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Investigating the Performance of Firefox 4 and IE9
theweatherelectric writes "Mozilla's Robert O'Callahan has investigated the performance differences between Firefox 4 and IE9. He writes, 'As I explained in my last post, Microsoft's PR about "full hardware acceleration" is a myth. But it's true that some graphics benchmarks consistently report better scores for IE9 than for Firefox, so over the last few days I've been looking into that. Below I'll explain the details [of] what I've found about various commonly-cited benchmarks, but the summary is that the performance differences are explained by relatively small bugs in Firefox, bugs in IE9, and bugs in the benchmarks, not due to any major architectural issues in Firefox (as Microsoft would have you believe).'"
It's faster than a turtle!
Only benchmark I care is the real usage of web. Is there any benchmark available that tests sites such as top 30 sites listed on alexa.com, and have some automated usage profiles and compare load time, render time, memory usage etc.?
the summary is that the performance differences are explained by relatively small bugs in Firefox, bugs in IE9, and bugs in the benchmarks, not due to any major architectural issues in Firefox (as Microsoft would have you believe).
So MS is spouting some anti Firefox FUD? When did this start? How are we supposed to measure browsers against each other if one (or both) sides aren't telling the truth. My confidence is crushed ... just crushed.
About the only performance benchmark I care about is the legibility of fonts, ever since Firefox 4 broke their font rendering in pursuit of this pointless "faster than IE9" rendering battle.
Great, both browsers can now render useless browser animations really fast, I guess. Too bad this is entirely useless, as I never recall thinking "gee, I wish my web browser could draw this web page EVEN FASTER."
Instead it's generally "gee, I wish Firefox didn't require 1GB of memory for no reason" or "gee, I wish a single tab couldn't freeze the entire browser." (Neither of which are fixed in Firefox 4, incidentally.)
But never "wow, I wish pages that already draw imperceptibly fast drew faster."
Ach, yet another up-to-date yet incomplete picture of what is going on with the latest browser speeds. Great they've done the work, but my head is starting to spin from all the recent related posts on this matter.
Is there not a site/service that compiles speed/etc info from automated tests on browser nightlies/etc? Surely it can't be that hard (for someone, unlike me, who can programme :)?
MilkMiruku
I am not sure I even care, as long as pages load reasonably quick (this one loads in about 1-2 seconds using FF4 RC over a Roadrunner cable modem), that is fast enough for me. I am more interested in things that save ME time, like password addons, dragable tabs, quick zooms, form fillers, etc. I have about 10 add-ons to help with this and generally I do not even think about it. Maybe if I were running some ridiculous AJAX app, but come on, to load Slashdot or TMZ or whatever the average user uses?
Does the average user even notice? How many people sit around with a stop watch and complain a page took an extra 0.25 seconds to load?
no comment
Benchmarks that Microsoft use are inherently favoring Microsoft and benchmarks that Mozilla use are inherently favoring Mozilla. That's surprising isn't it?
At least I commend the investigative work done here and the fixes applied to FF4. I hope we can see those before the final release!
I'd be happy for Web sites that don't run crappy buggy lardy scripts that bring my quad-core to its knees, and browsers that quit jettisoning useful functionality. With Firefox you have to install plugins to mitigate its usability defects. Which is a loser game because FF upgrades break plugins and you can't count on plugin authors to keep up. For example, remember the good old days when the URL bar kept a chronological history of pages you had visited, so it was dead easy to go back in time? Not any more, now it's some weird thing that keeps sites I rarely visit in the list but not the most recent, and you have to faff around in the History menu. After all these years there is still no decent cookie manager. No one-click clear the URL bar. No one-click clear the Google search bar, and it used to keep a history of searches which was very handy but not anymore. eh, lusers don't count...
That's not biased at all. "Well, IE9 was faster, so I messed around, tweaked some settings and built a script to make FireFox faster...so Firefox is faster!" Well, why didn't you do that in IE9, too? At least do your best to make them both the fastest they could be.
I mean, yeah, if we had the same size car, and I put more motor in it than you and won, would that really be fair to say all of the models of my car are superior to the models of your car?
Jesus. Journalistic Integrity doesn't exist in nerdland, apparently.
i think it will be faster than others
What's stupid is the wrong stuff is being concentrated on.
If google maps loads in 3 or 4 seconds doesn't matter to me. What I want is for the whole browser not to hang its UI anytime one website is doing stuff. I hate opening tabs in the background and having the browser be unusable until they load.
And this is on a quad core i7, 8gb of ram.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
The very idea you need hardware acceleration to get acceptable performance out of a 2d browser is extremely suspect to me. Compared to what hardware is capable of when not subject to browsers abstraction there is still massive room for improvement in this space.
Personally all I want is to be able to load a web page containing a table of hundreds of thousands of rows while not having to use GBs of memory or wait 20 years for the page to render.
If you really want faster general purpose browsing performance fix the fricking ad networks.
Is Microsoft still doing that thing where IE9 detects standard Javascript benchmarks and cheats on them, or have they also figured out how to detect when people insert no-op statements into them and "optimise" those too?
Because it doesn't let the browser devs wave their e-penises around. The thing is that in terms of speed, all browsers are plenty fast enough for normal browsing. Your internet connection is the limit, or slow ass ad servers, not the browser. I haven't waited on my browser to render in ages. It is always some dumbass ad company who's server isn't responding that hangs the rendering of the page.
So the browsers don't compare that because it isn't somethign they can brag about. You'd have to cache the data just to remove network differences from messing up the results and then it would be something like "Oh look! We rendered the page in 0.02 seconds, slow ass IE took 0.025!" Nothing anyone would care about.
Memory usage is also ignored. Part of it is because it is something that is too abstract for most people so they don't care. Part of it is because many of the browsers don't look so good in that area. Firefox loses to IE rather badly in most of my informal tests, so it isn't something they are going to be interested in going on about. Of course there again it usually doesn't matter. RAM is cheap so who cares if a browser eats it up.
The browser benchmarks are largely contrived because they are good enough speed wise these days for the actual web that people use. The differences that people might notice, things like extensions, stability, etc are much harder to 'benchmark'.
That 'Mr Potato Gun' game is not fun at all. I played for about an hour but couldn't get past the first level. Thumbs down...
I rather stay with K-Meleon and start in less than 1 sec. (with KM loader).
Recipes for USA bankrupt - http://tinypaste.com/0d66f dd = dollar deluge (printed in the infinity)
The WebBrowsers out there now are excellent, agreed 110% here...
"none of the browsers are really that bad any more." - by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 12, @11:59AM (#35464140)
The ones in my list below (the "big 4") are ALL decent for speed, and yes, even security, lately:
(FF & IE "stepped up their game" here, on the "security-front"... imo @ least, and those 2 have, by the MOST of them all in the past 4-5 yrs. though)
I say this because I regularly "track/observe" the lists that SECUNIA.COM put out in the way of Operating Systems, (and yes, WebBrowsers: They're the "biggest achievers" I feel & the "Most Improved Players" of this bunch!)
The results though...?
Well - That is the true beauty of competition I feel, and we "end users" get the overall final benefits of it in superior software that's improving ALL the time, over time.
APK
P.S.=> Big Opera fan here, but Chrome's rivalling it in speed lately, & IE9 &/or FF aren't that far behind (at least from a "humanly observable position" for MOST tasks)... & javascript's been boosted in speed by ALL of them - however, security, that's been another "big improvement" too I feel, especially the past 4++ yrs. or so! apk