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Which Performs Better on Linux: Firefox or Chrome? (phoronix.com) 92

Posted by EditorDavid from the battling-browsers dept.
Phoronix compares the performance of Firefox and Chrome on the Linux desktop. They used recent releases (at default settings) for both browsers on an Intel Core i9 13900K "Raptor Lake" system with Radeon RX 6700XT graphics, concluding "out-of-the-box Google Chrome continues performing much better overall than Mozilla Firefox."

One area where Firefox does better out-of-the-box is around the HTML5 Canvas such as measured via the CanvasMark test case. For the demanding JetStream 2 benchmark as one of the most demanding browser tests currently, Chrome on Linux was 67% faster than Firefox on this same Intel Raptor Lake desktop.

Firefox did have a small win in the rather basic JavaScript Maze solver benchmark. Firefox at least was in a competitive space for the WebAssembly (WASM) benchmarks, but aside from that Google Chrome continues holding strong on Linux in the performance department.
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Which Performs Better on Linux: Firefox or Chrome? More

Which Performs Better on Linux: Firefox or Chrome?

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  • Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)

    by zenlessyank ( 748553 ) on Sunday January 22, 2023 @03:40PM (#63230624)

    Chrome isn't even installed. It is no contest.

    • Re:Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 ) on Sunday January 22, 2023 @10:35PM (#63231504) Homepage Journal

      Also consider which one that would spy on you more if you installed it.

    • Re:Firefox (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Pieroxy ( 222434 ) on Monday January 23, 2023 @03:35AM (#63231864) Homepage

      Since I do dev for the web, I need Chrome to test obviously. But Chrome has a feature that I am missing dearly in Firefox: Shortcuts.

      You take a tab on your Chrome and click on "Create Shortcut" and bam, your tab now behaves as an app. It has its own window, its own icon, its place in the applications menu. My Grafana boards live like this as I have them opened at all time.

      So, for that, I use Chrome. For the rest Firefox.

      NB: If anyone knows how to do that with FF I'd appreciate

      • For Firefox I like to create searchable bookmark links, a feature that chrome seems to have removed at some point.
        https://xxx.atlassian.net/brow... [atlassian.net]{s}
        save as jira
        in the address bar type:
        jira Ab-123

        results in https://xxx.atlassian.net/brow... [atlassian.net]

        it's also pretty handy for other websites where the id is something you know and can fill in the address bar

  • Performance is one metric (Score:5, Insightful)

    by OffTheLip ( 636691 ) on Sunday January 22, 2023 @03:41PM (#63230628)
    I would say privacy is an equal metric. Not easily measured but I choose Firefox based on that metric. YMMV.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Same. It's also probably better to focus on performance metrics that "normal" people would actually notice, if the concern is about market share. Rather than some blah blah nerd benchmark. Most of the population is probably content if it runs video smoothly...

    • Re:Performance is one metric (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mrclevesque ( 1413593 ) on Sunday January 22, 2023 @04:11PM (#63230708)

      > I would say privacy is an equal metric.

      That too. The ability to easily customize Firefox is also a big factor for me.

      • Bypassing obtrusive and abusive ads is another metric. Hence I use Firefox on mobile (and on Desktop too, but that choice isn't related to ads).

    • I would say privacy is an equal metric.

      You would not be remotely representative of a normal user if you say privacy and performance are equal. The overwhelming majority of users don't give a crap about privacy. And those who do, the overwhelming majority of them would consider performance to be more important.

      • The thing though is that this performance win of chrome is basically in the benchmarks only, on normal day to day usage no one will notice a difference at all.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by johanw ( 1001493 )

          Yes they will: now that Chrome has started hampering adblockers Firefox will easily win a performnce test in real life situations.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Chrome's energy performance is vastly better than Firefox's, and you will certainly notice that on mobile or a laptop.

          After upgrading my phone fixed a decade old bug in Firefox I tried to switch away from Chrome again. Firefox for Android kills your battery. Installing extensions like uBlock only seems to make it worse. Maybe there is a good reason why Chrome doesn't support extensions on Android.

