Browser Benchmark Battle: Chrome Vs. Firefox Vs. Edge Vs. Brave 101
An anonymous reader writes: It's been some 18 months since VentureBeat's last browser benchmark battle. What better time to get the latest results than the start of a new year? Over the past year and a half, Google Chrome has continued to dominate market share, Mozilla Firefox has doubled down on privacy, Microsoft Edge has embraced Chromium, and Brave launched out of beta.
You can click on the individual test to see the results:
SunSpider: Edge wins!
Octane: Chrome wins!
Kraken: Firefox wins!
JetStream: Edge wins!
MotionMark: Edge wins!
Speedometer: Edge wins!
Basemark: Brave wins!
WebXPRT: Firefox wins!
The Chromium version of Edge did a lot better given that the stable release only arrived this week. We were expecting improvements, but not so many outright wins. That said, browser performance was solid across all four contestants -- each browser won at least one test. Performance of course shouldn't be your only consideration when picking your preferred app for consuming internet content. As long as you're using a browser that receives regular updates (and all four of these meet that criteria), you can expect performance to be solid. There is certainly room for improvement, but Chrome, Firefox, and now Edge, as well as Brave, are all quite capable.
You can click on the individual test to see the results:
SunSpider: Edge wins!
Octane: Chrome wins!
Kraken: Firefox wins!
JetStream: Edge wins!
MotionMark: Edge wins!
Speedometer: Edge wins!
Basemark: Brave wins!
WebXPRT: Firefox wins!
The Chromium version of Edge did a lot better given that the stable release only arrived this week. We were expecting improvements, but not so many outright wins. That said, browser performance was solid across all four contestants -- each browser won at least one test. Performance of course shouldn't be your only consideration when picking your preferred app for consuming internet content. As long as you're using a browser that receives regular updates (and all four of these meet that criteria), you can expect performance to be solid. There is certainly room for improvement, but Chrome, Firefox, and now Edge, as well as Brave, are all quite capable.
WTF is "brave"? (Score:5, Funny)
It that a browser that works without headphone jacks....
Oh wait...that was courage not brave.
Ok, then, still lost on brave....
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Brave is another Chromium-based browser, with a default set of features to favor privacy. It also has features to enable cryptocurrency payments, which I'm less sold on.
Find out more by doing a web search for "brave web browser" because why wouldn't you do that instead of advertise ignorance?.
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How do you do a "web search"?
Re:WTF is "brave"? (Score:5, Informative)
Aww poor snowflake. So easily triggered. Don't worry, when you are living on Mars you will forget all about me.
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Everything I've see about Brave:
It's still just Chrome.
Possibly with less Google.
With built in ads and a stick that prods you into making micropayments via crypto to whoever the fuck they deem worthy.
All run by a charlatan.
But hey they might ditch the Chrome base at some point???
How? He doesn't have a browser! (Score:2)
That's why he's reading this. With his trusty Walkman headphones and a morse taeppytaptap. Attached to the Ethernet port of his router.
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Bet you never heard of Dolpin either. They're mobile based browsers. As stated already, Brave is a privacy enhanced browser, it's been around for a while. I like it, it works well on my Android tablet (with headphone jack!) without breaking things.
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Now that you mention it, I have heard about Dolphin...it was something I saw WAAAY back in the day when playing with turning a nook into a functional tablet, and even an old, old Motorola (I believe the one I had was also co-branded Verizon).
I've been doing iPad Pros for tablets for my portable needs, and hadn't see dolphin in ages, and had forgotten about it.
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Brave speaks in a nearly-intelligible Scots brogue, has a flaming mane of red curls that makes it impossible to be stealthy in a hunt or fight, and is quite skilled with the sharp pointy things.
Oh, you meant the browser known as brave! I thought you were on about the main character in a cartoon called Brave.
I hear there's these things called "Search Engines" that will look up anything you ask them to. Kind of like the librarian back in the days of paper.
You may wish to explore, it's less risky than stati
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Brave is a browser with sub-standard ad blocker and crypto currency scam built in.
You can choose to allow some (more) ads in exchange for their tokens which you can exchange for etherium. That's right, you don't even earn the scam currency directly.
Other than that it's basically just Chrome and any performance differences in synthetic benchmarks are measurement errors.
