
(Not you, Edge. You've still got some growing up to do. Put an end to those crashes, for a start.)
It's broke, as far as I am concerned.
It's like a Mercedes that has no radio/xm/cd/etc..., no a/c, no adjustable seats, no side mirrors, no gps, plastic seat covers, etc...
They optimized for the one feature that didn't matter to me.
Last time I checked they hadn't, and while I'm sure googles coders think they're infallable and there won't be any exploitable bugs in their sandbox, I for one am not prepared to take that risk. There is ZERO reason for ANY part of a browser to strart up or run with root privs.
I mean they changed the way bookmark and liked page are handled, and I have spent the better part of 2 or 3 hours reorganizing everything. So I am pissed.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
For one thing, Firefox defaults to NOT sending everything to Google. That's quite a feature.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Mozilla gets approximately $300 Million dollars a year from Google (Mozilla just recently terminated their contract with Yahoo and went back to their old girlfriend, Google.)
If you don't think Mozilla is giving Google anything and everything they want, in return for that money, you are insane.
Webpage and technical data to Google’s SafeBrowsing service:
FWIW, safebrowsing works by downloading a blacklist of hashed URLs that are known bad. If a page's URL hash is not in that list, then it loads normally. If the hash is in the blacklist, then firefox sends the hash to google and gets back the full URL from the blacklist and compares it to the full URL of the page you are visiting in case there is a hashing collision.
Safebrowsing could be abused - google could put known good URLs on there and record when browsers do a full hash lookup of those hashes. But the blacklist can only be so big before performance goes to shit and anybody can inspect the list too, so that level of evil is unlikely to work in the long term.
Who cares? I've been using Netscape for the last 20 years. There's still nothing better.
There's that little difference between can send and will send...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Instead, they were probably sending everything to Yahoo! and we all know how well they do security-wise.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
As long as this little feature is not present, few Chrome users will switch to Firefox. For me it was an instant turn off, even more so on an old Gnome desktop with those preposterously humongous (humongously preposterous?) title bars.
Come on FF, this is a _title_ bar, makes perfect sense to show tab titles there!
When you get the mental masturbations of speed tests that seeming place ultimate speed above all other considerations. In the race to be the fastest browser, Firefox dumped a boat load of functionality that many would have preferred to keep instead of the speed improvement.
Mainly because it errors out fast when trying to display any big web page. In other-words, speed without working well is useless! Tim S
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.
As to the "new" Firefox, it looks like something from Soviet Russia. Ugly squared edges, no logic as to why useful items are hidden and have to be sought out, doodads which serve no apparent purpose other than they can be done, and of course the in-your-face, blaring advertisements when you open a new, blank tab, though they can be turned off once you figure out how to do so.
57 is a case study in shiny for shiny's sake.
FF should have supported the older engine line in parallel for a year or two until extensions catch up.
FF(S) they do! It's called ESR (extended support release). Go get it and you'll get security fixes for the next year (and a half? two?) which mainline FF extends the features available to the new extension architecture and the extensions catch up.
Why switch cold turkey?
They havne't. It's been supporting both sorts in parallel for a while now I believe.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
57 appeared on my Android phone early this morning. And yes, it is noticeably better. I was very happy to see ublock survive the upgrade and function as intended.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.topSitesCount
There is ZERO reason for ANY part of a browser to strart up or run with root privs.
Would it be preferable to for a PC with five user accounts to have five copies of the browser executable installed, one for each user account? Because that's the only way you're going to have the browser update itself without root permissions on an operating system whose primary application repository forbids third-party browser engines.
Mozilla do other things too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Why UNIX?
If you think you have any privacy on the internet then you're nuts. Nearly every site has a "like us on facebook" embedded piece of junk web button. Every single time you land on a page like this you're telling the img host where you've been... along with your cookies. It's not hard for the bigger ISPs to track you, regardless of your browser choice.
Why UNIX?
I'm so tempted to use profanity to describe the jackasses at Mozilla for what they've done to Firefox. Very few of the millions of people who now call themselves "former Firefox users" will come back. That includes me. I'm certainly not a spokesman for this group, but I bet my situation is very much like theirs.
'Way back at the beginning, I did not choose Firefox because it was the fastest browser out there. I chose it because it gave reasonable performance, used tabs, and offered all kinds of interesting add-ons that put me unambiguously in charge of my on-line experience. Before long, I had my browser configured exactly the way I wanted it. Life was good.
So did I stop visiting the Firefox add-ons site? Hell no! It was both fun and interesting to see what some clever person had come up with that I might want to try...often things I'd never have thought of on my own. Test driving was incredibly fast and easy, and if I didn't like an app or got tired of it, I could get rid of it in seconds.
This was what I loved: I had a core browser that was reliable and fast enough for my purposes, and that I used when I actually needed to be productive. And I had an endlessly-fascinating toy that let me try out interesting, fun things whenever I wanted. When Chrome came out, I gave it a try...why wouldn't I? It was fast, alright. And utterly soulless. I uninstalled it after only a week.
