Firefox vs. Chrome: Which Performs Better on a Linux Laptop? (phoronix.com) 57
Phoronix staged "a showdown" between Firefox and Chrome, testing them both on an Intel Panther Lake laptop running Ubuntu 26.04.
JetStream 3.0 was announced at the end of March as the latest major web browser benchmark. This updated version of JetStream is focused on intensive portions of modern JavaScript and WebAssembly web applications... Google Chrome 147 came in at 1.47x the performance of Mozilla Firefox 149. A very strong showing for Google's web browser and to not much surprise Google engineers have been heavily involved in JetStream 3 as part of its open governance model. Chrome debuts very well on JetStream 3 while it will be interesting to see what optimizations Mozilla engineers pursue in the months ahead...
In the recent Speedometer 3.1 benchmark update that is focused on browser responsiveness, Chrome was at 1.24x the performance of Firefox... Firefox picked up wins in the MotionMark and StyleBench browser benchmarks. Google Chrome meanwhile continued to dominate in the JavaScript heavy benchmarks... In some of the WebAssembly benchmarks, there was at least some healthy competition between Firefox and Chrome on Linux.
Across the web browser benchmarks, the Core Ultra X7 358H power consumption came in at 11.44 Watts on average for Chrome and 11.74 Watts for Firefox. Quite close. The slight CPU power difference may come down to the CPU usage with Chrome coming in slightly lower at 8.13% on average to 8.35% with Firefox. Chrome also came in at slightly lower memory consumption across all the benchmarks with total memory usage on average at 4.67GB to Firefox at 4.83GB.
In the recent Speedometer 3.1 benchmark update that is focused on browser responsiveness, Chrome was at 1.24x the performance of Firefox... Firefox picked up wins in the MotionMark and StyleBench browser benchmarks. Google Chrome meanwhile continued to dominate in the JavaScript heavy benchmarks... In some of the WebAssembly benchmarks, there was at least some healthy competition between Firefox and Chrome on Linux.
Across the web browser benchmarks, the Core Ultra X7 358H power consumption came in at 11.44 Watts on average for Chrome and 11.74 Watts for Firefox. Quite close. The slight CPU power difference may come down to the CPU usage with Chrome coming in slightly lower at 8.13% on average to 8.35% with Firefox. Chrome also came in at slightly lower memory consumption across all the benchmarks with total memory usage on average at 4.67GB to Firefox at 4.83GB.
Firefox in my case (Score:5, Informative)
Using 140.9-esr, Firefox is noticeably better in my laptop. Not exactly on power consumption but in these parameters:
These reasons make Firefox the undeniably better choice for my setup. I still have a natively compiled Chromium for those cases where Chrome is required.
Re:Firefox in my case (Score:5, Insightful)
In Firefox I can use the full uBlock origin. In Chrome I can only use the neutered one.
Important point. Firefox performance has never been an issue for me, but the ability to block ads and tracking is. Chrome may have better scores on performance benchmarks, but the fact that Google is an advertising company that will happily collect and sell my data any way they can, makes any benchmark wins moot. Put simply, it's not in Google's best interests to protect my privacy or allow me to shield myself for advertisements, so it's not in my best interests to trust Chrome.
Re: Firefox in my case (Score:4, Interesting)
That's the main thing for me, but Firefox has a lot of little nice quality of life things about it.
Slashdot ripped on the pip feature Firefox added a few months ago, but I find it quite nice being able to always float a playing video on top of whatever you're doing if you need to, nicer still is you can freely move and resize it however you want, something I had always wished YouTube would just allow on its own.
Container tabs, especially combined with temporary container tabs. Just so nice being able to have effectively a newly installed browser each time you open a new tab so that sites, especially google ones, give you consistent outputs.
Just too many nice things to give up when performance is already good enough.
Re: Firefox in my case (Score:5, Insightful)
We're thirty-plus years into the World Wide Web, and Firefox is still the only browser that gives you reasonably good cookie management.
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This. It's remarkable how good Firefox lets you manage the data stored by Firefox and how granular is.
Chrome, etc., only give you options like "last 1 hour" and such which are completely useless if one particular cookie is giving you trouble.
Firefox lets you see specific sites and those specific cookies and delete them individually (as well as the coarse grained options).
Re:Firefox in my case (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to mention, blocking more ads and other unnecessary stuff == better performance on the stuff you were actually trying to view. It very likely comes out as a net performance win even with a ~20% disadvantage in raw CPU speed.
