Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Firefox vs. Google Chrome practical performance review

Something crashed on my media computer recently.  It was so bad that the computer had to run "Restart Repair" in order to boot at all.  I didn't know there was such a thing!  And, in any case, how is such a thing even possible?  The computer is dead.  It won't boot.  So it runs "Restart Repair" to enable itself to boot!  Wow...

So, in any case...   It must have been something I got into online the corrupted something.  "Restart Repair" fixed whatever was wrong and I am back at my original desktop.

Chrome wiould no longer open.  After some futile efforts, I decide to reinstall Chrome.  Using Firefox, I download Chrome and "Installation fails".  Several times.

I give up and start using Firefox.  I set up all of my frequent open tabs and browse away.  I notice severe performance deficits - there seems to be a huge mouse (and sometimes keyboard) latency - missed mouse clicks and delayed scrolling.

I opened task manager and watched the performance.  Sure, I had a lot of tabs open (11 or more) but nothing was running.  CPU averaged about 25% with regular 90% spikes every few seconds.

I used to love Firefox, but I quit using Firefox before because it seemed to keep hijacking my default setting and trying to force Yahoo and AVG on me.  I suspected Firefox was actually preventing the download of Chrome!

This time I used Internet Explorer to download Chrome.  The download and installation went perfectly and smoothly.  It even replaced most of my previous bookmarks even though it had been uninstalled!

I have a Quad Core Processor running Windows 7.  As I replaced my open tabs, I checked Performance after each one to see if any of the websites had anything running in the background.  After opening each one, there was the expected spikes of activity as everything loaded, then CPU dropped back to about 0.5%.

Right now, I have 12 tabs open (but nothing actually running).  CPU usage is 0.5%.

Case closed.  Chrome 10.  Firefox 0.

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