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FireFox 3.1 Leaves IE in the Dust

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i-just-want-fewer-beachballs dept.

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?"

3 of 435 comments (clear)

  1. this is not news by buddyglass · · Score: 5, Informative

    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".

  2. Re:And yet by LSD-OBS · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  3. Re:And yet by beelsebob · · Score: 5, Informative

    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