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It’s been a while since last having a fresh look at the Mozilla Firefox vs. Google Chrome performance on the Linux desktop, but with a slow Linux/open-source news weekend, here are some fresh numbers with their latest browser releases.
Given the recently released Firefox 109 and Chrome 109 releases, here are some fresh web browser benchmarks under Linux.
Both web browsers were tested on an Intel Core i9 13900K “Raptor Lake” system with Radeon RX 6700XT graphics and using the same software stack for testing besides flipping between Firefox 109 and Chrome 109.
All of the web browser settings were at their defaults, no extra plug-ins / clean (new) user profile.
As we are very used to seeing from past comparisons, out-of-the-box Google Chrome continues performing much better overall than Mozilla Firefox using the official browser binaries for each.
One area where Firefox does better out-of-the-box is around the HTML5 Canvas such as measured via the CanvasMark test case.
For the demanding JetStream 2 benchmark as one of the most demanding browser tests currently, Chrome on Linux was 67% faster than Firefox on this same Intel Raptor Lake desktop.
Firefox did have a small win in the rather basic JavaScript Maze solver benchmark.
Firefox at least was in a competitive space for the WebAssembly (WASM) benchmarks, but aside from that Google Chrome continues holding strong on Linux in the performance department. While this round of testing was on an Intel Core i9 Raptor Lake desktop, these numbers jive with what I’ve seen over the months/years as well with AMD Ryzen hardware on Linux.