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Firefox 4 RC Vs. IE9 RC: the First Duel
An anonymous reader writes "Firefox 4 vs. IE9 is going to be an epic battle in a reigniting browser war in which Microsoft wants its IE to be seen as a capable browser again. Mozilla struggled to keep the pace with Chrome and IE9, but is about to release the first release candidate, which is expected to be the final version of Firefox 4 as well. This first review of JavaScript, Flash and HTML5 tests seems to indicate that both browsers are about even at the bottom line, while Firefox has the JavaScript edge and IE is ahead in HTML5 performance."
Unfortunately, Beta 12 introduced a crazy printing glitch on my local setup, so I hope by the RC they put enough stuff in order to make it go away again. I rolled back to Beta 11 and sent them a Feedback.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
After a while they just become samey and it's like arguing over which word processor is best - the one that loads 13% faster or the one that runs spellchecker 8% faster.
I put my books on Amazon, Smashwords, Demonoid, ISOHunt and Pirate Bay. Search for 'Michael Cargill'
Or even compatibility reasons. And I'm definitely not an MS hater. I use it because of the well implemented and widely used plugin system. IE has something similar but it's just not as well done and doesn't have as rich an ecosystem. So I don't really care about a 10% difference here, or an 8.5% difference there that I will never notice anyway.
"which is expected to be the final version of Firefox as well."
What the hell is with the summaries lately?
You didn't get the quarterly /. memo? We're Google Chrome fanboys and girls now -- Mozilla is right out.
The last time somebody tested these browsers using Microsoft's Fishtank, Firefox 4 Beta won. I wonder who wins the Fishtank test this time.
FF wins for flexibility, configurability and extensibility, the things that matter to most people on this site.
Things like speed and standards compliance are becoming irrelevant, as all 4 modern browsers are more than good enough. It's things like interface and how you can extend and configure the browser. In this Chrome is last, then IE, the Opera with Firefox coming in first, which is why it will be in the lead for a while.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
For 100 points, does your browser run on the huge installed base of WindowsXP?
Dang, we'll be limited to IE8 features until at least 2013...
The Flash text benchmark is highly suspicious. IE9 posts by far the worst score for that benchmark on one machine, then beats FF on the same test on another machine. Without any description of testing methodology, I can only assume the benchmarking procedure is totally broken (e.g. maybe they only ran each one once) and so the results are best taken with a pinch of salt, even if they're not entirely useless.
Firefox 4 has 86% of HTML5 features while IE9 only has 59% of HTML5 features.
Chrome 9, which is released already, not beta support 87% of HTML5 features.
Source: http://www.caniuse.com/
(Go to bottom of page for the summary caniuse.com should've put at top of their page)
That is possibly a reference to this.
Poster misunderstood the changing Firefox release strategy
The expectation is an increased number of Firefox releases after version 4, but the changes between any two releases may not be as dramatic as the current approach.
Microsoft always cares about being number 1 in everything. Sometimes they stick their noses where it doesn't belong. They can't accept to lose in something. Yet if they really cared they would put more thought into their products before they released them and focus more on fixes rather than trying to constantly come out with a product to trump someone else.
I don't know how IE has an HTML5 advantage since they have to do a WebGL conversion to DirectX which causes all renders to take 3X as long. You can hear it talked about in this demo from Fractallab(http://www.boingboing.net/2011/03/07/tom-subblue-reddard.html#comments) an online fractal generator built in HTML5 using WebGL.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Actually, I recently switched from Chrome back to Firefox around 4b9, and Firefox performs _MUCH_ better, especially (for some strange reason) with Flash content. Running Flash on Chrome used to make my entire system slow to a crawl.
The people that actually care about this have either made the switch already or have stuck with IE through it all, for whatever reason. Most of the end users I deal with that are on IE either don't have a clear concept of what a browser even is, or basically state they hate change and they've always used IE because "it's good enough" (likely because of all the IE workarounds we web developers have been forced to employ).
Don't get me wrong - from a web development standpoint I'm ecstatic Microsoft is trying hard to improve IE's standards support and functionality. But I just don't believe IE 9's performance is going to make a significant impact on people's perceptions of it.
#DeleteChrome
When chrome allows for even basic customization, then it might be in the race.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
Sunspider is a redundant test -- as are Kraken, V8, and the rest of them. Synthetic benchmarks are inherently flawed and we should all pay far less attention to them, but they happen to be easy to convey and chart (much like flawed compliance "tests" like Acid3 and html5test).
