I just checked these benchmarks results few days ago - am I reading this wrong or (apart from Assorted DOM) Firefox loses in most of the tests?

The problem is, benchmarks are never a fair game. It's the nature of the benchmark as a genre. You can always bias a benchmark towards some code path to show that you're superior.

Also, there are other factors to consider:

- Some of the benchmarks are "lower is better", so reading Y axis is important.

- Some results are very close (e.g. speedometer), but the zoom makes difference bigger, so reading the Y numbers again is important.

So, Firefox beats Chrome on WebAudio, StyleBench, AssortedDOM. However, this is still "benchmarks", The real world performance is very, very close.

The bigger picture is, when you look at longer histories, the performance is still being tuned and improved. So, Firefox people are not sitting on what they have.

Lastly, Firefox is way more sensitive to DNS response time when compared to Chrome, and a crowded site makes tons of requests. A fast DNS makes a ton of difference, which is way overlooked.

I used to run a DNSMasq instance when my ISP DNS was very slow. Now, my routers have their own tuned DNSMasq instances, so DNS is instant, so Firefox is as well.

> As a matter of principle, I'd never use a browser which is funded by an advertisement company which lives off my data to show me ads and rob me of my privacy and cognitive capacity.

You can’t use Firefox either then

I can disable all its telemetry, and change my search engine. It becomes a box which receives but never emits.

Plus, I don't use its Mozilla build, but its Debian build.

Sure but you specifically said “funded by” and Gecko dev is funded almost entirely by Google

How many daily-driveable browser engines we have today?

    - Blink: Chromium and their friends.
    - Webkit: Safari specific, on iOS and macOS only.
    - Gecko: Firefox and its a few forks.

First two are forks of KHTML, which is dead by the end of KDE5 era.

So? You have a cross platform evil and lesser evil. What you do?

Yeah they’re all funded by Google, so by your explicitly stated principle you can’t use any of them

At least, I’m not feeding Google directly with my every keystroke, so that’s a plus. At least in my eyes.

Sometimes we have to be pragmatic, especially if being pedantic is detrimental to our aims.

Happy new year.

Sure I do think we need to be pragmatic which is why I was questioning your original principle, but you don’t seem willing to abide by your stated principle at all. I’m just not sure why you said it if you have no intention to stand behind it

Just tell me a viable alternative. I'll migrate to it.

    - Not funded by an advertising company / data broker, etc.
    - Not chromium based.
    - Not a Firefox fork.
    - Works on Linux & MacOS natively.
    - Daily-driveable (i.e. functionally equivalent with Firefox).

There isn't one, which was my point. By your originally stated principle, you are screwed, but now you seem to be just pretending you never stated that principle. I can quote it again if you like:

> As a matter of principle, I'd never use a browser which is funded by an advertisement company which lives off my data to show me ads and rob me of my privacy and cognitive capacity.

That is what YOU said. All you've been doing is against your own quote. I think the quote is stupid, for the reasons you pointed out. I'm just trying to show you that you're the one who said it, but you seem to be totally unwilling to admit that you did, even though it is clearly publicly there

if you use Linux you can run Gnome web which also uses Webkit as it's engine. You can also build webkit yourself if you want to run it on Windows.