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday January 22, 2023 @08:18PM (#63231232)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Performance matters a lot on mobile. If a page takes 50% longer to decode and render, it probably uses something like 50% more energy to do so as well.

          Firefox on Android absolutely chews through your battery. It's way worse than 50% more than Chrome. I think Chrome is not just more efficient, it does things like killing/pausing background JS quite aggressively too.

      • The overwhelming majority of users don't give a crap about privacy.

        We're talking specifically about Linux users so I don't think that's true.

    • Standards compliance is other metric (that makes me use Firefox even on mobile)

  • Missing point of comparison - Firefox wins (Score:5, Informative)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday January 22, 2023 @03:42PM (#63230632)

    This one trumps the others, at least to me:

    Given both are quite serviceable - which one protects my privacy better (or at all)?

    • This. I use â" and send donations to â" the project that is not at present trying to rape every last human of every bit of personal data. GOOG can fucken die drowning in its own blood

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Chrome and Firefox are about equal on that front.

      Both have opt-in telemetry. Both default to sending search requests to Google, but can be changed easily. Both have cloud sync with optional encryption. Both have the same set of privacy-enhancing add-ons with the same capabilities. Both have similar controls built in for things like 3rd party cookies.

      Firefox is slightly better in terms of the options it has built in, but if you actually care about privacy you won't be relying on those anyway.

      On Android it's

  • On a nightly patched Ubuntu 22.04 system, I often have the chrome browser completely hang. It seems to usually happen when I'm either downloading a file (save as...blah) or if I'm uploading an attachment (send a file attachment in gmail, for example). So even though it's normally faster, I've fallen back to using Firefox.

    I have yet to try vanilla chromium.

    Best,

    • Sounds like there's some sort of problem with the integration with the OS file picker on your system. Suffice it to say this doesn't happen to most of us.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jabuzz ( 182671 )

      Problem is that Firefox is a snap, so a whole slew of functionality is broken. In particular use sshfs to mount a remote file system and then try and access said file system with Firefox to say upload a log file. Oh you can't because some lazy moron at Canonical decided that it was easier for them to build Firefox as a snap than a proper app and fuck the users. Classic case of tail wagging the dog. I used to use a mixture of chromium and Firefox, due to the snap idiocy of Canonical I am now using Chrome and

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        It takes a couple of minutes to permanently switch Firefox to using the Mozilla ppa version, there are detailed instructions available in several places, e.g.:
        https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/20... [omgubuntu.co.uk]

        Another couple of minutes and you can remove the entire snap infrastructure and block its return.
        https://www.debugpoint.com/rem... [debugpoint.com]

        Or just switch to Mint, which has gone down the 'no snaps by default' path.

    • I had a very similar problem with Ubuntu and the amdgpu kernel module for newer AMD APUs, like the one in my Thinkpad T14. It also affected Chromium based apps like Slack, Skype and Spotify, and they would randomly freeze and cause a complete system hang.

      I fixed it by upgrading the kernel to Ubuntu's 6.1.7 stable build. Disabling hardware acceleration in chrome://settings also works.

      Firefox is better anyway!

  • The average user will never notice the speed at which their browser renders a webpage. If having every page ready for you is THAT important, you need a caching server on your network, not some browser tweaks.
  • That setup should run ANY browser without any slowness....? Would make more sense to have a standard laptop, which most of us have and compare those results.
    • Exactly. They used THE FASTED PROCESSOR AVAILABLE for the tests, so the test tells standard PC users absolutely nothing.

      • Do you think the slower browser on faster hardware will be somehow faster on slower hardware?

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by dfghjk ( 711126 )

          No, he thinks anything other than precisely what he needs to win an internet argument is "absolutely nothing".
          Funny that he thinks "standard PC users" run linux.

