Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition
As someone that jumped ship from how slow Chrome has gotten and went to Nightly /w Stylo and (CPU threads - 1) e10s processes enabled about 2 monthsish ago...<p>Holy damn Firefox is actually fast.<p>Fair comparison, both having Pocket, uBlock, Evernote, OneNote, Pushbullet, and Bitwarden; neither of them having an extension the other doesn't. Above described Firefox Nightly config vs Chrome Dev.<p>Test machines are a workstation with a i7-4771 @ 3.9ghz, 32GB DDR3-2133, Radeon 7970 with a trio of 1080p screens (a very fast modern machine from the Haswell era) and a laptop with a i5-32120M, 8GB of DDR3-1600, Intel HD4000 iGPU feeding a 13" 2560x1600 @ 200% hidpi (an Ivy Bridge era MBPr 13" Late 2012). Both machines run Win10.<p>Both machines have less real world wait on Firefox than Chrome, and the interface has less latency between when I do something and it even begins processing the request. Also, under a ton of windows and tabs, Firefox seems to use less RAM and the speed gap seems to widen.<p>I don't care about about artificial benchmarks, btw, they never seem to measure what actually makes browsers slower for humans.<p>Edit: Even though I just said I don't care about benchmarks, using Speedometer 2.0-r2216: On the workstation: Firefox 58.0a1 2017-09-26 64bit 61.18 vs Chrome 63.0.3217.0 dev 64-bit 51.67; on the laptop, same versions: Firefox 28.58 vs Chrome 26.74<p>So, arguably, flat out benchmarkable performance is the same, with Firefox just slightly edging ahead (18% and 6% faster). It isn't enough to explain how fast Firefox feels now.<p>Edit 2: And now with Edge 40.15063.0.0/EdgeHTML 15.15063: Workstation, 46.72; Laptop 21.37. Firefox is 34% and 31% faster, Chrome is 25% and 11% faster.