
Chrome 27, Firefox 22, IE10, And Opera Next, Benchmarked - blueveek
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-opera-next,3534-12.html
======
SeanDav
Well, as a long time fan of Firefox, I am sitting here with quite the smile on
my face. Not sure how long it will last but this little victory is rather
sweet.

~~~
altrego99
This is sweet. Also because I love what they are doing on javascript
development. For example,

1\. Destructuring references is not yet supported on Chrome

    
    
      [a,b,c]=[c,d,f]
      [a,b]=[b,a+b]
    

2\. Shorthand functions are sweet

    
    
      [1,2,3,4].map(function(x) x*x)) // [1,4,9,16]
    

3\. Chrome doesn't have an inbuilt shell (Shift+F4 in Firefox)

Granted CoffeeScript makes some of these easy, but they are too paranoid in my
opinion to support new and useful syntaxes (e.g. yield keyword for generators,
getters/setters).

~~~
epidemian
I didn't know about that function syntax. Does it work just like the arrow
function syntax?

    
    
        [1,2,3,4].map(x => x * x) // [1,4,9,16]
    

I wonder why they included two new shorter function syntax alternatives. Is
one of them recommended/deprecated?

~~~
altrego99
This doesn't seem to work on Firefox 21 shell. Does it work on FF 22?

~~~
epidemian
Yep, it seems it was added on Firefox 22: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/arrow_functions). It also seems it's the
proposal for ES6:
[http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:arrow_functio...](http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:arrow_function_syntax).

This blog post explains the differences between these functions and current
functions:
[http://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/javascript-...](http://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/javascript-
fat-city/;) i wish the unbound "->" alternative is included, so that functions
used as methods can also use the new syntax.

------
nolok
What's truly impressive to me (in a bad/sad way), is how despite all it's
great features Firefox manages to feel so, I don't know, I guess clunky would
be the word. And it's not a habit thing because I use it every day, although
for disclosure Chrome is my personal browser.

It just doesn't feel like a piece of software that I enjoy using, like it used
to some long years ago. Fix that, and you win me back.

PS: I think the memory score is not so relevant as a few years ago. People
talked a lot about FF memory, but that was because it was leaking like crazy
and ultimately lead to crashes of your browser. I don't care how much ram my
browser is using as long as it doesn't start swapping nor crashing.

~~~
nimrody
Perhaps on a strong development machine, the resource-heavy Chrome is
enjoyable.

However, on a more limited machine (Since when is a 4GB machine not good
enough to browse the web???), Firefox definitely wins and is much more
enjoyable.

I was a long time Chrome user ever since it came out. However, recent versions
(on OS X and Windows) are unusable with a large number of tabs. Firefox
handles many tabs _much_ better.

~~~
Wingman4l7
It's a simple tradeoff: you want the security that Chrome's sandboxing
provides? Then you have to accept the memory overhead.

Frankly the memory usage isn't as infuriating as the "tabs extend past the
right edge of the window" bug, which has been open for _forever_ \-- I'd link
to a bug report but it's a nightmare to find with a search engine because of
how hard it is to describe. Firefox has a simple fix for this -- they let you
scroll the "row" of tabs -- but for some reason Google refuses to fix it this
way. It's probably too rare of a use case; you have to have a relatively small
resolution monitor and at least ~70-80+ tabs open in a single window, IIRC.

------
thezilch
These mechanical benchmarks may be true, but FF still feels sluggish and the
dev tooling still leaves A LOT to be desired. Even in recreational browsing, I
tend to use dev tools and would get bothered easily having to open another
browser.

The memory efficiency doesn't explain much to me. It's like complaining that
linux is holding memory hostage in buffers/cache or that Chrome should lose
points for its process model. The test surely doesn't tell the whole story;
not to mention, I can't be bothered to worry about a couple 100M when I can
get 160 of them for the price of dinner. For all I know, the chunking I
experience with FF could very well be a relic of their process and/or memory
model.

And security is just a smudge on the score? No thanks.

~~~
mnemonik
> dev tooling still leaves A LOT to be desired.

Anything specific?

Feel free to file bugs, we want to make it better :)

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&c...](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&component=Developer%20Tools)

~~~
thezilch
Not bugs, but features. And frankly -- sorry to be short -- everything Chrome
has (or doesn't yet). I and my colleagues use just about everything.

