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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."
According to TFA, Safari is beat out by Firefox 3 beta 3 and 4, and Opera.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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.
I could have sworn that PDF was Portable Document Format. All your other points about it are correct though.
This sig is intentionally blank
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.
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."
They've been throwing around the idea of multithreading for Firefox 4, but right now its still in contention, I think, because it has to be done right. I recall reading some dev blogs that said they'd jump ship if the team decided to expose the threads to extension developers.
Its all fun and games until someone loses an eye... then its just fun.
Are you sure it's actually swapping to disk, or is it merely reserving swap space in the map ?
Example: I have 8 gb in this system. Right now I only have FF and Thunderbird running (+ a few background processes). Current "commit charge" is 475mb, of which Firefox is using 150mb. The system says I'm using 280mb of swap, but it's not actually thrashing the swap disk at all. That swap space is reserved, presumably because it represents 280mb of idle memory that is eligible to swap out, should another process need it.
Windows allocates virtual memory quite aggressively (when properly coded). If a process requests 500mb, but only really uses 100mb of it, the remaining 400mb will be "allocated" to swap while the real memory remains available to other processes. The moment a memory page is accessed, it is marked "dirty" and moved to real memory.
It's very much like sparse files, where unused or 0-filled pages don't take up any physical space (except for the map entry). That's how virtual memory is supposed to work, and it lets developers simplify their code by not having to worry too much about the physical arrangement of memory. It's also partly why you should never run a system without a swap file, even if it has tons of memory. I've probably never used all 8 gb in my system, but I still keep a (small) swap file. If I didn't, and that process allocates 500mb, Windows needs to dedicate 500mb whether or not it is actually in use. It reminds me of real-estate players, who can "buy" million-dollar buildings with a relatively small amount of capital, the rest on credit. Swap is like a line of credit for the OS.
Linux probably does the same thing, but I'm not as knowledgeable about its inner workings.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
(or just glance below):
1. Firefox 3 Nightly (PGO Optimized): 7263.8ms
2. Firefox 3 Nightly (02/25/2008 build): 8219.4ms
3. Opera 9.5.9807 Beta: 10824.0ms
4. Firefox 3 Beta 3: 16080.6ms
5. Safari 3.0.4 Beta: 18012.6ms
6. Firefox 2.0.0.12: 29376.4ms
7. Internet Explorer 7: 72375.0ms
The results are generated by using the Sunspider JS benchmark suite.
This looks great, but everyone should notice a couple of things that may not be obvious.
1) Sunspider JS benchmark is designed by Apple developers and they use it to show the world how much faster Safari is, however Opera seems to outpace the Safari developers even with their own tests. However, yes some of the benchmarks used are 'picked' to favor Safari, and some are 'extended' to hurt IE.
2) Sunspider over does the tests of the Append String performance problem to make IE look worse than it really is. IE's JScript is coded as JScript was designed, and because of this, it doesn't optimize string append operations by using newer code. So by using this text extra, it artificially make IE look horribly slow. IE8 and possible additional IE7 releases are spending time optimizing the base JSCript code from the original implementations/specifications.
http://blogs.msdn.com/jscript/archive/2007/10/17/performance-issues-with-string-concatenation-in-jscript.aspx
3) If you remove the 'string' routine from the test, IE7, consistently outperforms Firefox 2.0, and is very close to even Safari for with the results were cherry picked.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001023.html
4) Some of the numbers are quite questionable as to the validity. For example IE7 is given 72375 in this article, and yet the slowest machine our tech lab has ever benchmarked is 2x the speed, and this is on a very old AMD 1ghz machine that barely runs Vista in which the test yeilded the horrible results. So where did they get the 72375 number from? A Pentium 200?
Again reference this link so see that even this person's results are no where near the 75K ms time reported for IE.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001023.html
So it is quite questionable and inaccurate to try to portray IE7 as 10x slower, when without the 'emphasized' string append slowdown in IE7, it is faster than FireFox 2.0 and within a few 'ms' of even Safari and the new FireFox 3.0 results.
Good job to the FireFox team, btw.. Also does anyone have benchmarks of the new FireFox using a non-Apple test suite?