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:6 milliseconds! Wheee!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not looking forward to 'the next level' of the web. It will only have more dancing and blinking crap on the page.

Want to make you site fast? You don't need Ajax, Flash, or any other "Hype du Jour". Toss it all out, stick with plain old HTML and make it look decent with simple CSS. Wham, your site is now an order of magnitude faster. You don't need those five load balancers and those twenty application servers just to serve up a page that could easily run on one server when you actually had a clue.

The Web is rapidly going the way of television: once it was about content, then ads came 'to pay for the content' and now it is all ads with the absolute minimum of content. Spreading a two paragraph article over eight pages just to have more ad impressions. Six pictures that just have to be in a slide show. Ads. Profit. Bottomline.

Get me a bucket, I'm going to hurl...
 

and yet Firefox still can't use 1 core... :(

[electrosoccertux]

Tell me, mr anderson, what good is javascript performance if you are unable to use multiple cores?

I wish someone would get on this and make firefox work with multiple cores better. As it is I use the "|" character in my home page settings to open about 20 tabs-- forums, review sites, slashdot, economics blogs, etc....and firefox slows to a grinding halt for about the 15 seconds (just timed it) it takes to render all those pages.
Chrome does it in about 4 seconds and pegs all 4 of my cores to 100%.

Please Mozilla, I know this would require a serious redesign, but it's seriously needed. Hitching while scrolling up/down because a tab is loading in the background (I make use of middle click to open tabs in the background extensively) is very annoying.

Re:FF4 has some pretty serious memory leaks still,

[someone1234]

I think they forget that page caching is not a leak.

Re:6 milliseconds! Wheee!!!

[Wraithlyn]

1) Nobody uses load balancers and multiple app servers because they're serving "dancing and blinking crap" (Flash and JS heavy) sites. Those things slow down people's browsers, not the servers. Heavy server resources are needed when you need lots of server side processing, which generally comes from delivering customized pages to every user (ie you can't just cache everything). Furthermore, using AJAX helps REDUCE server load, by only requesting snippets of content, instead of complete page requests; you think GMail would be faster and less server-intensive if every click required a full page response? How about Google Maps?

2) You seem to be under the impression that developers actually design sites. Maybe in some tiny one-man-show setup, but in the real world a UX/IA specialist designs the user experience, a designer does the visuals, the client signs off on it, and then the developer makes it all happen using whatever tools and techniques are necessary. They don't have the option to "toss it all out" and make it as simple as they like, much as they'd like to. Heck, I have to fight to make sure there's accessible fallback versions of the fancy JS-enhanced UIs everyone designs these days. "Throw it all out"? You live in a dream world buddy, or you do work of extremely limited scope.

In short, your post is just "get off my lawn!". More and more clients demand rich user experiences, and this will continue to grow. Welcome to 2010.