I think you're both right. On my Essential Phone (Snapdragon 835 running stock Android 9) pages tend to _render_ quicker in FF, but scrolling, pinch to zoom etc. is smoother in Chrome.

I also find that Firefox will bog down after a month and I have to manually delete out its cache in app settings. I haven't had to do this for Chrome since back in the Android 5.x era.

The latter might also be due to extensions

I could see that.

Not the issue in my case though.. I don't use any extensions on my mobile browsers.

Heh, maybe it's the opposite then! Like an accumulation of shitty trackers, because you don't use uBlock or privacy badger or the like. That would be pretty ironic

Trackers do not really accumulate though, no? Or can they install something persistent (web workers maybe?)

Store stuff in IndexedDB?

Scrolling in Firefox on Android is smoother, ie. more consistent 60fps, than Chrome for me for a few months now. It used to be very bad but suddenly improved dramatically.

Huh, your right. Scrolling in Firefox on Android was awful for years, and was the main reason i stuck with chrome. I'll have to give it a proper go now...

In my experience the minimum hardware baseline for Firefox is higher than Chrome but the optimal hardware baseline is lower.

I switched to Firefox on Android a few years ago and it was unpleasant until I upgrade my phone. At the time I was running a Nexus 4 and moved to a Nextbit Robin.

My partner switched to Firefox on a Google Pixel and regularly complains about issues with it's performance which makes me wonder if Google has done some optimizations to Chrome on the Pixel.

I feel like it has gotten a bit better with this update. Or, at least the release notes mention better scrolling performance and I'm imaging it.