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

Web browsers, bah!

[the_humeister]

I prefer to read the html code and interpret them myself...

Re:Web browsers, bah!

[Tumbleweed]

I prefer to read the html code and interpret them myself...

You young punks make me sick. Back in my day, we used Gopher and were grateful for the upgrade over the teletype!

I still prefer content distributed via mimeograph, though. Get enough enough of that sweet blue text!

Re:Web browsers, bah!

[doomy]

I'm still waiting for my last pigeon or else I'd have responded faster.

Re:Web browsers, bah!

[kahless62003]

We didn't receive any messages and we definitely did not shoot this plump breasted pigeon.

Re:Web browsers, bah!

[object88]

Your clients are a bunch of Neanderthals too, eh?

Another thread, another flamewar

[dasuser]

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.

Re:Another thread, another flamewar

[Kjella]

I'm very much looking forward to the <video> element - because every other solution tends to suck bigtime under Linux. There's a huge market for flash to do flash games and whatever but I really look forward to watching embedded video without it. I'll install x264 and not care about the codec wars as long it "just works". Opera is late to the party here, won't even be in 10.0 initial release :/. Too bad, because for various reasons I like it even better than Firefox...

Re:Another thread, another flamewar

[nine-times]

I'm very much looking forward to the element - because every other solution tends to suck bigtime under Linux.

I'm looking forward to it because every other solution tends to suck under every OS. Flash is a resource hog and crashes frequently-- and besides, why should I need flash just to view a video? I don't understand that one.

AFAICT, the only reason we're all using Flash is that it was a stop-gap measure to deal with the fact that normal video support in web browsers wasn't what it should have been. It's like all the various mutli-column HTML/CSS tricks that people use because HTML just doesn't directly support columns. It works well enough for now, but it should be seen as "something to be fixed".

Re:Another thread, another flamewar

[DdJ]

I'll install x264 and not care about the codec wars as long it "just works".

So far I haven't been able to get this to just work. If I point Safari at the YouTube HTML5 video demo, it all just works. But Firefox 3.5 doesn't have the x264 code, and fails silently, and I can find no mechanism to install that codec.

So, any pointers?

Re:Another thread, another flamewar

[Sunshinerat]

You forgot the complaints that FireFox is a memory hog when you have 389 tabs open.

Re:Another thread, another flamewar

[evilviper]

I'm very much looking forward to the element - because every other solution tends to suck bigtime under Linux.

Before Flash came along, web video on Linux was a great thing. MPlayer supported the big tree formats very well (Quicktime, Real, and Windows Media) and performed extremely well. Open Source browser plugins didn't disabled the controls, and made it easy to download the source of the video, no matter how obfusticated the web page code.

In fact, MPlayer supports all types of FLV video as well... The problem being the way its embedded into a page requires a SWF interpreter to even find the URL to the FLV file, and as of yet, nobody has written-up what should be a rather simple bit of code to do that, and pass the URL back to the user, or directly to a video player.

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.

Will it be fast enough to view slashdot?

[Joce640k]

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.

pffft

[ocularDeathRay]

I just did my own test and lynx is faster than firefox and chrome.

Re:pffft

[ocularDeathRay]

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

Re:pffft

[morgan_greywolf]

Sadly, lynx fails Acid3 for some reason.

I don't even see the code anymore

[slyborg]

"All I see is 'blonde...brunette...redhead...'"

Re:Big Brother...

[Kurusuki]

For one, the government usually doesn't ask for permission first. Not to mention that the information used to determine your geolocation is also derived from something already passed to the web host, your IP, assuming you're not using the WiFi option. Generally speaking web pages can achieve a similar result already with a little effort. As it stands this new feature isn't making new information available to the public, it's just making old information a bit more friendly.

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:Sickeningly biased.

[albedoa]

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.

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."

I don't care...

[cyberjock1980]

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.

Re:Firefox 3.5 freezes loading background tabs

[Runaway1956]

I suspect some configuration problem on your end, to be honest. I'm running FF3.5 on XP SP3 inside of VirtualBox. I do not see that behaviour. Using snaplinks, I just opened six tabs, and the current tab remained responsive while they loaded in the background.

Whether the configuration problem is in your VM, within Windows, or in Firefox, I couldn't even begin to guess. In my case, I have 1 gig of memory allocated to the VM - if you have less memory, that might be something to look at.

Of course it's possible that my FF is different than yours in some subtle way. I upgraded from FF 3.5 b4 to FF 3.5 RC1 and then to FF 3.5 final. I really wouldn't EXPECT there to be any real difference, but crap happens, right?

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.

Re:Weird

[mr_lizard13]

It's a new feature designed to promote the benefits of tabbed browsing.

Until you appreciate its value, you won't be able to close that tab.

So, start appreciating tabbed browsing, OK?

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:Big Brother...

[Just Some Guy]

Why would I ever want to share my location?

Seriously? Imagine you could search Google for something like "sushi restaurant near me", let Google access your location information (once or every time), and get a list of nearby restaurants. Location services are shaping up to be the killer app for mobile computing.

Why would I want part of my window eaten up by an option I don't like?

It's not. When you choose "share" or "don't share" the prompt goes away. It's exactly like the "remember this site's username and password?" prompt.

What happens when I click the wrong one at 5am cause I'm tired?

Oh, it clears out your checking account, sells your dog, and dumps your girlfriend. Honestly, what does any other random program do when you make a dumb choice? Whatever you asked it to do.