Browser benchmarks 2: even Wine beats Linux Firefox

Anothet test results

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - February 14, 2009 @ 1:42pm

Gentoo Linux Amd64
gcc 4.3.3, FF-3.0.6, wine 1.1.16
CFLAGS="-g -DNDEBUG -march=k8 -O2 -msse3 -pipe"

Google V8 Suite (draw)
Firefox Wine (1.1.16) 150, 146, 150
Firefox Linux 150, 150, 145

SunSpider (Linux Native wins)
Firefox Wine (1.1.16) 4731.8ms +/- 0.7%
Firefox Linux 4403.0ms +/- 1.2%

The beginning of the end

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - February 14, 2009 @ 3:15pm

This is just one more example of the unclothing of Emperor Linux. Can anyone suggest for a moment that the Firefox team wouldn't use every possible tool or technique available to ensure that the Linux distro performs as well as possible? Of course not. The issue clearly lies with the quality of the operating system. But of course the infected carriers of MDS (Microsoft Derangement Syndrome) still see glittering royalty in a code set that looks like a Rube Goldberg contraption fastened together with thousands of frayed strips of duct tape.

Very interesting results.

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - February 14, 2009 @ 4:06pm

Very interesting results. I've been using Ubuntu for a few years now as my main OS and I've found the main weak point of the later builds is Firefox. It tends to crash (i.e. freezes and needs force quit to close it) or just be really slow at doing some things. My (entirely empirical) observation was that the threading doesn't seem to work as well as it should, so a 'busy' tab can stop things working in other tabs. Also very poor when in contention for bandwidth with, say, bittorrent, so that pages that should load, albeit slowly, never load at all. By contrast when I boot XP to play games and end up doing a bit of browsing things are far snappier, looks like you may be homing in on one possible cause.

and factor responsible for slowness is..

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - February 14, 2009 @ 4:17pm

GTK

That's right - it's not secret that this joke-toolkit written in C many years ago to provide free and open source (as of then) competition for Qt is ironically much less responsive and laggy than Qt written in C++ (especially 4.5 with raster renderer - and OpenGL renderer is WIP).

Fortunately, in March 2009, Qt 4.5 will be released and licensed LGPL - that being said - the only reason GTK ever existed will cease to be and GTK should die along with it.

Stop blaming compiler and compilation parameters - I'm using Gentoo for many years and I know well enough that enabling mindless optimizations is not a factor for such dramatic speed improvements - especially comparing to default -O2 which already enables most sane optimizations and is far good enough.

Javascript optimisation is a work in progress.

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - February 14, 2009 @ 4:34pm

With benchmarks relating to javascript execution speed (using JIT compilation), one should bear in mind that the lightening increases in speed that have occurred very recently are a work in progress, and the full optimizations have only been introduced to Windows so far - Google Chrome is Windows only so far, as is I believe the Firefox optimizations.

Hence is is a bit of FUD to claim as some have done that this proves Linux is slow compared to Windows - wait a few months for the javascript optimizations to the Linux versions and Linux benchmarks will match or beat Windows.

For comparison look at how IE6 on Windows (not optimised for javascript) runs on Windows compared to Firefox on Windows

Quote/

Just ran the V8 benchmark for FF 3.0.6 and IE 7.0 with the following results:

IE 7.0 31
FF 3.06 115

/Unquote

On the same basis, one could run Firefox 3.06 with the javascript on Linux under WINE and compare it to IE6 on Windows and claim that Linux is more than 3 times as fast as Windows - fodder for the fudsters, shills and fanboys, but disproved by the fact that Firefox for Windows running under WINE under Linux is as fast as Firefox running natively under Windows.

Jithin

Jithin Emmanuel (not verified) - February 14, 2009 @ 5:25pm

I dont know about the bench marks. But from my use experience I always felt Opera is way more fast that firefox from my ubuntu repository.

Optimizing compilers?

DaVince (not verified) - February 14, 2009 @ 6:53pm

<i>"To the poster who said that "There is only so many ways you can write an optimizing compiler". It is exactly the opposite. It is actually a fun fact - it is proven that there are infinite number of ways to write an optimizing compiler."</i>

Kudos to the first person who can write a compiler that optimizes your app to 0kb!

