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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."
Your post could've been here if you had a faster web browser.
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.
Firefox 6 is so out of date, my parents will probably use it when it comes out.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
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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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.
Do you have any idea how it complicates Web contracts? We used to be able to say "your website will be compatible with current version-2 of the browsers" but now that would be ridiculous. We'd never be able to deliver since we would be stuck in a infinite testing loop.
We'll have to start writing "your website will be compatible with Firefox 5" and by the time we deliver Firefox 12 will be available. I guess we'll have to add a clause about how Microsoft, Google and Firefox are all teenagers who compare their peni- I mean version numbers to feel good about themselves.
Apple aren't being childish with the whole issue and using sane version numbers. And Opera has been out for quite a long time, though they do seem to be jumping into the version bandwagon as of late.
Feel free to explain to me how that's possible on a system with 12 GB of memory, while Firefox is using 700MB, and I have no other applications running.
And before I forget, I have an SSD, so I often don't even notice it when applications really do start swapping. Nonetheless, on one of the faster desktop PCs money can buy, Firefox freezes regularly.
It's doing it right now, pausing for a about 500ms before responding to keystrokes every 10 seconds or so.
It also does it on my work laptop, which has 8GB of memory, and also has an SSD, but on that it can be worse, freezing for 3-4 seconds at a time.
By my calculations, if Firefox had started this version numbering scheme with its start in 2004, we would now be running Firefox 61.
If they Mozilla had adopted it in 1998, this would be Firefox 113.
Bonkazoids.
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.
From what I can tell, Mozilla seems to have four versions of Firefox being developed and/or maintained at any given time:
Current - Whatever is currently released. Only bugfixes usually get ported to this release. Currently FF5.
Beta - Feature-frozen and reasonably stable, but not quite ready for prime time. Will be the next release. Currently FF6.
Aurora - Feature-frozen, but not stable. Early QA happens here, though it gets more fleshed out in Beta. Currently FF7.
Nightly - This is where the new feature development happens. Currently FF8.
When it's time for release, everything gets promoted: when FF6 is released, FF7 will become Beta, FF8 will become Aurora, and new development will start on FF9.
I kind of like the idea of putting new code through two entire cycles of public testing. All the same, I do wish that Mozilla would add a Long-Term Support cycle every few versions, akin to Ubuntu's LTS cycle, that people could count on to be supported for more than just a couple of months.
It is true that sane IT departments upgrade their browsers regularly, but not all IT departments are driven by sanity. This is a sad fact that Mozilla needs to account for, and there's a tested model out there that isn't too dissimilar to Mozilla's own. They should seriously look into adapting the differences.
Wait until FF automatically disables your plugins because the next "Major" version isn't supported. I am not sure if this is fixed yet, but it has cause me to set all my browsers in our company not to automatically upgrade due to a needed plugin.
no. Why? because it's called seamonkey.
I am already using version 21, its the pre pre pre alpha pre beta pre pre gamma delta pre RC pre build, I'm so bleeding edge I have to buy tampons at the store. My insurance company wont even insure my computer because all my software are practically from the future.
Can I light a sig ?
Seriously. I wish they would change the name. I'm embarrassed to tell people what browser I use because the name is so stupid.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
My poor little SeaMonkey is only up to 2.1. Somebody obviously needs to get their sh*t together!
Well, SeaMonkey 2.2 has been out for three days now...
Most of the comments have been about the version numbering...
I'm curious about the change to rendering. It seems to me they're saying, "these OS layout engines (Quartz et al) are too slow - we'll just route around them". Understandable, but it's kind of a shame that they'll presumably be re-solving a lot of the problems that Quartz et al deal with (e.g. are they going to do their own font rendering?), and I wonder why their concerns can't be addressed by altering Quartz.
I'm not criticising the decision, I'm just curious as to the reasoning that goes on when such decisions are made. (I'm always interested in the practical examples of why those lessons they drum into you at university about the myriad benefits of code reuse, standing on the shoulders of giants etc don't really pan out in the real world.)
Is the job they're doing fundamentally different? (such that rendering via Quartz was the wrong idea in the first place)
Is there some key component that fundamentally could not be in Quartz? (maybe, embedding videos or somesuch)
Is it that Quartz isn't open source (or Apple cooperative enough) and so Mozilla can't realistically get them to fix it in a sensible timescale?
Is it that they'd have to do this with all the vendors, which isn't feasible?
Is it that abstracting on top of different vendors' APIs turns out to be too much of a headache? (maybe a pure-Quartz implementation would be as fast as the OpenGL version but it's all the Mozilla layers above Quartz that are sub-optimal?)
I wonder if their rendering engine will be released as an independent library that Gnome/KDE etc could incorporate if they wanted to.
I had Firefox freeze up on my Ubuntu 10.04LTS machine regularly. Firefox turns "gray" when it happens, I can use the rest of the system. I first thought it was Flash-related, so I disabled it. That didn't fix it to my surprise. Googling a bit, some people suggested killing the profile. I did one step less, I cleared everything that is cached (Tools-Clear Recent History-Everything). That fixed it. The freezing is totally gone now.
I must admit that I have moved this profile from computer to computer, within different versions of Firefox (and probably even from when it was called Phoenix) and never bother to clean cookies or cache.
