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.
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…
What of those are unsafe?
https://github.com/Alex313031/Mercury/blob/main/mozconfigs/mozconfig
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
-Ofastwhich won’t even care about strict standards compliance. No sane distributor distributes-Ofastand the only distributor I’d trust to use-O3correctly is Intel’s Clear Linux.I don’t know about
OPT_LEVELbut it’s likely an abstraction of the build system for this flag.Interesting. Thanks!
After the shenanigans with that dev and his other project, Thorium. No fucking thanks.
Tried this myself, performance differences are non existent. In fact I noticed more regressions on speedometer than improvements.
Don’t bother, use Floorp instead.
Interesting, because I saw a 20 point increase between vanilla Firefox and Mercury when testing last night.
Floorp looks nice in theory but in practice it is very outdated…
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.
All hail the mighty AUR ;)
Been using it, absolutely cannot recommend.
Any reasons why you can’t recommend it?
I mean, “it’s shit” is technically discussion but I was hoping for more too lol
Neat.
