Benchmark Battle, September 2015: Chrome Vs. Firefox Vs. Edge 137
An anonymous reader writes: The next browser battle is upon us. Edge has been out for more than a month, and its two biggest competitors have received significant updates: Chrome 45 and Firefox 40. This article puts all three through their paces, and each manages to win a few tests. Edge convincingly won the JetSteam and SunSpider JavaScript benchmarks, while also eking out a victory in Google's Octane test. Chrome was victorious in Mozilla's Kraken benchmark for JavaScript performance, while also edging out Firefox in HTML5Test and the Oort Online WebGL test. Firefox won the WebXPRT test that combines HTML5 and JavaScript performance, and also the Peacekeeper test for general browser performance. There's no clear dominant browser for performance, and none of the three are obvious laggards, either. Browser competition seems to be in a good place right now.
Re: What happens when you turn off Javascript? (Score:1)
Turning off JavaScript makes baby webdeveloper cry.
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Really? I have never noticed that anywhere.
What it normally does is break website menus.
Javascript has to run after page loads (Score:2)
> Frankly I think browser programmers should not stop the spinning load icons until the javascript has stopped loading shit and the content of the page is actually visible. I'm so tired of "Oh look the browser thinks the page has finished loading...but it's wrong."
I understand your frustration. There is a good solution too, which is used on most projects I'm involved with. The technical reason for that is that very, very often the JavaScript manipulates things on the page, so it has to wait for the th
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I just want the stop button on the browser to stop everything in it's tracks. So often these days the text content I want to read is loaded and there's nothing more I want loaded on a page. And fewer and fewer browsers have easy ways to completely disable javascript.
I know there's a lucrative career in writing scripts for websites, but there are a lot of pages where it's unnecessary. Noscript is a good solution to most of it and it's heartening how much of the web just keeps working well with a script bl
Couldn't tell what any of these benchmarks measure (Score:2)
Look, I'm sure it's nice to know how fast you can open a window or tab, run some piece of Javascript thingie, and close it, but that's got very little to do with how I browse, and a benchmark result of "23456" doesn't tell me anything.
Go fetch a Fark.com 168-hour page, open all the links in separate tabs, and tell me how much memory it's burning and
Re:What happens when you turn off Javascript? (Score:5, Funny)
What happens when you turn off Javascript?
God kills a puppy in your name.
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What happens when you turn off Javascript?
God kills a puppy in your name.
And Dead Puppies [lyricsmode.com] aren't much fun.
Dead puppies aren't much fun
...
They don't come when you call
They don't chase squirrels at all
Dead puppies aren't much fun
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Excellent, Smithers!
I'm a gonna go donate to noscript development [mozilla.org] right now. Kittens rule!
Re: What happens when you turn off Javascript? (Score:2)
With AdBlock active and preventing connections to tracker sites it's even better.
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It still made a really good showing by winning 3 (tied w/ Chrome) and the ones that it wasn't 1st or 2nd in seemed to be related to lack of codecs which will likely get updates soon since there was an article about them adding support for VP9 coming up.
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Since Edge comes from the same company that makes the OS used to run those benchmarks, the fact the it did not win in all, or even most of, instances is a failure.
Um, No...
I'm sure that there is a trade-off where optimizing for specific content, which can have an effect on the loading time of other content. So, it would make sense for some browsers to have an edge depending on the test format.
Also, the benchmark includes checking for support for specific formats and functions, some more esoteric than others. For example, the HTML5 test includes a test for Ogg Theora. Mozilla and Opera were proponents of this format and support it, but it appears that it is being l
Re: Edge is the loser (Score:2)
How about good adblockers for edge?
Re:Edge is the loser (Score:4, Insightful)
Why? Do you think Microsoft's OS has some magic CPU cycles set apart for their browser?
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I doubt Apple will let you run competing browsers on their computer.
Chrome, Opera and Firefox are available on MacOSX and have been for a while. What are you talking about?
