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It is crazy that my CPU is getting 45744 score in Octane 2.0 benchmark when it's is running on Google Chromium. On the contrary, the same Octane 2.0's score is 34406 when it's run on Mozilla Firefox. Why is Octane 2.0 is running >32% faster on Chromium? I mean is the Chromium really that much fast?

I have tested multiple times. All other programs are closed while running each of those browser instances. No external plugins/configuration are being used. Both browsers are running at stock settings.

OS-> Debian 10 64-bit CD-edition with XFCE desktop environment

Firefox version-> 78.6.0esr (64-bit)

Chromium version-> 83.0.4103.116 (Developer Build) built on Debian bullseye/sid, running on Debian bullseye/sid (64-bit)

Hardware: Core i7-5775C 4.0 GHz, RAM 2x8 GB 2400 MHz DDR3 (total 16 GB)

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    Octane, when run on the same processor, is more indicative of the particular optimisations of the Javascript engine than anything else. It also is not particularly useful indication for the browser as a whole as browsers that are optimised to score well on that set of test may have poor optimisation in other areas more suited to the "modern web" with its larger frameworks and toolsets.
    – Mokubai ♦
    Commented Jan 3, 2021 at 22:23

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First of all, you're comparing apples and oranges. The Firefox version you're using is an extended security release, which is a stable version that primarily gets security updates but not performance improvements. Debian does not ship the non-ESR version in stable releases. However, Chromium unfortunately doesn't offer such a stable release, so Debian is forced to update it frequently to the latest version, which means both security and performance improvements come in.

Secondly, a particular benchmark is not necessarily indicative of the performance of a browser. It's well known that browser vendors have tuned their implementations to make their particular browser look better on the benchmarks, even if that doesn't result in real-world speedups in a lot of cases. Octane 2.0 is released by the Chromium folks, so of course they're going to have tuned their browser to perform well on it. Moreover, the things that are being measured in Octane may not actually matter in a typical web site or web application these days, so optimizations may be better spent on real-world cases people care about than on synthetic benchmarks.

Third, Octane is deprecated for the reasons I mentioned above, so it's not a useful measure of a browser's performance.

So it probably isn't the case that Chromium is much faster than Firefox. One will perform better on some cases and the other will perform better elsewhere. You should feel free to use whichever one you prefer.

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