So then the a-holes at Firefox decided they wanted to be Chrome. Even worse, they started screwing around with my GUI, apparently for sport. Classic Theme Restorer could only do so much. But that was only the symptom, not the disease. The disease was the Chrome obsession. And look at them now. "Add-ons" is now a dirty word. But oh my, they're the fastest (maybe).
So here we are today. The people who ruined Firefox are proudly trumpeting that they've turned it into an even faster Chrome. Good luck with that. I didn't want Chrome in the first place. I don't want it now. And I especially don't want a Chrome wannabe that reminds me every time I launch it what I have lost.
So thanks, Firefox, but I think I'll stay with Pale Moon as my regular browser, and Epic as my main backup. If you ever manage to buy back your soul, give me a call.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I use Firefox and Chrome regularly, leaning heavily towards Firefox because I was quite satisfied with the add-ons I had for it. Pretty much 100% of my recreational browsing is on Firefox.
1) Yes, Firefox IS much faster to load and navigate to my usual websites. However, sites heavy with the usual endless third party scripts, ads and so on remain occasionally frustratingly slow. However; I have always attributed that to poor design choices and lack of network optimization on the part of those third party content delivery networks. (I'm using Ghostery, but no other ad-blocking software on purpose.)
2) Page rendering is MUCH faster. I think this is the biggest factor in perceived browser speed. Easily matching Chrome and actually surpassing it on image heavy sites like imgur.
3) The add on ecosystem has a long way to go to catch up to what previous versions of Firefox had available. To preserve speed, function and reliability, Firefox 57 has a much more modular arrangement. That means ALL previous add-ons will not work in Firefox 57. In addition; what add-ons that do exist do not seem to be nearly as powerful as the add-ons I used previously. That may be due to the modular design not allowing as much control of Firefox by add-ons, it may be because there simply hasn't been time for third party developers to come up with equally powerful replacements.
4) Firefox has a pretty slick system for handling the deprecation of old add-ons. After updating, when you go to the about:addons page, you'll notice that none of your old addons are visible, but there is a link at the top you can click to view them. Clicking one of your greyed out addons takes you to the get more addons page and usually shows you a pretty good replacement. (9 of the 12 addons I love most had acceptable replacements, learning curve aside) The diversity of addons, as I said, just isn't there yet. So if you have one of the lessor known, less popular addons, you probably won't be able to replace it.
5) There are many very popular addons where the original developer is unavailable or as announced that their addon will not be, or cannot be, rewritten for the new Firefox.
6) The themes situation frankly sucks. Simple themes, ones that basically change the colour of the address and menu bar space are still there and old ones you have will still work. But "complex themes" (what I call REAL themes, ones that change the icons used for buttons, bookmark folders, shape and dimensionality of tabs and so on flat out do not exist. From checking out Mozillas pages on 57, it seems that, as it stands now, Firefox 57 is simply not capable of supporting them. Mozilla does say that complex themes are something they are working on and plan on making available later. Personally, I don't want to make the address/menu bar space simply some colour, or use some wide, narrow image as a simple background. I want themes that help visually distinguish tabs, themes that accentuate the skeuomorph effect. I find this makes it easier to see and mentally manipulate. For me a browser is a tool and a tool doesn't need to look pretty and should never never never try to look pretty at the cost of ergonomics. For now, this is a total loss in my book.
Overall, I do like Firefox 57 and have no plans on reverting to an older one. I am however, going to keep spending a lot of time working on it until I can regain the look and above all function I prefer.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
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.
I found that Firefox may use less RAM then Chrome but streaming it tended to use slightly more CPU and GPU. Both could affect battery but tests will have to be done. Otherwise I would say Firefox has hit Par but not much more. Certainly not enough to significantly change the browser market share as it is now.
My reasoning is that Edge is every bit as fast and now has 70 popular extensions and we have seen a decline not increase in market share for Edge since it was introduced. If you look at human nature, people stick with what works and doesn't make changes unless that stops working. Given Chrome's significant market share I would say most Chrome users won't change. So who exactly is going to use Firefox?
I switched to Vivaldi when 57 was released and I quite love it. Feels like the best of Opera and Chromium. I'm pretty sure I'd have switched anyway if I'd known about it before last week.
Firefox Quantum on android is the least bad mobile browser though.
I clicked on a link in google and it failed to relay it through the google pre-click domain or the rerouting javascript froze. So no.
Chromecast brokent, and, most, importantly, 57 broke NoScript.
Now all ugly creatures crawled out out of giant Internet arsehole and torture me on screen.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
if you insist on never closing your browser. Yeah, some folks get really upset when you suggest they do that, but most don't even notice that they periodically close their browser.
