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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
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?
Is it suddenly slashdots job to sell you on IE and Win7?