Firefox 22 edges out Chrome in browser tests

[bill]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-opera-next,3534.html [tomshardware.com]

Chrome 27, Firefox 22, IE10, And Opera Next, Benchmarked

With no apparent weaknesses and generally strong finishes all-around, combined with near-native start times, greatly-improved hardware acceleration scores, and almost-perfect reliability, the latest version of Firefox soundly wins this installment of the Web Browser Grand Prix.


While Chrome 27 is the leader in most categories, Firefox 22 is right on its heels in second place. So, with close second-place finishes in nearly all categories that Chrome wins, Mozilla really needed to exploit any weakness in Chrome. And it does just that. Chrome's extreme fall from grace in start-up time really hurt. With Firefox attaining top marks in that category, an extreme divide is created where we'd normally expect both browsers to pace each other. The same type of brutality is used against Chrome in reliability testing, where Firefox 22 almost pulls off a perfect score, while Chrome 27 has issues with more than 25% of the workload.

I stopped using Firefox some time ago as its performance and reliability were killing my workflow. Too many crashes.

I just updated to FF22 and will give it another go though.

[brotherhood of LAN]

FF user on Linux here. I haven't had any crash issues, but I think I tend to have less tabs open than the average tech user (half a dozen tops).

It's good to see FF taking greater care of memory usage.

I agree the Chrome startup time is awful but otherwise it feels quite a bit faster, but I can't draw a fair comparison as I have a few addons for Firefox, including Firebug which can appreciably slow things down when running.

[incrediBILL]

I'm using FF under Windows and always have 25-50 tabs open. Other than the memory bloat problem where one version seems to handle memory correctly and the next hogs up 3-4GB after running a few days and I have to reboot the browser and start the nonsense all over again.

Of course FF blames it on the add-ons, but that's a load of garbage collection and we all know it ;)

[bill]

I generally have 50+ tabs...and maybe a few windows open during the day so that was killing me before. Even my 16GB of RAM were no match for the hunger of FF. Here's hoping they've at least fixed that one...

[lucy24]

What on earth are they on about? Opera takes HOURS to start up before it even shows a single window. Vastly slower than anything else I've got. Well, OK, maybe MSIE 5 takes longer. But that doesn't count, since I only keep it for novelty value.

Once upon a time, programmers were taken out and shot if they didn't plug all memory dribbles before an application even got into alpha, never mind public release. Sigh.

[bill]

Have you tried the new Opera browser [webmasterworld.com]? It's just out of beta and wasn't used for these tests.

[dstiles]

Currently 5 FF windows open here (linux Mint Maya) with a total of about 60 tabs spread between them and 14 add-ons and 6 plug-ins. I often have more windows and tabs. Never a crash and no user problems apart from a minor exception of tabmixplus preferences colouring.

I use FF for almost every browsing action with a very occasional use of Midori and Opera when testing a few weird things. NEVER Chrome!

And using linux, of course, no MSIE; almost true: I have an online windows server that requires MSIE to update it and I tried to download a file with it yesterday - it was tied down so tight I gave up. :)

3Gbytes memory on a 6-core AMD processor.

[incrediBILL]

Have you tried the new Opera browser

Everyone always tells me how good it is and every single version I've installed has some kind of show stopper that sends me back to Firefox the memory hog.

I can buy more memory but I can't fix the bugs in Opera and I'm sure and heck not waiting till the fat lady sings to be able to use it.

[Robert Charlton]

I'm doing some overall updates on a cloned drive, so I needed to update FF anyway. Came here to check first, just in case I wanted to revert to version 11. ;)

So far, no problems with v22.0. The .0 always worries me, but .01.1.1.1.1 probably isn't far away.

I generally have 50+ tabs...

How do you keep track of that many?

PS re Opera... I have constantly encountered bugs in Opera since its early incarnations. I remember discussing this with a friend, and when he tried to show me how great it was on his laptop, it locked up on him.

[bill]

I switched to FF as of the first above posted...just shy of a month. I can't complain. FF 22 has held up extremely well. It still feels faster than Chrome under the same strain. I think I'll stay with it for a while.

I generally have 50+ tabs...

How do you keep track of that many?

Favicons generally. I group sites together and have many open all the time (via Sessions) so that I can access my tools quickly and don't waste time opening and closing tabs...I just open new tabs. Eventually I do click through to get rid of new tabs I don't need, but I leave my core tabs open.

[dstiles]

50+tabs - I organise my windows by application:

my company
search engines
WebmasterWorld
my online server security manager
current web sites I'm working on
current problems in linux I'm trying to solve
etc

Within each window there can be 5 to 15-ish tabs; as bill says, partly favicons but mostly the the long-term tabs are in the order I decided long ago so little problem finding them.