DOM's got to go (Score:5, Insightful)
With FF and Chrome JavaScript performance has been good enough for most web apps for the past couple of years. Good to see IE has caught up, but JS performance is not been what's hold the web back. The issue is DOM performance. For example, my stock trading app eats up 100% of my CPU time and causes Firefox UI to get unresponsive when tracking more than 30 stocks. Their native IOS app barely uses any CPU time and runs better on my phone than the web app on my desktop. It's time we ditch DOM's document based model for something application centrist.
Re:DOM's got to go (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of that is interaction with the graphics stack, which varies by OS and can be exacerbated by how the browser handles the DOM. Updates to the DOM that don't cause repaints or other visible changes are much less problematic for performance than those that do.
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Like I wrote to GP, DOM is a tool, not the right tool for everything (clearly DOM isn't good for manipulating pixel art).
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Ever tried adding a few thousand nodes to the DOM? It takes a very noticable delay even on the best hardware without any CSS.
Sure, you can optimize it by generating the HTML code within JavaScript, but that isn't very nice code and doesn't negate the fact that DOM itself is very slow.
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You rarely need to add thousands of nodes to fill in the viewport. There are techniques such as infinite scrolling which will display the viewport blazingly fast and download more content as the user scrolls down. You save network bandwidth, CPU, and it all looks good.
Choosing the proper tools is also a given. Anything developed in AngularJS for example is bound to be slow on every redraw since it generates a whole new DOM every time. Not counting the initial payload. Try out simpler frameworks such as mith
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Just because you can write a page to auto-refresh doesn't mean you should.
Especially considering XMLHttpRequest has been around a long time.
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The Independent - this means you!
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Bonus point if you lose the position in an article or in a very long page, or worse if you're losing the portion of "infinite comments" that you loaded piecemeal for several minutes, and loud autoplaying video starts playing again. It's making me laugh currently.
DOM is just a tool (Score:2)
If you want normal UI DOM enables fast development, and isolates things nicely (compared to coding against a frame buffer).
But for rendering some things raw framebuffers (canvas) is and always will be the right tool...
Could also be you're using setTimeout instead of requestAnimationFrame...
But yes you're right, the DOM is slow... but you're not forced to use it when making pixel art...
he he, I think I once saw a js library to draw with 1x1px divs
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maybe if the app was 100% WEBGL and not dom, it would be faster, its easy to render 50000 cubes, css cant do that.
Maybe DOM should be done in the gpu and browser render always in gpu mode.
or render your graphs server side with pixel level checking like old school VGA mode DOS apps.
Why HTML5Test? (Score:1)
Several of these benchmarks are outdated to the point of barely meaning anything anymore, chiefly Kraken and Sunspider. But even they have value compared to HTML5Test, which artificially skews data in favor of Google-specific technology, and breaks the scores down in mysterious ways to make Chrome's lead look much larger than it really is. At least go to caniuse.com and tally up the support there instead. Its tests are far more accurate, cover FAR more features, and aren't artificially biased.
Summary (Score:2)
Performance is roughly the same. Chrome renders HTML5 more correctly than others.
Tests were performed only on a Windows system. Still a very valid test as that what most people use.
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Tests were performed only on a Windows system. Still a very valid test as that what most people use.
Yes, let's pretend Android and iOS still don't make up a significant percentage of the devices people use to browse the web.
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Mobile benchmarks would be interesting, but at the moment very few people are actively choosing a mobile browser anyway. Almost everyone ends up using the platform default (e.g. Safari on iOS).
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Tests are great, but in real world usage Edge has been absolutely a shit fest for Facebook usage on my PC and tablet.
Scrolling locks up, typing often hits .5 to 3 second lag spikes. Occasionally, if I type too fast while it's lagging, I get a audible beep and any characters that were lagging are dropped and I have to re-type what I was writing.
Outside of Facebook, it seems fine. But I've reverted to Chrome for social media.
On my media PC it works fine. I don't get the disappearing cursor issue when binge wa
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my biggest gripe about Edge is the font rendering. Unless you have a 4k display and upscale to 125% (minimum), it looks like Linux's fonts in 1999.
