this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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It'll cost you nothing at all.
And in fact will save you CPU cycles. For a bit, Chrome had a slight performance edge over Firefox. But once Google got the market share, Firefox caught up and got ahead, and Chrome didn't invest in keeping up, so Firefox is generally faster. The only exception is a few sites (especially Google ones) seem to be heavily optimised for Chrome, but not necessarily as much for Firefox. If you stay away from those sites, Firefox is generally faster.
Plus Chromium is increasingly becoming more hostile to efficient ad blocking add-on implementations - so if you want to block ads (generally recommended due to ad networks doubling as paid malware distribution networks), Firefox or other Gecko-based browsers are generally the best bet.
Wait can you elaborate on that a little bit? Back in the days, Chrome was a resource hog which made me switch to Firefox for a few years. Then I tried a bunch of different browsers and found that my Firefox couldn't keep up with the performance of Chromium-based browsers, which made me switch to Edge. But now, Firefox has better performance again?
It ebbs and flows over time. All browsers will be attempting to improve performance, but at the same time adding features. More features often impact performance negatively.
Most normal pages are apparently faster in Firefox right now, but Google might make an optimisation effort in chromium that might make Firefox comparatively slower.
The main pages that are still slower in Firefox are Google sites. Google has repeatedly made things on their pages that unfairly favor Chrome. For example at one point they added an invisible frame that had no functionality over the video player on YouTube. They obviously made optimisations in chrome at the same time so they wouldn't be affected, but Firefox' hardware acceleration of videos broke, because the video now had additional items over top that it needed to custom handle. This gave chrome a massive performance edge on YouTube, until Firefox started ignoring completely invisible overlays of videos, just like Chrome did