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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).'"
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.
I'm liking FF4 so far. I was using Chrome but they never fixed my endless "Sending request" bug, no matter how many times I and others reported it, so I'm giving up on them for now.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Google are rubbish at responding to bugs. If they respond at all, it's often a joke.
I'm not using Chrome until there's a menu item for bookmarks. I'm not giving up a whole row just to get to the bookmark button.
You mean like http://arewefastyet.com/?
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!
The Mac version has a Bookmarks menu, but that's simply due to the fact that the menu bar shows context menus for any open app. The minimalist approach to chrome is a bit irritating sometimes. I also get irritated with the single 'options' button on IE. Sometimes it makes sense to have various context menus available for easy access. I have to wonder why they didn't take the same approach with IE that they did with explorer, where a hotkey would cause the menu's to appear when needed, and disappear when the key was released.
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...
Funny enough, Firefox' "broken" fonts are thanks to using the same DirectWrite that IE9 uses. However, MS disables DWrite for fonts and uses GDI instead when running sites in compatibility mode. When running in standards mode, IE9 and Firefox have identical font rendering (there's a big MozillaZine forum thread with screenshots if you're interested). Also, some recent MS hotfixes for DWrite have noticeably improved font rendering. Have you used a recent beta with an updated system? But in the end, if you're not happy with the font rendering, you can always disable the hardware acceleration through the options.
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.