That said, there was almost certainly no cheating. That was a valid optimization. What was identified was a boundary condition in the JIT, which took two syntactically identical statements, which were not lexically identical, and showed that only one was optimized out. People who don't have any idea how to make an optimizing compiler decided that the only way this could happen was cheating, leaving out mistakes or intentional heuristics.
The problem with that theory is that it would be more difficult to develop a cheating optimizing compiler with the characteristics it had, for that situation, than to actually come up with an optimization, so it's outright absurd. The guy who discovered the discrepancy never called it cheating.
The RC scores the same in those tests now. I bet it was something simple like doing a quick one-line dead code elimination pass before the full dead code elimination heuristics decided whether to bother trying.
Chrome, Firefox, Opera, whatever. IE loses.
My conclusion is "FINALLY".
IE till lags Firefox and Chrome in some of the larger "real world" benchmarks, but compared with prior iterations of IE, the improvements to V9 are nothing short of stunning. Similarly Firefox 4 Beta 12 cooks over 3.6.15 -- but even 3.6.15 has improved dramatically over prior 3.6 versions. The big stunner for me is how close all of the browsers are becoming in performance, while taking slightly different directions in browser tabs, menus, etc. -- but that most of the "nasty trick tests" I know for XHTML and CSS through what we sorta call "2.1" don't fail in any of the new browsers. (I've been stuck in VB land for the last year, so I can't claim enough knowledge to test either HTML5 or the CSS 3.X stuff at this point).
Anyway, what that means for me as a professional coder is that now I can concentrate on cross-PLATFORM applications, instead of cross-BROWSER. Which is nothing short of the best news I've had this year in terms of IT work.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
"which is expected to be the final version of Firefox as well."
What the hell is with the summaries lately?
Maybe it's been edited since you saw it, but right now it says "which is expected to be the final version of Firefox 4 as well." I agree that it's pretty poorly worded, but it should be obvious enough that it means that the release candidate will become the 4.0 release (i.e. they aren't planning another release candidate).
...but as a developer I just hope IE 9 conforms to standards. Firefox will. Javascript/CSS is all happy and fun until you need to account for IE's quirks.
QUOTE: "Ever wondered why Firefox is only just approaching version 4 after more than 6 years, when Chrome is up to version 9 in just over 2 years?"
No because I don't give a fuck about things that don't matter.
The new policy is pretty ridiculous when you think about it. Chrome and Firefox will be up to version 40-something by the end of the decade. IMHO it's more logical to avoid such large numbers by using decimal points. Release 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 this year, not 5, 6, 7.
Looks like marketers have taken over. "Bigger numbers seller better! Let's release Firefox 15 as soon as possible!"
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
Last time I checked, IE9 won't work on Windows XP... which is still the OS with the most market share. Many users like myself won't be abandoning XP any time soon, unless it is for a Mac or our Linux partitions. Since modern PC games suck and they contain more malware than gameplay), gaming is no reason for me to "upgrade the OS". I do not buy mainstream PC games any more.
So, can someone tell me why I should go with IE9 over Firefox, especially when I don't even have that choice unless I shell out for an OS upgrade?
Since you posted twice I know you're trolling, but I'll bite for anyone that doesn't know better. HTML 5 is in a draft state, much of it's functionality is still in flux with some parts being more stable than others. At this point we can't fault a vendor for not wanting to be stuck with an implementation that's broken later because they implemented an earlier draft.
I am using the Firefox 4 RC 1 and my native screen resolution is 1920x1080 (DPI adjusted to 150%). Firefox still ignores my DPI setting (Windows 7 OS). Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari are already aware of DPI settings. Why not Firefox?
Only if you don't use any Firefox plugins.
Slow when? doing what? FF is plenty fast on my 10.04 x86 box and my 10.10 x64 box doing general browsing and with Flash sites.
Good grief, give the drama a rest, will ya. It is only going to be an epic battle in the minds of those who count up page hits as a measure of self-importance.
It's about open standards. The reason we root for firefox is because Mozilla's goal is not to dominate the web, but to push open standards that can be used by everybody (including Microsoft).
Microsoft's goal, obviously, is purely to dominate. The only reason we see them adopting web standards now is because IE's market share has dropped like a rock over the past 5 years. They have no choice, and we can thank Firefox for that.