Damn commies! (Score:1)
Why should I care...? (Score:1)
...Someone dare to explain why I should care...?
Alternative Title (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox versus three chromium-based web browsers.
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Exactly! In other words, Chromium vs Chromium, vs Chromium, vs Firefox, vs Chromium, vs Chromium.
Re:Alternative Title (Score:5, Insightful)
And no webkit based browser either. They should benchmark safari or epiphany or midori at least.
At least benchmark all three remaining rendering engines.
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They seem to have screwed up their tests somehow too. Browsers using the same engine should get the same score on synthetic benchmarks, all other things being equal, but they vary wildly.
Web Browser Benchmark?! (Score:2)
When's the last time someone who cared about performance ran their code in a web browser?
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When was the last time someone who cared about security permitted unfettered third-party code execution in a web browser?
Hate to tell ya ... (Score:5, Informative)
but HTML5+CSS3 is Turing-complete. The interpreter is just as unsafe as ececuting a real programming language in that huge-attack-surface/API VM that is the browser.
Browser Comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't need any benchmarks right now. I am on Firefox and I see no reason for that to change. Everything else is slowly turning into Chrome (if they aren't already just Chrome with some window dressing) and I shouldn't need to remind the Slashdot crowd of all the reasons a one browser (from a company that is in the business of customer data) world is a bad idea.
Re:Edge is not on Windows Only (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I would assume so. The new Edge is just Chrome. Don't get me wrong, the old Edge was dead (and that new icon is snazzy!) but just becoming another Chrome seems to leave it just as dead but now in a saturated market.
Re:Edge is not on Windows Only - let's see it ! (Score:2)
I would really like to see the comparison of identical Edge tests on each platform they support.
I would just find it interesting... I am not using any of the browsers anyway (Pale Moon for me, until FF can win me back)
We have lost browser independence (Score:5, Insightful)
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I (and others) might give a crap if they did the "remove all ads from everywhere" bit and then just stop and leave it at that. I don't give a damn where the ads are sourced from, I just don't want all the ads.
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Anti-trust is the process of negatively abusing market power, and the IE antitrust fears had absolutely nothing to do with what was going on now. Back then MS actively avoided standards and used their market power to force the internet to adopt their own rules in a way that competitors could not implement.
On the flip side everything Chrome has pushed it has pushed via the standards body through public consultation. Hardly the same thing.
IE made the internet a horrible place.
Chrome hasn't done that yet, note
Re:We have lost browser independence (Score:5, Insightful)
Anti-trust is the process of negatively abusing market power, and the IE antitrust fears had absolutely nothing to do with what was going on now. Back then MS actively avoided standards and used their market power to force the internet to adopt their own rules in a way that competitors could not implement.
We're already seeing indications that Google is considering using Chrome dominance to implement "features" that happen to support their advertising and personal information gathering service to the detriment of competitors. It's naive to think that Microsoft had ill-intent while Google has pure intent. In reality, both are profit driven. And both claim the implementation of "features" that ostensibly benefit consumers but in reality benefit their corporate stock prices.
On the flip side everything Chrome has pushed it has pushed via the standards body through public consultation. Hardly the same thing.
But, if you're big and influential enough to effectively dictate the standard, then ignoring standards and dictating standards are effectively the same.
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Implementing features openly through standard bodies which are easily adopted by others and implementing features that depend on the underlying OS through closed APIs to stifle innovation are two very different things.
The former does not limit or prevent competition, it may strengthen Google's business, but it is not actively diminishing consumer choice. My point still stands. To date Google has done nothing even remotely as bad for consumers as what was done in the IE days.
But, if you're big and influential enough to effectively dictate the standard, then ignoring standards and dictating standards are effectively the same.
Only if you're benevolent. MS was
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everything Chrome has pushed it has pushed via the standards body through public consultation.
What about the changes to the extension API that make the life of ad blockers much harder?
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everything Chrome has pushed it has pushed via the standards body through public consultation.
What about the changes to the extension API that make the life of ad blockers much harder?
That never happened, and never really was going to happen.
