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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."
because I was first!
I get 404s unless I change the url to slashdot.org/...
Isn't there some test that's like a consistent snapshot of popular websites, with some automation to navigate around them like a normal person would? You know, a performance test that actually might matter?
If you look at the graph you see this was coming for a long while now, the x64 version will also be fastest in a short while (presumably second to Opera - I don't know their x64 speed - but on windows Firefox x64 would be #1).
This is a great achievement from the development team who consistently improved the performance from 'quite bad' to 'competetively fast', so kudos to the developers. Please don't stop now, it seems you can still stretch performance quite a bit...
Which will be stupid, since the second page of TA is all about hardware rendering, which works even (partly) on XP, unlike IE9, and on the MacOSX.
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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 love stories who run like this: "Not-released-software A is faster than Not-released-software B". Great news! Carry on!
Grab an average computer, browse with Firefox, then browse with Opera or Chrome. You'll quickly see that these benchmarks mean nothing unless you are visiting a VERY javascript heavy website.
Plus the Aros interface of the menu/tab bars really makes the fonts unreadable
Cue the "Performance in browsers isn't just about Javascript!" comments.
Here's an example: I switched from Firefox to Chromium last year, but not because of Javascript performance. I did it because Firefox had a nasty habit of doing a bunch of housecleaning when it shut down (I don't know, but I assume it was doing huge updates on an internal SQL database or something like that.) That could cause it to lock up for many seconds after I hit the close button; sometimes the window manager would pop up a dialog asking me if I wanted to terminate the unresponsive app.
That behavior was infuriating, and Chromium always closes immediately. It was nice that Chromium has snappier page rendering, but it's not such a huge difference that it's totally compelling. If Firefox has addressed the shutdown issue in recent versions, I'd consider going back because the Chromium UI is so "stripped down" that they lack a few handy features that Firefox had.
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.
But when it comes to Firefox, I'd rather have a plugin that would allow the use of the operating system codecs (if available) to play HTML5 video encoded in h264. That, along with the built-in support for Ogg Theora and WebM, would allow us not to care about codecs from a user perspective.
the organizer/editor for bookmarks is so bad (eg, where is the export a folder of book marks to email function, where is the scan for rendundant book marks button, where is..)
when nevercooky is not in the default install
when the new addon webpage looks like a commercial for useless crap, instead of a guide to all of hte addons
when pdf handling still sucks in the default,and is, in my hands, number one cause of crashes
the browser lets other people see stuff like what type of browser I am running, and doesn't try to obscure this
new versions break old addons . . .
It's "JaegerMonkey" or "JägerMonkey" if your keyboard has umlaut available. But certainly not "JagerMonkey" - q.v. https://wiki.mozilla.org/JaegerMonkey
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
But performance in browsers isn't just about Javascript!
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I hope this performance improvement really shows in the release version of the program, and I hope it runs fairly lightweight on system resources. I've been using Firefox since my high school days and I really loved it up until a year ago or so. About the time Chrome came out, Firefox was eating up so many of my system resources (so what if I use six year old hardware, it's adequate!) that it was making it hard to get things done on my computer and have Firefox running simultaneously. I switched to Chrome for it's speed and small footprint but, honestly, internet with scripts enabled and crappy half-assed ad-blocking software is just too annoying. I'd love to return to Firefox soon. So here is crossing my fingers and hoping that the browser will run on an old Athlon 3200 processor with a single gig of pre-DDR2 memory.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Cue "we don't really care about performance", rather. I care about feature, compatibility, safety, stability... and not a jot about performance.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
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.
You know what? If a page takes 200 milliseconds longer to run because JS performance isn't quite as fast who cares?
None of these browser speed wars addresses the problem that when I watch Hulu on machines that aren't top-of-the-line state-of-the-art, the video is jumpy often to the point of unwatchability.
My pipe is fat enough and the computers I'm using can do fullscreen video just fine. It's Flash, especially on Linux, that kills performance. Most video sites still use Flash, as do a lot of those fun little games, etc., and the only only alternative to Flash in most cases is to go without the site or functionality. Flash is what makes web browsing slow. Every other performance issue is like line noise in comparison.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
People _say_ that, but when they vote with their feet (or mice, as the case may be) it turns out that they do care about it. Often subconsciously.
