RSSMozilla posts yet another Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published June 19, 2009, 12:26 PM
It was apparent yesterday, after a test of the organization's latest private daily build of the Firefox 3.5 browser, that Mozilla's developers had discovered a jackpot of performance improvements in some specific areas: JavaScript math, RegEx (regular string expression) searches, and general control flow. Betanews tests yesterday gave the Thursday morning build 8% better overall speed in Windows 7 RC, and a better overall performance index score on that platform of 9.35 versus 8.81, relative to the performance of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista on the same physical machine.
Now it appears the team is willing to capitalize on that find. This morning, Mozilla's servers made available Release Candidate 2 of Firefox 3.5 to the general public. Again, the team makes these public builds available prior to a formal announcement, though word from Mozilla about RC1 was actually rather quiet this week. The possibility of an RC2 in the near term -- just days later -- may have been why.
Betanews has not yet tested this new RC2 build specifically, but if it incorporates the improvements to RC1, here is what Windows users can expect: Pages will render on Windows XP SP3 with 257% the speed of Firefox 3.0.11 (the current stable build), 246% the stable version's speed on Windows Vista SP2, and 259% the stable version's speed on Windows 7 RC. Yesterday's private build was 35% faster overall on Windows 7 RC than on Vista SP2, and 41% faster on Windows XP SP3 than Vista SP2.
Pretty much useless. I've decided to stop using Firefox until I see some real improvement and an end to the bizarre messages.
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|What messages?
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|This is some good news for the Mozilla Firefox fans i guess as the other browsers go on talking about their faster rendering speeds
Firefox is slowly getting up to them although this certainly wont matter after some days i think but
still the long time user are getting some solid reason to continue with their favorite browser.
I am certainly hoping to get a faster 3.5 than these release candidates.
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|There are no more secrets. I'm SURE that the open source engines (Firefox/Chrome) steal BIG (and small) algorithmic rendering efficiencies from one another. Of course, the closed source rendering engines (Opera/IE) steal from the open source without being stolen-back-from, so these, on one hand, will always have a THEORETICAL slight advantage IN THE LONG TERM, though, on the other hand, of course, they've proven very slow to react IN REALITY...
One thing is for sure -- nobody is gonna be king for more than a few months... Rendering speed will become less and less important in coming years. Browser choice IN ITSELF will become less and less important... All browsers will do 99% of what 99% of the average PC bstards will need... ;)
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|This is fast, yesterdays offering was ordinary, but this is very, very fast. I find it difficult to believe that yesterdays sluggard was related to this incredible bit of gear. It's my new default, second new default of the week. The thing is in the real world, that would be the sites I visit this is the fastest browser I've used, IE 8 did hold that title, but no more. Just need to get the security sorted, having been decidedly iffy on that front of late, heck it's needed more patches than Apple.
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|I definitely agree. I would definitely like to see the new bench mark test of this RC2 or the final release versus Safari 4 and Chrome 2.
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|@internetworld7: Feeling well? No rants this time.
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|The nightly build update had been delayed and when I checked for it, the update was so small that it didn't last long enough for me to see.
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