RSSExpect 22.8% performance boost from next week's Firefox 3.6 beta
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published October 9, 2009, 4:39 PM
The developers at Mozilla have set next week as the tentative rollout window for the first public beta of Firefox 3.6 -- the first edition of the organization's big fixes for 3.5 where it's accepting analysis and advice from the general public. Betanews tests this week on a late version of the 3.6 beta preview, close to the organization's planned code freeze, indicate that users will be visibly pleased by what they see: Generally faster JavaScript execution and much faster page rendering will result in a browser that's almost one-fourth faster than its predecessor -- by our estimate, 22.78% faster on average.
Betanews tested the latest available development and stable builds of all five brands of Web browser, on all three modern Windows platforms -- XP SP3, Vista SP2, and Windows 7 RTM. Once again, we threw the kitchen sink at them: our new and stronger performance benchmark suite, consisting of experiments in all facets of rendering, mathematics, control, and even geometry. Like before, we use a slow browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, the previous version, running in Windows Vista SP2) as our 1.00 baseline, and we produce performance indices representing browsers' relative speed compared to IE7.
Averaging all three Windows platforms, the latest Beta 1 preview of Firefox 3.6 posts a Betanews CRPI score of 9.02 -- just better than nine times the performance of IE7. Compare this against a 7.34 score for the latest stable version of Firefox 3.5.3, and 7.81 for the latest daily build of the Firefox 3.5.4 bug fix.
When looking at the results broken down by platform, we've noticed that in the CRPI scores for Firefox's development builds, moving up through the latest Alpha of version 3.7, the Windows 7 score has been pulling closer to the XP score. Typically, XP has been the fastest platform by a noticeable margin; that hasn't been the case in the latest builds. This trend has definitely permeated Opera 10, whose stable and development builds on XP and Win7 are almost dead-even.
Still, Firefox 3.6's score on XP crossed over the 10 mark on our new index, with a 10.44 on that platform versus 9.09 for the current stable version 3.5.3, and 7.38 for version 3.6 on Vista.
For our long-time readers who watched browsers' performance scores before we added new tests to our comprehensive suite: You'll recall how during the development of Firefox 3.5, test builds flirted with a 10.00 score on the old index in Windows XP SP3, and only occasionally crossed that mark. Right now, using the old scoring system, Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 is scoring a 13.59 on XP -- moving into the territory that Google Chrome blazed when it first hit the scene.
For all its forward strides, the pace of Firefox's acceleration is finally approaching that of Chrome. That is, Firefox is getting faster at the rate Chrome is getting faster. Of course, Chrome's acceleration has been, and continues to be, meteoric, absorbing about one IE7's worth of performance in its development builds every two months. Having posted a CRPI score of 15.37 just one month ago, the latest stable build of Chrome 3.0.195.25 posted a score of 15.85 this week. (In strange but typical Google fashion, build 195.25 was posted to both the stable and beta channels simultaneously, for reasons known only to Google at the moment.)
While the Chrome 4 development builds had been lagging behind Chrome 3 somewhat, they're catching up nicely now with a CRPI score of 15.35. On Windows 7, Chrome 3 and Chrome 4 are almost dead even in performance (15.27 versus 15.23), and only two tenths of a point separate the stable and dev builds on Vista.
Next: Performance breakdowns by individual test...
Here it is!
http://ftp.mozilla.org/p...ates/build1/win32/en-US/
BN slow on the draw!
Score: 1
|That, my good fellow, is what we call a "release candidate." It is not the beta, regardless of what some other service that posted it as the beta may have told you.
http://www.betanews.com/...lity-control/1255625274
-SF "I Don't Draw Until I Have Something to Shoot" 3
Score: 1
|Yeah so where's the beta BN?
Score: 0
|I am a home user. You can't imagine how meaningless this stuff is to people like me. My internet works fine and the difference between 7.8 and 9.4 is not even noticeable.
All I can add as an average home user is I have tried all these browsers and have seen little difference in performance, and none of them have brought anything revolutionary to my desktop.
It's a good thing they are free cause they would not warrant me dumping ie8 in favor of any of them if I had to pay.
Score: 3
|Still no Firefox support for Aero Peek? Yawn.
Performance is second to feature set for me.
Maybe version 4 will earn a place on my PC.
Score: -2
|You mean Aero Peek for tabs within the browser as opposed to open windows? A cute feature that 99.9999% of people will never use.
Score: -4
|Your made-up "statistic" is meaningless and ridiculous.
It is a feature that I (and many others) use all day long and find invaluable.
I remember not too long ago people were claiming that tabbed browsing was a feature hardly anybody used. Now, we are finding it essential. Much like text messages sent from cellular phones.
Score: 1
|Aero Peek, Jump lists and progress in icon are scheduled for Firefox 3.6. Currently the corresponding bugs are marked as "blocking 1.9.2+" which means that Firefox 3.6 can't be released without those features implemented.
