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Firefox 4 Beta 8 Up
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has released a new beta of Firefox 4 this morning. Originally intended as a quick update for the feature-complete Beta 7 release, the new Beta includes 1415 bugfixes, a fine-tuned add-ons manager, improved WebGL support as well as URL bar enhancements."
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2010/10/are_we_fast_yet.html
That benchmark is a bit old (two months ago), but you get the idea.
It has been a turd since this summer, mostly due to the bug in the SQL code which
killed interactive performance. It was repaired this week and should make beta9. It
is also in recent 3.6 builds so mainline firefox is almost unbearable.
Meaningless javascript benchmarks are not very useful for this sort of bug- which
gives 10 second hangs when working with history or bookmarks.
Bug number 595530
You may wish to re-try this on FF 4. There has been significant work put in to reducing disk access in Firefox:
There is also a tracking bug for bad I/O patterns available, so you can see what they're up to.
As a long time Firefox user, this has been one of the most infuriating things, as they continually remove or fuck up useful features. The Mozilla developers seem obsessed with changing things just to make them different. The list of things they have eliminated or made less useful is almost endless. I'm sure they can give us all sorts of rationalizations for what they do, but it's all bullshit. Making things less useful is not an improvement.
I'm a Firefox developer. I understand that it can seem that way, but trust me, a lot of thought goes into each change we make. I'm not saying we are always right, or even always right for most people - nobody's perfect. But I do think that overall we do a good job, in picking what to change, and for the specific stuff you dislike, most of it should be configurable through prefs.
But, I realize that doesn't help you, and I'm sorry that some of our changes are not to your taste.