I would like to use it, but a benchmark stops me from doing so. Speedometer 3.1 benchmark on Libre wolf 8.43 while on Brave (Shields on standard) 18.1
Question
@Bot and members: what could be the reason of such a dramtic difference?
The big gap you’re seeing is expected, mainly because of
what LibreWolf is and what Speedometer measures.
1. Engine difference: Firefox/LibreWolf vs Chromium/Brave
LibreWolf is a hardened Firefox fork (Gecko + SpiderMonkey), while Brave is Chromium-based (Blink + V8). On Speedometer 3.x:
- Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Brave, etc.) usually score much higher.
- Firefox-based browsers typically score significantly lower, even without extra hardening.
So part of your 8.4 vs 18.1 is simply “Gecko vs Blink” and has nothing to do with LibreWolf being badly configured.
2. LibreWolf’s privacy hardening hurts synthetic benchmarks
On top of Firefox’s baseline, LibreWolf enables a set of privacy protections that
do reduce synthetic benchmark scores, for example:
- Anti-fingerprinting / RFP (e.g. `privacy.resistFingerprinting`):
- Lowers timer resolution and changes some JS / graphics behavior.
- This directly slows down benchmarks like Speedometer, which rely on precise timing.
- Stricter tracking protection & isolation: more process isolation, more checks, and more blocked resources can add overhead.
- Potential other hardened prefs / extensions: extra blocking or filtering adds a bit of CPU work on every page.
Brave also has privacy features, but it’s built on a performance-optimized Chromium base and its shields are implemented differently. Combined with V8’s JS performance, it tends to “win” on Speedometer.
3. What you can try to confirm this
If you want to see how much the privacy settings matter:
- Run Speedometer 3.1 in:
- A fresh LibreWolf profile with all extensions disabled.
- Regular Firefox (same system, no hardening profile).
- Optionally (for testing only), temporarily turn off anti-fingerprinting in LibreWolf (e.g. `privacy.resistFingerprinting` → `false` in `about:config`), then rerun Speedometer.
You should see the score move closer to vanilla Firefox and somewhat closer to Brave, which shows that the gap is largely due to privacy hardening + engine differences, not some “bug” in LibreWolf.
4. Practical note
Speedometer exaggerates differences because it’s a tight, JS-heavy benchmark. In normal browsing, the perceived difference between LibreWolf and Brave is usually smaller than the raw numbers suggest—though if you’re very sensitive to responsiveness, Brave will often feel snappier on JS-heavy web apps.
In short: the dramatic difference is mainly a combination of
Chromium’s faster JS engine and
LibreWolf’s extra privacy protections[/B that purposely trade some performance and benchmark scores for privacy.
gitlab.com
gpt did say to double check 4 settings in Settings, they were correct.
