this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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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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[–] [email protected] 44 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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..

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Interesting. Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 31 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

Furries hold up the entire IT field though

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Its an art form depicting humanoid animals engaging in sexual activities

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

Thanks for pointing it out 😂

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 45 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Where can I get the versions WITH the furry porn

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

All hail the mighty AUR ;)

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

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

Don't bother, use Floorp instead.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Been using it, absolutely cannot recommend.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Any reasons why you can't recommend it?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

You won't notice any difference whatsoever.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

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

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago