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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 prefer to read the html code and interpret them myself...
Well, I guess we're in for a thread about how Firefox is still the (greatest|worst) browser in existence because of its (extensions|javascript performance|standards compliance|support for HTML 5). Looks like I need to go and get some snacks and pull up a recliner.
We're #3 - wow that's something to boast about.
According to Nike, this means that your the second loser.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The new benchmark in Javascript performance - slashdot.
...and I wonder if it will be powerful enough to get the line breaks right in "plain text" mode so I don't have to insert "br" tags manually.
No sig today...
Somewhere between "crashes every 5 seconds" and "can't render anything correctly".
I just did my own test and lynx is faster than firefox and chrome.
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
Why is it when the government can keep tabs about where we are it's "draconian" or "orwellian," but when a web browser does it, it's "cool"?
...how fast are all the plug-ins that are inevitably add-on?
It's like my dad use to tell me, "If you're not 1st your last!" Shake and Bake Baby!!!
.. I know 92% of time statistics are made up, but if you read the article you'll see they have a pretty graph, so I think the data is good.
"All I see is 'blonde...brunette...redhead...'"
"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)" Opera 9.6 =! Opera 10 Beta, or am I missing something here?
Having used Chrome now for a little while after becoming irritated with FFX's memory utilization in particular, I'm going to have to admit that while it is quantifiably better than FFX (and Opera) in many ways, I don't find the speed difference compelling. Indeed, I find myself occasionally wondering if Chrome is actually slower than FFX in some ways. I am still using it, as the memory utilization is significantly better, but the little inconsistencies in presentation and the weird sensation that it feels slower makes me really want to switch back to Firefox. If Mozilla can get off their ass and really plug the memory leaks and utilization, I'd probably switch back today.
That's not to say that Chrome is bad. It's 100% usable, and its much more compatible with sites I use than Opera is. (I tried Opera first after I started looking around). The problem is that it still breaks some sites that aren't broken in IE or Firefox. And whether or not you blame the browser or the non-standards compliant webmasters, the reality is that I cannot switch their sites, but I can switch browsers that I am using. That means I have opened IE 7 windows more while using Chrome, than I have with Firefox.
I posted a blog about this yesterday. I tried Firefox 3.5 in a Windows XP VMware Virtual machine yesterday and quickly web back to Firefox 3.0.
The problem is that FF 3.5 freezes while loading a background tab. In Firefox 3.0, I have no problem clicking on some link that looks interesting, loading the link in a new tab, and continue reading the article I'm reading or what not.
This doesn't work in 3.5. When I load a page in a background tab, the entire Firefox client freezes up when it's processing Javascript, HTML, or whatever in the background tab. I can't scroll up or down in the foreground, write a posting or email (typing in text freezes and the letters I'm typing in aren't buffered), or do anything else with Firefox as it parses the page in the other tab.
Because of this issue, I quickly moved back to Firefox 3.0. I hope the Mozilla developers address this issue in the next six months, because if this issue isn't resolved in Firefox before they EOL security updates with Firefox 3.0, I will probably have to move to another browser.
Any modern browers besides Firefox with a "always use this font for text" option? Neither Opera, Safari, nor Chrome had this option last time I tried those browsers. (Don't get me started on IE8, which forces me to use anti-aliased text)
I ran the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark on Chrome 2.0.172.33, Firefox 3.5, and IE8. Firefox was almost 7x faster than IE, and Chrome almost 8x faster. Of particular interest are the contraflow and recursive tests. Chrome: 4.4ms. Firefox: 55.4ms. IE...? 218.4ms. Chrome is fifty times faster than IE in those benchmarks. Embarassing!
...almost as quick as the original version of Google Chrome
What a comparison. It's almost as fast, but not quite as fast, as a much earlier and slower version of the fastest browser.
The article is about Firefox, and yet it is shown, in the only quantifiable test that the author conducted, to rank third in a three-horse race against its two speed competitors.
Firefox is the fastest fully open-source browser.
My blog
I tried to do something pretty seemingly simple with Javascript (1 draggable line to redraw the background colors of the table), and it drags its ass on IE8. It is fast and smooth in FF/Opera/etc, but with so many people using IE still, it hardly matters.
