Hacker News Reader

Comment by apfsx | Hacker News Reader

I tested this with Firefox stable release and Brave stable release, 3 runs on each. Same exact extensions across both.

Highest scores across tests: Firefox: 6.34 +- 0.31 Brave: 11.3 +- 0.37 on Ryzen 9 7940HS + RTX 3060 mobile

Which really sucks since I highly prefer Firefox but this past week I've been trying out Brave and I think its noticeably faster and smoother to me. Even with the reduced speed I'm still swayed toward Firefox for the customization factor you can achieve with userchrome.css file.

View on HN

The 'same' extensions on each browser control for your experience, but not for the browsers' performance:

The browsers have the same or very similar APIs for the extensions but that is just the interface; each browser executes the extension's instructions differently (a lot or a little - I don't know the browsers' code). The same extension will impact Brave's performance differently than it will impact Firefox's. In other words, the same extension is not, in this sense, the 'same' on each browser.

In this sense, an extension is part of the user experience, like a website. The Speedometer test suite doesn't include those extensions (I assume) and that is the experience the browsers are optimized for.

The parent's test doesn't represent that; it does represent their desired experience, of course.

What's your score in Firefox with extensions disabled?

Firefox extensions disabled: 16.8 +- 0.59 Brave extensions disabled: 19.0 +- 0.88

Interesting because I have only 5 extensions. The heaviest extension seems to be Dark Reader which causes over 5 point changes.

Yeah, Dark Reader is known to totally plummet Firefox performance.

Not sure if it's a coding issue in the Firefox version of Dark Reader, or it's hitting some slow path in Firefox itself.

Even if you have the exact same extensions the fact that you have an old Firefox profile may be hindering the results. Try comparing with a fresh Firefox profile with the same extensions.

The Firefox profile I'm using is no more than 3 weeks old. Fresh install of Windows was done around that time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com