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

Re:have they fixed

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Half the Internet has reported that bug.

It's often caused by having a page in one tab doing something slow (loading from a slow server, lots of JS, something like that) and locking up all the other tabs because they aren't properly independent in Firefox.

Someone will be along shortly to bleat about how this will be fixed in Firefox 15 or something, because apparently it's now OK for anything that is mentioned in a footnote on a roadmap to be announced as if it's an existing feature in production builds, even if in reality it remains unproven and several months away from release at best. Don't believe me? Take a look at the subject of this discussion.