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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.
How about testing with a WebKit nightly?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I could have sworn that PDF was Portable Document Format. All your other points about it are correct though.
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AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
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.
The Webkit nightly builds are significantly faster. I don't have the same machine they've tested on obviously, but for comparison purposes here's the current release vs. the most recent nightly build on my Mac OS X 10.5.2 machine:
Safari 3.0.4: 10758.4ms +/- 0.5%
WebKi r30628: 3390.0ms +/- 0.3%
If the performance gain percentage is comparable on their test machine (big if, granted) the comparable time would be 5675.8 ms, 22% faster than the PGO Firefox build.
I have nightmare's about JavaScript being the one language to rule them all... please, let's have no such talk.
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.
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
But with NoScript it's not so much surfing as paddling through the mud!
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
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?
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.
(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?
No, we're just profiling on browser startup/shutdown right now. I did do a build profiled on the benchmark, and it was pretty fast, but that's probably overkill. Mostly we just want to hit enough common code paths to make things faster. Turns out sunspider perf correlates pretty nicely to overall JS speed, since the benchmark is made up of real world code that people complained was slow.