Morphing Software
If you want to install the new Firefox 3.5, you are well advised to remove all traces of previous versions. Otherwise your new install will have bizarre behavior like failing to open up links from websites like digg and being slow.
What I did was to uninstall it through the Windows XP control panel and delete all instances of Mozilla and Firefox in the registry. This is one bit of info developers should have informed us about.
Does anyone know how to use its geo-location feature?
By the way, it does not score 100% on the ACID 3 test and some links are returned as invalid but on clicking the "back" button, the sites load! I am also surprised that Yahoo Search is the engine that reports the error. Why, I do not have an idea. Could it be my ISP?
I don't care how fast it loads webpages. What I want to see is a browser that isn't riddled with bugs and easy ways for badware to end up infecting my machine. I'll gladly surf on the slowest browser in the world if it really is proven to be the most secure. So what if I save a few seconds surfing web pages. That is nothing compared to the hours spent trying to get rid of a virus/trojan/keylogger/etc.
From just poking around the web with gecko and webkit browsers I found a bunch of pages that looked fine rendered by gecko, but had elements in the wrong place or other visual problems rendered with webkit. The majority of sites render fine in both, but not all and other then acid tests I haven't visited any that rendered better in webkit.
I'd rather have the page look good than be super fast, so I'll stick with firefox until sites render as well in webkit or firefox becomes unusable slow.
The downside is... that almost nothing works with it; hardly any code has been ported for themes, plug-ins or add-ons, so you're basically starting back at square one again.
I tried it here on 64-bit Linux, using the Adobe flash plugin and got dozens of crashes/hangs (even the bug-reporting feature hung, and had to be xkill'd off). It's faster, but it crashes a LOT more than 3.0.11 for me, given my current use of the browser as a productivity tool.
Those crashes were with no plugins installed at all. My 3.0.11 browser has 32 plugins installed in it, and it is ROCK solid.
It's getting there, but it's not quite ready for prime-time just yet.
Firefox is the fastest fully open-source browser.
Out of how many?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Ahh, we have someone with a good sense of humor. Nice. Next.
Quick way to get 30% Funny 70% Troll: defend Opera browser on
Home come these "news" deserve to be on /.? I'm feeling sick of this "Wow! We have a new who-the-hell-knows-what test. Out browser of choice is better at it than others! Boo-hoo!" And hear I thought browsers are for well... browsing. Apparently I was wrong.
Quick way to get 30% Funny 70% Troll: defend Opera browser on
I'm sorry, but Lynx is still faster than all of the above. When will we see fair treatment of all browsers? That's racist.
Man, the experience is like I if bought a new laptop.
Since Firefox's GUIs and extensions are entirely assembled in JavaScript, the new javascript engine not only optimizes page rendering, but in fact, the entire browser experience in faster.
Presumably in Seattle it could tell you where your nearest 100 Starbucks are...
I read the web from the ethernet stream, you noobs.
In academics: 43.9% of statistic are made up. .009% were a sampling error.
In business: 72.3%, although banks were slightly higher than average.
In politics: 99.991%, although it's possible the
Now if I could just make this a pretty graph.
Compared to the current Chrome 2, Firefox 3.5 with JIT enabled gets 1/2 the speed here, 7/8th the speed here, but about 2x the speed here. That's a much better result than ff3.1!
Well done, guys.
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
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.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
Of course Firefox rocks!
I got to "Address Not Found" in like... less than a second
(link slashdotted...)
I'm the Deej, and I approve this message.
I thought Safari was the fastest. http://crave.cnet.co.uk/software/0,39029471,49301219,00.htm
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
If you live where I live, then there are several Starbucks within a few hundred meters radius.
If that's the case one might argue that you don't need a web browser to tell you where to find a Starbucks. You should be able to see one.
Yeah, that just happened.
I upgraded yesterday and I've had all kinds of loading problems. Facebook photos don't load. The gmail theme background loads, then goes missing ("whites out") after switching to another tab then back. I've had some some other sites like yahoo finance not load the charts. My 3.0 never had these issues... I hope they get sorted out. I noticed it has a better deferrable loading engine, where it can lay things out and get the page in front of you faster. I'm not describing those types of things. Unless the deferrrer gives up too soon.