So you pit the two browsers currently losing market share against each other? Granted IE far more than Firefox, but the standard to beat right now is Chrome. Look at the graph. There's only browser going up is Chrome. Maybe IE9 and FF4 can stop their customers bleeding away, but they have a long road to get on the offensive - particularly IE.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I've been switching back to Firefox for my primary since I can't seem to run Chrome on my other monitor in Win7 while also running a "fullscreen windowed" game at the same time without the whole machine completely locking up.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
IMHO it's more logical to avoid such large numbers by using decimal points. Release 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 this year, not 5, 6, 7.
That's only a clear win if there's some notion of compatibility (either programmatic or user experience) that you're maintaining among the 4.x releases, and even then it may not be. E.g. I find the progression of Linux kernel versions to be increasingly ridiculous; I'd rather see "the current stable release is 37.2 and the current unstable release is 38-rc7" than "the current stable release is 2.6.37.2 and the current unstable is 2.6.38-rc7".
If you stick to the point releases when there's no discernible big jump in features or whatever in a new release, as is what Linux is doing and what Mozilla wants to do, you've just turned "Chrome and Firefox will be up to version 40-something" to "Chrome and Firefox will be up to version 4.40-something", because if there are no stand-out updates, when do you bump the major revision number?
Looks like marketers have taken over. "Bigger numbers seller better! Let's release Firefox 15 as soon as possible!"
Ah, but the "big number" thing doesn't roll around, 9 sounds more than 11. The 6990 is a much faster and higher model than the 7230. Every time you get there, you like to reset your number scheme somehow, like for example OS X. Could they have continued with 11, 12, 13 etc? Yes, but it doesn't sound that good. Instead they just "froze" the version and technically haven't had a major version upgrade in 9 years. I'm sure you all realize that is bullshit though, that "10.6" is actually OS XVI. I wager that pretty soon both IE and Chrome will change version numbering, oddly enough Opera hasn't yet...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
They count e.g. support for specific video codecs (H.264, WebM or Theora) or WOFF fonts as "HTML5 features", which they aren't. Neither are MathML nor WebGL.
I don't use any FF plugins, obviously :)
About the only one I really needed was firebug, and that comes builtin for chrome, and stuff like adblock etc. there's plenty going around for chrome, even the web-developer toolbar has been ported (not that I need that much).
Experiments and other stuff
Firefox 4 could possibly stop the market share bleeding, but it does not have the unique feature set and appeal to win users back from Chrome
Strange conclusion, when they didn't compare the browser to Chrome in the article, but IE 9. I'm not showing a preference for either of these browsers involved - I just thought it was late in the article to start talking of a completely different web browser...
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Paraphrased somewhat with an additional comment.
Both browsers are fast JavaScript browsers and the differences are unlikely to be noticed in average browsing today.
Firefox 4 and IE9 are substantially upgraded browsers when compared to their predecessors and show few weaknesses in any benchmark.
It is obvious that Firefox has a great JavaScript engine.
IE9s hardware acceleration engine is the one to beat.
Firefox's only real competition is Chrome for the standpont of what the author calls and unexplained "unique feature set" which IE9 appears to lack altogether.
So it's a draw on performance. No evaluation was done from the very important security standpoint. The most striking difference not commented upon but highlighted by the results is the poor performance of the Intel graphics chipset in both browsers.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
You do realize that IE is not supposed to run on Linux? (Which I assume you are using, given the inclusion of the kernel number in your post)
Forgive me if your post is meant as sarcasm-I've been dealing with a lot of dumb people lately.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
Don't forget the countless people on older Windows software that won't be supported. MS fanboys claim that this because IE9 needs the unique features of late Windows versions, despite Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari having the same features and can run on older OS'es some can even run on Linux.
What does that say about MS? Either they are not as capable as their competitors or not as willing.
Make no mistake. MS has NOT changed its attitude. It will simply do IE9 hoping it can dominate again, then ignore it. MS still hates the open web.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I thought that IE 9, with its much-improved standards compliance, was also going to support MathML. After seeing your post I did a quick search and found that it turns out that IE 9 doesn't even allow good MathML support with the proprietary (but free) MathPlayer plugin. Since this is one of the few features I have a reason to care about, I'm quite disappointed.
How about IE9's relatively shit CSS3 support?
Any concerns of broken implementation could be alleviated with the -ms- prefix.