I'm not that sensitive to these things, but in a browser where i spend most of the time looking at text, something that bad is too much. I don't even mind ClearType vs MacOSX/FreeType. But the grayscale thingy they use in Edge is just useless unless you have god-level DPI.
1% advantage sounds good...in theory. (Score:1)
I will give up 1% winning speed, or 50% actually, for a browser whose various scripting engines don't grind things to a halt as some web site overwhelms their calculations, no doubt abusing this to grind defenses to a halt, or exploit race conditions.
Google, with the "best" programmers, this means Chrome! Some damned 3D ad or video ad or something, freaking stop it from "use every CPU cycle you can!" to eke out that winning percent. Maybe they overuse RAM, too? You figure it out if you are so good.
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Try going to amazon.com, and just sit there on the front page doing nothing.
One entire core will peg out to 100%, the computer fans kick into turbo mode, and the browser process uses 2GB of memory.
Just sitting there doing nothing with JS enabled.
Nope. Don't see that at all.
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Fastest ? Fastest longer term is probably Mozilla (Score:5, Interesting)
Fastest will probably be 'Servo', which is the new browser engine by Mozilla.
It's a parallel browser engine, it can render multiple parts at the same time:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.... [phoronix.com]
It's also written in Rust a language probably less prone to security issues than C++ (which all the other engines are written in).
A general article about Servo:
https://lwn.net/Articles/64796... [lwn.net]
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Fastest will probably be 'Servo', which is the new browser engine by Mozilla.
The future is indeed interesting... :)
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Meh, they still haven't finished the Electrolysis [mozilla.org] project for multiprocess Firefox and they've been working on that since 2009, if it's in pre-alpha now it'll take a decade before it's usable.
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I thought they knew how they want to do Electrolysis without breaking addons to much and how to fairly easily fix any broken addons.
But recently when they said they would move to supporting WebExtensions this could mean a delay of the transition.
It's the right idea in the long term of course.
I wonder what the impact will be on the number of users Firefox has if the advantage of addons ecosystem gets smaller.
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Servo is still a year away, and Blink/Chrome has had parallel rendering for a long time now. Chrome threads everything. Network, layout elements, compositing, JS, even GPU offloaded tasks.
In other words, Mozilla are just catching up.
Firefox does okay in benchmarks, but it feels slow compared to Chrome and even to some extent Edge. The problem is this lack of threading. The page may render about as fast as Chrome but the UI is frozen while it does. It's particularly noticeable when you use the back button an
Give people what they want (Score:1)
Benchmarks are an uninteresting aspect.
The real question, the question that will make or break the browser, is: does it give the people what they want?
Does it have video chat builtin?
Do the tabs have artistically sculpted curves?
Does the color scheme use soft, pleasing low-contrast colors?
Does it have flat chicklet controls or old-fashioned 3-d buttons?
Does have an integrated mail reader?
These are the things the public wants, these are what it takes to make a modern browser. People want user-friendly, somet
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Pale Moon Browser (Score:1)
Is it just me or does PM seem a lot faster than Firefox. I tried it out for the interface but it seems faster too.
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Just you, and the few people who also want to believe it's true.
I compared fresh installs on a bunch of systems, and Firefox was faster in all but a couple of cases. But in even those cases, comparing the nightly builds with the multi-process support to Pale Moon revealed Pale Moon to be much less responsive.
It's all down to two things: do you NEED the crappy old Firefox UI? If so, and you're loading up the stock Firefox with addons to get that effect, then Pale Moon might seem faster to you for now.
The oth
"Performance"? Bah. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why on earth would I care at all about "performance" in my web browser. Unless its 10x slower, seriously who cares?
What I care about are:
Obviously you can't get perfect in either, but I'll err on the side of coming closest to these marks.
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Because you have complex applications that run in a browser that you would like to use.
Nope. Any other reasons?
