I wonder when people will finally notice that "being fast" is not the most important option of a web browser. There is so much that Firefox has given up by version 57.

I, for one, use qutebrowser now when using my Void machine.

Here is the benchmarks I promised earlier.
Sorry for the wall of text, I like to be both complete and precise.



This is a test of browser speed, the UI and rendering engine.
I'm loading 482 html files from my hard drive that originally came from several
random sites. Scripts are disabled.
The browsers were put into offline mode when ever possible, but I'm not online
anyway, so it does not matter much.
All the browses were run twice to ensure that they were loaded into the RAM.
All the browsers were built with -O2 and other flags appropriate for my system
to ensure that they were all running equally fast and well. Opera and chromium are excluded from this level of optimization because Opera's source is unavailable and chromium comes with several prebuilt binary files (Boo).
I'm running Gentoo Linux 9.4.x kernel.
The browsers did have active plugins, however, none of them were ever triggered as there was not JS, no cookies, etc.

If a browser could not load several files from the command line I ran:
on another command line after starting the browser.

Firefox did not load all of the html pages, this is due to a bug in the parsing of the command line. Firefox treats many characters as invalid in spite of the fact that Linux uses UTF-8 file names and so they all aught to be valid. This list includes "WORD:", "#", curly quotes, -- (UTF-8 double dash), etc. Chromium, dillo, and w3m are even worse, it seems that everything that is not a letter, number, underscore, hyphen or period is illegitimate. And these are URL safe characters too.

qutebrowser could not find the installed webengine, I'm not sure why.

This is the load time, time to confirm that all windows are open (using a random selection and CPU usage when a whirly icon was not available), time to look at the memory usage in htop, and time to close them all and the app.

It is worth noting that chromium did not even render all the pages that it was handed. That is to say, if I reloaded several of the pages they rendered fine, otherwise chromium failed to display them correctly giving only a partial render. This occurred even when using the stable version (the speed and memory difference is negligible between versions I tested).

The older version of opera does not allow many pages to be loaded from the command line. I don't know the exact limit.
It's worth noting that the newer Opera takes a few milliseconds to display a new tab (normally not noticeable). I'm not certain why this is -- it's too short for a page reload or loading an image of the page from cache.

Because qupzilla takes so long to process all the requests, I closed it and then reopened it and reloaded the tabs from the session, so there are two results for qupzilla.

It's worthwhile remembering that dillo is not a complete web browser yet, and it often times mis-renders things (I'd guess that the vast majority of times it is the css being not fully implemented that causes the issues).

The latest version of firefox has a very unresponsive UI, I gauged when it was
done rendering purely on CPU usage because it takes about 30s to get it to
respond to even the most basic interactions (like scrolling, menu, etc.)

The following don't use tabs.
links-2.14
lynx-2.8.9_pre11
netrik-1.16.1-r1
surf-0.7

Midori-0.5.11-r2 could not take more than 100 tabs.

Qutebrowser-0.9.1 and xombrero-1.6.3 crash when loading a local file.
Conkeror-1.0_pre20140212 crashes, even in safe mode.

In the case of otter-0.9.12, after 20+ minutes of waiting for the browser window to appear, I hit ^C and was offered the option to type help, I did this and got no response so I killed it.

These cannot open local files via the command line because it is ignored:
dooble-1.55
netsurf-3.6
qtweb-3.8.5_p108

W3m-0.5.3-r9 and w3mmee-0.3.2_p24-r9 refused to open multiple tabs from on the command line or lack support tabs. In other words multiple tabs would have open multiple windows.



To Sum up, chromium losses badly, not because of the raw numbers but because it never even loaded most of the pages and so it is plain broken . Qupzilla is very resource hungry until you reload it . Firefox is also very resource hungry and just plain slow . Opera would be the best choice here . Don't worry though, FLOSS will catch up, eventually, if instead of unlimited feature adding they fix and optimize what they have got.

Don't forget to say whether or not this was helpful (it did take a while to create)!

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Truthfully, I was never concerned about the "speed" of Firefox. It just won't perform on my older machine (Dual 2 core Intel). It greys out on my system for seconds at a time (sometime not recovering), I frequently get a message that a script isn't performing right, and it just plain locks up on occassion. Having said that, it doesn't do this often on my newer machine (an i core 3 Intel laptop). Both HP computers.

I've been running Chrome all day and not a hickup.

?

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Did anyone try cleaning out the history, cache and cookies?

1 members found this post helpful.

Good question! I set all my browsers to not accept third party cookies and to clean history and cookies on exit. That is mostly a strategy to control tracking cookies, but it may be relevant to this thread.

On the question of speed, I don't care whether my browser is the fastest. I care only that it is fast enough.

And I wouldn't use Chrome on a bet. The notion of running nekkid through the Googleplex somehow does not appeal to me.

Speed isn't my #1 consideration, either, but it sure doesn't hurt, and FF 57 delivers on speed.

100% agreed on Chrome. I've also found that I can't even tolerate Chrome-based browsers (Brave, Vivaldi, Opera) for more than a few days. So even though I have experienced some frustrations with FF over the years, I always stick with it (I've been using it since Mosaic, haha). With Firefox Quantum, I'm feeling better about the browser than I have in quite a while, and all my regular extensions work, given the new API (uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere).

I went with vivaldi for a while and found it performed pretty well. I know it's chrome based but I think they're trying to move away from google. However, when I saw ff 57 I thought I'd give it a go. Prior to vivaldi I used ff for years.
I'm really impressed with it again.

As I said in my last post, Chrome is broken on at least my machine. You can try out what I did on yours and compare.
BTW: I failed to mention that the web pages that were downloaded were all done with FF.
I also get a script hang on my machine (a Phenom II), from time to time. It's because FF is doing too much work with respect to your computer's processing power.


Yes. And Yes, FF is faster once cleaned. I cleaned the history of all the browsers I benchmarked before benchmarking with them.
However, a massive slow down because you have a little (500 pages), history is really bad IMHO.
Mind, I love FF. The plugins are very good, it is well supported, etc. but it has some really ugly sides too.

Based on this thread I just installed Qupzilla 1.6.6 on Debian Jessie.

It feels fast. To my surprise Microsoft Technet pages which have stopped working since a few weeks in Firefox, do work in Qupzilla. (Browsing Microsoft Technet makes me already unhappy, when the pages do not display even more so!)

But to my disappointment Qupzilla does not produce any sound. Which Mozilla does. The stream simply does not show up in PavuMixer. Like there is no application at all producing sound.

jlinkels

Gotta say so far Firefox 57 has been wonderful to me. No more freezing, can browse with more than 1 tab open without bringing my 8-core/32 GB ram desktop to it's knees, pages load fast, and all the necessary functionality for extensions is available (gestures are wonky, but known issue for webextensions gestures on linux/mac), and the gesture still works, you just have to move the mouse further than normal to avoid clicking on a context menu item.

Firefox has been absolute trash since v4.0 when they started to get a fetish for Chrome's UI and such. I agree that Firefox literally has zero character anymore. If you're looking for a Firefox-like browser which actually has character, I'd suggest Pale Moon.

+1 for Pale Moon.

i think i'll just keep on recommending seamonkey.

not that it's any better or worse than say palemoon or qupzilla, but it's up there among the best lightweight non-google browser alternatives.

plus, you get an equally lightweight thunderbird compatible email client.

... I thought.

But I get frustrated with each and every one of them, once in a while. Vivaldi (ex Opera) does not arouse much enthusiasm. I tried some of the niche-browsers and gave up on them, either. Take them all, use a few of them for some time, replace... Epiphany-Browser or whatever it is called nowadays, did never promise more than it kept, though. W3M is my favorite on the text-console... Else, I am switching to FF 57 for regular use, for some time, maybe ...

I kind of liked Netscape 3 Gold and Opera 3.21 (although I am sure, I had 3.15, too).

Thats right. Switched back to Firefox after a gap of couple of years. firefox 57 is fast , seems like
they rewrote lot of code in "rust". Bye chrome!


Entering the Quantum Era—How Firefox got fast again and where it’s going to get faster: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/11/en...to-get-faster/