The idea was to remove a dangerous API that was used by ad blockers but also was abused by lots of malicious extensions, and instead have adblockers use a different, more limited, but better-performing API. The difference is that the bad API allowed extensions to write Javascript to do arbitrary processing on every URL visited while the other allows extensions to configure a set of block patterns. None of the adblocking extensions had any real pr
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We're already seeing indications that Google is considering using Chrome dominance to implement "features" that happen to support their advertising and personal information gathering service to the detriment of competitors.
Cite?
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We're already seeing indications that Google is considering using Chrome dominance to implement "features" that happen to support their advertising and personal information gathering service to the detriment of competitors.
Cite?
Google has plans [vox.com] for increasing privacy by limiting cookies in Chrome. This is ostensibly good, after all privacy should be a good thing. But once the broad ability to track users via cookies is reduced, those companies who can maintain tracking via other methods, i.e., Google, will benefit in a relative competitive sense.
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We're already seeing indications that Google is considering using Chrome dominance to implement "features" that happen to support their advertising and personal information gathering service to the detriment of competitors.
Such as?
The closest thing to what you describe seems to be their proposal for a new privacy enhanced ping-back service for counting ad impressions, which is extremely similar to Apple's proposal. Can't see how it benefits them over anyone else though.
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We're already seeing indications that Google is considering using Chrome dominance to implement "features" that happen to support their advertising and personal information gathering service to the detriment of competitors.
Such as?
The closest thing to what you describe seems to be their proposal for a new privacy enhanced ping-back service for counting ad impressions, which is extremely similar to Apple's proposal. Can't see how it benefits them over anyone else though.
That's one view of what Google is doing. Here are other less favorable views [slashdot.org].
Re:We have lost browser independence (Score:5, Insightful)
Be careful with this line of thinking. It sounds like "our current dictator is not abusing his power, therefore, we have no reason to replace the dictatorship with a democracy." The problem isn't with the individual who has the power, but with the system as a whole.
We don't want a browser monoculture, and if we do have one, we certainly don't want it to be owned by an advertising company (Google) with the most popular operating system in the world (Android). Even if Google isn't using it for evil today, we know that power corrupts.
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thegarbz was not trolling, he/she was arguing the other side. sheesh people, chill!
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It sounds like "our current dictator is not abusing his power, therefore, we have no reason to replace the dictatorship with a democracy."
Indeed it does. Incidentally this is also a view that has severed many countries well for generations. Your argument presumes that democracy is the be all and end all of political systems, rather than a system which fixes flaws that arise from the abuse of other systems. They key word there is abuse. There are well functioning monarchies in the world as well, and what is the fundamental difference between a monarchy and a dictatorship other than systematic abuse of power?
Even if Google isn't using it for evil today, we know that power corrupts.
Nope. That's a variant of the slippe
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I do not believe "slippery slope" is a fallacy. It is vigilance, backup up by reality.
There are well functioning monarchies in the world as well
We could argue this, but I'll just say that I don't want Google to become one.
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Spin doctor bullshit, if there ever was any! (Score:3)
Google *actively and deliberately* creates "standards" as fast as it can, for the sole and only purpose of other browsers not being able to catch up, so the "standards" become factually Google-exclusive. By the time they catch up, a new "standard" will break all non-Chrome browsers already. Leaving them permanently "broken".
So in its actual effect it is *exactly* the same, and only has the added "feature" of letting assholes like you "technically" claim it's not. Something that, make no mistake, is a delibe
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Google *actively and deliberately* creates "standards" as fast as it can, for the sole and only purpose of other browsers not being able to catch up, so the "standards" become factually Google-exclusive.
They do nothing of the sort. Most of their standards are in a long review period for several years at a time and are discussed in detail with the wider industry. The fact that you only hear about them on Slashdot the day support for them is released doesn't make Google bad, it simply makes you ignorant. Incidentally what other browsers are "not able to catch up"? Are you talking about Firefox? A browser that seems to be solely focused on creating features of its own and integrating end user garbage no one w
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Do you have an example of this?
Also Mozilla does the same thing, creating new standards and trialling them in Firefox before they are officially adopted.
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While I agree it isn't all good news, it isn't quite that bad either. Mozilla has 1000 employees and made $429 million revenue, they have come quite a long way. The top browser engines are both open source now. While many of the top browsers use basically the same engine, there is no real way for the main players to do Microsoft style embrace-extend-extinguish.