I confirm this too

Ravi (not verified) - February 14, 2009 @ 7:23pm

What was an unspoken truth has come out as a big shout!

Firefox on Linux needs optimization and the developers should give back to the community from which they derive much.

Firefox on windows is a lot faster and I usually find it faster while running my Firefox Portable using wine.

I think this is due to Firefox developers giving more time to their bigger customer slice who are on Windows. __After all why give a damn to Linux users who have limited choice in case of web browsers (we don't have IE or Chrome and Opera or Konqueror are not much choice).__ (pun intended)

This is pretty sad...

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - February 14, 2009 @ 7:57pm

This is a pretty sad article on the part of the author. In fact it makes me question the technical competence of the author.

In your test the Linux system is running both Wine and FF. FF is running native code and FF-Wine is running an "emulation" layer thats still running native code under it. FF-Wine has an additional layer of work to do. So if Linux itself is slow then its going to be slow in both cases. The only differences between the two are the FF code bases (Win vs Lin) or the graphical toolkits used (GTK, QT).

Now maybe someone can come up with a way to test out GTK and QT so that we can eliminate them from the equation. However I get the feeling that the author doesn't really care about the suggestions. He just wants to make a case that Linux is slow without trying to find the reasons and take them to the devs.

My tests

FieserKiller (not verified) - February 15, 2009 @ 12:21am

Gentoo on 1.6Ghz Pentium M, GCC 4.1.2
CFLAGS="-Os -march=pentium-m -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"

on google v8 test:
native Firefox 3.0.6 129
wine Firefox 3.0.6 150

Conclusion

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - February 15, 2009 @ 3:26am

It is clear that the companies prefer to spend most of their time fine tuning their strategic and time consuming apps for the leading OSes. Period.
It is quite reasonable spending almost no time for supporting an OS that has less than 3% market share, according to other stats - less than 1%.

For now, if the Linux community wants better code, it must either greater market share or participate itself and improve the quality of the corresponding portions of the Linux code.

JAVASCRIPT PROFILE GUIDED OPTIMIZATION

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - February 15, 2009 @ 11:38am

The explanation for this is javascript Profile Guided Optimization for JIT features. This and Javascript was introduced into Firefox and Chrome to boost javascript performance by a factor of 10 to 20 over existing browsers like IE6. PGO has been incorporated into Windows Firefox in version 3.0x whereas it will be introduced into Linux versions of Firefox in version 3.1. It is also the explanation why IE is massively slower than the Linux versions of Firefox on the same benchmark (by a factor of more than 3) - IE6 does not have any javascript JIT features at all.

Basically, the bottom line is that the Firefox Linux version is a couple of months behind the Windows Firefox in the implementation, but implemented it will be. Unfortunately as can be seen from a number of the comments, this has not stopped wishful thinking Windows fudsters, fanboys, shills etc. proclaiming that Linux is a toy, what would you expect from a free OS, it shows Linux is obsolete etc. Just part of the course I guess.

Other benchmarks suites?

Anonymous George (not verified) - February 15, 2009 @ 11:48am

I have not looked too closely at what the google benchmarks actually do to come up with these scores. And even with everything else perfectly aligned, the performance difference between ff on win vs lin is probably still a mystery.

But I can't help wondering whether the 300% speed increase going from ff to webkit could be a feature of the benchmark suite itself, rather than a compiler/code-quality thing? And if that is the case, perhaps something in the windows build is somehow treated preferential in the benchmarks as well?

Is there another benchmark suite out there, besides the google suite, that we could try to verify these results with?

FWIW, I get 193 in Firefox under Fedora 10 (x86_64) and 807 using webkit on the exact same machine.

Opera results

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - February 15, 2009 @ 8:20pm

My scores

Opera 9.63 static-qt (Debian 5.0): 91
Opera 9.63 Wine (Debian 5.0) 165

Disturbing.