Score: -1
|Well, I must be part of the 0.0001 group then because I use it all the time when on Windows 7 (I'm a Mac person most of the time). It's actually quite neat to be able to navigate to a tab directly even when the browser windows isn't in the forefront. One of those small touches which make using an interface more comfortable.
Score: 0
|The latest nightly builds have Aero Peek and Jump lists.
http://ftp.mozilla.org/p...-US.win32.installer.exe
Score: -2
|"A cute feature that 99.9999% of people will never use."
Cute.
Got tired of being rational and decided to go trolling, did ya?
Glad you don't ever plan on using it. FYI, though: You !== Everyone else. Please keep that in mind.
Score: 0
|Yeah I love all the users here that switched to IE because it has Aero peek versus Firefox/chrome/Opera.
geeks aren't users. I'm pretty sure joe user isn't going to go looking at Aero peek for their tabs. I bet the average user on IE doesn't even know what a tab is!
Score: -3
|The average user is going to click the IE/firefox/chrome/(w/e) icon, and select the window (tab) they want when it is in the background...and not care one whit if it's a tab or a window.
"geeks aren't users"
Love that. I could have sworn I used a computer every day. But then, your original comment said nothing about geeks or users...just "people". A nice generality...which as you and everyone else here knows are almost always wrong. :) (Throwing in the percentage you pulled out of your *** was a nice touch as well....always bring the credibility way up there.)
Score: -1
|I suspect there are a few people around here that think we are talking about tab previews when hovering over a tab in the browser when really we are talking about previews on the taskbar. These people probably aren't running Win7 and have no clue. Any "user" is going to use Aero Peek unless they go out of their way to turn Aero off. If anything a "user" will use it more then a "geek" because geeks tend to turn Aero off because they think it is bloat. I enjoy being able to click FF on the taskbar and then middle click on all tabs I want to dispose of without bringing it to the foreground.
Score: -1
|I agree 150%, and I'll bet 65% of the folk who post here are also in agreement at least 50% of the time.
Score: 1
|I need my secret decoder ring to figure out that post. Hahaha.
Score: -1
|"If anything a "user" will use it more then a "geek" because geeks tend to turn Aero off because they think it is bloat."
Wrong.
A "true" geek would leave it on because they would know that disabling the Aero interface in Vista/7 would actually decrease graphics rendering performance.
Score: 2
|I just love Firefox
Score: -1
|0blio421, you got a thumbs-up for that ?
Score: 0
|But I'm running Windows Server 2003!
Score: -4
|I'm sorry to here that. Perhaps this will rescue you: http://bit.ly/14SnWW
Score: -5
|No need to wait for Firefox 3.6 for a 22.8% performance boost, Camino which also uses the gecko rendering engine is significantly faster than Firefox 3.5 especially from a cold boot up. I love this lightweight speedy little browser.
If you're on Windows, it sucks to be you but if you're on a Mac you definitely want to download this. Camino is also a Cocoa app and it integrates much better into a Mac environment.
Score: -8
|"If you're on Windows, it sucks to be you but if you're on a Mac you definitely want to download this."
Nobody cares about Mac. I laugh at comments like this where someone tries to make the Mac sound relevant. Oooh, you're so different, you're so hip, because you paid a premium for your PC hardware (yes, that's right) and you run a browser no one's ever heard of, on an operating system nobody cares about. Yaaaawn.
Score: 5
|Well, you guys do know that I am a MOFO and a SOB, so forgive me for my ignorance
Score: -1
|The current stable version of Camino uses Gecko 1.8.1, which is the same engine Firefox 2.0 used. It is slow, more so in pages with lots of JavaScript and especially when compared with browsers like Firefox 3.5, the latest Chrome or the latest Safari.
Camino 2, which is still in beta, uses Gecko 1.9.0, the same engine Firefox 3.0 used. That is, Camino still lags considerably behind.
I’d say that, as far as Gecko browsers go, it sucks much worse to be on OS X.
Score: 0
|On the IE 8 point, I agree drop IE 7 out of here and use IE 8 as the standard. Its the most used browser and the only browser that really matters. Yes, we can do the "maths" (I like that comment, it was funny but no offense is meant), but IE 7 has no relevance.
Also, I'm using Chrome now for browsing based on these tests, thanks! It still has a few kinks, but its incredibly fast.
Question about the tests: Are there any tweaks your including, or do you run the default installation? I'd also like to know the low-level network settings your using (ie. MTU, etc) just in case thats having a bearing on any browsers.
Keep up the good work!
