Faster on sunspider. In practice, on real web pages, as someone who occasionally browses the web using a low end tablet PC (Surface Go 2 with linux. The CPU is downright anemic but good enough for treating it like a reading device/video stream platform), I experienced many more stutters on Firefox that I did not on Chrome and it has become one of the reasons I stopped using it (the syncing is also way worse and often breaks. "Read latest tab from other device" is almost useless if you don't manually trigger a sync because it sure won't do it by itself in any reasonable time frame).
The performance difference is much less visible on my main computer though. But yall really need to try firefox on low end devices before you make generic statements about its performance. Or the android version.. lord, firefox on android is just unpleasant.
By stuttering, if you mean video stuttering, I used to experience those a lot; I installed Brave for that very reason, because Netflix, Twitch, etc. were performing pretty poorly on Firefox (on a 4GB RAM low end laptop). But I very rarely experience that these days, to the point I've switched back to Firefox for those sites too.
But general performance-wise, Firefox is so easily better than Chromium in my experience, it's not even a competition. Firefox with hundreds of tabs open performs better than Chromium with 10-20 tabs. It's more responsive to interactions, uses less memory, and is much less likely to freeze up. With Chromium, I have to constantly keep a watch over open tabs, and close them mercilessly, or suffer from overall system slowdown and a browser that's almost a slideshow.
Firefox still runs great on my ThinkPad T420s running Linux, which is 12 years old at this point.
And while I never use Firefox on Android without uBlock Origin, I don't get how it can be described as unpleasant after the rewrite a few years ago. The combo makes browsing bearable compared to Chrome.
The sync tabs thing used to be flaky, I agree, but now sending tabs to and from Linux and Android always works for me.
It's about 12 months ago now, but I worked on a GL project where Firefox was significantly slower than Chrome – and, agreed, it was often on lower end devices. This was to the point it was easier to just drop features wholesale from Firefox, in order to ensure a steady 30 FPS (with Chrome solidly performing 60). I believe a large amount of it related to WebAudio APIs.
Funny, I use Mull on my Android, which is basically Firefox on Android but even more heavily restricted. Have for at least a year. Didn't know people considered it unpleasant.
I have the exact opposite experience. Streaming video is stuttering and buffering so bad that I can't use Chrome at all on those sites (Brave isn't any better). It was the reason I switched to Firefox and the performance was so much better.
Your experience is not "exact opposite" since for me video in FF with VAAPI-based hardware decoding also works better than in Chrome. However, FF can stutter while scrolling animation-heavy sites or when open/closing tabs.
I use Firefox fork as main because anything else is worse on QubesOS. Both WebKit and Chromium have scroll lags, while Librewolf is smooth almost as on bare metal. I don’t know what’s the difference on normal websites, but I can use it and there are almost no lags on it when running few VMs on 8GB RAM.
Android variant is actually shit, but it’s getting only better. It’s much faster now than 5 years ago. Hopefully they will improve it further.
Faster on sunspider. In practice, on real web pages, as someone who occasionally browses the web using a low end tablet PC (Surface Go 2 with linux. The CPU is downright anemic but good enough for treating it like a reading device/video stream platform), I experienced many more stutters on Firefox that I did not on Chrome and it has become one of the reasons I stopped using it (the syncing is also way worse and often breaks. "Read latest tab from other device" is almost useless if you don't manually trigger a sync because it sure won't do it by itself in any reasonable time frame).
The performance difference is much less visible on my main computer though. But yall really need to try firefox on low end devices before you make generic statements about its performance. Or the android version.. lord, firefox on android is just unpleasant.