Mercury - a Firefox fork with compiler optimizations (github.com)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by vojel@discuss.tchncs.de to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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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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[-] Atemu@lemmy.ml 44 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 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 9 months ago

What of those are unsafe?

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

[-] Atemu@lemmy.ml 14 points 9 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.