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).'"

Comments

Real Benchmarks

[camcorder]

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.?

Re:Real Benchmarks

[sakdoctor]

Ultimate browser benchmark: Logging in, and posting on slashdot.

MS Firefox FUD?

[WrongSizeGlass]

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.

Re:MS Firefox FUD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pick a browser. If that works for you then well done. If you dont like it then pick another.
Politics, morals & fanboi-ism aside none of the browsers are really that bad any more.

Re:MS Firefox FUD?

[Per Abrahamsen]

> Joking aside, I am kind of curious what thuis "as microsoft would have you beiieve" comment is coming from.

This blog post, which was linked to in the article. Especially the last section ("Full Hardware Acceleration is the Difference") would lead the reader to believe that the difference was architectural.

Re:Firefox 4

[sandytaru]

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.

Re:Firefox 4

[Threni]

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.

So...

[Nemyst]

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!

Re:IE9: Readable fonts Firefox 4: Blur

[RebelWebmaster]

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.

NEVER hang the UI

[anethema]

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.