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."

Comments

Re:pffft

[ocularDeathRay]

http://www.asciipr0n.com/pr0n/morepr0n.html

Re:Big Brother...

[Just Some Guy]

You have the option of not using the web browser.

Beyond that, I tried one of the location demos. A Firefox prompt opened at the top of the window: "${site} wants to know your location: Share Location, Don't Share" with a checkbox to remember the settings for that site. Go ahead and explain how you could possibly be offended by that.

Re:Opera 10 not benchmarked in either link

[albedoa]

Yes: "Opera 10b1 wasn't fast enough to appear in this chart I'm afraid. It scores just under what the original Firefox 3 achieved."

Weird

[cayenne8]

I just upgraded to 3.5.

Strange thing...when it restared, it of course had a tab opened saying it was upgraded, etc.

Trouble is...I can NOT close this fucking tab to save my life?!?!? I can close and open others, but, cannot close this one. I can go to other sites on it..but, cannot close it.

Re:Weird

[SecondaryOak]

They changed the default behavior, but you change it back from about:config (type about:config in your url bar):
set browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab to false.

Re:Weird

[Sterling Christensen]

Firefox now shows the tab bar even when you only have 1 page open. What you're probably used to is the tab bar being hidden when only 1 page is open.

If you follow SecondaryOak's suggestion, you can close the tab and the whole Firefox window will disappear - because it's going from displaying 1 page to displaying 0 pages.

But I'm guessing that's NOT what you want - you don't really want to "close" the tab, you just want to hide it like you're used to.

So go to about:config and double click browser.tabs.autoHide to change it.

No speed improvement for those on x86_64

[zoips]

The Tracemonkey JIT doesn't work on x86_64 in the Firefox 3.5 release. Apparently it works in trunk, but for those on x86_64 machines, you either have to run the 32 bit version or just deal with no JIT.

Re:No speed improvement for those on x86_64

[BAILOPAN]

It's not in trunk yet, but we want to get it in as soon as possible. It's not trivial, but not terribly difficult either - someone just has to take the time to do it. Unfortunately getting 3.5 out in time was a much higher priority, we just couldn't block on x64. If you're interested, a tracking bug is here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=489146

Re:Another thread, another flamewar

[Simetrical]

I can't get that to work in anything but Firefox!

If the way it works out is that some sites work with Firefox, other sites work with every HTML5 browser other than Firefox, and none of them work with Internet Explorer...

Sites can provide video in one of two formats:

1. Theora is unpatented as far as anyone knows, and is supported by Firefox 3.5, Chrome 3, and experimental Opera versions. Apple has said they refuse to support it at present because of fears about unknown patents surfacing when someone with deep pockets starts shipping it (this was before Google shipped Theora support).
2. H.264 is patent-encumbered and supported by Safari 4 and Chrome 3. Mozilla and Opera both refuse to support a patented video format on principle.

Microsoft has not commented on any of this as far as I know.

Of course, sites can provide fallback so that the content works in the absence of video tag support. The way to do it for the time being is 1) provide both Theora and H.264 in a video tag, 2) put Flash or something in the fallback for older browsers and IE. This can be automated through various tools, and will "just work" for the user. Eventually everyone will support the video tag with a single common format, hopefully, but you have to give it some time, it's new stuff.

Re:Another thread, another flamewar

[evilviper]

there are also numerous FF plugins to do that.

No, there aren't, I'm afraid. There are numerous apps written that understand Youtube's naming scheme, but that's all. They don't actually parse the SWF, and any trivial changes to the site layout breaks them. Not to mention that FLVs on any other site still won't work.