  • Wait until adblocking gets neutered... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by williamyf ( 227051 ) on Sunday January 22, 2023 @03:48PM (#63230654)

    ... in chrome, and then see which browser performs faster for day to day use (not syntetic benchmarks) in any platform. ;-) :-P

    PS: Yes, I know there are "lite" adblockers for manifest V3, let's see how easy are those to set up, and how effective they are. For me Firefox ESR for the win!

  • Staying for the GUI (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Stormwatch ( 703920 ) <(rodrigogirao) (at) (hotmail.com)> on Sunday January 22, 2023 @03:52PM (#63230666) Homepage

    I have a severe dislike for programs that use their own interface designs rather than obey the standards of the OS or DE. Chrome has its own alien looks, and annoyingly so do most other browsers. Firefox uses (or can be set to use at least) the standard looks of my system, with proper title and menu bars. So Firefox wins.

  • This is an easy choice (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Miles_O'Toole ( 5152533 ) on Sunday January 22, 2023 @04:11PM (#63230710)

    Even if the difference in speed was greater, I'd choose better privacy with Firefox. I'm just so utterly sick and tired of corporations trying to track me 24-7. Sundar Pichai can take Chrome, wrap it in razor blades and broken glass, and shove it up his ass.

  • Chromium (Score:4, Interesting)

    by lsllll ( 830002 ) on Sunday January 22, 2023 @04:12PM (#63230714)
    In Linux, I went from Chrome to Firefox because of Chrome's relationship to Google and tracking. I went from Firefox to Edge (Yes, Edge in Linux) because of Mozilla's draconian decisions on user interface and functionality. After a short while, I went from Edge to Brave (basically Chrome, but stripped of all the tracking) because, well, Edge is from Microsoft and while it's a little better than Google tracking you, it's still tracking. But Brave is awesome. It's faster than Firefox, memory leaks smaller than Firefox, and the debugger is nicer than Firefox (or at least I'm more used to it). Brave's memory footprint is smaller than Firefox in my opinion.
    • Yup, I don't use Linux any longer, but on OS X the Brave browser is plenty fast and more secure.

    • Thought I'd give brave a whirl. (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Tried to download brave. Can only get a "downloader", not the full package. I hate that.

      Next it tells me I need windows 10 (with all the telemetry that implies) to get updates. That's no good.

      Then it starts up, and it crunches and crunches and "stops responding". So much for "fast browser".

      Oh, but it needs to do full-screen moving backgrounds. I hate autoplaying video and crap like that.

      Oh, now it gives me a "desktop in the browser" with just as much unwanted gadgets. So now I get to hunt those down fir

    • Re: Chromium (Score:5, Informative)

      by FudRucker ( 866063 ) on Sunday January 22, 2023 @04:32PM (#63230768)
      there is ungoogled-chromium that should be clean of all tracking and with ublock-origin its all good (both found on girhub)
    • Edge on Linux?!

  • Speed: Not a Important Figure of Merit (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BrendaEM ( 871664 ) on Sunday January 22, 2023 @04:15PM (#63230728) Homepage
    What about privacy, security, convenience, usability? Someone who's browser is slow, should be looking more at their internet connection.
    • Unless you're using an incredibly slow connection, most of the time spent loading a page is waiting for the server of that page and the internet nodes in between. Can't do anything about those.

    • Nobody cares about those things except for a handful of people.

  • Missing the bigger picture (Score:3)

    by GotNoRice ( 7207988 ) on Sunday January 22, 2023 @04:16PM (#63230734)
    Chrome is "faster" likely because most sites design their pages based around Chrome now, and google basically has control over the direction of web development due to that. Google isn't concerned about compatibility with other browsers; if they can introduce "shortcuts" which give Chrome an advantage, they will. Yes, Chrome is based on "Open Source" Chromium, but Google basically controls Chromium development, so the result is the same, except that other browsers (such as Edge) can use Chromium also. But in the end, it still achieves Google's objective. And the reality is that there are no "slow" browsers anymore. This was something that was a concern 15-20 years ago.
    • This simply is not True. FireFox is about 3/4 the speed of Chrome on my 3 year old Linux laptop, mostly due to memory and disk use. ESPECIALLY when on battery. FireFox is simply slow and bulky compared to Chrome and Edge.
      • What is this "Edge" thing?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by G00F ( 241765 )

        Not true on my 10+ year old hardware. And not true when using more than a few tabs.