I keep a personal compilation of benchmark results from Peacekeeper's browser benchmark. I do not like their averaging of tests but I do like their individual tests. Due to this I keep the numbers in a Google Docs spreadsheet where I can easily look at them.
Here are my results, with Firefox 4b7 included. Beta 7 does not seem to be much faster than Beta 6, although in some tests it is a big leap from Firefox 3.6.8.
BTW, these are all ran on the same machine with no configuration changes and the same background processes running for all tests.
I'll see if i run SunSpider's benchmark later and add it to the versions I still have on my machine.
Firefox has a better extensions framework, better configurability, a better interface and better performance.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
I have had faster browsing times with Opera as well. My problem with Opera is that is not as usable as FF or Chrome. My biggest bugaboo with Opera is in trying to copy and paste from the window to my email so that I can send info to a friend. I do a lot of that and I cannot do it with Opera. It just will not copy and paste outside the browser itself. It works well from screen to screen within the browser but it just does not work from browser to message or anywhere else outside the browser itself. That makes it practically useless to me. Chrome and FF both do this very well. So long as I have relatively good speed and can copy and paste I am good to go, otherwise forget it. Used to have a problem with a lot of websites would not display correctly on Opera, especially if they were designed for IE but Opera seems to have solved that one in the latest release. This came up with real estate sites mostly that would not display the selection screen. Now if they just solve the copy and paste then I will bring it up as a potential for default browser.
This story makes me curious: how has JavaScript implementation speed improved over time? I see a lot of benchmarks comparing recent versions of browsers, but does anyone have a comparison against, say, Firefox 1.0? Also, how do current JavaScript implementations stack up against current implementations of other languages, such as C, Lua, or Python?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
In other news, OS X PowerPC was dropped and there is also a crazy talk about dropping anything=SSE3. They really lost the design philosophy of Firefox or anything Mozilla. What happened to portability especially when nobody likes their mobile offerings? How many times they must learn to think outside X86 PC?
Firefox in speed race with a company who controls/knows about every single device they shipped (Apple) and another who can spend couple of billions of dollars in no time without even noticing it (Google).
As a person who knows and always respected Mozilla mission, I feel obliged to post this although I know what kind of karma suicide it is.
I really wonder what kind of management took over Mozilla. I remember old days these guys spending hours to make it run/compile on OS/2, dead desktop OS, not completely documented and stabilized one like OS X 10.5.8 PPC.
What about Atom CPUs Mozilla guys? Drop that too as it will make you score less in couple of benchmarks? I heard netbooks are outfashioned, perhaps you should drop them next to keep yourselves cool (!)
You know what? If a page takes 200 milliseconds longer to run because JS performance isn't quite as fast who cares?
None of these browser speed wars addresses the problem that when I watch Hulu on machines that aren't top-of-the-line state-of-the-art, the video is jumpy often to the point of unwatchability.
My pipe is fat enough and the computers I'm using can do fullscreen video just fine. It's Flash, especially on Linux, that kills performance. Most video sites still use Flash, as do a lot of those fun little games, etc., and the only only alternative to Flash in most cases is to go without the site or functionality. Flash is what makes web browsing slow. Every other performance issue is like line noise in comparison.
Old times, when some company abandons/will abandon your computer/OS or you can't decide whether to join the herd (windows) or run linux/BSD, you always had Firefox at your mind. You would think it would have Firefox support and would run it one way or another.
Now, they dropped PowerPC binaries (because their cool looking addressbar not working) and speak about dropping anything below SSE3. Publicly that is...
Code is being infested by completely unportable x86 specific ASM to join cool kids with JS asm acceleration.
If they weren't afraid of Win32 users, they would drop X86 32bit in no time because 64bit runs 20% faster!" and they will have great fan feedback from idiots who have no clue about anything other than 64bit is faster.
Does Adobe support PowerPC? Yes they do. They have to do massive trickery on OS X (not hacks) but they do. Your Flash is probably slow because it doesn't do GPU decoding. If you use Linux, Adobe has a weird excuse. If you use OS X, they have a very good/justified excuse as Apple refused to add a central GPU decoding framework open to others (not private) until OS X 10.6.3. Running 10.5.8 on a production machine you can't update? Bad luck.
But performance in browsers isn't just about Javascript!
Whichever browser can run Farmville/Fronterville/Mafiawars (all facebook apps) the best will win over most people.
I have a modern-ish machine that runs Lord of the Ring Online quite well, but crawls when I looked up those apps.