I have suspicion that lots of the "chrome is faster" is because devs optimise for chrome. More unique and "new" the API is the bigger the difference. Webgl is probably pretty different between browsers but nobody will bother to even look at webgl project in Firefox. It's pretty remarkable that such complex code can run pretty well in multiple different browsers.

Another example Chrome has rel=prerender support and some libraries use it to make loading pages faster. Safari and Firefox don't support it. But it's progressive enhancement so why not use it. Result is that Chrome seems faster. There are probably many ways to make things faster on the other side but nobody will bother.

Could it be that people compare chrome without an adblocker with Firefox without an adblocker?

If I were Google, I would spend billions on making chrome showing ads really fast.

I have definitely noticed my laptop fans spinning up whenever I do Youtube on Firefox on Windows. I just figured the GPU acceleration was broken, but this makes sense. Certainly not the first time Windows Defender has consumed extraordinary amounts of system resources for simple tasks.

I've noticed that AWS Console will spin up the fans on my MBP running Firefox, specifically on the EC2 screen. None of the other Console screens spin up the fans like that. Viewing about:performance always shows the AWS tab running full tilt to the point I've jokingly assumed they're trying to spin up an instance via WASM ;-)

The "new" EC2 console is the biggest pile of crap.

it amazes me how they can release that kind of thing. something the size of AWS, and this is what gets released to the public?

On Linux I fixed issues by setting media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled true in about:config.

From fan noise to none on youtube/twitch - chrome never made the fans spin.

I’ve noticed Firefox getting unbearably slow when several YouTube tabs were open. Tried toggling HW accel too with no success. Yes, I did blame FF since thorium (the chrome variant I use) doesn’t suffer from the same problem.

Firefox is significantly slower than chrome.

This usually doesn't matter, but you can immediately see it in any page that

A) has a massive DOM

or

B) uses complex regular expressions that eat up the engine

I've read that a number of times now, but I have trouble matching it to my perceptions. Can you point to a specific website where you notice that slowness and then describe what action is slower? (Initial load, clicking stuff, scrolling, etc.)

Just as an example, loading jslinux.org for me in Firefox is about twice as fast than in Chrome. That might be a special case of course, because it is a very special type of workload that probably is not common on other websites. But I would love to see concrete examples of the opposite.

WebGL / Canvas heavy sites are typically significantly slower in Firefox compared to Chrome. Google Maps is a pretty good example of this.

To be fair though, Google maps is an awful beast on any browser compared to older versions.

Put 10,000 or so event handlers with their own DOM updates on a page. Chrome will run it smoothly (taking up a huge amount of RAM in the process), Firefox won't.

That's not a specific site though.

What is the definition of huge amount of RAM? How does Chrome perform when it's RAM constricted? Are we blaming Firefox for poorly designed websites?

It feels like this is a straw man constructed to bash Firefox, rather than a real world scenario.

Extremely poorly-optimized websites are far more common these days than even mildly performant ones.

Do you have an example of one with 10,000 event handlers? If the case where Firefox falls isn't real it doesn't matter that other sites suck (not arguing that fact).

For our benchmark suites at work, Firefox and Chrome generally trade back and forth on who's faster. It's not a consistent 'chrome is fastest'. I'm sure there are specific websites where Chrome dominates but I've yet to see any evidence that we're still in the bad old days where Firefox was orders of magnitude slower on important stuff.

Firefox is slower than Chrome if and only if your DNS is not responding as fast. When backed by a performant DNS server, Firefox is generally faster than Chrome.

Don't ask me how I know it.

Both of which are more issues with the website than the browser, imo.

I just ran a test at https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.1/

Firefox scored 89.5 ±1.7

Chromium scored 87.3 ±2.9

I guess that means Firefox did faster for those tests. I don't use Chrome or Chromium based browsers in general so I don't know how they compare in "feel".

I am on Linux.

79.3±0.92 for me in Epiphany/Gnome Web

Which is a lot better than I was expecting compared to Firefox/Chromium.

I obtained 86 on Linux but I am on a very old Dell PC Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz. Firefox has 16 addons and is running in Firejail and CPU reniced.

Just for fun I also ran it on a Windows 11 mini-PC Ryzen 9 6900HX 3.3 GHz with no addons and obtained:

Edge: 291

Firefox: 196

I do not have Chrome installed but I believe Edge may be some fork of Chrome?

80-90s feels low in general, my phone gets +300 on that. Maybe some funky CPU powersave interfering with the runs?

My old android phone got 52.7±2 chrome, 51.6±0.8 in Firefox, so effectively the same.

However, I had to disable some ff add-ons to get that score (chrome had no add-ons to begin with).

Hmmm, that seems like it's going to be super situational. It hit 160 ± 1.9 in Firefox, 236 ± 5.2 in Chrome. So results are all over the map.

Just wanted to add, my hardware is old.

That's interesting.

M1 Pro 8 core

Safari: 133

Firefox: 221

Chromium: 339

Weird - Firefox seems about what I get but Safari and Chrome have always been within ~10% of each other for me on this test with an M1 and M2 (both straddling 450 if I run them right now). Extensions or power save at play maybe?

>I wonder how many of the people who say "Firefox is significantly slower than chrome" are using windows...

I have heard the most complaints from Mac and Linux users on HN and Reddit. Especially with Youtube...

Windows + Firefox is just fine in my experience. After the Quantum upgrade/version. Yes Chromium based Edge and Chrome is a bit faster, Opera and Vivaldi feel slower depending on the number of tabs.

Firefox and Edge handles many tabs the best from a performance perspective on Windows in my experience. Vivaldi is very close.

Anything without vertical tabs is impossible to use with many tabs.

I use windows and firefox for most of my browsing and I can tell you that I have definitely noticed that firefox was struggling really hard on youtube compared to chrome. I wasn't sure if chrome was just that much better or if there was something else going on.

I'm happy this was found and its not clear if this is already patched, but hopefully it will somewhat improve performance on youtube or other sites like it going forward.

It's much much slower for me on macOS. But that's with all my extensions while I don't have as many on Chrome.

Firefox seems a little slower than Chrome on Linux but force enabling some of the GPU offload stuff seemed to help.

Firefox is slower than Chrome regardless of the OS.

On my base M1 MacBook Air FireFox is noticeably slower than Chrome/Edge/Safari.

Strange, I have the same laptop on a fast network and I can't tell the difference.

I can't tell the difference either even with all the add-ons I use. FF runs great on my M1.

I use all three browsers (FF for personal, Edge for work and on my Surfaces, Chrome on my chromebooks). Edge on Surfaces is the fastest and tbh these days I like Firefox over Chrome in every way, and don't notice a speed difference. I consider myself a power user, for what it's worth.