        If you consider the speed of 1 tab, sure, I'll concede that, that wasn't even part of my benchmarks as my lowest tab count I think was 20.

        Also that matches my understanding of (and this is grossly simplified cuz I'm lazy) Chrome is it's lighter over head but more of that gets duplicated with more tabs vs mozila heavier over head but needs to duplicate less with more tabs.

        Also tests revealed at the time that Windows FF in a VM

    • Not sure if it is still the case now, but I remember in the past Chrome cut corners in the name of speed. Not initializing variables or forms properly, that sort of thing. Drove me nuts when Chrome first became popular and suddenly a bunch of forms on a website I worked on started generating lots of errors. Turned out Chrome wouldn't clear the values of the forms, leaving random garbage in them, even if the HTML explicitly set a default value. Worked on all other browsers so took me a while to realize the
  • On those stubborn, hard to remove sites. Otherwise, Firefox larded with script and privacy adornments. Linux Mint x 2 user since Windows turned full Fisher-Price replete with monitoring telemetry to mommy. Triangle goes in ....Star?
  • This seems like a reasonable factor to measure. It could just be Ubuntu, but I have to wait several minutes before Firefox becomes responsive and starts acting on my prompts. Before I ditched Chrome, I remember that it at least started promptly.

    • This is because Canonical has abdicated the responsibility of creating a distribution, and installs a sandboxed "snap" package created for them by Mozilla.
      Snaps are lots slower than traditional binaries.

  • Default "out-of-the-box" experience. (Score:3)

    by SeaFox ( 739806 ) on Sunday January 22, 2023 @05:05PM (#63230820)

    With Google's attempt to neuter ad-blocking on Chrome with Manifest v3, I wonder which would load pages faster -- Firefox with UBlock Origin, or Chrome without? And that's not even counting the quality-of-life improvement of not having to be bombarded by the advertising.

  • Try a real test (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ukoda ( 537183 ) on Sunday January 22, 2023 @05:07PM (#63230826) Homepage
    What is speed difference when you go to an ad bloated website? With Firefox more open to effective ad blockers it should have to load less unwanted content and therefore be faster and safer. It is the better attitude to blocking unwanted content that will keep me on Firefox regardless of how trendy Chrome becomes.
  • Chrome (thanks largely to Microsoft oddly) is also FAR BETTER than FireFox on battery use on laptops. Firefox is essentially dead IMHO

  • Because we're all using Core i9 13900K....

    The browser which performs best on Linux is the browser which lets you use the www as you prefer. Performance has to be astonishingly awful for it to be more important than features, extensions etc. I'm still using Firefox. I did use Chrome/chromium for a couple of years while Mozilla appeared to be waging war on their users but they seem to have got through their teenage asshole fuck you phase and gone back to trying to make a nice browser.

  • On an i9 machine, does anyone notice any difference? I mean when they're actually using the browsers like human beings.
  • Which add-ons do you use for Firefox?

    Not loading advertisements?

    Deleting cookies?

    Saving the browsing session?

    Ghostery Add-on? "Ghostery is a powerful privacy extension. Block ads, stop trackers and speed up websites."

    uBlock Origin? "uBlock Origin - Free, open-source ad content blocker."
  • OT: Opera.

  • Probably Chrome But I'll Never Know (Score:3)

    by TranquilVoid ( 2444228 ) on Sunday January 22, 2023 @09:01PM (#63231302)

    From running Firefox on both my work Windows laptop (~4 years old) and my home Ubuntu desktop ( 1,000 tabs (don't ask), the Windows performance and memory resilience is far greater.

