I’ll admit that I’m a bit concerned that Google is Mozilla’s “nest egg” financially, so-to-speak, and if Google decides to drop support for their search engine as the default, what the future of Mozilla might be. So, I was a bit relieved to see the Twitter search integration with version 8. I’d be willing to bet that Mozilla isn’t doing that for free.

At any event, my support for Firefox isn’t waning any time soon.

By the way… there is a way to make FF look almost similar to Chrome: http://linuxblog.darkduck.com/2011/08/chromofox.html

PS: I wasn’t using Safari on Android before (what the …?). It was Dolphin HD on Android.

But despite moving back to Firefox, I miss Chromium’s performance. I’m running 11.04 on a reasonably powerful laptop, but try visiting http://www.ninjago.com (needs must with a 7 year old son) using Firefox 6 and the animations are appalling – useless in fact. Same with Firefox 7, albeit ever-so-slightly faster. Now try the same site on Chromium – perfect. In fact, this goes for just about any flash game. They’re all better on Chromium.

It would seem that the benchmarks aren’t telling anywhere like the whole story.

And it doesn’t help that sites like Amazon’s Cloud Reader require Chome or Chromium.

So, that’s interesting. Updating to the latest release yields the following results from http://html5test.com:

“your browser scores 325 AND 13 BONUS POINTS out of a total of 450 points”

Interesting that from 14.0.835.163 to 14.0.835.186, there is that much difference. Either that, or something else is going on.

@kahping- The others are V8 by Google and Kraken by Mozilla. V8 is only designed to test Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. It’s not meant to be a cross-browser benchmark. Also, I was unaware of Kraken when I posted this, but on running those browsers against that benchmark, Chrome outperforms Firefox:

Chrome: 2885.6ms +/- 0.7%
Firefox: 3820.6ms +/- 0.9%
Opera: 6981.2 +/- 0.9%
Safari: 11116.9 +/- 0.6%

@fRIOUX Schmidt- Yes. I would much rather support a nonprofit than a mega-corp.

@dAnjou- Sure, usability is very important, of which all the browsers on the market have. I find Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari all very usable, but this post was about metrics, rather than subjection.

@Etric- How bad it ended up where? On the benchmark or elsewhere?

@BeSlayed- No idea. I don’t have access to a Windows 7 machine to test (with the rest of the browsers, of course).

@Anonymous- Other than the benchmark, those are interesting results. Of course, the benchmark would mean more if it were on my machine where I tested the rest of the browsers as well. I have no idea what hardware you have, nor do you know what I have.

With regards to your other comments about Flash crashing, usability, and breaking extensions, I’ve not had a problem with any of them. I’ve heard people complain about Firefox being so unstable, but I’ve not discovered it. In fact, I’ve had crashed tabs more often in Chrome than Firefox. And with breaking extensions, that’s not the fault of Firefox, but of the extension developer.

@stefan- Other than DNS prefetching, of which Firefox has, I’m not familiar with this enhanced page loading before you’re done typing the URL. Is there some documentation on this?

@KOSHrf- It appears that you have a more recent build of Chrome than I do. Are you running the stable build, or beta? Or development even?

@alindt- Hmm. Interesting. It appears I have an older build. I’ll update, and see if that has an effect on the HTML5test.com results. With regards to the cores, that’s an interesting find, something I didn’t pay attention to.

@wh- “Extensive use of JS is IMHO very bad”. Then complain to the web developer? That’s not a standards problem, and the standards certainly aren’t broken. With regards to your complaint about “needing” extension, none of them are “needed”, you just have different expectations about privacy on the web than others. I use AdBlock, but that’s it. Other than that, the web is fairly usable for me. To each their own, I guess.

Can you name a few of these “broken standards”?

I still use Firefox as my primary browser though, mainly because of Firebug, although Chrome’s developer tools are getting quite good.