# The latest version of Chromium is 10% faster on FreeBSD 12.3.



## Voltaire (Jul 28, 2022)

In the past I always had a maximum result of +- 63.1 on Speedometer 2.0

Today I updated my system, and although it was a minor version change, I have much higher performance in the main browser benchmark:


			https://i.ibb.co/wSr7WXF/Screenshot-2022-07-28-15-38-40.png
		


Chromium should now perform very fast on FreeBSD, similar to the performance on Clear Linux.


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## zirias@ (Jul 28, 2022)

Well, if that can be confirmed, a huge thank you should probably go out to *the port maintainers of chromium*. They are maintaining a *huge* set of patches (currently 1075) to make it work on BSD, since chromium upstream outright refused to maintain portability to BSD.   

IIRC, OpenBSD and FreeBSD recently joined forces on that beast....


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## Voltaire (Jul 28, 2022)

If you want a fast and reliable browser in FreeBSD, I think you currently have five options: Firefox, Epiphany, Falkon, Konqueror and Chromium. Opera doesn't seem to be kept up to date. qutebrowser and Midori are slow and don't have active development. Maybe it would be easy to also bring Nyxt to FreeBSD?

In fact, I am also surprised by the performance of Konqueror in Speedometer 2.0: https://i.ibb.co/vwvKCVr/Screenshot-2022-07-28-20-04-52.png It is almost exactly as fast as Chromium and Speedometer 2.0 is seen by countless web developers as the benchmark that approaches _standard browser use_ the most and is the most usefull of all the browser benchmarks that exist.

Even Falkon is much faster as Firefox in, for example, _Kraken 1.1_ so you can actually say that Epiphany, Falkon and Konqueror are strongly undervalued. And FreeBSD on desktop systems is very nice for browsing the web.


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## Voltaire (Jul 29, 2022)

I have benchmarked all these browsers and this is the general conclusion: Konqueror is faster in the graphic tasks, Chromium is narrowly faster in the 'non -graphic' tasks.
Konqueror is effectively more than 20% faster in Basemark Web 3.0 and the same for MotionMark. In all other benchmarks, Chromium is faster but usually very narrow and there is simply nowhere where Chromium can hit a 'big' difference with Konqueror.
Epiphany is faster than Chromium in Kraken 1.1 but Epiphany fails in MotionMark.
Firefox is faster than Chromium in 'WebXPRT 4' which I did not expect. Firefox still performs normal in Speedometer, but in many things it is the slowest browser, especially in Basemark Web 3.0
Konqueror, Epiphany and Falkon cannot run the 'WebXPRT 4' benchmark, but we can run WebXPRT 3 without problems.
The biggest problem with Konqueror, Epiphany and Falkon is their audio support for YouTube. Specifically with this website they have all three audio problems. Konqueror even ensures that your entire session no longer has audio in any app. Falkon does play audio from SOUNDCLOUD but not from YouTube.

From Epiphany, Konqueror and Falkon I have to say that Falkon is the most useful at the moment (by far the most stable) and Falkon is generally certainly 'fast enough', very often faster than Firefox, and _very_ fast in JetStream 2. And faster than Chromium in MotionMark. I could use Falkon as the daily driver from now on.

Then there is also a special result that I have to mention from Chromium: https://i.ibb.co/S0PYLxg/Screenshot-2022-07-29-13-45-00.png
So more than *93 000* in JetStream 2. My hardware is an *i3-3240* + 4GB RAM @1600MHZ + NVIDIA GTX 650 + EVO 850 500GB. You have to compare it to these results:









						WebKit's JetStream browser benchmark hits version 2
					

I prefer applications that you download and run on your local machine, but I guess I'm old-fashioned because it seems like even most of those run in a browser these...




					techreport.com
				



_'*125 587* On A 5.0GHZ Core-I7 8700K, DDR4-3600 CL18 on Google Chrome Version 73.0.3683.86 (Official Build) (64-bit)' ''_
So three years ago a heavily overclocked i7-8700K was only exactly 34.8% faster in some cases in the JetStream 2 benchmark !!



			https://tweakers.net/reviews/9472/all/intel-12th-gen-alder-lake-core-I9-12900K-I7-12700K-en-i5-12600k.html
		

AMD Ryzen 2600 was _only_ 37.4% faster so many years ago, and that is a fairly decent Hexa Core, with faster RAM, 3x more cores, of which every core is faster than my cores.









						Apple M1 Max vs. M1 Ultra, Tested: Apple's Top Desktop Chips Face Off
					

How much more powerful is the new M1 Ultra, available as an optional extra in the new Mac Studio desktop? Take a look at our early test results to see if you should spring for the $2,000 upgrade.




					www.pcmag.com
				



A MacBook Air 2019 was less than 10% faster in JetStream 2.
And this has never been 'cheap' hardware: https://www.apple.com/nl/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air/met-m2‑Chip
JetStream 2 is rather a synthetic benchmark that says less about real performance than, for example, speedometer, but it remains impressive.

What is perhaps even more speaking in this link from PCMAG, my current system scores much higher in certain browsers than this MacBook Air (2019).
In fact, by using Falkon or Konqueror I get a higher result in 'Basemark Web 3.0' than the MacBook Pro 13-inch (2019).
The latter is actually inexplicable because the MacBook Pro 13-inch (2019) is much more recent and much more expensive hardware.


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## cy@ (Jul 29, 2022)

The reason is this commit:



commit b1c7d48f37e746b786cb18b27dbafb9b3da57d89
Author:     Robert Nagy <robert@openbsd.org>
AuthorDate: Tue Jul 12 22:07:54 2022 +0200
Commit:     Rene Ladan <rene@FreeBSD.org>
CommitDate: Thu Jul 14 09:54:43 2022 +0200

    www/chromium: enable PGO (profiled) build which can yield up to a 10% speedup


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## Jose (Jul 29, 2022)

Zirias said:


> ....since chromium upstream outright refused to maintain portability to BSD.


Yeah, this is another reason why Chromium and its derivatives are a hard pass for me.


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