    The Linux version is greedier about sharing memory and drags down other programs eventually, especially large ones like games. Eventually some browser windows lose input to their top area (tabs, URL and men) and I have to restart Firefox.

    On Windows I'm happily running various database servers and bloated dev tools like Visual Studio. Very occasionally Windows will kill Firefox if memory and swap become exhausted.

    None of this is necessarily the fault of Firefox. The Linux desktop environment is not as stable as Windows, but for all the usual reasons I have no inclination to switch to Windows or Chrome.

    • I have to ask about the 1000 tabs. I’ve had about 100 open in FF because I wanted to read them later, or sort of use them like bookmarks without actually bookmarking them. What would you possibly need 1000 tabs for?

      • Okay, it's definitely a lack or organisation, doing too many things at once (and switching between rather than finishing one at a time), a hoarding mentality, not being able to make decisions until I have all the info and having a job that doesn't mind blurring work/personal on the laptop.

        Looking at my work Firefox, I have multiple different work areas I look at. There's customer issues, customer licensing, a project to transfer our licence system into various other systems, build setup/Azure dev ops, Azure

  • Firefox, out of principle (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sremick ( 91371 ) on Sunday January 22, 2023 @11:52PM (#63231614)

    It never ceases to amaze me how many people who are sufficiently techno-savvy to know better, who will denounce Microsoft and Windows and use Linux out of principle will then hypocritically turn a blind-eye to Google and use Chrome or Chromium. Basically giving Google a carte blanche to get away with all the shit that Microsoft was roasted over the coals for not too many years ago.

    Either they're too young to remember, have short memories, or aren't as smart as I'd make them out to be.

    Look: a browser-engine monoculture is dangerous to the overall internet and web experience. Full stop. As long as Firefox is serviceable, I use it on every platform on that basis alone. Period.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/... [theverge.com]

    Meanwhile:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]

    https://www.inquirer.com/busin... [inquirer.com]

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/z... [forbes.com]

    https://www.techradar.com/in/f... [techradar.com]

  • Are we fast yet? (Score:3)

    by El_Muerte_TDS ( 592157 ) on Monday January 23, 2023 @01:29AM (#63231764) Homepage

    Mozilla continuously runs benchmarks of Firefox, Chrome, and Chromium:
    https://arewefastyet.com/linux... [arewefastyet.com]

  • Is Chrome's performance a good proxy for that of other browsers with the same core? Privacy-focused Chromium browsers exist, which seems to be Firefox's biggest selling point over Chrome.
  • ... I'm more concerned about the browser allowing sites, and the browser itself, to harvest data from me.

  • They might also look at which browser plays nice with the desktop. First thing I notice about Chrome is how it locks up my desktop kb+mouse until it is done starting all of its tabs. I regularly kill my browser when I'm done browsing, but having chrome lock things up for 30+ seconds while it restarts still keeps it off regular use on my desktop -- it may be faster, but only because it pauses everything else while it needs cpu.

    If you keep it up all the time so it can keep sending back status to google, you

  • Faster? Using what scheduler(s) (Score:4, Interesting)

    by lpq ( 583377 ) on Monday January 23, 2023 @12:37PM (#63232800) Homepage Journal

    Also to take into consideration, is the effect of the various Linux CPU and I/O schedulers available.
    There are several, some of which lower priority for over-users. Might be nice to see how performance varies with different schedulers.

  • Still using Firefox (Score:3)

    by Mononymous ( 6156676 ) on Monday January 23, 2023 @02:48PM (#63233168)

    Even if Chrome were to become open source, stop spying, and allow real privacy extensions, I would still use Firefox.
    Firefox is still the only one that lets me turn on the menu bar.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • And I do not even use Linux based desktop (only servers)

    Why? Ads. Firefox is the only browser left that fights ads and allows free reign of adblockers as plugins.

    Chrome, Brave etc all suck in that aspect and sold out to venomous ad industry.

    From my cold dead hands.

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