The ultimate parameter for me is speed. As much as I love Mozilla's open source policy, I just can't use it because it is slower. RAM is not a problem to anyone, so I prefer more RAM used than slower performance.
The same thing can be said about Chrome. I was previously on 3gb ram. It ran so fucking slow. Firefox was much better. Now I added on 8gb and chrome runs very fast is more responsive than Firefox. The first thing that came to my mind was that developers have optimized for their own environment rather than what most users have.
The last time I checked (about a year ago) Firefox consumed less RAM than Chrome did yet was notably slower than Chrome. So I would say RAM efficiency is not the most important thing to define actual performance.
I might go back to Firefox when it no longer consumes gigabytes of RAM after a few hours of operation. Until then, I'm with Chrome. I don't care about speed as much -- so long as it's reliable, and doesn't grind the rest of my machine to a halt, it's all good.
Once every 6 months, I make an honest attempt to switch to Firefox. I want to use it. However, at least on macOS, I don't buy the argument that it's faster/uses less RAM. I usually have a TON of tabs open[1], and Firefox is horrible at pulling that weight. It's just a slower browser, and I can't tolerate that.
> But Firefox wins, against stereotype, for memory usage and page load speed (more so with ad blockers installed).
I'll agree on memory, and that's one of the reasons I continue to use Firefox but memory is not speed. It's my impression that Chrome wins on JS execution and DOM manipulation/reflow, which is really what I are about as a developer and (generally) as a user. When you're on a low end machine, these make a big difference. When you're on a machine like most developers have, it really doesn't except in technology demos.
The Jaegermonkey and Layers work should help out, but I'm not sure that Firefox will ever catch Chrome. It's a difference in development philosophy. Webkit reverts ANY performance degradation while Mozilla reverts all performance regressions except for new features. I prefer Mozilla's philosophy since the places where this matters is generally a performance vs edge case correctness tradeoff.
On my old hardware, Chrome based browsers run significantly faster. Faster startup, significantly faster page loading. More responsive UI (new tab, new window etc). Once a web app loads it’ll be equally fast though.
I keep switching back to Firefox as it’s supposedly “as fast now” but it never was, and on my hardware, it still isn’t.
I gotta add to this that when it comes to ethics and privacy there is no contest. But the bulk of Mozilla’s funding coming from its arch-nemesis is tragi-comical.
What many others have already said - it's slower and many popular sites don't work properly on it. I don't feel like randomly having websites break when I am trying to get things done.
Even on a newer computer Firefox feels jagged and hangs. Memory leaks still happening years later. It is so frustrating to see Firefox using 1.5GB of RAM when only 2 tabs remain.
Quantum helped a lot, but it's still not enough for me and many others.
I'm concerned about this as well. But yet I still predominantly use Chrome. Why? Because Mozilla seem completely incapable of delivering a browser that doesn't Hoover up every ounce of available RAM at the earliest possible opportunity. Chrome also uses more memory than one would consider acceptable, but it seems to suck it up more slowly than Firefox. And, even in a somewhat RAM starved state, Chrome seems to perform better. Net-net, I keep using Chrome.
My advice to the Mozilla group: drop ALL new feature development and dedicate every man, woman, child, cyborg, dalek, c'thulu, earthworm, or rock that you can round up, to one purpose: improving Firefox performance. Specifically, try to decrease RAM and CPU utilization. Don't do anything else until you're consistently better than Chrome.
"objectively better performance"
What are yon talking about? How many people browse the web on an i9 13900K with 32GB RAM? Try a 5 year old laptop with 4GB RAM and you'll see a completely different picture - Firefox is far better at managing limited memory.
Also on Android (probably on iPhones as well) Chrome doesn't allow installation of ad-blockers - making it 10x slower than FF with uBlock Origin.
I occasionally run Firefox (out of nostalgia, idealism, or the need to test a site), and the fact that it is so slow is absolutely what stops me from switching back to it.
I love Firefox's features, but I've tried it for a week and I just have a too big loss of performance. My 2017 Macbook pro with 8gb of RAM just doesn't cut it. The browser is something I use +6 hours per week, I can't handle it being laggy.
When I try it a little bit it seems fine, but after using Firefox for a week going to Chrome seemed like a relief in terms of performance. I'm missing some cool features from Firefox like containers, but performance is more important.
Is Chrome a RAM hog and therefore faster than FF?
I exclusively use FF and find it a bit sluggish, but am fine to give up some speed for the privacy gain.
So much of any comparison like this is about performance, but I really don't think that's as important as it used to be, and that's coming from someone who generally uses slow computers and optimizes software until they run fast.
I'm typing this on a bit of an exceptional example, a 2.6 GHz Northwood Pentium 4 with 1 GB of single-channel DDR-400 RAM. The one saving grace is that it has an SSD, but I put the swap file on the spinning drive (which is modern). It's running Linux Mint 14, Xfce edition, with a handful of minor OS-level optimizations. Firefox 21, with a fairly standard configuration, flawlessly handles a dozen or more tabs on a daily basis. It's even pretty snappy, more limited by my internet connection (1.5 Mb DSL) than by the hardware it's running on.
If this sorry excuse for a computer does that well, are the relatively minor differences in performance between browsers going to be a big deal on modern hardware? There will be edge cases, such as the people who have hundreds of tabs open at a time, but for the average user I'm having trouble envisioning that.
The things that make a difference anymore are very tough to quantify in tests like Tom's Hardware did. I will always have Firefox around because I think Mozilla actually cares about privacy. I use Presto on my phone because it's the only one I've found that renders things how I want. Many people are tied to a browser because of extensions. Standards support doesn't matter until you find a page where a browser doesn't work, and those pages will be different for different people. Browsers can be rock solid on one computer and worthlessly crashy on another.
I don't think a round of benchmarks has meant anything to me in browser selection for a long time, and when it did I did them myself so as to account for the computer they were running on. I choose by trying to use a variety of them for a while, and a winner always emerges quite quickly.
Firefox is my default browser but I have Chrome handy too in case I have to use Google Docs (things like Copy paste don't work properly in Firefox). I find that Firefox is maybe 50% slower than Chrome on initial load, but thereafter, I can't tell the difference. I really cannot see how an extra second or so of load time for a software product that one uses all day every day (ie you probably load it only once), represents a material performance difference. I think Chrome at this point is much more about inertia, and it is entirely reasonable to argue that we need competition and to request for people to use Firefox. Moreover I find Mozilla to be quite credible on its Firefox roadmap; after all, they invented a whole new, advanced, programming language, just for Firefox, and there's a lot of noise coming out of Mozilla on its various strategies IMO (including the logo, for example) which suggests to me that the organization is dynamic and has a strong future. Therefore I'm supporting Mozilla, and it's essentially costing me nothing, while hopefully doing a small bit to prevent a dangerous hegemony from forming.
You know, I have a lot of RAM in my laptop, but Firefox - even the latest release - still gradually slows down over the course of a single day. If I leave it running over night, my whole system becomes sluggish, every keypress takes visible time to render a character.
I was pretty disappointed when I had to leave my perfectly configured Firefox behind to switch to Chrome, but the thing is just so much more stable.
"Faster" is not the holy grail metric. Standard compliance and well-thought-out interoperability are high on my list.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to use a dog of a browser, either, but in modern times with dual-core this and 8GB that, one would probably have to actually work at it in order to have a genuinely slow browser.
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