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."

Comments

Re:Safari

[CajunArson]

Yeah great, was anyone complaining about the speed? Actually many people (myself included) were complaining about speed, and in some cases new "features" are just bloat. One feature that I would LOVE to see is to have isolation between tabs so that if one page in one tab causes a crash, the other tabs would be unaffected and the browser could continue. A multi-process model with better isolation could do this, and would also make more efficient use of multi-core systems (since FF is notoriously single-threaded, have a single thread per-tab instead of per-browser). FF does crash, and while sometimes a third party plugin is to blame, I really don't care about pointing fingers just in getting the browser more reliable.

Re:Microsoft's Biggest Mistake

[chelsel]

I have nightmare's about JavaScript being the one language to rule them all... please, let's have no such talk.

Re:OSX?

[BrainInAJar]

I have. Still ass. doesn't go lighter when it's backgrounded, stays the same dark grey as if it were foregrounded.

Open-Source seems good for getting a job 90% finished and completely ignoring the 10% polish required to make it an app of the same quality as closed-source

Re:I tried Firefox 3 today

[TheSkyIsPurple]

>I don't want software that tries to think for me.

In which case you don't want the browser to autocomplete the URL for you at all, and the fact that it finds seemingly irrelevant matches shouldn't matter.

Re:Safari

[Anonymous Coward]

Would it be fair to say the following actually occured to obtain these javascript performance improvements:

1. instrumented firefox (PGO technology)
2. ran the stinking benchmark with the instrumented code
3. used the feedback from the benchmark to automatically compile an optimized version of firefox optimized specifically for the benchmark.

4. Publish results of said benchmark for all to oooh and awwww over.

Isn't this as pathetic and useless as vendors manually tweaking their 3D drivers to artifically raise performance figures displayed in 3dmark? Did I totally misread TFA?

Re:Safari

[Idiomatick]

I know, it really sucks that people don't write books anymore since the printing press came out. The whole industry collapsed, you probably haven't even heard of these jobs:

* Copyists, who dealt with basic production and correspondence
* Calligraphers, who dealt in fine book production
* Correctors, who collated and compared a finished book with the manuscript from which it had been produced
* Rubricators, who painted in the red letters
* Illuminators, who painted illustrations

Ohhhh wait, people still write books and the industry didn't collapse. It just changed. I'm sure in 50years we'll be saying 'wtf was a publisher again?'. And nothing of value will be lost. Artists have the HUGE opportunity of being able to cut out the middle men (there are lots of them) with current technology. With less hands in their pockets they will make big money from live shows and bigger profit from merchandise as well as profits from ad supported downloads and site page views. Artists will NOT starve, i don't see how cutting away the massive corporations which artists are carrying on their back atm will hurt the artists.