[eclecticfrank]

Give us an example where Chrome is faster than Firefox, so we can see if it is more important than having uBlock Origin.

I use both Firefox and Chrome for work and haven't noticed any speed differences (without measuring).

[homebrewer]

If your life has been as unfair to you as it has been to some of us, and forced you to work on SPAs as the result, try opening any large frontend project that uses Vite (or any other dev server that serves each file separately instead of bundling them).

If you're unfamiliar with this stuff, it results in your browser fetching thousands of JavaScript files from the local dev server.

Any Chromium-based browser handles that just fine in about 1-2 seconds. Firefox takes at least ten, including full page reloads. No adblocking on either, and yes I've tried all combinations of about:config knobs, fresh/empty profiles, etc.

That's the only reason I use Chromium for development work.

[chamomeal]

I use firefox to work on SPA’s and occasionally use chrome for compatibility checks. I haven’t really noticed a difference in speed, except for startup time (which firefox is definitely slower, but I also have it open pretty much all the time anyway)

[CafeRacer]

Life is unfair to me and Firefox works just fine.

[_benj]

> If your life has been as unfair to you as it has been to some of us, and forced you to work on SPAs as the result…

Hehe

[pixelesque]

I suspect part of it might be interactive-ity with the event loop: let me explain.

I regularly have to use web browsers (I try and want to use Firefox, but Chrome is faster for me in this scenario) on an under-provisioned (yes I know, but I don't have any control over that!) VM which runs VDI sessions on both Linux and Windows (with VMWare on Windows).

On both Windows and Linux, Firefox's UI (in this CPU-constrained env - it fluctuates, and sometimes is okay, but often is slow) in terms of UI interaction is very notice-ably much slower than Chrome, especially when there's animated content in the document. It seems like Firefox prioritizes thread-wise the HTML/JS content at the expense of any UI signals/presses/drags or other interaction, and so sometimes clicking close tab does nothing for > 30 seconds, but animated content within the document keeps playing perfectly.

Chrome does none of this (on same VM machines) with same content: I click the close button, and instantly a tab closes, or I can drag a tab around instantly.

[cosmic_cheese]

I think that Chromium’s UI stack is also just more solid, being closer to “native” and being drawn with Skia and such, as opposed to the Firefox approach (previously XUL, which was always slow and clunky and later switching to a web tech based UI).

There used to be Gecko based browsers that fixed this with alternative native UIs (Camino, K-Meleon, and Epiphany aka GNOME Web), but then Mozilla removed embedding support and ever since anybody wanting to use Gecko are stuck with the design decisions of the Firefox team whether they want to be or not.

[buzer]

One example that I can give is that when Firefox has been running for long time, especially in Private window, the memory usage of "main" processes will grow a lot (normal & GPU). Compacting memory via about:memory does free up a bit but Chrome in similar situation will use a lot less memory. This does slow down Firefox (especially in system where you don't necessarily have a lot of memory), restarting it will make it a lot snappier.

For example I currently have Firefox & Chrome sessions which have been open for about a month on my laptop (16GB of memory). I closed every tab and only left the "blank" page open. Firefox's process manager shows 4GB GPU usage, a bit under 1GB usage for Firefox & about 250MB for extensions. After clicking "minimize memory usage" the GPU memory dropped to 3GB and Firefox process memory usage dropped by about 50MB.

For comparison Chrome uses 400MB of GPU, about 200MB for "Browser", ~150MB for for "utility" processes and about 100MB for extensions (extension list is different so we can ignore the memory usage difference for them, listed it just for completeness sake).

Despite this I do use Firefox as my primary browser.

[mixmastamyk]

May be a leaky extension, I rarely get over 1gb with firefox.

[jeroenhd]

Chrome is faster and smoother on my Linux machines and on Android. On Windows and macOS, the difference is much less obvious.

I still use Firefox everywhere, but Mozilla still has some catching up to do in my experience.

[EbNar]

https://arewefastyet.com/win11/benchmarks/overview?numDays=6...

This is from Mozilla themselves.

[jhasse]

https://www.browserating.com/#rankings

[esskay]

As I said I think it's more of a perception thing than an actual slowness.

I don't think Firefox is actually any slower in a practical test of loading a site for example, I just perceived it as being slower, perhaps more likely its something like the transitions between tabs and other actions being different enough to feel slower.