Slashdot Mirror
Firefox 3.5 Benchmarked, Close To Original Chrome
CNETNate writes "The tests prove it: It's the third-fastest browser in the world, and over twice as fast as Firefox 3. In terms of Javascript performance, Firefox 3.5's new rendering engine places it squarely above Opera 10's beta and Internet Explorers 7 and 8 (based on previous benchmarks), plus it's getting on for being almost as quick as the original version of Google Chrome. Also, the new location-awareness feature was testing in central London, and pinpointed yours truly to within a few hundred meters — easily enough for, say, a Starbucks Web site to tell you where your nearest Starbucks is."
I'm not sure these benchmarks make much difference. The advantage of Chrome and IE is that they are multi-threaded.
Sure for one or two tabs open maybe Firefox does well. But if you are someone who opens 5 or 6 tabs routinely, and those tabs reload in the background, then Firefox is a total dog. Not to mention the whole not releasing memory thing that makes it unusable after a long browsing session.
So, fine, 3.5 is an improvement. But until Firefox is multi-threaded it's still not good enough. It's still far behind the competition on this.
Do you mean to tell me that Firefox 3.5 succeeded at failing to defeat Safari 4 at the one thing it does well, Javascript performance? Wow!
It also succeeded at failing to defeat Opera and Safari at the only other thing Firefox does well, standards support! They still fail the Acid 3!
Does it also succeed in failing to defeat Opera and IE 8 at page-load speed?
INCREDIBLE!
I think the only thing Firefox does better than other browsers at this point is attracting frothy-mouthed morons to shout their message from the tree tops and aggressively attack users of other browsers. So technically speaking, its only major strength is its wacky collection of extensions... just like IE 6! Welcome to mediocrity, Mozilla!
My Mac can play Apple's QuickTime h.264 clips, even those larger than the screen.
They only play larger than the screen when the reality distortion field is enabled.