It's gotta be a Microsoft

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - February 15, 2009 @ 11:56pm

It's gotta be a Microsoft fault somehow. Maybe Mozilla is being paid by M$ to make Firefox slower on Linux.

Interesting the choices made in this test.

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - February 16, 2009 @ 2:26am

>Javascript used to be interpreted until very recently Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safari introduced JIT compiling to increase javascript speed by a massive factor, however all the features are not enabled yet on all browser variants.

>On the Webkit benchmarks the two slowest benchmarks by a large margin are IE7 and IE8.

>PGO isn't enabled yet on the Linux version of Firefox, and hence it currently runs slower than Firefox on Windows, but much faster than IE7 or IE8 on Windows. PGO will be enabled soon on Firefox Linux versions and then Firefox will run as fgast or faster on Linux than on Windows.

In other words, almost any comparison of javascript performance on Linux versus Windows would have yeilded the result that the Linux version was much faster ... except for the versions chosen by the original authors.

In order to get the result where Windows javascript performance was better, the original posters HAD to choose Firefox 3.0.x on Windows XP versus Firefox 3.0.x. on Linux.

ANY other choice for comparison would have yeilded opposite results. Choosing to compare Linux vs Vista, or choosing Firefox 3.1, or choosing any version of Firefox 2.x, or choosing to compare Firefox on Linux against IE (any version) on Windows (any version) ... would have resulted in the result that Firefox on Linux had the better javascript performance.

Interesting.

Agenda, perhaps?

The single most sensible suggestion

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - February 16, 2009 @ 12:58pm

As posted recently, you should indeed compile the windows version with gcc and recompile the linux version with gcc using the same options and see if indeed the compiler is implicated.

Having established whether (or not - and my gut feel is not) this is the case, then all that remains is poorly optimised Linux code within Firefox. Profiling ought to pin that down, I would have thought. I remember years ago having a performance issue with a Windows application and finding that the leading bottleneck was a call to get the decimal point character for the locale - the developer had called this virtually every time a number needed formatting and it turned out to be a surprisingly expensive call.

To be absolutely clear

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - February 16, 2009 @ 1:33pm

As we can see in the graph Firefox Mozilla got 181 bananas in the benchmark whereas Firefox Wine got 227 druken penguins.

Is it so hard writting WTF the units mean!? comparison with a reference system (as in this case), DOM accesses per second, time to load whatever... And at least saying something like "higher is better".

GTK?

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - February 16, 2009 @ 4:58pm

Isn't it obvious that it's GTK that's slow here?

robert@ocallahan.org

Robert O'Callahan (not verified) - February 16, 2009 @ 9:02pm

Oh, just to allay conspiracy theorists: far more Mozilla developers use Linux than Windows. Partly because it takes about 20 minutes to build Firefox on a good Linux box vs an hour on Windows. And also of course because of free software.

.

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - February 16, 2009 @ 9:54pm

.

Swiftfox is not the solution and FF 3.1b2 does worse

Diaa Sami (not verified) - February 19, 2009 @ 2:04am

I'm using Kubuntu 8.10, with native FF 3.0.6 from the repos I get 161 and with Swiftfox I get only 171, not good enough IMHO, On WINE I get around 188.

Ironically FF 3.1b2 which uses the new TraceMonkey JS engine gets 154 when using the native linux binary and 173 when using WINE(javascript.options.jit.content = true in both)

Midori 2

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - February 25, 2009 @ 12:47pm

On same hardware both using libgtk-x11-2.0 :

FF : Score : 71 ->
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; fr-FR; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009020407 Iceweasel/3.0.6 (Zenwalk GNU Linux)

Midori : Score: 775 ->
Midori 0.1.1-a4e6720

x10 !!!! Mozilla team : how about checking your code ?

Maybe it's due to the

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - February 27, 2009 @ 7:44am

Maybe it's due to the wine-gecko implementation

No surprise

ben2talk (not verified) - February 28, 2009 @ 2:41pm

I used linux for a year now, and I'm quite aware of the difference. Occasionally I'll launch Opera or Firefox in Wine to get a page that freezes in linux. To me it's rather a disappointment, however I didn't leave windows for the performance issues - more because I really wanted to get away from the kind of evil inherent to the platform.

