Benchmarking Mozilla's Firefox Performance Over The Past Two Years

With 2019 quickly drawing to an end, I figured it would be interesting to see how the performance of Mozilla Firefox has been trending over the longer term. So for this article today is a look at the Firefox 57 through Firefox 71 stable performance plus tests of Firefox 72 beta and Firefox 73 alpha all from the same system and using a variety of browser benchmarks.

Going back to Firefox 71 means a look at the performance of this web browser from present back through November 2017. Firefox 57 was the cut-off as Firefox 56 and older was not working with the Selenium / WebDriver interfaces used for automating these browser benchmarks. For all the Firefox releases tested, they were using the official Linux x86_64 binaries from the Mozilla FTP and each time tested in an out-of-the-box configuration with clean profile.

This browser benchmarking was done from an Intel Core i7 8086K desktop with UHD Graphics 630. The Linux distribution running on the system was Clear Linux with the Linux 5.3 kernel and Mesa 20.0-devel graphics drivers. No other changes were made to the system throughout testing besides changing the Firefox release. Via the Phoronix Test Suite all of the testing was automated and carried out a minimum of three times for accuracy and all of the other normal safeguards applied.

So with 2020 just around the corner and Mozilla working to ramp up the Firefox release cadence, here's a look at the performance of Firefox on Linux over the last two years.