Firefox Takes the Performance Crown From Chrome

diegocg writes "Recent browser benchmarks are showing surprising results: in 'a geometric mean of all four performance-based categories: Wait Times, JavaScript/DOM, HTML5/CSS3, and Hardware Acceleration,' Firefox 22 'pulls off an upset, replacing the long-time performance champion Google Chrome 27 as the new speed king.' (Other browsers benchmarked were IE10, Opera 12, and Opera Next.) With these results, and Firefox developers focusing in fixing the UI sluggishness, can this be the start of a Firefox comeback, after years of slow market share decline?"

Geometric mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

Geometric mean? Colour me cynical but that sounds to me like "we lost under the arithmetic mean, so we selected a mean under which we won".

Memory hog

[EmperorOfCanada]

I regularly see my Firefox cracking a gig of memory. Then after a few days use it often starts getting weird. Then when I try to quit it the damn thing won't go away so I have to do a "Force Quit". I primarily keep using it because firebug is so good.

Re:In Windows 8 64 Bit As Defined by Tom's Hardwar

[Ambassador Kosh]

On all my systems I start the system when I boot up and it stays running pretty much indefinitely. When I am done with the system for the day I just hibernate the system. I just care how well the browser works over time and that it doesn't go nuts memory wise. Since my laptop has 16GB of ram I worry very little about the browser.

I do like hardware acceleration a lot though. What I find is that it translates to better battery usage and the system runs faster while also running longer.

Overall I care about performance, standard compliance, security, responsiveness, and to some extent memory usage. At this point though it doesn't really matter if you choose Firefox or Chrome.

Re:Memory hog

[MightyYar]

Same here. It can get so large and complicated in memory that it takes 10 minutes to quit. This seems to be mostly limited to the Mac version. I'm a slave to vertical tabs, though, so I haven't used Chrome since they abandoned that feature.

Re:Damned lies and statistics

[Anonymous Coward]

See "How not to lie with statistics: the correct way to summarize benchmark results"

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=5673
http://ece.uprm.edu/~nayda/Courses/Icom6115F06/Papers/paper4.pdf

Re:Disagree

[marsu_k]

Wake me up when the Chrom(e/ium) console is better. Yes, both allow tab-completion of properties of an object. However (as a contrieved example), say you have an object "foo" that has a method "bar" that returns an object of type "baz". In both, I can type "foo.b" and select the "bar" method. But in Firebug, I'm able to write "foo.bar()." and autocomplete properties of "baz". If you're working with something like ExtJS it's godsend. Also the network tab is much more useful in Firebug - in Chrom(e/ium) one can sort by type, but there's no way to show only requests of a certain type.