Benchmarks Show Firefox 57 Quantum Doing Well, But Chrome Largely Winning
With the hype this week around Firefox Quantum Beta with its user-interface refinements and more noticeably the performance improvements, I decided to run some benchmarks on my end with a variety of tests comparing Firefox 52 ESR, Firefox 56 stable, Firefox 57 Quantum beta, and Chrome 60. Here are those web browser benchmark results from the Linux x86-64 desktop.
Firefox 52.3.0 Extended Support Release, Firefox 56.0, Firefox 57.0 Beta 3, and Chrome 6.0 were the releases tested using their Linux x86-64 binaries. Tests were done from a modest Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon ultrabook with a Core i7 5600U Broadwell processor with HD Graphics 5500, 8GB RAM, 128GB Samsung SSD and running Ubuntu 17.04 64-bit with Linux 4.10 / Mesa 17.0.
Web benchmarks run included:
Basemark Web 3.0: An independent test of JavaScript calculations, WebGL 2.0, JavaScript frameworks, and more.
ARES-6: A test measuring execution time of newer JavaScript features.
Speedometer: A BrowserBench.org test measuring the responsiveness of web applications.
JetStream: A suite focused on advanced web application features in JavaScript from crypto to 3D to throughput and more.
MotionMark: A graphics benchmark measuring the browser's ability for dealing with HTML5 canvas, SVG, CSS, etc.
Kraken: A Mozilla-developed JavaScript benchmark.
Octane: A Google-developed JavaScript benchmark that has been recently retired.
All the usual standard practices were followed for the browser testing, including restarting the browser between tests, completely restarting the system between switching browsers, not using any browser plug-ins/extensions, etc.
Additionally, during the browser benchmarking process, the Phoronix Test Suite was plotting the overall CPU and memory usage of each web browser.