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It's also a TREMENDOUS performance advantage. The benchmark in TFA doesn't reflect real-life usage as most sites, even javascript-heavy ones, spend 90% or more time on ads and tracking. That "instant auction" for whom gets to rape your eyeballs is anything but instant.
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Re:Firefox in my case (Score:4, Informative)
With Firefox you can have the full uBlock adblocker.
Mozilla money (Score:5, Insightful)
They could have done all those things. They have the resources. Their focus needs to be on making the absolutely best browser in the world.
Re: Mozilla money (Score:2)
The best car isn't necessarily the fastest one.
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Google Money (Score:2)
I would also like to see Mozilla putting more of its funds directly into improving their browser's core performance, and less on expensive side quests like buying Pocket and Anonym.
But let's not forget that Google has billions to counter Firefox's millions, and since the vast majority of JavaScript on the web is used to load advertisements... Google is incentivized as an ad company to provide the fastest JavaScript performance they can manage. They want their advertisements loaded as quickly as possible, of
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I would also like to see Mozilla putting more of its funds directly into improving their browser's core performance, and less on expensive side quests like buying Pocket and Anonym.
I don't disagree, but I accept that other people have different priorities.
As a practical matter, Mozilla has enough to buy Pocket and Anonym (which I consider mistakes) and ALSO make the best browser in the world.
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Mozilla seems to have decided long ago that Firefox was in terminal decline and they needed to find other business models to survive.
Lately that may have changed a little, but only because they think they might be able to build an AI browser. I'm still not convinced that they see just making a really solid browser as a viable business.
Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Firefox (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah this, load Firefox up with the usual goodies like UO and run this test again, I guarantee different results. Blocking all that garbage improves performance.
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Don't say I didn't warn you.
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Yea. But... (Score:2)
Yea. But Firefox has vertical tabs so who cares about performance stability... /s
Granted, I choose to believe that my life is more private because I choose Firefox over Chrome or Chromium. But, there's no arguing the better performance of all the Chromium based browsers, including Edge.
I should be choosing Brave. I can't really explain why I do not use Brave. Old habits, I guess.
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Been using Brave for a few years now.
Just do it, no reason not to (and look into AdNaseum separately, as Google kicked it out of their extensions site since it undoes their business model).
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>"Been using Brave for a few years now. Just do it, no reason not to"
Yes, there are LOTS of reasons not to.
Better than using Chrome, for sure. But in some ways not. Brave is still chrom*. It still depends on Google code and pretends to be Chrome. And that means it still contributes to extremely dangerous browser monoculture. A security and "standards" nightmare waiting to explode.
Firefox (and children) is the only major multiplatform browser whose code is not dependent on Google's Chromium.
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Yea. But Firefox has vertical tabs so who cares about performance stability... /s
Boy do I have bad news for you [blog.google]...
I must be a lightweight user (Score:4, Interesting)
I've never experienced any problems due to too slow a browser. Of course, I don't try to keep dozens of tabs open at once or probably anything else that a 'heavy' user would do. So these browsr speed wars have always seemed silly to me.
Power consumption (Score:2)
Why would you care about power consumption, other than trying to use it to do greenwashing/green marketing? It needs as much power as is required to do whatever it needs to do. As long as I pay my electricity, who cares?
Re:Power consumption (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you care about power consumption
"Firefox vs. Chrome: Which Performs Better on a Linux Laptop?"
Some people care about battery life.
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Why would you care about power consumption, other than trying to use it to do greenwashing/green marketing? It needs as much power as is required to do whatever it needs to do. As long as I pay my electricity, who cares?
Because power consumption is a proxy for performance? If you run two different programs (performing the same task) on the same hardware, and one uses more watts (watt hours actually) than the other, then the one using more power resources is using a higher percentage of the total capacity of the system. Processors (and their related cooling infrastructure) have a limited amount of heat they can dissipate. While power consumed is not a (speed) performance metric for a computer running a single task, it is a
Re: Power consumption (Score:1)
But they're not performing the same task, do they? Yes, there's probably an equivalent task in browsers A and B, but they are implemented differently and have different bells and whistles.
For example, browser A may need more energy because it performs a task better in terms of provided value than browser B. If browser B performed the same task to the standard of A, it might actually use more energy for the same task than A.
Unless the tasks are defined in exactly the same way in A and B, individual performan
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The overall topic of the thread is about comparing the performance of two browsers, and the summary listed electrical power usage as part of the comparison. Your post was discounting the power comparison portion and writing it off as "greenwashing" as if power comparison had no value other than being green. I am saying that power consumption is a valid technical comparison point for reasons beyond the political. It impacts the total performance possible on the machine (my point), and it impacts cost and bat
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For example, browser A may need more energy because it performs a task better in terms of provided value than browser B.
