Chrome versus Firefox

WebPageTest General Discussion
1

Website http://artgreet.com

Testing this website with Chrome https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170224_GR_SM7/
First view 3.293s / First byte 1.591s LONG HTML BAR!
Second view 2.058s / First byte 0.233s
Third view 2.038s / First byte 0.241s
On every single test the First view results in an “F” (First Byte Score)

Testing this website with Firefox https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170223_ZR_743/

The results of all views are very similar. There is no such big difference between the First and subsequent views like it is with Chrome.

Anyone has an explanation for this?
Thank you

2

Hmm, I would’ve thought that firefox is much faster. That’s an interesting experiment indeed.

3

It’s unlikely that the timings have anything to do with the browser, that long bar was all time-to-first-byte (i.e. server response time).

If I had to guess, I’d say that in the first Chrome run the server didn’t have anything cached and it had to do a bunch of (slow) lookups to databases or external services. For the other runs (firefox included) the various queries were cached in some form so it was faster.