And yes, I did provide the feedback.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
yes, but "zomg you're not supposed to use tables for layout!"
which of course has led to the similarly quaint removal of b, u, s and i tags for the sole reason that content and presentation should be separate. Nevermind that if you -now- want something to be bold, short of writing your own XML bits and pieces, you have do something insane like "<style>.b { font-weight:bold } </style>...<span class="b">this is bold</span>".
At some point, the scales tilted completely the other way and all balance was lost. Alas. The same applies to tables. Not that I think tables are appropriate for layout, but DIVs with a crapton of CSS aren't particularly it either.
Well, you have Epiphany and Konqueror, which aren't that terrible.
...as a video with out of sync audio. It's JUST like youtube! Awesome!
Your passwords are utterly useless to you when they are saved. Pretty sad that you can't remember your passwords.
b and i, at least, are in the working version of html5:
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/text-level-semantics.html
and 'strong' usually results in bold text (but I guess it might not if the CSS for a page goes all over the place).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The advantage of using DIVs and CSS to format your page into columns is that you won't have a shit-ton of copy/pasting and code rearranging to do if you ever want to swap your columns around, or switch out some content from the right to the left. You just change a few lines in the CSS. If you can't see the enormous benefits this brings over Table based formatting, you have not made many changes to existing websites.
And from your CSS example, it shows. You do know about inline styles right ? You don't need to use the <style> tag at all. You can just do <span style="your CSS stuff here...">. But then again, why do it like that at all ? Even XHTML 1.0 Strict has support for the B and I tags for Bold Text and Italic Text. You can check the DTD yourself : http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/dtds.html#a_dtd_XHTML-1.0-Strict
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
...unless he uses the good practice of using a different password on every site. I have saved passwords for between 75 and 100 sites, almost all different. Many of these sites I visit rarely, so when I do go to them, it's nice to be able to just hit Ctrl+Enter and be logged in instead of trying to remember or recover the password.
I just did a "normal" upgrade, overwriting the 3.0.x directory with 3.5. All of my account settings, passwords, bookmarks, toolbars, etc. are working just fine. I've had no problems accessing any websites, and even the old cache entries seem to be getting used.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Nevermind that if you -now- want something to be bold, short of writing your own XML bits and pieces, you have do something insane like ".b { font-weight:bold } ...this is bold".
(1) What's wrong with and ? Okay, they aren't exactly the same, but they are pretty darn close.
(2) If you're working on a quick & dirty page or something like that, why not just use a version of HTML with it?
1 - Make a graph of SunSpider scores for 3.5 and 3 other browsers.
2 - Hmm, that seems a bit thin.
3 - Add some stuff cribbed from the release notes.
4 - Still a bit thin, hrmmm...
5 - Acid3 results!!!
6 - Meh, 798 is almost 1000 words. Publish it!
6 - ???
7 - Profit!
Sheesh.
Crap... I totally screwed that up. This is what my part should have looked like:
(1) What's wrong with <strong> and <em>? Okay, they aren't exactly the same, but they are pretty darn close.
(2) If you're working on a quick & dirty page or something like that, why not just use a version of HTML with it?
Firefox is the fastest fully open-source browser.
Chrome has a very small amount of closed-source code in it, but Chromium is certainly fully open-source, and it's identical to Chrome for performance purposes. So no, Chromium is the fastest fully open-source browser.
MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
The only website I've come across that Opera doesn't render properly is Slashdot. By which, the correct statement is actually Slashdot "can't be rendered in anything correctly".
(Opera doesn't crash for me, either, discounting the Flash plugin that crashes, and Adobe have yet to fix. Works fine now that I've uninstalled it.)
and 'strong' usually results in bold text (but I guess it might not if the CSS for a page goes all over the place).
The same is true for any HTML markup. b { font-weight: normal; color: green; } would chuck your expectations out the window just as well.
MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
And Linux is the closest fully Open Source operating system to the desktop?
Lynx might be able to render Slashdot correctly...
But does linux run IT?
Your proxy probably only supports http 1.0, which ie uses by default while firefox uses http 1.1, there is a setting to change that in about:config
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I can run 100+ tabs in FF with no problem. Chrome starts choking after 10-15. At least in my humble experience.