The value here is power use, speed and efficiency. If you want a different metric then do your own study and publish your own article.
Re: Power consumption (Score:2)
I'm just saying that the metric is a dumb one to start with.
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As long as I pay my electricity, who cares?
Ignoring the fact that you don't seem to know what a laptop battery is, it looks like you could have a promising career as a data center site planner.
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Someone who cares about his CO2 footprint.
Someone who has a laptop, and cares about battery endurance.
Someone who's computer gets extremely hot.
Someone who's computer gets extremely loud, because of CPU cooling of housing cooling.
Someone living at a place where electricity is expensive, or gets cut for several hours some days or weeks.
Re: Power consumption (Score:1)
The difference in power consumption is so miniscule that it would take years to make any difference.
It's a dumb metric.
Also, screw CO2 footprints.
Firefox dev tools suck (Score:2)
Performance aside, Firefox dev tools and available extensions are decades behind Chrome.
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Quantity or quality because the one I care the most about doesn't work well on Chrome.
Privacy, not memory or watts (Score:5, Insightful)
Chrome is a privacy nightmare. The minor benefits they have with regard to electrical consumption and memory usage is no where near the significant penalties they offer other ways.
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Be that as it may, it's not what most people give an iota of a crap about. People in general are far more concerned about battery life and performance than those nefarious things they can't see or experience happening to them. People who care about privacy are already not using Chrome. This study is for the 70% of so people who clearly don't give a shit.
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>"if people actually cared primarily about privacy they would not be using Chrome OR firefox."
Really? And what would you recommend over Linux + Firefox + UBO? Because with Firefox configured correctly, I don't think you are going to find a more privacy-capable browser that is high performance, open-source, and compatible with nearly all websites.
A moving target (Score:3)
The browser performance matter feels like a moving target -- each vendor is constantly developing, changing. I use multiple browsers where I feel my task will be best experienced (by me). Firefox, for ad blocking; I agree with other sentiment here, Google is an advertising company, they changed from Manifest V2 extension framework to Manifest V3 (MV3), which cripples the functionality of traditional ad blockers (go figure, right?). There is the BRAVE browser that still supports Manifest V2, but how long will they be around?
My choice of browser usage fits my circumstances, but I've been around long enough that I don't worry much about it, though I do find some of it utterly frustrating -- if something changes, I will adapt. Having multiple browsers allows me to do that.
Who the hell cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
Browser 'performance' is about as relevant as memory footprint.
What matters is a wide array of privacy-enhancing plugins, multi-platform compatibility, and a pholosophy of respecting privacy.
The Google/Chrome environment has nothing but contempt for your privacy.
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Browser performance is very important.
Because the standard perception of a typical loser is: the internet is rather slow right now. WTF!
While in fact half the browser tabs are stuck at some inter process communication which takes seconds to clear up and let the browser run smooth again. Or the main process does a GC and the sub processes have to wait for something.
Hint: if your browser seems to wait for stuff from the internet, then it is most likely not the internet, but the browser having a hick up.
Discla
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70% of internet users disagree with you (the number is actually higher because some alternate browsers are also privacy nightmares). Anyone who gives a shit about privacy stopped using Chrome a long time ago. Most people don't, they care about things like performance, battery life, and having a functional system while their browser is open (memory footprint is absolutely critical as soon as you run out of it. A typical user won't care how good privacy is for a browser if their workflow requires closing appl
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Privacy Outweighs Performance... (Score:2)
It always better to use firefox (Score:2)
Firefox performs better because... (Score:2)
It doesn't really matter (Score:2)
slash has rendered firefox partially inoperative... At least MY installation no longer properly updates stuff on slash.
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>"slash has rendered firefox partially inoperative... At least MY installation no longer properly updates stuff on slash."
You need to check your install/settings. I have no problem at all using Slashdot with Firefox. Or any other site, for that matter.
Performance isn't everything (Score:2)
>"Which Performs Better on a Linux Laptop?"
Don't care. I am going to continue to use Firefox on all my machines, no chrom*.
1) The speed differences, depending on the benchmarks and use cases are not that far apart, with Firefox still winning some of them. Same with RAM/power usage. And Firefox wins more with effective element blocking.
2) I want to reduce my Google dependence and exposure as much as possible.
3) I want to reduce Google's control over the web as much as possible.
4) I want to support Fire
Tweaks (Score:1)