Why do you wonder about that

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - March 2, 2009 @ 9:06am

I am using both, Windows and Linux (at work) and I really hate using Linux as a Desktop because it is just way slower than Windows is.
It feels like working with a 386 machine especially when I use Firefox.
I wonder why there aren't more people complaining about that. And please don't think that I am an unexperienced user who is not able to configure his system properly. I am using Linux and Windows for ages.
Every kind of browser is working in windows much better compared to Linux and I am not talking about the rendering time. No, its about scrolling, switching tabs etc. Linux just feels (and it is) way slower. Don't misunderstand me, I really like Linux and I am not a Microsoft fan at all but we just need to realize that Linux Desktops are far behind Windows ones.

Cheers,

Fedora user :-)

Ubuntu 8.10 my results on

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - March 12, 2009 @ 5:55pm

Ubuntu 8.10

my results on Sunspider

firefox 3.0.7 native => 6065.0ms +/- 5.8%
minefield 3.2.a1pre native => 3361.8ms +/- 17.3%
firefox 3.0.7 under WINE => 4926.4ms +/- 2.8%

V8 Benchmark Suite - version 3

firefox 3.0.7 native => Score: 112
minefield 3.2.a1pre native => Score: 147
firefox 3.0.7 under WINE => Score: 155

hope it helps, does anyone know in Minefield is using PGO??

another benchmark

arty (not verified) - April 3, 2009 @ 10:02am

hey there, i did my tests too

Details : FF 3.0.8, Fedora 10 x86_64, 2.6.27.21
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3500+
cpu MHz : 2200.000
(during tests)

Results :

Score: 74.5
Richards: 36.9
DeltaBlue: 75.9
Crypto: 84.1
RayTrace: 98.0
EarleyBoyer: 114
RegExp: 65.2

What?

Initrd.gz (not verified) - April 26, 2009 @ 8:53pm

How the heck does this happen? Shouldn't it take slower since WINE has to load libraries and whatnot? That is really weird.

Actually, on my computer, it takes windows about 5 seconds to load Firefox, while on Linux, it takes about 2.

How long have you been playing ball?

Mr Wizard (not verified) - May 3, 2009 @ 3:37pm

Compiler optimizations will yield better performance. Glibc, GCC, and the Linux kernel compiled for the architecture will perform better.

* note: architecture meaning i486, i586, i686 and Pentium 4, Pentium Core Duo, Pentium Core 2, Xeon

Windows probably has binary checks to enable features for different architectures. Only Windows operating system developers from Microsoft could truly explain this.

With all that said,

Fedora enables SELINUX by default. This is more of a hinderence to performance. Their kernel is compiled Pentium 2, i586, probably with the server preemption kernel option and 250 hz timer resolution option.

Ubuntu:
A better distribution to test against because they are user oriented supposedly. Perform your tests again on Ubuntu 8.04 which is the current maintained distribution of Ubuntu. I'd advise avoiding Ubuntu 9.04 as there are major issues with the Intel graphics drivers. This will reflect what the majority of users currently use.

Identifying the problem:
So the real culprit here is the kernel and operating system.
If you are seeking the results you get from wine and Windows then recompile the kernel with the following options.
* CPU type, ie. Core 2 or whatever your cpu architecture is
* 1000 hz timer
* Voluntary Preemption
* Tickless Timer Optional
* Disable kernel profiling

Recompile GLibC for i686 cpu architecture.

Recompile Xorg for i686 cpu architecture.

Recompile Firefox for i686 cpu architecture.

Disable Xorg's compositing.

Run your test again and be amazed.

ArchLinux and Gentoo handle the majority of what I've outlined here. They are superior versions to all other Linux distributions when seeking performance.

Call-outs:
Nothing is ever handled upstream. This is a bad practice. If you're going to help save the world .... computers, come on people need food, water, and good teachers. Machines will be the death of the human race.

Thank you for your time.

