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JSBench reports Firefox faster *without* the mitigation.

Speed Battle reports Firefox faster *without* the mitigations.

Bearing in mind that those are ran from inside a VM.
Firefox isn't "allowed" to touch my HOST MACHINE

I'm going to stop at those tests. There are dozens of such online browser tests.
In general, Firefox does run *SLOWER* when you enable mitigations that strive to prevent lightning from striking your big toe.
I'm not saying the difference is night and day. But that also depends on the computer you are running.
The older the computer, the more adverse of a slowdown just to prevent something that literally NEVER HAPPENS "to the common user".

I should also report that Firefox **CRASHED** a half a dozen times just trying to get Speedometer 3.1 scores!
D@mn near threw my computer monitor out the window!
I'm sure this was a result of running from within a VM and getting THREE scores insread of just one, BUT MY CHROME v140 HAS NO CRASH ISSUES IN THE SAME VM!

But anywhooo...

The-10-Pen wrote: *

10 Jan 2026, 22:18

Quite seriously, the "average user" has higher odds of being struck by lightning than being affected by Spectre!

What is the source of this screenshot ?

The-10-Pen wrote: *

10 Jan 2026, 23:23

In general, Firefox does run *SLOWER* when you enable mitigations that strive to prevent lightning from striking your big toe.
I'm not saying the difference is night and day. But that also depends on the computer you are running.
The older the computer, the more adverse of a slowdown just to prevent something that literally NEVER HAPPENS "to the common user".

Yep, the differences are not clear and not that spectacular. Plus I'm not sure how does it affects our normal, regular daily browsing experience. One more second for loading a page ? Bah!
That said, I wouldn't recommend to anyone to disable these options since we don't really know what could be the side effects. It's up to each user to understand then to take and to assume the possible risks related to these options.

The-10-Pen wrote: *

10 Jan 2026, 23:50

I should also report that Firefox **CRASHED** a half a dozen times just trying to get Speedometer 3.1 scores!
I'm sure this was a result of running from within a VM

I guess it's because of the VM because I don't get any crashes at all with my Firefox, R3dfox and LibreWolf.
Maybe because of hardware acceleration ? Anyway, VMs don't act and react like real computers

Agreed. But VMs really are the ****ONLY**** way I ever run Firefox and most Firefox forks.
I do like IceCat and it is allowed on my host machine. I'm still at v115 and have not looked to see if there is anything newer.
The Linux distributions are updated more fequently than the Windows distributions.
And Linux (to me) is really just a "hobby project" no different than firing up the ol' Commodore 64 emulators for some nostalgic games.

Though I often feel like speaking against Firefox "herein" is grounds for detention.
Too many "fanboys" here.