Granted it is much better than IE8 and below, but for stuff like text-shadow, there's really no excuse not to have it at this point
Whoops, left out a delimiting quotation mark, should have previewed. Trying again:
I thought that IE 9, with its much-improved standards compliance, was also going to support MathML. After seeing your post I did a quick search and found that it turns out that IE 9 doesn't even allow HTML5+MathML support with the proprietary (but free) MathPlayer plugin. Since this is one of the few features I have a reason to care about, I'm quite disappointed.
Firefox will continue to be standards compliant and MSIE will continue to be a standard complaint.
Microsoft has too much invested in its old tech and backward compatibility. Furthermore, it still has too much to gain from "everyone else's browsers seem broken while MSIE works just fine" which is still a pervasive perception among users.
(This has a chance to change, though, as MSIE9 will be clearly unavailable to WinXP users, web sites will begin updating to support MSIE9 leaving MSIE8 users less supported and they just might try out an "alternative" such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Opera.)
In the end, it is not in Microsoft's interests to write a standards compliant browser and so they won't. They will "make efforts" but they will not fix the problems that make all other browsers seem broken by comparison. I see nothing that can or will motivate them at this time.
Still, I want to see a 100/100 score on the Acid test. Yes, I know it means less than I think it does, and the main reason why is Firefox's lack of support for SVG fonts, but I still want that 100/100 score. (But I would also like to see the Acid test site update itself to randomly selecting "test questions" so that Microsoft can't simply write their browser to appear to score higher when it actually doesn't in practical usage.)
Because "the blue e" still spells "internet" for a huge portion of the users out there.
I tried installing this "Linuz" colonel on my XP box, but it just wouldn't install. Bummer.
Your replies on Moz stories are appreciated.
This is the exact reason most IT personnel I've met have advised I NOT use IE.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Does changing layout.css.dpi make any difference?
God, slashdot is so 2008.
Get with the program - 3D HTML6 is the way to roll!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I can't get IE to install on my iPad.
How come?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
No it just depends on what you expect from your release. Providing the feature upgrades are consistent I see no reason why going with your approach we won't end up with version 4.20 by the end of the decade. The only difference is if you take this approach eventually someone is going to expect that you will release a version 5 that is somehow the second coming of Christ.
You can always go down the AutoCAD or MS Office route and start naming your release by the year.
Not sure how trying to build a better product in an area MS has had enormous success in constitutes sticking "their noses where it doesn't belong". Besides, the existence of MS's shitty browser (along with the shittiness of our old friend Netscape) was one of the catalysts for the development of Firefox in the first place. Competition is a good thing.
It's the same with Windows "7". Did someone lose count?
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
It's the same with Windows "7". Did someone lose count?
Nope. Windows 7 is version 6.1 anyway:
I hate the fact that Windows "7" is version 6.1; I can see future support people asking are you using version 7.0 or Windows 7?
Tim S.
Thats about the philosophy that Emacs adopted. The current version in development, 23.3, would have been 1.23.3 under the original numbering scheme. But then they realized they were probably never going to bump the major version again and so they might as well drop it. Makes a lot of sense to me, honestly.
What is logical about using decimal points to avoid large numbers? It's all arbitrary.
When I test IE9 under Kraken it goes bottom up and crashes the page. Maybe that is just the 64bit version. They aren't 'very close' a all. On some scores they are similar on others IE9 is over X10 slower. Do your own testing and don't believe anyone.
The average joe doesn't understand how Microsoft's ownership of the browser market was a serious setback for technology, for user experience, for productivity. For five years MS had nothing better to offer than IE6 because they owned the market. They didn't need to rev their browser because they weren't competing. Five years, from 2001 to 2006. The Great Languish. Or maybe The Great Rot. How many Windows systems did you have to clean up for friends and family? How fun was it coping with all the standards noncompliance? Thanks a lot, Microsoft. I don't ever want that again.
So, for one thing, I will fight Microsoft's domination of the market by being against them so long as they're over, say, 1/3 the market. (I don't think the platform (OS/browser) is really a commodity until it shows greater signs of market variance.) And for another, I will push for the best and most standards compliant alternatives to cover whatever ground MS loses.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Internet-explorer-usage-data.svg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Web_browser_usage_share.svg
We're not quite there yet. The browser wars aren't over.
If the people who in effect vote by their choice of browser don't know what kind of effect they're having, it's my responsibility as a technology aware friend and netizen to encourage their better choices.
I once told some "techs" at a computer store that I was running Windows version 6.1 it only confuses them.
Needless to say I lost all faith in computer stores
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Just be a bit patient...
http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/news/55