I really like FF, being a web developer I use many different browsers, but ever since Google Chrome was announced I have been using that. Within the last few months I have been using the Chromium daily builds as my main web browser (completely stable, I might add) I like Chromium better than FF because it is clean, simple and fast. It takes the focus away from the browser and puts it on the content, I just wish they'd sort out fulscreen browsing :D
The only reason not to upgrade from Firefox 3 immediately is if you myriad extensions aren't compatible
For the record, unmasking the still hard-masked mozilla-firefox-3.5 ebuild broke apart my Gentoo installation. Just saying.
Property is theft.
*thows pebble, draws circle in the sand with stick, grunts*
...for more than 5 minuttes it will probably slow down. Like 3.x - gets more and more sluggish. Their new awesome bar (or whatever it was they called it) is a really brilliant idea, but its so slow, it lags and freezes the browser - so firefox.. not so quick.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I had the same annoying thing. Suppose I wanted to be on a blank page, I had to open a blank tab and close the last tab, till I discovered ctrl+W.
It will close the last tab and make it blank
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
I didn't have any of these problems but I started from a new profile.
This is all just my personal opinion.
It isn't the default, but you can configure Opera to allow you to close all tabs. When you close the last one, it goes away, and you have no tabs until you create a new one. It's a perfectly logical way to work that I haven't seen any other web browser copy yet.
I've been using Opera for ages, and I find it humorous how everyone gets excited about new browser features when I've had them for quite some time.
I don't recall when Opera first included tabs, but it was ages before any other web browser. It's particularly funny how everyone was excited that Chrome put the tab bar above the address bar, so that the address bar is effectively a part of that tab, when it was that way in Opera since the very beginning and it always annoys the fuck out of me that it doesn't work that way in other web browsers.
Now I hear a lot of stuff about AdBlock and NoScript for Firefox. With Opera you can go to any web site and Right Click->Edit Site Options where you can block any page content you don't like, or disable javascript or java or plugins in general for that web site. There are also easily accessible toggles for javascript/java/plugins under Tools->Quick Preferences. There's no general ad-blocking that I'm aware of, but I haven't looked into it since I always use the winhelp2002 hosts file and so I don't see ads anyway.
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm
That isn't to say it's without its problems. One annoying as fuck thing about it is that it's far too happy to send clipboard contents to Google. Middle-clicking anywhere in the Opera window takes the clipboard contents and, if they aren't a valid URL, sends them off to Google or some other search engine as a search query. It's a hell of a privacy problem if you ask me. I sent them a bug report about it, suggesting that they change it so that it only does that when you middle-click the new page button or perhaps the tab bar, but I suspect they don't give a fuck.
Which isn't a surprise, no one gives a fuck what I think. I also sent a suggestion that HTTP uploads come with some sort of progress indication, so that users aren't confused into thinking that the page load has failed when five minutes later after clicking "upload" nothing has happened. It makes perfect sense to me. We've had download progress indicators for ages, it's about time we have upload progress indication as well, and having web browsers provide this information is a lot cleaner than the hacks that web sites are forced to use to avoid the confusion of their users.
Come to think of it, I also sent in a bug report about the fact that HTTP uploads fail if the file name contains apostrophes since they aren't properly escaped in the mime content, nor are long file names properly split over multiple lines. Of course, every web browser I could get my hands on suffered from the exact same problems, but Opera's fail was particularly humorous since, instead of uploading the file, it uploaded half a dozen copies of it's "file not found" HTML page that it displays locally when it can't find a local file typed into the URL box. All of the other web browers simply choked and failed to upload anything.
It is a wonderful browser, however. For everything I hate about it I hate a lot more about others. Konqueror is damn-near a winner, though. The only thing that turns me away from it is that, like all KDE applications, it features "single click menus" which means that if you right click, the menu appears before you release the button, so that you can move the mouse over the item you want and select it by releasing the button. For compatibility, you can also just release the button, move the mouse, and click what you want. The problem comes when, in the process of clicking the button and releasing it, you happen to move it just one pixel down and to the right, so that it's now on the fucking menu, and you accidentally select whatever the fuck is first on the menu. I searched for a solution, in
Hmm. Why should we use it again? Don't get me wrong, i was a firefox user from way back (when it was called phoenix, up until version 2.x or so), but I just don't see much point lately. Chrome whoops its arse on speed, stability and interface, safari whoops its arse on speed, coverflow bookmarks/history and standards compliance. Sure, firefox has a million plug ins I don't use, but it just fails the basics as far as I'm concerned...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Your demands seem to be mainly met by running the browser of your choice inside a VM (and restoring to a fixed, virus/trojan/keylogger-free configuration either every time or just periodically).
