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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."
FF4 crashes when I try to open Gmail since the change. This makes it slower for opening my mail.
1. connect to gmail with FF4
2. FF4 crashes.
3. Open chrome and go to gmail
4. ??? (train monkeys to joust)
5. Profit
I'll be able to do one more mouse click every three weeks or so.
No sig today...
Why do I have a feeling that Slashcode's terrible AJAX interface is going to get even worse in the near future?
This is quite possibly the lamest e-peen measuring contest ever.
Well, if it sucks, maybe you should implement a vacuum cleaner with it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Its great Firefox are working on certain areas of speed but they seem to always do it in the wrong areas or more to the point that their browser is built on top of a slow memory leaking turd. I run a computer with a E2200 on win7 at work. Firefox is sluggish, I've even tried the latest beta and its still slow. Chrome is very fast somehow and so none of these tests are that relevant to me. I haven't liked Firefox since version 2.
I am sure this will set off a whole series of arguments over benchmarks, tuning, fairness, etc. But from this article I will just take this: I don't care which one is fastest to the few dozen milliseconds, they are probably all in the same "class" now. Everybody wins. (I can sorta understand not including IE, but wonder why they didn't include Opera?)
Now that Javascript is so much faster, perhaps the browsers can focus on giving some type of automated/intelligent control over when it is used and how so older machines won't come to a CRAWL because of all the cutesy animation and junk spread over most big sites now. (And no, NoScript doesn't cut it- too complicated for most users, not automatic, too easy to break Javascript that is actually needed, etc). Suppress time-delayed actions, disable tight loops, throw artificial delays in loops under user control, visually tag elements to manually "play" on-demand only or stop after X seconds. I know, keep dreaming.
...is NoScript. They have brought my Java script load times down to 0.00 seconds. Thanks, NoScript.
Seeing that Firefox on a few weeks ago was starting to lag pretty severely behind Chrome, I applaud and thank the Firefox team for their hard work. This is also a boon for their technique, the so-called "shotgunning" method of pushing through compilation the old way if it will complete faster than the optimizations. I had become afraid I might have to move to Chrome, looks like that won't be necessary.
.Net, or whichever other poison you want, but Javascript is free of ownership and frankly a damn good language when written properly.
As a developer I completely understand the dislike of the "everything in a browser" attitude, but we need to look beyond that. The next version of ECMAScript will give us the security we've been wanting, and this round of browsers will give us the speed we need. Enabling universal, secure process level interaction between machines is the goal. You can think of it as widgets,
Now give me an 100% on the Acid3 test please, that way I'll have multiple tools to leverage against my boss next time he asks me to make a web app IE6 compatible.
Where genius and insanity become confused true wisdom is found
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.
from http://arewefastyet.com/faq.html:
"3. Why isn't Opera/IE/something here?
Right now, the performance tests are run on a Mac, which means no IE. Also the tests rely on a "shell" JS engine that runs in a command line. It doesn't test browsers. We'll change that, eventually."
I really don't see the point in a posting like this. Its all
My _______ (1) is _______ (2) than yours
with typical choices for (1):
- car
- wife / husband / significant other
- d*ck
- browser
- javascript
- OS
and choices for (2) like:
- faster
- harder
- more expensive
- longer
- more open
- prettier
Now that we have covered all these discussions, can we move on please?
CU, Martin
Quake II was released in 1997. That's 13 years ago. At the time of its release, Intel's top-end CPU was the Pentium II running at 233 MHz, and even that had only just been released. Most Quake II players were still using Pentium or high-end 486 systems.
Today, a decade and a half later, we have cell phones that are many hundreds of times faster than those Pentium and Pentium II systems, and desktop systems that are thousands or tens of thousands of times more powerful. Yet with all that raw processing power, JavaScript still barely allows us to do what we could do way back then.
I don't know if you've tried it yet, but that version of Quake II that you've linked to runs quite poorly on very modern hardware when using Chrome (which has the best JavaScript implementation around).
If JavaScript doesn't let us easily do what we could do before, we'll never be able to get further ahead.
Really, all this focus on faster Javascript puzzles me. JS, used correctly, should be a thin layer of glue,
That was the original idea of JS. It's already being used much more heavily in current web apps. But the main point of speeding it up isn't for today's websites, it's so that websites can do entirely new things without bringing the browser to a crawl. Think image processing, online mini-games, and no doubt hundreds of more imaginative uses.
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.
May the Maths Be with you!
As I've said, I've tried this. Firefox's memory use tops 200 MB after two weeks. Other browsers go over 200 MB in a few days. I'm not attacking you, just stating for the record that I cannot see a problem. Perhaps on your computer that problem exists. Do not assume that every other Firefox user in the world sees the same problem. I do not. If you don't believe me, look at any number of memory tests that show Firefox using less memory than other browsers: 1 2 3 4, and many more!
I know, I know, it's damn near impossible to believe, but the Firefox developers voluntarily chose to write a huge portion of Firefox in JavaScript and XML (XUL). The rendering engine and network stack are written in C++, but just about everything else is implemented using JavaScript and XUL, including all of the UI.
This is why JavaScript performance is so important to Firefox. While other browsers didn't make the same mistake, and wrote the bulk of the browsers in a real language like C++, the Firefox developers chose what is probably the stupidest architecture possible. A slow JavaScript implementation means their entire browser is slow, rather than just any web pages that might use JavaScript in some way.
Fragmentation can certainly cause a program to slow down. If memory is fragmented significantly, you're going to see a lot more page faults as memory is accessed. With an OS like Windows that's aggressive in moving memory out to disk things will certainly slow down.
I think they forget that page caching is not a leak.
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You're missing the point; simply because you, me, or the majority experience no memory leak issues does not mean they don't exist. Computers differ enough that it's impossible to say that what works on one system will work on another with a different operating system, different system settings, different software installed, or even different hardware. I'll concede that it's impossible to replicate every possible user installation, but it's likely that the people who report the problem have something in common, even if it's not readily apparent; being hostile toward them for reporting it is arrogant and counterproductive.
Jesus loves me, he loves me a bunch, because he always puts Jiffy in my lunch.
Memory fragmentation can cause it to slow down because it takes more overhead to find free space for more allocations.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
I, too, saw the speed of Firefox 4 in a pretty simple, math-only benchmark that rotated a 3D object. Run it for yourself and/or see the gathered statistics (bottom of the page). Here is the Reddit discussion where many people run it and confirmed Firefox 4 supremacy.
Your operating system should be dealing with that, not the browser.
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Jesus guys, can't you just congratulate the Firefox devs on the great job they're doing? Just look at the rate of improvement over the past few months and give the JaegerMonkey/TraceMonkey guys kudos for a really impressive job of software engineering. Have a look at David Mandelin's recent post to get an idea of how much work and planning has gone into this project.
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