Who would have thought in the early KDE days that of all the browsers it would be the venerable KHTML that would end up dominating.
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and what % of Mozilla's revenue comes from googlebux?
If push came to shove (i.e. real competition) google would sever that lifeline before you could say "don't be evil"
Sometimes, even while dressing up as good guys -- the bad guys do in fact win.
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Mozilla is facing layoffs because they pivoted into "social justice" over productivity.
Firing the guy who invented goddamn Javascript because he donated like... $300, to a group that opposes gay marriage was a great start.
Then they continued by working with known political organizations.
Banning a CHAT application from their app stores not because it violates any policy, but because they hate conservatives.
When they found out that an employee wrote on Reddit that they were "social justice bullies" they in tu
American "liberal". (Score:2)
Aka "extremist neocon-fascist-libertarian ultra-right-wing stillstandist-backwardsist" in rest-of-the-developed-world terms.
Yeah, your "center" is falling off our "right" into the same off-the-scale overflow pot that Nazi Germany sat in.
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It's hard to take someone seriously when they're either deceiving or misinformed and shouting their information as truth. Brendan Eich donated $1000 towards Prop 8.
https://www.theguardian.com/co... [theguardian.com]
Second, back of the envelope math suggests that the $1000 is responsible for causing roughly half a marriage to be dissolved.
https://news.ycombinator.com/i... [ycombinator.com]
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I voted for Obama, twice. But keep it up by pretending anyone who disagrees is a secret russian puppet.
Fun fact: Gen Z hates you, and they're going to begin to replace you and your bigotry within 10 years.
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Wait a minute. You went through my comment history (to find something to discredit me because you knew you couldn't do it through logic alone) but you failed to notice on the FIRST PAGE of those results that I'm a Bernie supporter, and subsequent pages I mention I'm pro-weed, pro-immigration, pro-gay marriage. If I'm not a liberal, what the fuck do you consider a 'liberal'??
And if you don't consider all of that "liberal", then whatever you do consider "liberal" must be on par with the lunacy practiced at Mo
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The problem with your analysis is that Firefox has improved vastly since they embraced social justice. Maybe the two are not linked in any way, but it certainly hasn't harmed Firefox which is once again a competitive browser.
Wait (Score:3)
But, aren't these all running the same [chromium] core code, with the exception of Firefox?
It shouldn't be surprising that they're competitive with each other if the underlying engine is the same in three of the four.
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Running the same core code does not preclude one from optimising differently to the other.
My only criterium: does it kill ads ?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Avoid Brave. The build-in ad blocker is crap and you still need uBlock Origin. Plus it's tied in to their crypto currency scam which you don't want to get mixed up in.
Firefox is the best for privacy. It has the best built in privacy controls and with a few add-ons (uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Cookie Auto-Delete) it's the gold standard. Also there are no crypto currency scams in Firefox.
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Criterium means "a one-day bicycle race on a circuit road course"
The word you want is "criterion".
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When choosing a browser, my only criterium is: can I install add-ons that will kill all advertisement ?
Exactly. It doesn't really matter how fast your browser is if it is overloaded by a sewage firehouse that is ad networks.
Re:My only criterium: does it kill ads ?!? (Score:5, Informative)
Ublock Origin is better than Adblock Plus.
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For at least some people here (i.e. those who like being able to customize things exactly to their taste), uMatrix may be preferred over uBlock Origin. It's made by the same guy and it's significantly more fiddly, but it gives you MUCH more granular control over what gets loaded and from where.
I set uMatrix to be even more restrictive than it is by default, which caused it to break most sites, but after about two weeks of use everything was back to normal, pages loaded faster, I saw virtually no ads (there
Adblocking (Score:3)
The only thing that really matters is support for adblocking. It doesn't matter how "fast" it is if it is delivering malware to your computer, or slowing down the browsing with unnecessary advertisements. Not sure if you can use adblocking software with Edge now.
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Personally I don't block ads, but I don't go on a lot of different sites either. If I find a website uses too many ads, I just stop visiting that site. Websites need a way to fund themselves, and paying for individual sites isn't a model that works for a lot of sites. I'll happily accept seeing some ads so that web sites can support themselves.
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But those ads are delivering malware to your device. You shouldn't accept ads.