You just have to figure out what is important to backup from that VM before rolling everything back. For most people, that might only be their bookmarks (easy to backup) and/or saved passwords (which might be tricky to backup, don't know).
(Of course, this isn't the most memory-efficient solution I can think of. It's actually one of the worst from that point of view.)
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!
Yes, I wish Mozilla would instead concentrate on advertising the "user doesn't need a mouthful of cocks at all times" feature. This is an area in which Chrome and especially Safari will simply never be able to compete.
What is needed is a close button on the last tab.
Currently 3.5 has no close button on the last tab.
In Firefox 3, all you had to do was click on the close tab button, and the last tab would become blank page.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
"The advantage of using DIVs and CSS to format your page into columns is that you won't have a shit-ton of copy/pasting and code rearranging to do if you ever want to swap your columns around, or switch out some content from the right to the left."
Really?
Presume I have two TDs, and I swap their content. Select all content from through to , cut, paste. Done.
Now do the same with DIVs.
- Copy the positioning information from one.
- Paste into the other
- Copy the other's now
- Paste into the former
Done?
"And from your CSS example, it shows. You do know about inline styles right ?"
Should I take from that, that it shows you are horrible about your CSS?
-----
<span style="font-style:italic">why<span> on <span style="font-style:italic">why<earth> would you re-use styles <span style="font-style:italic">why<in-line> when you can use a <span style="font-style:italic">document-wide rule<span>?
-----
"Even XHTML 1.0 Strict has support for the B and I tags for Bold Text and Italic Text."
Yes, 1.0 does. 1.1 does not. HTML5 does*, I'm suspecting the XHTML equivalent once again will not; as per the desire to separate content from presentation completely.
For those suggesting em and strong; those are meta data for the content wrapped. They do not state anything about presentation. One browser might render strong as bold, for example, while another underlines it. Both are perfectly acceptable, but only one gives the desired effect.
* Unfortunately, however, the HTML 5 specification clearly states:
"Style sheets can be used to format b elements, just like any other element can be restyled. Thus, it is not the case that content in b elements will necessarily be boldened."
The above is -exactly- what my little rant is about. There is no more balance. There was a tag, <b>old, that did what it was supposed to do, in any browser that was at least -capable- of displaying bold text. Now, that same tag has been either deprecated entirely (XHTML 1.1), -or- neutered (HTML 5), allowing a browser to not do anything with it if it so pleases.
I've edited plenty of websites to know the advantages of CSS, including DIVs with a bunch of CSS for layout. Sometimes tables are simply easier and I daresay a better choice than DIV'd layout; neither, however, were particularly intended for page layout in any way from the get-go, and the "websites should be fluid so that they render appropriately on any device" crowd is holding this back in terms of standards. There's libs available that make things a lot easier for developers (much like jQuery filled a glaringy obvious hole in implementations), but I'd say that the vast majority of websites that are 'custom built' (so not just another Joomla! or Drupal or other CMS with a template slapped on and slightly modified) are done so through graphical editors which spit out a ton of code.. and usually for a good reason; you need that code if you want it working.
Yes, I wish Mozilla would instead concentrate on advertising the "user doesn't need a mouthful of cocks at all times" feature. This is an area in which Chrome and especially Safari will simply never be able to compete.
Yeah!! You show The Man! He'll never be able to use chemtrails to read your mind!
Oh it's interesting alright. Does it still have that "Do not report bugs! There are too many of them and reporting does not help because we are in Alpha!" screen?
On Linux and Mac it does, because on Linux and Mac it's still in alpha, just as Chrome is (and I assume Chrome shows the same screen). Chromium on Windows has no such screen and never has. Chrome is just the name for official Google compiles of Chromium.
MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
Well I am using Firefox 3.5 on a Linux box with dual 64 bit cores (AMD4200+), and 3.5 is more than twice the speed of 3.0.0.11 when rendering the URL ftp://fedora.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/linux/fedora/linux/development/x86_64/os/Packages - Firefox 3 took about 77 seconds.
So if it is not using a JIT, then I'm even more impressed!