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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by vojel@discuss.tchncs.de to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

I was looking for a non-chromium alternative browser to Firefox and found mercury. According to this site it is one of the fastest Firefox forks and also has optimizations from other well known forks like librewolf.

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[-] Atemu@lemmy.ml 44 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Claims 7-10% performance improvement on an old AMD FX thing. No information about the baseline though; whether it's the terrible Snap or Firefox's official binary package. I suspect it's the former because it has known performance issues IIRC and the latter has quite good compiler optimisations already (LTO+PGO making most of the difference).

When I built Firefox for x86_64-v3, I saw no measurable improvement over x86_64-v1 in speedometer. I didn't dare to build the most security critical application on my system with unsafe compiler optimisations though..

[-] Pantherina@feddit.de 3 points 11 months ago
[-] Atemu@lemmy.ml 14 points 11 months ago

Everything involving -O3. That usually stands for "enable all standards-compliant compiler optimisations, no matter how how little their benefit or their stability".

What would be even worse would be -Ofast which won't even care about strict standards compliance. No sane distributor distributes -Ofast and the only distributor I'd trust to use -O3 correctly is Intel's Clear Linux.

I don't know about OPT_LEVEL but it's likely an abstraction of the build system for this flag.

[-] Pantherina@feddit.de 6 points 11 months ago

Interesting. Thanks!

[-] z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml 23 points 11 months ago

After the shenanigans with that dev and his other project, Thorium. No fucking thanks.

[-] d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz 25 points 11 months ago

Out-of-the-loop here, what shenanigans?

[-] z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml 31 points 11 months ago

The developer included furry porn art as part of the code base of his other browser project, Thorium. He removed it after it was discovered.

[-] KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 9 points 11 months ago

Furries hold up the entire IT field though

[-] vojel@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 11 months ago

Do I really want to know what furry porn is?🤨

[-] Pantherina@feddit.de 12 points 11 months ago

Its an art form depicting humanoid animals engaging in sexual activities

[-] vojel@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 11 months ago

Oh well - why should one integrate this in a browser lol? Jesus sometimes I regret sharing something I think is good at first glance - but well I think I will then go back to librewolf

[-] Pantherina@feddit.de 3 points 11 months ago

Mercury is ESR and not privacy focused. The dev found nice build flags though. Using Librewolf for privacy is always advised, if you dont compile FF yourself and use it with arkenfox and policies

[-] sugartits@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago

Don't ever go to 4chan. Ever. You will lose your innocence.

[-] vojel@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 11 months ago

Thanks for pointing it out 😂

[-] wopazoo@hexbear.net 5 points 11 months ago

Could you elaborate? I'm not familiar with the drama.

[-] socialpankakemix@lemmy.blahaj.zone 20 points 11 months ago

just make sure to download one of the newer versions without the furry porn

[-] WeLoveCastingSpellz@lemmy.dbzer0.com 46 points 11 months ago

Where can I get the versions WITH the furry porn

[-] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 7 points 11 months ago

Easy, you start with the one without and add it yourself.

[-] Pantherina@feddit.de 15 points 11 months ago

It is based off ESR but the flags are really cool!

You can build Firefox yourself, takes like 30min on a modern Laptop.

I did that to remove the jemalloc memory allocator, to make it work on Secureblue

Just havent found how to compile regular Releases yet.

[-] vojel@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 11 months ago

All hail the mighty AUR ;)

[-] Cornelius@lemmy.ml 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Tried this myself, performance differences are non existent. In fact I noticed more regressions on speedometer than improvements.

Don't bother, use Floorp instead.

[-] wagesj45@kbin.social 2 points 11 months ago

Interesting, because I saw a 20 point increase between vanilla Firefox and Mercury when testing last night.

[-] madis@lemm.ee 1 points 10 months ago

Floorp looks nice in theory but in practice it is very outdated...

[-] cyanarchy@sh.itjust.works 9 points 11 months ago

Been using it, absolutely cannot recommend.

[-] wagesj45@kbin.social 1 points 11 months ago

Any reasons why you can't recommend it?

[-] daed@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago

I mean, "it's shit" is technically discussion but I was hoping for more too lol

[-] 1984@lemmy.today 7 points 10 months ago

You won't notice any difference whatsoever.

[-] d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Does this enable x86-64-v4 (AVX512) optimisations? I've checked the github page but don't see any references to x86-64-v4.

[-] Pantherina@feddit.de 4 points 11 months ago

https://github.com/Alex313031/Mercury/blob/main/mozconfigs/mozconfig

You can likely use Mozillas documentation to optimize your Firefox that way

[-] lemmyreader@lemmy.ml 0 points 11 months ago
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
86 points (88.4% liked)

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