Epiphany wins no competition

Anonymous ArchLinux Penguin (not verified) - June 10, 2009 @ 9:16am

These is the score of epiphany:

Google V8 Benchmark suite V3: 2898

Epiphany Web Browser 2.27.2
Dell XPS - ArchLinux 64bit

PGO Rocks

PGO Pinguin (not verified) - June 24, 2009 @ 2:12pm

Hi folks,

I confirm, it partially comes from the lack PGO buids for Linux.

Google V8 benchmarks results :
FF nightly build from mozilla : 180
FF HG version (same day) with specific instruction set (-march=prescott -O3) : 191
FF HG with PGO (takes ages to compile) : 220 !
FF Windows under wine : 275 !!!

(the 3 scores are the maximum results after a dozen of tests in each case, linux 2.6.30 / Debian Lenny / wine 1.1.24 / FF 20090624 Shiretoko/3.5pre)

HOW FAST YOU WANT YOUR FF?

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - June 27, 2009 @ 3:34am

I can see that indeed FF for linux (and Opera for linux) is slower than FF for wine or windows.
I am using Ubuntu 9.04 in a gigabyte board with AMD and ATI chips. I am not bothered by the "speedy" or "slowliness" of FF. Actually, when reading a page, I don't need a fast browser, since I read quite slowly ;-(
Also, I can accept to wait seconds until web pages get load, for which FF is no guilty, but my ISP and the crappy phone line I have.
However, I get very mad when Firefox gets frozen or becomes unresponsive, thanks to I don't know which glitch in the pulseaudio-compiz/something else that are fighting for resources.
We have a more serious problem in linux: lack of outstanding hardware support. Yes. We need nice drivers. Manufacturers give crappy drivers. Developers reverse engineer from scratch drivers but unfortunately they may not be perfect. We need to have hardware makers to become friends with linux. After we have PERFECT functionality of all kind of hardware, we can start blaming on FF developers to neglect Linux.

plugins

nanjuah (not verified) - July 29, 2009 @ 12:13pm

sorry, i said u _can_ use ff plugins in epiphany. that's wrong. you _could_ be able to do so theoreticaly.

epiphany has it's own set of plugins.

see epiphany's project page.

Windows broke Firefox

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - August 14, 2009 @ 2:56am

I remember back at 0.6 Firefox was called Phoenix and it was fast and pretty great.

Then from 0.7 to 1.0 I they added better Windows support and I noticed FF on Linux getting slower and slower as the browser was doing things in new ways.

It's really too bad that didn't work out better. And ironic since when Firefox originally forked off from Mozilla it was a lighter trimmed-down version of the bloated suite.

I think some of the blame can lie with X, which has always been a bit slower at popping up a new window than Windows. Compiz support would rock!

Epic fail :)

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - September 14, 2009 @ 9:08pm

Epic fail :)

...iceweasel

end user (not verified) - September 15, 2009 @ 12:35pm

tried the latest version(5) of the google benchmark 8 and got 284 points :)

Firefox 3.0.14 and Safari 4.0.3 on mac ic2 2.4ghz

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - October 27, 2009 @ 11:57am

Safari:

Score: 1734
Richards: 3503
DeltaBlue: 2363
Crypto: 2764
RayTrace: 931
EarleyBoyer: 2849
RegExp: 780
Splay: 995

Firefox:

Score: 141
Richards: 124
DeltaBlue: 109
Crypto: 162
RayTrace: 112
EarleyBoyer: 109
RegExp: 147
Splay: 284

Firefox 3.6.5p and Opera 10.53 is pretty fast under ubuntu 10.04

Rodin Shih (not verified) - May 29, 2010 @ 4:07pm

Yes, PRETTY fast at my T5600(1.86GHz) Thinkpad X60 and the V8's v5 bench:

Firefox 3.6.5pre:

Score: 254
Richards: 1019
DeltaBlue: 55.8
Crypto: 623
RayTrace: 212
EarleyBoyer: 147
RegExp: 169
Splay: 366

Opera 10.53:

Score: 2289
Richards: 2042
DeltaBlue: 1547
Crypto: 1844
RayTrace: 3251
EarleyBoyer: 2729
RegExp: 1029
Splay: 6193

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