The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

PCXFirefox - https://code.google.com/p/pcxfirefox/
LawlietFox - https://code.google.com/p/lawlietfox/

PCXFirefox and Lawlietfox are third party firefox builds. You could say they are cousins to the Tete Atelier build's because they share some patches and optimizations.

PCXfirefox is the fastest of the three and sometimes has extra features the official builds don't have like Google WebP support, but it's only updated every other version.

Lawlietfox is faster or slower than Tete's depending on the benchmark.

Tete Atelier builds seem to be in the middle in performance and the most stable.

Lawliet offers 32/64bit builds and PCXFirefox sometimes has x64 builds too.

All three of them benchmark faster and feel snappier than the popular Palemoon and Waterfox. At least on my ancient 6 year old core2duo.

There's doesn't seem to be a many benchmarks comparing them. I found a random article and some post on the palemoon forums.
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/interne ... for-speed/
http://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=823#p5135

Since the benchmarks I came across are old. I'm interested in seeing how current versions stack up against official builds and palemoon. The difference's are probably less noticeable on high end computers.

I like to use them portably with the PA.C firefox launcher. Simply by replacing the contents of App/Firefox folder with any of the 3rd party builds. PCXFirefox has Tete's portable mode available as well. But the PA.C launcher makes it easy to run multiple versions simultaneously.

Another contender is htguard.
I tested LawlietFox before and haven't found significant differences in comparison with Tete's builds.
Anyway, what I appreciate in Tete's version of Firefox is its stability (no crashes in 6 months), total compatibility with the official extensions and, off course and mainly, the possibility to use it natively portable.

This, the 64-bit Firefox, Palemoon and Waterfox all seem to be getting a lot of attention lately here and elsewhere. It reminds me vaguely of (my) early days with Linux there was some speed competition between the different distributions. That seems to have largely faded away in place of usability or speed gains associated with compiling Gentoo.

Anyway, if these efforts can open up some new speed doors or optimizations, I think that would be amazing. Plus, it's nice to see this kind of hobbyist interest. The variety of WebKit browsers that seemed to be coming out for a while there had me thinking that had shifted away from the Mozilla code base.

I'll probably switch to one of these in the future because of Extension Signing becoming mandatory in v44.

Does anyone still use one of these builds?

I still use it. But they take a while to update to the latest versions. Right now though I'm using official firefox v43/44 beta since v42 had a niche addon related crash bug. At least 44b1 still allows unsigned extensions it seems.

There will also be unbranded versions that will allow you to use unsigned extensions if you wanna stick with official Mozilla releases.