Score: -1
|Actually, according to Net Applcations the most used browser worldwide is still IE6 (http://marketshare.hitsl...rket-share.aspx?qprid=2) so you might rethink the notion to use the most used browser as a baseline. ;-)
Score: -1
|Love Saturday over here at betanews, a new graph to peruse , another browser to try. The fastest browser now, is in fact Opera. Firefox is second, IE8 is third, and Chrome has just been deleted from my machine, because in the real world it's actually rather slow. Opera rocks bro, I am expecting today a number of thumbs up from those fine folk who may be visiting from the Opera forums.
Score: -4
|Interesting to hear you say that Opera is the fastest browser. I guess you are not really a good graph reader.
Score: 0
|LOL, because a bunch of graphs from artificial tests shows real performance, yeah :D
Score: -2
|LOL. because some Microsoft fanboy buys the Microsoft propaganda on how tests like these, which show how crappy IE is, are bogus. Can't win the test, so trash the test.
Score: -8
|Wrong fatty, blabbery is an Opera user.
Score: 0
|Unless Firefox has fixed the Insert key toggle, it's a non-starter for me. I use that key all the time for a remote job I have that does edits through the browser.
Score: -1
|heh, never noticed that. Is IE the only one that works on?
Score: 0
|Firefox is a bit sluggis, wouldnt mind a little performance boost, but not holding my fingers
Score: -1
|Yea I only wish Firefox could load faster and be more responsive. Page rendering/JavaScript performance improvements are not so noticeable compared to those.
Score: -1
|"but not holding my fingers"
Hehe...
Holding your breath? Crossing your fingers?
It's like Ziva David from NCIS. Beautiful...
Score: -2
|Yeh, I think we all wish it would be faster. I am a firefox user myself but you can't really say that the performance improvements aren't noticeable. Long term users like myself will notice the difference between the speeds of IE and Firefox. Chrome is faster but buggier than that of firefox (And I know that most chrome users would disagree with that statement.) But firefox is still the best of the bunch for me, and the development of 3.6 is just going to make it that much better and easier (and more secure/less buggy) to use.
Score: 0
|I go back and forth between Chrome and FF3.5.3. FF has a tad more functionality for me, but man Chrome just flies. Extensions are coming online for Chrome, the Fox better watch out...
Score: 4
|I'm sorry but numbers are too inflated. IE7 is no base nor benchmark for anything.
If i want to see how fast the latest Chrome development build is, i don't want to see it's 15 times faster than IE7. Or 15.85, doesn't make a stronger point either.
I want to know how much faster it is than IE8, then compare each browser against each other and see how much faster than IE8 they are. Not IE7.
In fact this breaks the purpose, makes getting a perspective harder and looser if anything.
What should i care now how much faster IE8 is to IE7?
Sorry, you've talked this a million times i know, but you're still defending nonsense. Please move on.
Score: 1
|This is why we provide all the charts, so people can stop complaining and do the math. IE8's CRPI is 1.75. So how much faster Chrome 4 is than IE8 is 15.85 / 1.75 = 9.057.
Maybe we should provide an instruction manual for calculators.
-SF3
Score: 6
|And we keep saying "just drop IE7." S'far as geeks are concerned IE6/7 are dead ends.
Also update your test platform with SSD's. Within a year I won't have any machines without them. My guess is they should level the playing field for browsers a bit better.
Score: -4
|Exactly. It's like comparing a Ferrari to a Model T...no comparison so they shouldn't try to make one.
Score: 0
|Just drop IE7. It's an irrelevance. Perhaps WE should provide an instruction manual for relevance and simplicity. The fact that one needs to do some maths to get the info you exampled proves the point that things are not as simple as they could be.
Score: 0
|Why drop IE6, it is the mostly widely used version of IE? You are right, IE 7 was irrelevant from day one.
Score: -4
|We shouldn't have to do that math. IE7 is "almost" (just to be politically correct) completely irrelevant. If any IE other than 8 counts it would be 6... but don't even think it.
DrTeeth said it in a way that may be clearer. Try it. No math nor manuals required.
Score: -1
|Chrome may get 100% but it does NOT pass Acid 3 yet.
To "pass" Acid 3 you have to match the reference rendering, which right now Chrome doesn't do just yet (I think it's the web font thing it fails... the bits in the upper right corner).
IMO you should award bonus points to browsers that get the reference rendering right AND get 100%, so that a browser that does get it right gets boosted above a browser that does not but still gets !00%. I don't think any pass it yet though so it wouldn't really change much ATM. :)
Also you'll notice if you click on the A it'll tell you which tests were a bit slow in running... perhaps bonus points can also be awarded for having lesser entries here?
Your current method for scoring the browsers is great, just those little things bugged me. :)
Score: 0
|Considering its a performance index, which ACID3 really has nothing to do with, I don't see how adding bonus points for rendering it correctly is even relevant in this case.
Score: 0
|I just tested acid 3 on the dev version of chrome and it passed (100%)
Score: -1
|