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Firefox 3 Performance Gets a Boost
jason writes "Mozilla has been working hard at making Firefox 3 faster than its predecessor, and it looks like they might be succeeding. They've recently added some significant JavaScript performance improvements that beat out all of the competition, including Opera 9.5 Beta. And it comes out to be about ten times faster than Internet Explorer 7! Things are really starting to fall into place for Firefox 3 Beta 4 which should be available in the next week or two."
Hopefully it can best Safari's Javascript performance. Firefox is pitifully slow compared to WebCore's javascript core.
One of the ways I usually demonstrate to people the advantage of Firefox 2 over IE7 is to show them the difference in time it takes to open multiple tabs. With Firefox, they open as fast as I can hit CTRL-T, but with IE it takes about a second for each one.
I stole this sig from a more creative user.
To be honest, I hate it. WTF have they done with my handy URL bar? It used to be a place where I could type "slas" and get the slashdot URL come up. Even worse for "news", as it "handily suggests" all the pages in my history that have "slas" or "news" in my history.
Heads up for all those trying Firefox 3 is Oldbar. I suggest you get it if you don't like the new 'innovations' by Mozilla Corp.
The Safari team recently introduced some native javascript functions, which showed very impressive speed. It looks like the next release Safari will be up there as well (if not even faster still).
I'm off to download the latest Firefox to see how the two compare (on both Windows and OS X platforms).
The Mothership
Firefox 3 is going to include support for the new Java SE 6 runtime environment.
This is a new implementation of the Java Plug-In that features increased reliability, ability to specify large heap sizes, ability to select a specific JRE version to execute a particular applet, and support for signed applets on Windows Vista.
The New Plug-in is designed to work with: - Internet Explorer 6 and 7 on Windows XP and Windows Vista - Firefox 3 on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Solaris and Linux
Personally, I've been wanting to use the Firefox 3 beta for some time, primarily because of the performance and speed boosts over Firefox 2, but my favourite add-ons still aren't compatible.Note: The new Plug-in does not work with Firefox 2, and no support is planned for this browser with the New Plug-in.
http://gemal.dk/blog/2008/02/24/firefox_3_gets_a_new_java_plugin/?from=rss-category/Back up your Firefox Profile and start clean.
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The Mothership
note that this is a javascript test, not a html test, but the main problem is, you need to break the problem down into many components, including, but not limited to:
a) efficient networking
b) lexical analysis
d) parsing.
e) DOM tree construction (required because it's available to javascript)
f) javascript lexical analysis
g) javascript grammar parsing
h) javascript compilation to bytecode
j) javascript execution by vm (including subtasks: initialization, execution, security checks, etc)
k) rendering output
It's probably even more complex than above, but it's a long process to go from <html><body><p>hi!</p></body></html> to a page that has "hi!" on it. Longer if it needs to execute javascript safely as well.
No, recently the developers have found that few leaks are left, so that to reduce memory usage further they had to change their focus to reducing fragmentation. Originally, the problem was leaks, it's just that once the worst ones were fixed fragmentation became responsible for a larger fraction of the memory usage. This a continuation of people trying to find one single cause of high memory use. As I and others have been saying for years, there is no one cause. There is no "the memory leak" or "the memory issue", just as there is no "the crash problem" or "the security problem".
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I could have sworn that PDF was Portable Document Format. All your other points about it are correct though.
This sig is intentionally blank
Short answer, maybe Long answer: If FF3 isn't using a processor specific optimization, you can always Download your own build, I like pigfoot's (scroll down) build for windows.
Well someone had to, so I ran the numbers for OS X. All of the below were on OS X 10.5.2 running on a MacBook:
I guess if you're a Safari or Firefox person you can look forward to some really fast Javascript performance either way.
They've had that fixed in the Betas for quite a while. Native widgets, even. Why don't you try out the latest beta?
Its all fun and games until someone loses an eye... then its just fun.
Why is the parent comment marked as troll? It was reported a few weeks ago that the next version of Safari, 3.1, would see major JavaScript performance gains due to the latest WebKit builds. This article uses the beta Windows 3.0 version to compare to.
"Sufferin' succotash."
What the internet desperately needs is an application transfer protocol completely distinct from HTML.
We already have a perfectly good one. It's called HTTP. While the acronym may be misleading, it has nothing to do with HTML. In fact, no protocols (that I know of) have anything implicit to do with HTML.
I agree that we should be getting the damn code out of your hypertext, but that doesn't necessitate a new protocol.
Just to give you the alternate perspective- I love the idea of Opera, and use the kick-ass mini (and mobile) versions every day. But on my desktop, it just seems so foreign. It's like a swiss army knife, with inbuilt functionality poking out every which way, and (in my head) obstructing the work I've got planned- It doesn't feel like it's mine.
I realise that it mostly is amazing, and I'm not satisfied with Firefox by any means, but Opera just feels alien; a bit like when you start messing about with WINE after a long period of not needing to.
I realise that seems woolly as fuck, but I guess Opera is sufficiently advanced that such intangible and abstract criticisms become the only valid ones.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
I had these problems with Firefox 2 exactly running the default Ubuntu version. I downloaded the firefox 3 beta 3 from the website and it is so much better it is unbelievable.
- Where as before FF2 would use around 500 meg it now only uses around 50 meg
- Flash no longer crashes the browser
- Javascript no longer crashes the browser
- Those long pauses as it is doing something that stalls the browsers operation are gone.
I couldn't believe the difference.
You haven't even mentioned the number one problem that makes Firefox slow when it's been open for too long: memory allocation costs associated with heap fragmentation.
You must be using windows, on Linux it doesn't do this, you just download the zip file, extract and run.
Um, PDFs can be made just as accessible as HTML documents, and Adobe's PDF tools have good integrated support for assistive technologies built in.
PDF accessibility is a lot like HTML accessibility; you have to know what you're doing to make it happen, but you can make it happen.
Read my blog.
I've got to agree with you. Memory usage, per se, isn't going to affect speed, *if* that memory isn't constantly being addressed.
If the memory in question are rendered page caches, which aren't going to get touched unless they're viewed. As long as the allocation tables are efficiently indexed, i don't see how memory usage is directly related to speed.
Firefox is actually using FreeBSD's new malloc (jemalloc; PDF) internally, instead of the default OS allocater on all platforms. It's quite fast and has less fragmentation than other implementations.
I have found JavaScript performance depends immensely on what it was written for.
For instance Gmail in FireFox is really fast, almost as if it weren't a web application.
However, Gmail in Opera is a lot slower.
Possibly due to how FireFox caches and similar, but either way, theend result is that Google Apps is a lot faster on FireFox.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Foxit Reader is absolutely the smallest and fastest PDF viewer available. You can get it for Windows or Linux.
The JS runtime in Firefox supports threading and has for years. I believe it did that even before the Mozilla project started. Using this in the UI or across tabs/windows is blocked on several issues:
1) Web content expects all JS that might interact with each other (which includes JS in different windows) to run on a single thread. Not doing that breaks websites.
2) All the DOM code is single-threaded. Changing that would involve some nontrivial locking overhead. Might be worth it as processors become more and more parallel.
3) A lot of other application code is single-threaded in Firefox (though a number of worker threads _is_ used). This would need to be addressed.
Making the runtime support threading is the easy (and done long ago) part.
Except that Mozilla relies on HTML, CSS, XUL and JavaScript for it's whole user interface, for it's extension system, ...
So, even with NoScript which stops the webside JS, there is still tons of JS to execute...