Firefox 8 20% Faster Than Firefox 5

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."

Comments

What about Firefox 6?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know it's been said before, but this new release system is fucking retarded.

I'm this close to dumping Firefox on every machine I touch.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[Tukz]

Tell that to the extentions that constantly break on new major version.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[Errtu76]

Is it possible to check compatibility of installed extensions before your upgrade? Other than going to the homepage of each extension, that is.

If not, that would be a nice option:

"A new version of firefox is available. Checking list of extensions for compatibilty issues ... Done! From 10 installed extensions, the following are incompatible with the new version. Would you still like to upgrade?"

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[BitZtream]

It is now. It wasn't once before. At one point, version numbers had meaning, that is until marketing and people such as yourself decided it really didn't matter.

I've worked doing both support and development and for me, a version number is not 'just a number'. It tells me something about what I can expect.

The number should be as follows: major.minor.patch.build

A major version bump means there WILL be compatibility issues. API changes require a major bump. Massive UI/Feature changes warrent a major bump a lot of the time.

A minor version number means it probably won't break anything unless you have some dependency on a specific bug that has been fixed, which should be unlikely if you followed documented APIs and such. May introduce minor new features, should mostly be features that you missed on the release or where incomplete due to deadlines. Occasionally the 'heh, I forgot that obvious small feature that makes a world of difference' goes here, but for the most part this should be reserved for fixes that may accidently break compatibility.

A patch version number change means you shouldn't notice any difference other than a security/bug fix.
The build number is a unique identifier for the developer to reference internally as an exact point in time snapshot of the package. Thats the number that allows the dev to reproduce the exact same build.

With the exception of a major number change, all other changes shouldn't result in massive breakages, for instance a major version change is the only thing that should break Firefox plugins en masse, and it should be avoided if there is any possible way to do so.

I want to know what to expect from an upgrade, traditional version numbers help me at a glance determine my risk.

Firefox (and Chrome) is taking an approach that I could only describe as amateur and completely lacking of any experience of having to support someone elses software product. It indicates you (Mozilla) don't give a flying fuck about what happens to the people who use the browser or what their experience is like, just that they get their way.

And for the record, going from 4.05 to 4.08 generally would result in my response being something like:

Great, another Firefox release, wonder how much this one breaks?

The only people who randomly see a new version of software and get excited for no reason aren't relevant to this conversation. Normal people (the majority of us) have better things to do than worry about the latest release of Firefox. Anyone who does get excited needs to seek counseling.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention you are losing extremely important information that the classic versioning system gave us, which is why we had it in the first place...when there are gonna be major changes to the code. with the old system if it was a change from .01 to point 02 it was a bug fix, those rarely broke things and if they code was well written a change from .10 to point .20 rarely broke major things although their might be some minor niggles. It was the 1.0 to 2.0 you had to watch out for as THAT is what bit you in the ass.

Ultimately I think this move is gonna be a major victory....for Chrome The Google juggernaut will make even larger gains thanks to this dickish move and here is why: People tend to use at home what they learn and use at work and no admin with any sense is gonna touch FF now, and most importantly even little guys with not nearly as many people to support as an enterprise are now dumping FF because i don't know when they are gonna break extensions myself and my customers depend on. Finally let us not forget that most extension developers are doing this in their spare time and/or for donations an the crazy release schedule with the 'fuck you, jump on board or piss off" attitude is causing quite a few to spend a LOT less time worrying about the FF extension and instead working on Chrome.

Lets be honest folks, the extension framework was the only real selling point to FF anymore. Their GUI was becoming more of a Chrome ripoff by the day, in performance tests Chrome and Opera regularly stomped them, all that was left is the extension framework. So what do they do? Take a big old shit on the extension developers!

This is why I have switched and am switching my users to Comodo Dragon, based on Chromium. So far I have upgraded from Dragon 6 through Dragon 12 without a SINGLE extension breaking, whereas I lost about a third of my extensions going from 4 to 5, including those like the Avast site rating that helped my customers to avoid dodgy sites. The only extension I had on FF I don't have on Dragon is NoScript and as I understand it the Chromium guys are working on an API that will give NoScript the hooks it needs.

And sorry about the length but as someone who used Firefox before it was even called Firefox, and the Suite before that, this really saddens me. Mozilla has become the rebirth of Netscape, with an arrogant leadership whose code simply can't back up their arrogant attitude. So from me and my customers Mozilla so long and thanks for all the fish.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[toriver]

Because "if our plugins didn't fail to run because Firefox decided to throw version number semantics overboard, they would be running 20% faster" is not a good position to be in.

Wow, talk about version inflation

[Fnkmaster]

You fools are only benchmarking Firefox 8!! Well I benchmarked Firefox 14 and it's plus 10 faster than Firefox 4.

I appreciate the benefits of rapid versioning and release cycles, but really, this is ridiculous.

Not all addons are on AMO nor in pure JS

[tepples]

Anonymous Coward wrote:

If your addon is on addons.mozilla.org

Does addons.mozilla.org offer private hosting of bespoke addons used by a single company? Does addons.mozilla.org offer hosting of addons whose use requires payment? Or is addons.mozilla.org intended solely for addons intended for public use at no charge?

they've begun automatically testing addons for compatibility

I seem to remember reading that any add-on incorporating a native code component will automatically fail the test.