Slashdot Mirror
Firefox 4 Regains Speed Mojo With No. 2 Placing
CWmike writes "With the release of Firefox 4 Beta 7 this week, Mozilla has returned to near the top spot in browser performance rankings. According to SunSpider JavaScript benchmark suite tests run by Computerworld, the new browser is about three times faster than the current production version of Firefox in rendering JavaScript, and lags behind only Opera among the top five browser makers. Mozilla launched Firefox 4 Beta 7, a preview that includes all the features slated to make it into the final, polished version next year, on Wednesday. Beta 7 was the first to include Mozilla's new JavaScript JIT (Just In Time) compiler, dubbed 'JagerMonkey,' which shot the browser's performance into the No. 2 slot behind the alpha of Opera 11."
I get 404s unless I change the url to slashdot.org/...
No, there's not, because the outcome would inevitably be "every browser is fast (and you won't notice a difference) given enough RAM, CPU power etc". In reality, it's not things like Javascript microbenchmark performance that matter: browsers CAN be faster or slower, but whether you can get a few ms less on Sunspider is going to be lost in the noise. The real differences will stem from other factors.
As such, the whole thing is basically a giant red herring. I'm not sure why Mozilla is playing along here, either, although I guess they didn't manage to get the word out that these tests are a load of bollocks for real world browsing.
On my aging PentiumD/2.8GHz:
The link on the front page goes to http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/11/12/037241/Firefox-4-Regains-Speed-Mojo-With-No-2-Placing which doesn't work. The same URL without "news." works.
I stopped using Firefox because it would use up large amounts of memory after only a couple of days and then start lagging every 30 seconds or so until I restarted it. That is related to page rendering performance since the lag directly affected it.
Sure JS speed is nice, but the reason I switched to Chrome was simple, the UI is actually responsive.
Launching new windows/tabs in FireFox is noticeably slow, whereas Chrome is almost instant. Rearranging tabs, slow on FireFox, snappy on Chrome.
Try loading a large page in FireFox, while its being rendered the entire UI locks up tight. When I do Google searches I tend to open 10-20 tabs at once with the results I find interesting, then go back and look at them all. Again with FireFox this is a slow operation with the UI locking up everytime a new tab opens, whereas with Chrome it feels natural with no slowdown at all.