Summary

The article compares the performance of popular Firefox forks, including LibreWolf, Waterfox, Floorp, and Mercury, with Mercury ranking as the fastest.

Abstract

The article "Comparing popular Firefox forks" evaluates four well-known Firefox derivatives: LibreWolf, Waterfox, Floorp, and Mercury. It highlights their focus on privacy, lack of telemetry, and customization options. Each fork's performance is benchmarked, with scores indicating significant speed improvements over the standard Firefox browser. Mercury, developed by the creator of Thorium, emerges as the top performer with a 109% faster score than Firefox. The benchmarking tests are conducted using Basemark on a device running Windows 11, with UBlock Origin installed across all browsers for consistency.

Opinions

The author suggests that LibreWolf is a reliable choice for users prioritizing privacy and fast updates.
Waterfox is praised for its classic look and feel, as well as its privacy features and built-in customization options.
Floorp is recognized for its focus on speed and privacy, and its regular updates every four weeks.
Mercury is highlighted for its exceptional performance, attributed to multiple compiler optimizations, despite slightly slower update cycles compared to LibreWolf and Floorp.
The author provides an honorable mention to Betterfox user.js for enhancing Firefox's performance, nearly matching LibreWolf's benchmark score.
The article concludes by thanking the readers, indicating a courteous and engaging tone towards the audience.

Comparing popular Firefox forks

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!