Firefox 4 Regains Speed Mojo With No. 2 Placing 98
Posted
by
timothy
from the greased-lizard-not-so-terrible dept.
from the greased-lizard-not-so-terrible dept.
CWmike writes "With the release of Firefox 4 Beta 7 this week, Mozilla has returned to near the top spot in browser performance rankings. According to SunSpider JavaScript benchmark suite tests run by Computerworld, the new browser is about three times faster than the current production version of Firefox in rendering JavaScript, and lags behind only Opera among the top five browser makers. Mozilla launched Firefox 4 Beta 7, a preview that includes all the features slated to make it into the final, polished version next year, on Wednesday. Beta 7 was the first to include Mozilla's new JavaScript JIT (Just In Time) compiler, dubbed 'JagerMonkey,' which shot the browser's performance into the No. 2 slot behind the alpha of Opera 11."
Re:Realistic tests? (Score:3, Insightful)
For standard website browsing, the biggest bottleneck is probably going to be the network connection. If you're talking about a handful of seconds to download a page, then a few milliseconds here and there on some Javascript isn't going to matter, like AC said. However, AJAXy webapps that make extensive use of Javascript may show a lot more difference if each Javascript function takes an extra 100ms to run. I think that's the point of these JS benchmarks - everything else is pretty much the same, so we're testing the one thing that could make a difference on script-intensive sites. Whether or not we actually have sites right now that are advanced enough to really show a difference, I can't say.
Re:Realistic tests? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, there's not, because the outcome would inevitably be "every browser is fast (and you won't notice a difference) given enough RAM, CPU power etc". In reality, it's not things like Javascript microbenchmark performance that matter: browsers CAN be faster or slower, but whether you can get a few ms less on Sunspider is going to be lost in the noise. The real differences will stem from other factors.
That's because you're looking at it wrong. JS performance isn't going to improve the current browsing experience, that is perfectly true. The part you are missing is that the JS performance matters for FUTURE browsing.
Why, you ask? One word: Flash. HTML5 exists purely to replicate most of Flash in native HTML. Flash is heavily scriptable and runs complex apps (see any heavily produced Flash game) with passable performance (most of the performance problems with Flash are due to the way the graphics stack was designed [it sucks]). If Canvas, Video and Audio tags are going to replace Flash, the JS needs to be comparable to Flash's ActionScript performance — preferably better to insentivize migration.
Re:URL doesn't work (Score:5, Insightful)
why do i care about speed when (Score:2, Insightful)
when nevercooky is not in the default install
when the new addon webpage looks like a commercial for useless crap, instead of a guide to all of hte addons
when pdf handling still sucks in the default,and is, in my hands, number one cause of crashes
the browser lets other people see stuff like what type of browser I am running, and doesn't try to obscure this
new versions break old addons . . .
Re:In 3, 2, 1 ... (Score:3, Insightful)
At cost of? (Score:2, Insightful)
In other news, OS X PowerPC was dropped and there is also a crazy talk about dropping anything=SSE3. They really lost the design philosophy of Firefox or anything Mozilla. What happened to portability especially when nobody likes their mobile offerings? How many times they must learn to think outside X86 PC?
Firefox in speed race with a company who controls/knows about every single device they shipped (Apple) and another who can spend couple of billions of dollars in no time without even noticing it (Google).
As a person who knows and always respected Mozilla mission, I feel obliged to post this although I know what kind of karma suicide it is.
I really wonder what kind of management took over Mozilla. I remember old days these guys spending hours to make it run/compile on OS/2, dead desktop OS, not completely documented and stabilized one like OS X 10.5.8 PPC.
What about Atom CPUs Mozilla guys? Drop that too as it will make you score less in couple of benchmarks? I heard netbooks are outfashioned, perhaps you should drop them next to keep yourselves cool (!)