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But those ads are delivering malware to your device. You shouldn't accept ads.
Only if they contain javascript.
You wish. (Score:2)
No need for JS to be Turing-complete with access to network fetching, RAM flooding, CPU burning and GPU shaders.
HTML5 and CSS3, together with complex media formats, can do all that all on their own.
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Pale Moon supports ad blocking but I wouldn't recommend it. Being single threaded the performance is complete crap. So clearly ad blocking is not the only thing that matters.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Oh good catch.
So I found Speedometer's version 2.0. And the results were pretty different so far between Firefox and Chrome (didn't do Edge yet).
Firefox (with over 50 tabs open between 13 windows) ran on my PC on Speedometer 2.0 with a:
78.9
Chrome ran on the same PC, two windows one tab each open, Speedometer 2.0 with a:
98.7
Whereas on speedometer 1.0 they got a 85.88 firefox vs. a 123 Chrome.
I also ran a test with Firefox speedometer 2.0 on a VM on a big fat server, but the VM only had one virtual CPU. It sc
chromium (Score:2)
might as well just run chromium instead of google chrome or chromium edge.
Less concerned about browser speed nowadays... (Score:2)
Mozilla has no choice (Score:3)
It is either implement the bullshit that Google adds to Chrome and stupid webdevs use right away for "exciting new features", ... or die for being called "broken and outdated".
Features that the underlying OS did for decades and did better and faster too.
Chrome Vs. Firefox Vs. Chrome Vs. Chrome (Score:2)
FTFA
No Safari? (Score:1)
Any reason why they are not testing a very popular browser called Safari but testing 3 (!!!) Chromium based browsers, one of them I've never heard of before?
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Dunno if Safari is still available for Windows; maybe they wanted to test everything on the same hardware.
Anyway, Chromium uses the Blink rendering engine, which is a fork of WebKit -- the KHTML fork Apple developed for Safari. Earlier versions of Chromium (pre-2013?) used straight up WebKit before Blink was forked.
Simpson's paradox (Score:3)
Test old ones too (Score:2)
For me it isn't all about peformance.. (Score:3)
..it's about which one(s) are owned by advertising giants, and which are the scrappy underdogs.
I much rather prefer the scrappy underdogs. I've been on Firefox pretty much since it came out all those years ago.
I have no intention of rewarding Google / Alphabet for how they behave. That means I use their services as little as possible, refuse to run their browser unless there's no alternative for that specific job, and I don't buy their hardware.
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Yep, right here, same thing. I just love that Firefox let's you do what you want... any addon to block if you want, whatever. Google is up to no good once again from the latest news it would seem. They really need to consider how evil they are becoming.
Very obviously meaningless bullshit. (Score:3)
Note how they let the exact same browser (Chromium) "compete" against itself multiple times... Meaning you are measuring everything BUT the browser.
Besides: When the browsers are textbook examples of the inner-platform effect ... trying to resemble the OS around them except more limited and wasting much more resources due to duplicate layers ... then a competition on speed is nothing more than a game of retard olympics.
Let's compare it to a native application. A truly native one. No frameworks, platforms, Electron, etc madness.
So we can point and laugh at the insanity that is modern "browsers".
(No, a VM is not a security solution. The attack surface is what matters. And in that regard, browsers almost couldn't be larger.)
Who cares? (Score:3)
90% of the time of the waiting is the stuff we have to do to block the cookies, the trackers, the fingerprinters, the ad blockers, the social network blockers, the site analytics, the typing trackers, the behavior analyzers, phenotyping, beacons, tracking pixels, and whatnot.
The rest is downloading javascript that is 200 times bigger than the text they want to display.
Chrom* (Score:2)
>"There is certainly room for improvement, but Chrome, Firefox, and now Edge, as well as Brave, are all quite capable."
Translation: "but Chrom*, Firefox, and now Chrom*, as well as Chrom*, are all quite capable."
>"Performance of course shouldn't be your only consideration when picking"
Indeed it should not.
Beating performance benchmarks (Score:2)
Performance benchmarks only test a small subset of what browsers do. The browser makers simply need to tune their performance to prioritize the metrics tested by the benchmarks, to look like they are "the best." It's really an arms race. Personally, I don't trust any of the benchmarks.
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