On: Web Latency Benchmark: A new kind of browser bench...

[modeless]

(benchmark author here) I don't have comprehensive numbers compiled yet, but I can give you a general ranking of browsers. From best score to worst, the current ranking is roughly:

  Safari
  Firefox (except Mac)
  IE 11
  Chrome and Mac Firefox

[Semaphor → modeless]

I wonder if I'm using my browser differently than others or if there is something wrong with my machine. Whenever I try to switch from Chrome to FF it seems way behind Chrome in terms of speed and snappiness.

edit:

Windows 8.1, SSD, i3, 16GB RAM (63% used)

Chrome 30.0.1599.101 m: 3.4/10

Chrome Incognito: 4/10

Firefox 25: 5.4/10

FF Private Browsing 3/10 O.o

All tests done at least twice with similar numbers.

But Chrome has been running for a few days while FF was just started. Guess I'll leave FF running a bit and see if it changes anything.

Also interesting, FF takes around 2-3 times as long to run the tests than Chrome.

The reason for the low Chrome score is this:

JavaScript jank Tests responsiveness during JavaScript execution. CSS: 1.0 frames jank, Scrolling: 170.1 frames jank

[modeless → Semaphor]

There are many different ways to measure speed. For example this benchmark says nothing about page load times or JavaScript speed; Chrome might (hypothetically) be way faster than Firefox there and still score worse in this test.

> FF takes around 2-3 times as long to run the tests than Chrome.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, lower latency is more difficult to measure, so it takes more trials to get the same number of good measurements. Secondly, Firefox has longer scroll momentum than Chrome, and the benchmark waits for the scroll momentum to die down between each scroll latency measurement.

[Semaphor → modeless]

The main problem I have with FF is it's scrolling performance ;)

Thanks for the explanation, makes a lot of sense.

Can you explain the extreme FF private browsing results?

[modeless → Semaphor]

I have no idea why a private browsing window would perform differently, but you're right, I get the same results myself. That's weird! It's exactly the sort of issue I hope to expose with this test. Latency issues like that are often ignored because they're not visible, and I want to make them visible.

[lstamour → modeless]

Thanks very much for making this test. I use just about every browser out there, and love Chrome on my new Nexus 5, but I've felt that with iOS 7 and 10.9, Safari made huge improvements in responsiveness and it was hard to pin that down until now. I look forward to future optimizations. :)

[robin_reala → Semaphor]

Is that with a fresh Firefox profile? You could try resetting it to see if that helps: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-preferences-fix-p... . For the sake of fairness you could do the same to Chrome: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/3296214?hl=en

[Semaphor → robin_reala]

No, that was a "real-world" test. It's the FF I had set up after the release of 25 to make yet another try at switching from Chrome.