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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.
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/in this thread
The Mothership
Flash has more and more accessibility support, but PDF is the Page Description Format. It's meant for print output and says nothing about the meaning of the contents of the document, just how they are supposed to look on the screen and on the page.
The good thing about tag-based formats like HTML is that--provided someone's following the standard--they can be fairly easily parsed regardless of the output format. With XHTML, you can read stuff on your screen, the blind can use screen readers, and web developers can easily extract and transform elements from a given document things are good as they are.
Finally, why do you think PDF = lean and mean? Acrobat proves that a PDF reader can get hideously bloated.
The benchmark used in this article is a JavaScript benchmark, but PGO was enabled for most components of Firefox, not just the JavaScript engine. And even if only the JavaScript engine improved in speed, you'd see a speed boost despite having JavaScript disabled in web pages, since parts of Firefox itself are implemented in JavaScript.
The shareholder is always right.
Microsoft's biggest mistake was thinking people wouldn't write complicated apps in Javascript. They supported it, in their usual half broken style, but it created the only widely deployed cross-platform system for running code that Microsoft has ever implemented. Now, with Firefox 3 running so fast javascript might become THE platform. It's hilarious because Javascript started out as such a kludgy platform and now it is becoming a serious contender if only because it's the only cross-platform thing Microsoft ever supported.
I tend to have the opposite experience. When I need to use it, IE7 is quite fast and responsive for me, and it will certainly open tabs as quickly as I can hit Ctrl-T. On the other hand, Firefox (on any computer I've used) occasionally has a bit of a delay when opening new tabs, especially if other pages are rendering in the background, you have a few complex sites (like gmail) open, or you have more than 3-4 tabs open.
There are a bunch of great reasons to use Firefox - adblock, keyword bookmarks, decent standards support, Firebug, etc. But in my experience (especially post-1.5), the responsiveness of the UI is not one of those reasons.
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
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."
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
3* tabs should be enough for everybody.
*For older versions of IE, 3 equals 1.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Mark this as off-topic if you like. I'm responding partially to the parent comment, but mostly to its score and reason.
This is a discussion board. How can you mark someone's comment as redundant? Is this an attempt to invalidate their statement? Don't blame them when it's actually a limitation of the forum system. There is no simple way to increment an "I agree" or "I have the same problem" counter, there has to be a new comment for each person who agrees. There is no way of adding weight to a comment except by increasing child nodes, or adding as many individual argument nodes that are similar. Yes, there is already one branch in this thread that talks about the memory issues, but relax not everyone perfectly gets all their statements in exactly the right location in the discussion tree. Judge it simply on what it says, not the comments location.
For what it's worth, I agree. I also have problems with memory bloating with FF. I don't really care if they are memory leaks, or memory fragments, it's still a problem that I would like to see fixed. Unfortunately I cannot fix the problem, so I will patiently wait for the next great release of FF. I have no solution, but this is my informal bug report.
Increase in speed on JavaScript will be great. There are many times when my FF instance gets temporarily grayed out when it loads a page with lots of JavaScript. This is the window manager thinking that FF is locked up and not responding.
Or does a single tab still cause the entire browser to freeze up?
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
I always see these benchmarks and wonder "why does this matter?". The only time I ever see Javascript run too slow or tax my CPU is when it's buggy and then it'll probably throw up all sorts of warnings anyway. This is on any browser I've used and any system.
What matters to me is the imperfect implementation of Flash (it's not really their responsibility but it is their problem) which often eats up 100% CPU from random flash objects or causes firefox to freeze. Another annoyance is Firefox being frankly poor at displaying large HTML files (when you go on websites with insanely large lists for instance). Where as IE and Opera display these as the page is downloaded. Firefox, for me, freezes, much like notepad will when you open a 2meg+ file . Sometimes it'll recover and display the page after a minute or so, sometimes I have to ctrl+alt+delete.
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.
There is no "the memory leak" or "the memory issue", just as there is no "the crash problem" or "the security problem"
Once upon a time there was this OS named Windows Millennium Edition, also known as "the" in your examples above.
Actually in Firefox 3/Gecko 1.9, external CSS loads do not block the parser. Woohoo! However, we do block the parser if the page tries to execute script while there are pending CSS loads.