About the most complex application I ever use in a browser is an MMO character builder. I haven't ever felt the need to speed those up, and I suspect they wait for my next selection at the exact same speed no matter which web browser I use. Again, my main considerations here are (1) Does it actually work right in my browser? and (2) If it tries to subvert my browser, do I have the tools to stop it?. These both boil down to support and freedom.
Probably the next most complex things
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A lot of people care.
Eg: if someone wants to store a trillion data points and run reports on them, it sucks a lot to have to run that yourself. Sure, you could have a fucking desktop app to render the UI that you have to install with dependencies and shit. Its still going to go talk to the server running potentially hundreds of milions of lines of code to make it happen.
If you wa
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So you care about compatibility and ownership only?
I would've said number 1 concern is security (and number 2 as well).
Also extensibility, resource usage, ...
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And which browser is likely to be the most "secure"? Hint: it won't be the one that's totally in thrall to ABC Megacorp. Even if theirs is pretty secure, how do you know that? Take their word for it? Nobody is allowed to look at the sources. You're completely at their mercy.
Extensibility, and to a lesser extent resource usage also work that way. If users are free to add in things they want themselves, then by definition it will be extensible. If there's some kind of outlandish resource issue, and users ca
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And which browser is likely to be the most "secure"? Hint: it won't be the one that's totally in thrall to ABC Megacorp. Even if theirs is pretty secure, how do you know that? Take their word for it? Nobody is allowed to look at the sources. You're completely at their mercy.
It's not ideal, but to say you cannot deduce (to a high probability) from other methods is just silly. Also for any moderate complexity program, having the source doesn't give you all seeing ability to spot bugs, only obvious ones.
Extensibility, and to a lesser extent resource usage also work that way. If users are free to add in things they want themselves, then by definition it will be extensible. If there's some kind of outlandish resource issue, and users can fix it, they will. That's the cool thing about "ownership", it helps cover all the little nitty things that might hit my radar as an issue if they got out of hand. So if I worry about ownership when I first select my go-to browser, I don't have to constantly worry about all the other crap.
Another "great in theory" point.
Just because you have the source doesn't mean you can fix the problem. If I architect the browser in such a way that a complete rewrite is needed to stop it being a resource hog, how are you at an advantage by having my program. I would value a prog
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Why on earth would I care at all about "performance" in my web browser.
Because your browser is becoming the new operating system. If you think JS performance doesn't matter you should try reading your gmail on a pre-performance war browser version.
Between Office, Google Apps, every bloody database frontend currently on the market, and even some stupid games I care more about Javascript performance now than I ever have in the past.
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All useless. Edge is missing huge features. (Score:1)
Edge doesn't let me, or a script, print just one frame or iframe content or selection content. Making it useless by breaking functionality that's existed for decades. I'm sure it's got many other missing things for no reason.
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Edge doesn't let me, or a script, print just one frame or iframe content or selection content. Making it useless
Right, because my #1 use case for the internet is to print web pages so a browser that can't do that is 100% useless. I'm glad I finally ran into the other person who uses the internet the same way I do.
I had to write this comment twice. I forgot that printing your post and writing my reply underneath it doesn't actually post anything.
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I program ticketing solutions for a living. Ever printed a ticket to anything?
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After the e-commerce of the purchasing, and the contact CRM of the mailings, and the scheduling software of the event conference, and the ad display network for the sponsors, and the box office sales systems and cash drawers, and the touch-screen kiosks, and the barcode scanners at the door, and the web-site selling the thing in the first place, and the private wifi network in the building that doesn't have a reliable one of its own.
After all that, the ticket's a report, but only if it can be printed proper
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So would you say that Edge is useless as a web browser, or that it doesn't work very well for your specific use case? Because those are 2 completely different things, and it sounds like you're trying to claim that it is useless as a web browser. Obviously it's not. What's more, Microsoft is aware [stackoverflow.com] of the bug you've found and has promised a fix.
