Investigating the Performance of Firefox 4 and IE9

theweatherelectric writes "Mozilla's Robert O'Callahan has investigated the performance differences between Firefox 4 and IE9. He writes, 'As I explained in my last post, Microsoft's PR about "full hardware acceleration" is a myth. But it's true that some graphics benchmarks consistently report better scores for IE9 than for Firefox, so over the last few days I've been looking into that. Below I'll explain the details [of] what I've found about various commonly-cited benchmarks, but the summary is that the performance differences are explained by relatively small bugs in Firefox, bugs in IE9, and bugs in the benchmarks, not due to any major architectural issues in Firefox (as Microsoft would have you believe).'"

Re:Firefox 4

[sandytaru]

I'm liking FF4 so far. I was using Chrome but they never fixed my endless "Sending request" bug, no matter how many times I and others reported it, so I'm giving up on them for now.

Re:Firefox 4

[Threni]

Google are rubbish at responding to bugs. If they respond at all, it's often a joke.
I'm not using Chrome until there's a menu item for bookmarks. I'm not giving up a whole row just to get to the bookmark button.

Re:MS Firefox FUD?

[Per Abrahamsen]

> Joking aside, I am kind of curious what thuis "as microsoft would have you beiieve" comment is coming from.

This blog post [msdn.com], which was linked to in the article. Especially the last section ("Full Hardware Acceleration is the Difference") would lead the reader to believe that the difference was architectural.

Re:IE9: Readable fonts Firefox 4: Blur

[RebelWebmaster]

Funny enough, Firefox' "broken" fonts are thanks to using the same DirectWrite that IE9 uses. However, MS disables DWrite for fonts and uses GDI instead when running sites in compatibility mode. When running in standards mode, IE9 and Firefox have identical font rendering (there's a big MozillaZine forum thread with screenshots if you're interested). Also, some recent MS hotfixes for DWrite have noticeably improved font rendering. Have you used a recent beta with an updated system? But in the end, if you're not happy with the font rendering, you can always disable the hardware acceleration through the options.

Re:So...

[RebelWebmaster]

Firefox 4 is already at RC stage and won't be changed for the final release unless a showstopper bug is found. More likely is that they'll land for Firefox 5, which is supposedly coming 3 months from now. It's also possible that some of the fixes could land for a 4.x or 4.0.x release if they're proven stable and relatively risk-free.

Re:Wow...

[RebelWebmaster]

Out of curiosity, did you actually read the article? The work he did to make Firefox faster was in Firefox' code, not in the demos. The only changes he made in the demos were to better expose the underlying issues causing performance differences (like adding more fish to the tank demo so that FPS limiting isn't confounding the results).