Resources are limited. What's a better use of time, tracking down a few kilos worth of memory leaks that annoy the less than 1% of your user base who never close their browser down and keep 100+ tabs open or making your JavaScript engine 10% faster?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
How's the memory footprint doing Firefox? That's what I thought. Still looking down at everyone from that ivory tower. It's lonely up there isn't it? That was Firefox's fatal mistake. It's too bad, I used Firefox for many years and then switched because Firefox would grind to a halt after being open for a relatively short period of time.
We'll make great pets
By the way if you want some real benchmarks, here. While 57 has improved performance over 56, these claims about Quantum being twice as fast as Chrome are just blatantly false. It varies depending on the benchmark.
We'll make great pets
well it runs twitch now , so that's good...
No part of the browser runs as root unless your stupid enough to explicitly do so...
It runs as your user account, and then sandboxes things like javascript and plugins even further.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
There is ZERO reason for ANY part of a browser to strart up or run with root privs.
[How else are you] going to have the browser update itself without root permissions[?]
application should run with user privileges, and only an admin can install an update to a binary provided with the system.
Then what process, if not part of the browser, downloads and installs said updates? Is it desirable to leave a security vulnerability unpatched for days or weeks until the admin returns to the machine to apply an update?
My PC has several user accounts. Obviously, none of them can update the browser. Only root updates the browser
How long does it typically take from the day the browser publisher publishes an update addressing a security vulnerability to the day root arrives, such as from vacation, and installs said update?
Ops - you're talking about some system that forbids third party browsers.
I was referring to Windows. Windows has Windows Store, a mechanism to update EdgeHTML and wrappers around EdgeHTML. It can run Firefox or Chrome but doesn't have its own means to update Firefox or Chrome. It instead relies on means provided by each browser publisher.
What key feature FF has that Chrome doesn't? (except being OSS)
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
...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.
Digital Citizen
APT doesn't run natively on Windows. It runs in WSL, sure, but browsers are X apps, and WSL isn't intended to host X apps yet. For this reason, each browser on Windows must include its own update mechanism.
Uhh, let's see, their search engine and advertising deal with Yahoo, and we all know about Yahoo's data breach, unless you've been living under a rock for years.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
You realize that Firefox 57 for Android doesnt have any of the Stylo improvements that Mozilla claims made things twice as fast right?
Its a shame you don't apparently understand how to use google search as well as you seem to think you understand google chrome.
Are you seriously suggesting a program should run with root privs just for the sake of ease of updating?? I hope you're never employed as a sys admin, your company would be owned within months.
This new FF quantum architecture has a major regression which they're very slow on fixing so far. If you have a large select list(html SELECT), FF takes several seconds to open it when you click on it. It's so bad that we had to tell users to use IE for now until they fix it. Chrome and Safari all display the select list in less than 1 second. Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...
Yes, ABP is working just fine in Firefox 57.
I don't know if the new Firefox is faster. But I don't care. It's now, finally, fast enough to be usable!
Previous versions struggled just to scroll down a Web page. This new version is fast enough that I can't really tell a performance difference between it and Chrome. That means that it's now a viable option for me. And I LOVE that it can block auto-play videos!
No package should autoupdate its systemwide binaries.
This traces back to a failure on the part of the OS to provide an adequate package manager. Both Windows and MacOS suffer from this. I don't see any reason why every OS shouldn't have something like apt/yum that can update the OS and all applications via a system-wide updater and configurable repositories. Not only would it do away with the need for applications to update themselves, it would make mass deployment/updates much easier for IT departments.
But forget security, and forget making people's lives easier. Apple and Microsoft need to force everyone into their app stores so they can get a cut.
Then one is reversing the version number. It's hard to know how user settings/data will behave under back-versioning. I'll try PaleMoon for a while. They don't plan any major engine or UI overhauls any time soon: my cheese won't move again.
Table-ized A.I.
nonsense, all that can be rendered useless by the savvy user. Maybe *your* browser reaches to a facebook web beacon landing site, mine does not.
that you don't turn off unless you're shutting down your business. So I cant' really blame them.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
While I like the improvements of Quantum, I still rely on "Tab Groups" plugin, which has yet to be developed for Quantum.
So, it's v56 for me until this one little plugin is ported!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
If patching systems is taking weeks instead of a few days, you have a manpower problem, not a permissions problem. Any CIO worth a shit
...isn't necessarily going to have the money to hire someone to update the PCs on his home LAN while he is on vacation.
For work, I agree with your assessment. But at home, I've seen cases where the administrator is present only once every couple weeks.
I am happy that downloads can't be written wherever. Isn't that a good thing?
Sure, but that's no good reason to restrict downloads to a singular location. Allow extensions to select alternate download locations (tied in with a directory selector dialog), and allow only downloads to the predefined directories.
Who cares when it stutters when I scroll and it did not do that before. Go ahead and blame my extensions... oh, you can't. All of my extensions (only noscript) stopped working immediately. Meh.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen