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Comment by maddyboo | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been a Firefox user on Linux for the past 2 years. I recently had to open Chromium to accommodate a site that refused to work with Firefox, and I was quite shocked at how much snappier Chromium’s UI felt. Going back to Firefox the sluggishness is palpable.

My machine is in the upper-mid range with a TR 1950X + Vega 56, so I can’t imagine it’s a spec issue.

I’ve read the entire Arch Wiki article on Firefox performance [1], ensured that hardware acceleration and other performance settings/flags are enabled, and tested different configurations of theses settings. Nothing made a discernible difference.

Chromium, even with hardware acceleration disabled, is dramatically more responsive than Firefox.

I have been very tempted to go back to Chromium. Ideologically and privacy wise, I really want to support Firefox, but I can’t help craving a lightning fast UI.

1: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox/Tweaks

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I own a Dell XPS13 9380 with Intel igpu 620 and switched back to Chromium (without the hardware acceleration patch). My OS is Archlinux, LTS kernel and my desktop environment is Gnome Wayland.

Starting from Firefox 79 I had to disable webrender, otherwise youtube videos crashed very frequently. So except for watching videos, the Chromium experience is much smoother and consumes less cpu. There is this Fishbowl web browser rendering test, for Chromium I can display 100 fish at 60fps, for Firefox (without webrender but hardware acceleration) with 10fish I get only 53fps.

For watching youtube videos (with h264lify on both), I get on firefox between 15%to25% cpu consumption with Vaapi but without webrender. With both vaapi and webrender it is <15% but very unstable. Note that on Windows10 for the same hardware cpu consumption is between 5% and 10%.

For Chromium and youtube videos cpu consumption it is more like between 20% and 40%.

So I hope the webrender is more stable with Firefox 81, but I think I'll keep Chromium for anything other than watching videos.

Quick update since Firefox 81 package has been released in Arch repos, I have been able to test it and it seems that videos instabilities are gone. I get a <10% cpu consumption on youtube videos with webrender + vaapi.

I've also (unfortunately) noticed that Chrome is much more responsive on Linux than Firefox on several different machines.

In fact, on a resource-constrained VDI for internet access (for security reasons), I've also noticed that Chrome seems to prioritise interaction of the UI elements much more than Firefox does: in Firefox I've often noticed that when the page has animated items (whether gifs, videos, etc), Firefox seems to prioritise playing back the content over responding to keyboard or mouse events (i.e. page up or Ctrl+W), and can often take multiple seconds to respond, whereas Chrome responds to events much faster. Maybe it's something with the event loop?

This fits with my observations. It’s not that Chromium is faster than Firefox per se, but it responds quicker to user interaction giving it a snappier feel. I think it has to do with prioritization and other tricks to make it ‘feel’ faster than it is (e.g. pre-fetching).

If I were a developer, the battleground of the web through Firefox would be one that I would seriously consider putting my time, energy, blood, sweat, tears, pride and joy into.

It's a sad pain point isn't it...

I too dropped Chrome for ideology and the snap was dearly missed.

I had the opposite experience. Used Chromium for as long as I could remember, then it started becoming too slow and memory-hungry. I switched to Firefox and it's been so much better! It's super fast and uses way less memory. The only thing Firefox is truly a lot slower on my computer is the startup. But the only case in which I start Firefox is after updates, otherwise it's always running.

I'm running Firefox on ArchLinux with the 5.8 kernel and an Intel motherboard with integrated graphics.

Very interesting. What are the rest of your system specs?

I have the same setup on my desktop and laptop computers.

Desktop: quad core Intel i5, 16 GB RAM, SSD,integrated graphics.

Laptop: quad core Intel i7, 32 GB RAM, SSD, integrated graphics.

As far as I can tell my Firefox on Linux is as snappy as snappy gets.

Firefox is my main browser on Linux, but sometimes I browse using Chromium. Both feel equally snappy to me -- even though I have hundreds of tabs open in Firefox and several add-ons, and none on Chromium.

I feel the same on Mac. I really want to use Firefox but as of right now I feel like Chromium is much better built. Another annoyance is the back and forward buttons don't work on Firefox but they do work on Chrome. I'd check out Brave, they've done a few shady things in the past but generally care about privacy and are quick to resolve any issues

There are Chromium-based browsers, like Brave, that might give you the snap while maintaining the moral high ground.

I've been a big fan of Vivaldi for a while now. They seem really on top of adding features and customization options. Everything feels snappy and is a great balance of modern/performant UI.

I use it as my work browser, and run Firefox as my personal, mostly due to Vivaldi not having an iOS browser (I love me some tab sync).

Thank you, I hadn't heard of it. Looks like a better job of extending the UI than Brave, which is pretty conventional. Either one is "Chrome withOUT the all-seeing eye of Google".

https://vivaldi.com/

https://brave.com/

Vivaldi has the the best 'history' page of all the browsers.

Displaying your browser history as a calendar is one of my favourite features of any browser.

This is curious to me. Were you using any extensions?

I have tested with a clean profile and didn’t notice a speed up.

This is not to say Firefox is slow, but that Chromium feels much snappier.

Have you tried enabling pixel-perfect scrolling?

Scrolling is fine, it’s most other UI interactions like button presses (both browser UI and in-page).

Funny, for me this is something i need to turn off to make it snappier. Especially the mousewheel scrolling really feels laggy with it on.

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