My guess is thus, that it is possible under certain conditions that the cached items are corrupted and impact on the performance of Firefox. It also makes it extremely hard to find, as basically, someone with the problem should sumbit their profile to the developers so they can look into it. That's surely not going to be me.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
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.
I have always had problems with Firefox streaming my 20 cameras through Zoneminder from my server. Invariably the whole machine would lock up within 2-3 minutes because Firefox was using up 90%+ of my 4gb RAM. I have just installed Firefox 7.0a2 and I have been streaming the cameras now for about 20 mins and Firefox is only using up 240mb. If this is any indication of where they are heading, then I think they have cured one of Firefox's largest issues - memory hogging.
Hopefully Adobe updates Square as it is still at version 10.1.
Preferably one that doesn't break my plugins every month. Thanks for the great use Mozilla, but I'm jumping ship to something that's more stable/supportable.
So that leaves out both Chrome(terrible plugins in comparison to Firefox) Firefox(batshit insane update schedule) and IE(...do i need to explain this one?)
Suggestions, slashdot?
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
The 32/64-bit situation for Mozilla right now is the following:
Linux: both 32-bit and 64-bit builds are available and supported starting with Firefox 4. Default download is probably 32-bit.
Mac: On 10.6+, the browser runs 64-bit by default and the plug-in process runs 32-bit. On 10.5, both run 32-bit due to OS-level bugs in 64-bit support.
Windows: Only 32-bit builds are supported. 64-bit builds exist, but are somewhat buggy. Shipping them involves fixing those bugs and addressing the issue about not being able to run 32-bit plug-ins in a 64-bit browser. On Mac, if you noticed, the solution is to use the built-in support for fat binaries and just ship both sets of code, using the 32-bit code for the plug-in process and 64-bit for the rest of the browser. Windows doesn't have such built-in support, so a similar solution would require some nontrivial work (and would of course about double the download size, unless the plug-in process stops being a copy of all of Gecko).
So long story short, 64-bit on Windows will happen, but it's not as simple as "flip the compiler switch".
Well, Mozilla gave you the finger a few slashdot articles back. They don't do corporate, stick to Internet Explorer for that.
When I saw "Firefox 8" in the title, I fell into a panic. What happened to 6 and 7? People weren't meant to upgrade their browsers to new major version numbers weekly! No one could possibly survive that pace, their mouse buttons will burn out at the furious pace necessary to install that often! Think of the effect that has on the women and children!
This is how I feel
It'll be alpha on Friday, beta on Sunday, released next wednesday and discontinued next friday.
By the way, is this true for Chrome, too? It's said to be parallel but by my experience (on a dual-core system) some other busy tab can quite efficiently jam the current one I'm browsing.
I tend to find it's DNS that causes the jam-everything problem. If your DNS is slow to respond, everything grinds to a halt.
FF just pushed me ("Strongly Recommended") to upgrade to Firefox 6. My favorite part is after the upgrade installs, then it runs a check to see which of my plugins are compatible. Hmm, you think maybe it would be a useful feature to run the check BEFORE doing the upgrade so then I can make an informed decision about whether to upgrade?
You can download it and see. In my testing, Firefox today kills Firefox from back then in performance. JS is about 30 times faster. Start-up is about 5 times faster. Rendering is much faster. UI responsiveness is way ahead. It's a slam dunk. Go get Firefox 1 for yourself and give it a try.
The author of this article only reports performance numbers for Microsoft's Windows OS and Mac OS X but fails to report the actual performance under Linux. Pretty pointless article with such limited numbers.
Pointless because it's only relevant to 98% of Firefox users? It would it be nice if every website reviewing Firefox has 6 machines (or VMs) so they could report on win32, win64, Mac32, Mac64, Lin32, and Lin64? Actually, make that about a dozen different OS versions. Win XP, Win Vista, Win 7, Mac OS X 10.5, Mac OS X 10.6, Mac OS X 10.7, Linux âz will all give different performance scores.
It's not pointless to be incomplete. It's difficult to be complete.
- A
I think it is time for an ask Slashdot. It appears that Firefox developers are going to ignore users requests to stop this numbering and release scheme. Which leaves a number of corporate and general web developers in a lurch.
I used to work for a web development company and it was always a pain to keep or get web-sites working with various versions of browsers.
With Chrome I would have told customers , "Hey, if it happens to works with Chrome that's just great, but we can't continually test against new versions of Chrome".
Now I work for a medium size company and we have limited the number of browsers our internal web interface will work with. Currently it is with Firefox. But now it appears that we are going to have to move away from Firefox. I hate to go back to IE but it appears that is where we are heading.
Sorry Firefox, but we can't just keep regression testing at your whim.
So maybe it is time for someone to ask, what is the recommended browser for corporate use?
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.
I think it's silly to dump both Chrome and Firefox because of their release systems (which are identical - both release a new major version number every 6 weeks).
I guess you can use other browsers than Chrome and Firefox. But those other browsers release new versions with new features very rarely. Is the *version number* enough of a reason to not use Chrome and Firefox? I don't think so - even though I thought it was silly when Chrome started with it, and when Firefox decided to do it as well.
Firefox 8 about equal with Chrome 14?
How can version 8 be as good as version 14?
Seriously, we're in danger of the average person thinking that one day, to the detriment of software development in general. Madness.