Unlike gaming consoles, computers are multi-purpose devices. We use it for productivity work, media watching, web browsing, gaming and much more. Computers are also great for managing multiple tasks simultaneously, which is often an important feature for PC games — you can quickly change playlists in the music player between rounds, or look up tutorials for a tricky section without switching devices or breaking anything.
However, not all programs work well with computer games. Web browsers can be demanding on system resources, especially with RAM – something that many PCs already struggle with as games move towards 16GB of memory as the minimum requirement. Most web browsers also use your GPU to render pages and media content, which is great most of the time, but maybe not so much when you’re trying to play Call of Duty: Warzone.
There are also other factors to consider that make some browsers better while gaming, such as game-specific features or integration with popular services and platforms. In this guide, we are going to highlight the best web browser for PC gaming, based on performance testing and available features.
Best Browser
Winner: Firefox
No matter if you’re in the middle of a game, or just surfing the web normally, Firefox is the way to go. While Firefox scores slightly lower in the performance test compared to Chromium-based browsers, such as Microsoft Edge and Vivaldi, it tends to use the least amount of RAM across all the apps we tried. This is an important factor when games want to use as much of your available memory as possible.
Firefox is also an excellent browser overall. It has an easy-to-understand interface, lots of add-ons, cloud sync, and mobile versions for Android and iOS. Mozilla also has a proven track record of defending user privacy and security, and unlike most other browsers, all of its code is freely available for your consideration. In comparison, Chrome and Vivaldi are only partially open, and Edge and Opera GX don’t allow any of their code to render.
Firefox is available for download on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android.
Second place
Description: Opera GX
Opera’s gaming-focused browser, Opera GX, earned an honorary mention here. The interface isn’t for everyone – it honestly looks like a gaming motherboard’s BIOS – but Opera GX is a good browser to check information or stream music while opening a game. The limits of RAM, network bandwidth, and CPU are pretty impressive.
Opera GX supports syncing with other Opera browsers, so you can also use the company’s other software for regular browsing/productivity, and only open GX when you need gaming features. The browser is only available for Windows, and you can download it from their official website.
Tests
How we tested browsers
The most important factor here is performance: not just how fast your computer’s web browser is, but also how resource-efficient it is. Ideally, the best browser in this scenario should load pages and content quickly, while not slowing down any games that might be running at the same time. It also needs to do things in the browser.
We used three web-based benchmarks to test the performance: JetStream 2 (a standard for JavaScript and WebAssembly), MotionMark (a graphics test), and Speedometer 2 (a benchmark for typical web applications). Testing conducted on a computer with a Ryzen 5 1600 CPU, Nvidia GTX 1080 graphics card, 16 GB RAM, and Windows 10 Pro build 2004.
Most importantly, every browser was tested with a clean user profile – no synced data, no running extensions, etc. It is common when switching browsers to feel that the new browser is noticeably faster, but the difference can simply be that thousands of registry entries, bookmarks, and extensions have not been transferred to the new application.
The browsers we tested performed nearly identically to each other, which comes as no big surprise. Most web browsers now share a common engine (Chromium), although some browsers lag behind in the latest engine improvements than others. Microsoft has been making headlines lately about speed and power-efficiency improvements in its Edge browser, but most of these changes are being sent back to the main Chromium codebase for Chrome and other browsers to take advantage of.
The main exception is Firefox, which uses its own engine called Gecko. Apple’s Safari web browser also has a different engine, WebKit (which Chromium is based on), but Safari is no longer available for Windows.
Far from that, it’s time to test another controversial data point: RAM usage. Chrome’s memory requirements have become a meme over the years, but are other browsers really that different? In short, not really.
To test RAM usage, we opened three tabs with the same pages across all browsers: a YouTube video playing at 480p, and the home pages of two news sites with various videos, images, and ads. This should roughly mimic what most people would open in a browser while playing – music or videos streamed in the background, as well as some guides or wiki pages. Blocking of content/advertising was turned off across all browsers, and we let tabs run for a while (while scrolling/clicking on items) to set minimum and maximum usage.
Vivaldi ended up being the most RAM hungry in this test, consuming just over 1GB of memory just to keep all three tabs running. Firefox had the lowest RAM usage, using around 700MB with the same three pages. Chrome, Edge, and Opera GX performed roughly the same.
So why do web browsers need so much memory, you might ask? The answer is sandbox, which is a security mechanism to separate applications or tasks from one another. This blog post from Google explains why sandboxing is necessary:
Every day, web users download and execute random code on their computers or phone multiple times. If someone tells you “Hey! Download and run this app!” You may pause to consider if this app comes from a trusted source, read about the app seller, or check reviews carefully. What about when someone sends you a URL that says “Check this blog post”? You’ll likely click it without asking questions like “What kind of JavaScript will this site download?”. Browser sandbox is the main feature that makes browsing on the web easy by making it safer to run arbitrary code.
Chrome was one of the first web browsers to implement a per-tab sandbox to improve security, resulting in higher memory usage compared to other browsers (hence the origin of the memes). All other browsers later implemented this functionality.
Besides the RAM usage and general performance, the features are also important for determining the best gaming browser. Every web browser we tested has all the basic functionality you’d expect (cloud sync, multi-platform support, picture in picture, customization, etc.), but there are some notable features in each browser that come in handy while you play. Edge and Vivaldi both support vertical tabs, so you can see page titles more easily with a large number of tabs open. Vivaldi also has a notepad, which can be useful for quickly jotting information from the game without reaching for your phone or Windows Notepad.
Opera GX has the most game-focused features of any web browser currently available. The GX Control panel allows you to specify how much network bandwidth and CPU/RAM usage the browser can hold, although the RAM limit cannot be set below 1GB.
Opera GX also has a dark theme by default (with customizable features), a quick-access sidebar for Twitch, and other features. Most add-ons are also available through extensions or themes on other browsers, but there is some value in having everything hidden in the primary browser.