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FireFox 3.1 Leaves IE in the Dust
Anonymous writes "Granted, FireFox 3.1 is just a beta and IE 8 is also in beta, but it looks like Microsoft has some ground to make up when it comes to browser performance. Given that Mozilla appears to be on a much faster cycle than Microsoft with this stuff, it's also possible that it could increase the gap even more before IE 8 is GA, no?"
If you've even remotely been keeping up with FireFox, WebKit and IE progress, it's no surprise that IE8 fares poorly. It fared poorly the day it was released, which was about two months ago. Why are we getting this story now?
As a side note, IE8 does fix the pathologically bad performance IE6/IE7 exhibited on certain SunSpider benchmarks. That alone should improve its overall SunSpider score by an order of magnitude. Its javascript engine will still be 2-3X slower than FireFox and Safari, but it will at least be in the same "ball park".
I don't know about the rest of the world, but Firefox 3.0.3 sucks on my three XP machines. Version 3.0.2 worked just fine. I let Firefox upgrade itself to 3.0.3 and it immediately started crashing. It crashed so much that I actually had to use IE to download a copy of 3.0.2 to downgrade Firefox on those machines. And Firefox 3.0.3 crashes on my Ubuntu machine far far more often that earlier versions ever did (although I'm still using 3.0.3 on Ubuntu).
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Well, javascript-wise, maybe not. I've spent the last week doing some extensive testing on pure javascript performance (not DOM-tree manipulation, etc) using a little raytracer I hacked up overnight.
Opera is noticably above average, in this respect. More importantly, however, you might note that the Firefoxes are absolutely, hideously bad at memory management. When rendering a big scene here, Safari will do it in a fraction of the time using 60mb of RAM, whereas Firefox 3.1beta's memory usage spirals out of control and into swap space. And the JIT compiler is way broken still :)
Anyway, here are some figures (only meaningful when comparing different browsers on the same box):
IE 7.0.5730.13 -- 10.1 seconds
Firefox 2.0.0.17 -- 9.9 seconds
Safari (win32) 3.1.1 -- 5.9 seconds
Opera 9.60 -- 3.6 seconds
Firefox 3.1b2pre (no JIT) -- 2.8 seconds
Safari (win32) 2008-10-15 -- 1.0 seconds
Google Chrome 0.2.149.30 -- 0.8 seconds
Firefox 3.1b2pre (JIT) -- anywhere between 0.6-35.0 seconds
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
Opera used to be faster, but not any longer now that Mozilla, Apple, and Google have been improving performance so much. If you look at the links in the previous post, you can see that Opera beat Firefox in only one speed test. Yes, Opera is faster than IE, but that's only because IE is so slow.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Actually, you're wrong -- Firefox 3.1 comprehensively outperforms Opera in pretty much all tests now.
On the other hand, what does blow the FF 3.1 beta out of the water, are the latest WebKit betas. Here's the stats on my machine:
Sunspider (faster times are better)
FF3.0.3 - 2697.2ms
FF3.1 - 2442.8ms
WebKit - 702.6ms
V8 Benchmark (more runs are better)
FF3.0.3 - 199 runs
FF3.1 - 241 runs
WebKit - 2087 runs
ACID 3
FF3.0.3 - 71 and significant laggyness
FF3.1 - 89 and significant laggyness
WebKit - 100 and passes timing tests
No, I don't remember performance being mentioned in the anti-trust cases. And why would they? It would highlight an uncompetitive advantage and weaken their position.
Citation needed.
Well if you're willing to take Wikipedia as a citation, then:
"A number of videotapes were submitted as evidence by Microsoft during the trial, including one that demonstrated that removing Internet Explorer from Microsoft Windows caused slowdowns and malfunctions in Windows." (Emphasis added)
Microsoft later withdrew the claim, but only because the plaintiffs spotted that Microsoft attempted to mislead the court with their initial video demonstration. I'm still disgusted that no one from Microsoft was directly prosecuted for any of that.