Mercury - a Firefox fork with compiler optimizations

vojel@discuss.tchncs.de to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 86 points – GitHub - Alex313031/Mercury: Firefox fork with compiler optimizations and patches from Librewolf, Waterfox, and GNU IceCat.
github.com

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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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 -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.

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

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

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.

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

Its an art form depicting humanoid animals engaging in sexual activities

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

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

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

Chris Titus Tech explains the issue well enough in this video.

Fucks sake, why does it have to be a 10 minute video to get a simple, short answer?

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.

from another user in this thread

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.

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...

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

You won't notice any difference whatsoever.