We all love Firefox for various reasons.
📖 It’s open source 🌐 It’s not based on Chromium ✒️ Is highly customizable 🦊 It looks stunning
Firefox being open source, there’s many forks around, maintained and developed by the community. I compared four of the most popular forks, namely — Librewolf, Floorp, Mercury, Waterfox and ranked them based on their performance.
For the benchmark scores, remember that higher is better.
4. LibreWolf
Probably the most popular Firefox fork with a strong focus on privacy, LibreWolf is a strong contender when it comes to reliability.
🕵️♂️ A strong focus on privacy 👁️ No telemetry 🏃♂️ Fast updates 🏅 Scores 622.35 on the benchmark, which is 28% faster than Firefox
Honorable mention to the Betterfox user.js, using it makes Firefox considerably faster and it scores 638.36 on the benchmark, which is 31% more than vanilla Firefox.
3. Waterfox
Waterfox is an old Firefox fork, flaunts a classic look & feel while improving on speed and privacy.
🕵️♂️ A strong focus on privacy 👁️ No telemetry ✒️ Many built in features to modify the look & feel of the browser 🏅 Scores 749 on the benchmark, which is 54% faster than Firefox
2. Floorp
Floorp is a relatively new browser based on Firefox, made in Japan. It aims at improving speed and privacy.
🕵️♂️ A strong focus on privacy 🏃♂️ Updates every 4 weeks ✒️ Comes built in with another sidebar and 5 themes 🏅 Scores 752 on the benchmark, which is 55% faster than Firefox
1. Mercury
Mercury was made by the same person who made Thorium. It’s blazing fast but updates can be a little slow at times when compared to LibreWolf or Floorp, the last update being 2 months ago at the time of writing this article.
🕵️♂️ A strong focus on privacy 👁️ No telemetry or reporting 🏃♂️ Houses multiple compiler optimizations, making it faster 🏅 Scores 1017.2 on the benchmark, which is 109% faster than Firefox!
Here’s a quick comparison between the performance of all these forks and the original Firefox -
Some details ->
The benchmarking tests were performed on Basemark with UBlock Origin installed on all browsers, on a device with AMD Ryzen 5 7535HS with 8GB DDR4 RAM and a 512 GB M.2 SSD, running Windows 11.
That concludes this article, thanks for reading!