The Fastest Linux Distributions For Web Browsing - Firefox + Chrome Benchmarks On Eight Distros

First up was the Ares-6 benchmark, but before talking about the results it's first important to note the browser versions. With each of the operating systems when applying all stable release updates, nearly all of the distributions had available the newest Firefox 66.0.1 and that's what was running. The exceptions were openSUSE Tumbleweed as of testing only had Firefox 65.0.1 and Debian Buster/Testing is still locked into Firefox 60.5.1. With the ARES-6 performance in Firefox, there wasn't a whole lot of difference for the most part except with openSUSE Tumbleweed running noticeably slower than the rest.

When switching to Google Chrome with version 73 on all of the tested platforms, the results were largely flat. Clear Linux had a slight lead over the rest while openSUSE Tumbleweed again was the slowest, at least in its default/out-of-the-box configuration.

Similarly, with the Octane JavaScript benchmark on both Firefox and Chrome there wasn't much of a difference besides openSUSE being the outlier.

With WebXPRT is where the results began to vary much more between the tested Linux operating systems. In this benchmark Clear Linux pulled off a 10% win compared to the second fastest distribution (Manjaro) or 28% compared to the slowest (openSUSE. Clear Linux, Manjaro, and Fedora Workstation 29 all had a slight advantage at least over the other tested Linux distributions in this particular web browser benchmark.

When switching over to Google Chrome, Clear Linux had more than a 22% lead over the other Linux distributions tested. Keep in mind this is with the official Google Chrome release binaries and thus the performance difference comes down to lower-level changes in the stack.