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

The Basemark benchmark also sees quite different performance based upon the Linux operating system under test. Clear Linux was again the fastest with Firefox and there was a 54% spread in performance from slowest to fastest. With Clear's competitive Firefox performance, as was pointed out a few days ago, Clear Linux is in fact using the official Mozilla release binaries and at this point isn't compiling any optimizations into Firefox itself and thus its speed difference comes down to other OS changes, similar to Chrome. Fedora and Manjaro continue performing competitive as well.

Basemark running inside Chrome 73 saw much less deviation in performance between the distributions tested but there its performance was also a great deal faster: all of the Linux distributions tested with Chrome had better performance than the fastest distributions with Firefox. Clear Linux though still pulled out another win and was 36% faster than the next fastest Linux distribution (Manjaro).

The JetStream JavaScript benchmarks weren't too exciting or different besides openSUSE still trailing in last while Clear Linux had come in first again but with a narrower margin.

When running the CanvasMark benchmark of the HTML5 canvas performance, Debian Buster pulled out a surprising victory but with high variation in the results between the multiple runs.

When switching over to Google's Chrome, Clear Linux was back in the lead.