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."

For those confused

[Samantha Wright]

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.

iOS browser does this from day 1

[whiteboy86]

Apple's browser is built on OpenGL and GPU accelerated, nice to see Mozilla finally recognizing this vastly superior technology.

Great... yet another version of Firefox to support

[leonbev]

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.

Re:Firefox 6 & 7?

[Millennium]

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.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[compro01]

Addons hosted on addons.mozilla.org are now automatically checked for compatibility with new versions (by checking API calls used by the addon) and are bumped to show as compatible. If not, an email gets sent to the addon developer alerting them to the fact their addon is broken, and what exactly is broken about it.

This will start happening for the release of 6.

Re:Rendering

[jesser]

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".

Precisely the opposite. It's our previous abstraction layer that's too slow, and we're replacing it with a thinner one, starting with the easier things like Canvas. See Introducing the Azure project [mozilla.com] and Azure vs Cairo [basschouten.com].