Quick as a Fox: Firefox keeps getting faster

October 31, 2023

Perla Duenas

Web browsing is a pervasive part of modern life, and the quality of the experience directly affects the quality of your day. When your tasks are disrupted by slow or unresponsive pages, it is frustrating and distracting. As such, performance is a key component of Mozilla’s vision for the web.

To deliver against our vision and enable a better online experience for everyone, we’ve been working hard on making Firefox even faster. We’re extremely happy to report that this has resulted in a significant improvement in speed over the past year.

Improvements on benchmarks

One way to judge browser performance is by using industry benchmarks. We have seen measurable improvements here, specifically around the popular benchmark Speedometer 2.1.  This benchmark measures browser responsiveness by simulating user interactions (such as manipulating a list of to-do items).

Since January 2023, Firefox’s Speedometer score has improved by 50%, a significant performance improvement for our users.

Performance on the web

Yes, benchmarks matter, but it’s worth pointing out they only simulate what a user could experience. It was important for us to verify that the performance improvements were actually being felt by users.

We’ve observed improvements on performance metrics that matter. In particular, pages are appearing 15% faster on average:

It is extremely gratifying to see that the improvements in benchmark scores are actually being felt by Firefox users everywhere. If you’re interested in getting more technical details, check out our recent blog post on Mozilla Hacks. 

It’s been an exciting year for the Firefox Performance team – and we’re not stopping any time soon. This is a preview of the work we’ve been doing, and we’ll be sharing more technical detailed posts in the next few weeks on Mozilla Hacks.