With all the hype surrounding the improvements brought by Firefox Quantum it was only right to bring a short review and some benchmarks for it,right?
So getting to the point, the new UI looks is a lot cleaner and nicer than the older Firefox UI we were used with. It is still just as customizable as before but now all the detailed data is nicely organized under a drop-down menu in the top right. While it does remind us a bit of the Chrome interface, it is a welcomed adition.(see picture below)
Now for the Benchmarks
All tests were done on the windows 10 x64 stable release on a desktop with Ryzen 5 1600x @4.0Ghz, 16GB 2933Mhz RAM, a 1TB Seagate SSHD and a GTX 1080. After testing each browser I restarted the computer and installed the next one. The results in the charts are an average of 3 runs for each browser.
The browsers included in the test are: Firefox 52.5.0 ESR, Firefox 57 Quantum, Chrome 62, Opera 49, Vivaldi 1.12 and Microsoft Edge.
The Benchmarks are:
JetStream 1.1 : A suite of advanced web app features in JavaScript
WebXPRT 2015 : A suite meade of 6 HTML5 and JavaScript tests that cover everyday tasks.
Kraken 1.1 : JavaScript Benchmark developed by Mozilla
Ares-6 : A test measuring newer JavaScript features.
Basemark Web 3.0 : A suite of JavaScript frameworks, calculations, WebGL2.0 and others
Speedometer 1.0 : test measuring the responsiveness of web apps
MotionMark 1.0 : a graphics focused benchmark
Octane wasn't included as it was retired not long ago due to not being relevant to real life browsing, only focusing on specialized parts of the browsers code.
In JetStream 1.1 Firefox Quantum scores second behind Microsoft Edge. The improvements over the Firefox 52.5.20 are small but enough to move Firefox to the second place from the last place.
In WebXPRT 2015 Firefox 57 takes the lead while the older version placed third, a decent improvement I might say, just enough to beat Microsoft Edge as well.
In Kraken 1.1 Firefox 57 remains in lead with Microsoft Edge being second again. Compared to the older version, 57 is almost 100ms faster.
In Ares-6 Firefox 57 Quantum takes 4th place being on average 2 times slower than the Blink based browsers but is is slightly faster than Microsoft Edge and almost twice as fast as Firefox 52.5.0. Opera 49 seems to be the winner here.
In Basemark Web 3.0 Firefox 57 takes 4th place again offering modest improvements over the older version but still falling behind the Blink based browsers. I do have to mention that Microsoft Edge scored so low due to not being able to run the WebGL 2.0 part of the suite. Opera and Vivaldi seem to have decent advantage over the others though.
In Speedometer 1.0 Firefox 57 falls behind scoring the 5th place but still ofering almost twice the performance of Firefox 52.5.0 ESR. Again Opera takes the lead.
In conclusion, the new Firefox Quantum brings some noticeable improvements, it still doesn't score perfectly across all the benchmarks. While bringing 2 clear wins and a second place(beaten only by Edge) it still falls behind in 4 of the tests but not as much as it used to. Would I recommend it as the definitive browser? Nope, but I do still think it's the best choice if you want something fully open source. For now, you can keep to what works best for you but always try another browser as we really got some serious competition nowadays. Of course Firefox Quantum is just the beginning of the bigger "Project Quantum" with more components from Servo set to come up in the not so distant future( I hope).
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