Yeah, a bug. Not "things missing for no reason", like they made a design decision to remove that, but a bug. Keep in mind also that Edge is not the new IE, it is
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It's "removing" a feature not because it's IE, but because this is a feature that's been in every browser for ages. If you build an e-mail client today, and it doesn't support flagging messages, then you've removed a feature.
It's useless because if it's missing one vital feature, then it's missing many more. And since it's not my job to seek out bugs in other people's products, and it's not my job to solve them, then I have no interest in telling them. I work for my clients, and when this kind of thing h
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Your definition of "doesn't work" is highly skewed. When someone sends you an email and says that the large system you've implemented "doesn't work", what's your response? I know what my response is to that non-bug-report. I ask them exactly what they're trying to do and what happens, because I know that the system as a whole works and they've just found a bug in some part of it. But, here you are, claiming that Edge "doesn't work". You're not filing bug reports to make sure the problem gets fixed on t
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Again, it's not my job to fix their product. They aren't paying me.
You are correct that my clients enjoy the "doesn't work" report. There's a reason that they all do it. It "doesn't work" for their business. It's not only true of bugs. It's also true of things being the wrong colour, or a missing feature. If it doesn't work for their business, then it simply doesn't work.
Asking them for more details isn't a part of their report. It's a part of your/my solution. In my world, if a client says it doesn
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Again, it's not my job to fix their product. They aren't paying me.
Filing a bug report and adding your voice to the list of people wanting it fixed is in no way, shape, or form you fixing their product. They have programmers to fix the thing themselves. The only thing the bug report accomplishes is helping to make sure that the problem gets fixed quicker, if that's of any concern to you.
I'm not interested in making sure that microsoft fixes it. I don't benefit from that fix.
You don't benefit from your product working the way it was designed in the default browser of Windows 10? Well, OK.
My point was that you can't benchmark a partial browser against a complete browser.
You sure as hell can when the benchmarks measure things like Javascript
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There's a difference between mouse gestures, which are a rare feature, relatively new, and are a user-selected, per-user feature, and printing, which is a cross-user, fundamentally long-standing feature, scripted away from the user. The former is how it's used, the latter is what it does.
You say they "have programmers to fix the thing themselves". Well, they also have testers to find the problems themselves and analysts to prioritize the problem themselves. You can pray if you want to; I don't.
And no, th
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There's a difference between mouse gestures, which are a rare feature, relatively new
When Opera released a version supporting mouse gestures, they were competing with IE 5. There are high school kids younger than mouse gestures.
The former is how it's used, the latter is what it does.
Way to completely miss the point.
Well, they also have testers to find the problems themselves and analysts to prioritize the problem themselves.
That's correct. And guess why they didn't find this particular bug before release, or why they decided to release it anyway before fixing the bug (hint: it's the same reason!). Go ahead, guess.
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Do what everyone else in the industry does and open another page with the printer friendly version.
It makes everyone's life easier, even Chrome and Firefox users.
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I develop ticket-purchasing web-sites. Ever printed a ticket to anything? Printing the hidden frame is helpful for the page to actually print what you want, and not the entire page.
And iframes are 19 years old, I believe you. Frames existed way before iframes. So I'm saying decades again.
And I often selected a paragraph or two and hit print, instead of printing the ten page article.
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Dude, I've been doing it for 20 years. It's not hard to print 5" by 5" ticket in HTML. Welcome to liquid layouts from the 90's. HTML 0.9 is really good at that.
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Using paper creates trees. Welcome to capitalism.
Browser wars aren't really browser wars any more (Score:2)
Any user's decision for a browser is pretty much made already. There's no "browser war" to be had. That's a good thing: in the past it was like that because IE had terrible rendering issues, bad usability and common security issues. These days the overall browser landscape is less black and white, and for web developers it matters less which client the user is running.
Basically I see the choice of browser like this:
so firefox wins? (Score:2)
there is no winner in the benchmark test, so firefox is the clear winner.
it's open source and it is not being pushed by a for-profit company.
Speed? Who cares! (Score:1)
Re: MSFT Wins (Score:2)
The taste of irony.