I see a lot of these things landing in the FFs landing in the last week, so I
can't commend those efforts enough. Literally, I don't want to have to ever
install Firebug; it makes the browsing experience even more sluggish. And I
would have probably never started using FF, a decade ago, if it wasn't for the
tooling, and I would have never had a chance to convince as many friends and
family to use FF. The same reasons I will just recommend Chrome, today.

Frankly, you will have to have something that Chrome doesn't to bring us back,
and it's been a long time coming for the tooling to be even on par. Again, I
commend your efforts, because I think your community involvement and dev blogs
are really great.

~~~
idupree
My Chromium-using coworker is jealous of my (Firefox's) 3D View and my
Responsive Design View. I use both browsers in order to have access to all the
best tools.

(I keep development separate from regular browsing, either through Incognito
or separate Firefox profiles. This way, my regular browser addons don't
distort my view of how-my-website-looks-to-most-people, and Firebug speed
becomes irrelevant.)

~~~
thezilch
Your co-worker should know that both are available via an extension and native
DevTools, respectively.

------
ippa
I switched from FF -> Chrome some years ago. Sometimes I try to switch back.
Maybe FF is fast.. but it feels clunky, I wish they would copy Chromes GUI
right off :). Also the "screen" flickers when I scroll, in Chrome it doesn't.
And that's on a high-end windows PC.

I like what Mozilla is doing with regards to privacy and so on though...

~~~
magic_haze
Try FxChrome: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/fxchrome](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/fxchrome)

I switched from Chrome a few weeks back and had the same opinion about
firefox's native UI. FxChrome and Close-Tabs-to-the-Right
[[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/close-tabs-
to...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/close-tabs-to-the-
right)] made the switch completely worth it.

Edit: I noticed a difference in the default scrolling as well. Try disabling
smooth scrolling (Options -> Advanced -> General.)

~~~
padenot
Just wanted to note that a close-tabs-to-the-right menu entry was recently
added in Nightly builds.

------
FilterJoe
Pinned tabs on demand (introduced early 2012) is Firefox's killer feature that
got me using Firefox again after using Chrome almost exclusively for a year.
When you pin tabs, and then restart the browser, the tabs are not loaded until
you click on them (not yet loaded, pinned tabs, are visually dim).

Pinned tabs are not included in any benchmarks I've seen but have a drastic
positive impact on memory usage and speed. I typically have 20 or so pinned
tabs and only 1-3 unpinned tabs when I quit Firefox. A cold start takes just a
few seconds and about the only time I restart the browser is when I restart my
system (2-3x per week).

Chrome loads all tabs on start so it can take around a minute to load the same
21-23 tabs. And furthermore Chrome tends to operate sluggishly after a couple
hours of use with so many open tabs, so when using Chrome I tend to close then
reopen the browser every couple hours.

Chrome 5 had a similar feature called phantom tabs but it was removed in
Chrome 6. I loved that feature and was very unhappy when it was removed.

~~~
Arelius
The option "Don't load tabs until selected" gives similar behavior for
unpinned tabs too. This helps significantally where I use tabs and tabgroups
as something a little more temporary than bookmarks.

------
rhelmer
Firefox edges ahead of Chrome in performance, memory usage, startup time,
reliability.

~~~
halban
Firefox used ~50% less memory than Chrome on open pages, but the composite
memory score was slightly for Chrome because after closing the tabs Firefox
used more memory over its starting amount. Tom's basically treated this as a
leak when really it was just fixed overhead (wouldn't grow when opening and
closing the tabs over and over).

FF 'won' this benchmark despite a unfair memory score against it.

~~~
PavlovsCat
[http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionhistory.max_total_v...](http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers)

 _Pages that were recently visited are stored in memory in such a way that
they don 't have to be re-parsed_

I guess the same applies for closed tabs, since those can be re-opened as
well.

What does Tom think caching is, or what unused RAM is good for? To be a pretty
and useless number in the task manager? That not all users understand this is
one thing, but a so-called reviewer? Just wow. Thanks for _actively making
people worse informed_ , Mr. Expert.

------
swah
Some people I know, myself included, have the perception that Chrome is "not
as good as it used to be", loosely. Anyone else noticed this?

