Firefox 4's JavaScript Now Faster Than Chrome's

An anonymous reader writes "Firefox 4's JavaScript engine is now faster than V8 (used in Chrome) and Nitro (used in Safari) in the SunSpider benchmark on x86. On Mozilla's test system Nitro completes the benchmark in 369.7 milliseconds, V8 in 356.5 milliseconds, and Firefox 4's TraceMonkey and JaegerMonkey combination in 350.3 milliseconds. Conceivably Tech has a brief rundown of some benchmark figures from their test system obtained with the latest JS preview build of Firefox 4: 'Our AMD Phenom X6-based Dell XPS 7100 PC completed the Sunspider test with the latest Firefox JS (4.0 b8-pre) build in 478.6 ms this morning, while Chrome 8.0.560.0 clocked in at 589.8 ms.' On x86-64 Nitro still has the lead over V8 and TraceMonkey+JaegerMonkey in the SunSpider benchmark."

Comments

Re:FF4 has some pretty serious memory leaks still,

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

It's not a memory leak problem. This is pretty obvious when, after weeks of continuous use, Firefox's memory usage remains more or less constant.

However, Firefox does have a memory fragmentation problem. After continuous use, the program will become noticeably slower on certain tasks which it previously had no issues with. This is particularly the case if you're visiting more intensive webpages. Often you're better just restarting it after the first 100 or so tabs.