Firefox 8 20% Faster Than Firefox 5

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday July 11, 2011 @12:59AM from the pedal-on-the-right dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Thanks to continued improvements to start-up and first paint performance, tweaks to memory footprint and garbage collection, and the addition of a new 2D graphics backend called Azure, Firefox 8 is some 20% faster than Firefox 5 across all major metrics — and actually about equal with Chrome 14 on JavaScript and 2D rendering performance. Azure (which is new with Firefox 7) replaces Cairo, and instead of dealing with Direct2D and Quartz, it allows Firefox to deal directly with the Direct3D and OpenGL subsystems — resulting in a 20% speed boost under Windows, and probably even more under OS X."

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For those confused by Samantha+Wright · 2011-07-11 01:02 · Score: 5, Informative

FF8 is the nightly branch, FF7 is the smaller-than-beta branch ("aurora"), and FF6 is the alpha branch. Mozilla hasn't suddenly started to number their versions geometrically, although that would be hilarious.

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Great... yet another version of Firefox to support by leonbev · 2011-07-11 01:23 · Score: 5, Informative

We just got our web site rendering correctly under Firefox 5, and now there not one but THREE new versions in beta that we also need to test with.
Just a quick note from the web developers and web site QA testers around the world to the Firefox development team... you're really starting to piss us off.