~~~
scholia
I used Chrome from when it came out until recently, when I switched back to
Firefox.

I gave up on Chrome because of Flash crashes, general crashes (two or more per
day), and pages showing up as plain, pale blue pages (instead of the web page
content). Maybe I had too many tabs open and not enough RAM (3GB). Either way,
the tabs were too small to show what the pages were, which wasn't helpful.

Firefox has worked perfectly, and it doesn't feel any slower, so I've no
complaints....

------
HugoDias
In the 'real world' when it comes to memory I believe the google chrome is
still winning. If you keep these two browsers with more than 10 tabs open for
a while (1h+) and then close a few tabs, google chrome will have an immediate
reduction in memory usage, unlike Firefox, which continues to consume the same
amount.

~~~
PavlovsCat
Maybe Firefox simply holds longer on to cached stuff if the system has still
free memory? Unless it fails to release it when needed, I would see this as a
plus.

~~~
HugoDias
Well, it isnt for me. I use Google+ and Youtube frequently and these services
consume a LOT of memory. When i close these tabs , Firefox keeps holding this
memory space alocated. Generally i need to use some app to remove the
'inactive' memory alocated by FF. I don't think this is a 'plus'.

~~~
PavlovsCat
Why? Unused RAM is just wasted RAM. In an ideal world, we would use all unused
RAM for aggressive caching, and release it _just_ before it's needed by
something other than caching. That Firefox frees up the memory when you start
other apps seems to indicate it does it exactly right.

------
KaoruAoiShiho
Firefox is still far behind in rendering images, something that's untested in
this benchmark. In real world use this makes FF slow as hell.

I really do hope FF catches up.

~~~
padenot
I you are talking about rendering speed, you'll be pleased to know that people
have been working on multithreaded image decoding. Not sure when it will be
available in release, but it is in my Firefox Nightly.

~~~
asb
There's still more to do on optimising rendering for pages with lots of
images, see
[https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2013/06/15/memshrinks-2...](https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2013/06/15/memshrinks-2nd-
birthday/). I've got my eye on
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=847223](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=847223)

------
HugoDias
Even so, the chrome browser has a great integration with google products and
with my android, so I will stay here for now....

------
digitalzombie
Yay, I love firefox and still with it even when Chrome was out way back then.

They fixed the memory leaks a long time ago guys... One of the big one was
each extension have a copy of the DOM tree I believe.

And firefox is the only webbrowser I know that can handle 100+ tabs. >___<.

Aurora is very very stable btw.

------
mehrzad
Just a suggestion while the comments are still sparse: When we're posting
about new Firefox features a lot of us already use Aurora or Nightly, so it's
not really news. When a feature hits the beta or stable channel we might've
used it for weeks. This problem exists on 4chan's /g/ board as well.

~~~
sp332
Most people don't use channels other than Release, so I think it's still
useful to post about them since it's news to most people.

------
soundgecko
Would be interesting to see how IE11 fares since it's close to release. Also
sad to see one less engine because of Operas' Presto being retired because of
things like this.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4195298](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4195298)

~~~
callahad
We're still at the same net number of engines, since shortly thereafter Google
forked WebKit into Blink.

~~~
brokenparser
Also, a new engine is being built which goes by the name Servo. Mozilla,
Samsung and independent contributors from the open source community are
actively working on it. Git:
[https://github.com/mozilla/servo](https://github.com/mozilla/servo)

------
programminggeek
I'm not sure I can pinpoint why, but I have grown to dislike Firefox more and
more with each release.

First it was the memory leak issues that were there for a long time, then it
was the feature creep of things I didn't care about, then it was Mozilla's
stances on formats and junk that seemed a bit to self-interested, and then
Mozilla making their own OS instead of just making webOS or Android more
awesome.

It's weird, but I get the vibe that Mozilla is sort of selfish and is becoming
less relevant over time. That is a stark contrast to Firefox making the web
awesome back in the pre 1.0 days. Maybe they haven't changed and I have, but
it's kind of odd

~~~
mehrzad
They need to make money; would Android let them do that?

~~~
claudius
Even if Android let them make money, it is broken beyond repair with its funny
idea to run everything in Java sandboxes, invent a new packaging format and
releasing source code months after the actual release.

No thank you.

