Firefox 8 20% Faster Than Firefox 5 441
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."
How about compared to 3.6? (Score:1, Interesting)
20% faster than Firefox 5? That's about about 80% slower than Firefox 3.6, right?
Re:What about Firefox 6? (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree that the race-to-the-highest-number game is silly; but it is the silly, albeit visible, symptom of the FF team having a fire lit under its collective ass by Chrome. Arguably, while a lot of what gets full numbers really should just be point releases, FF's quality today is relatively better than it has been in some time. Are you really going to let the version numbers get in the way?
Ridiculous (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you have any idea how it complicates Web contracts? We used to be able to say "your website will be compatible with current version-2 of the browsers" but now that would be ridiculous. We'd never be able to deliver since we would be stuck in a infinite testing loop.
We'll have to start writing "your website will be compatible with Firefox 5" and by the time we deliver Firefox 12 will be available. I guess we'll have to add a clause about how Microsoft, Google and Firefox are all teenagers who compare their peni- I mean version numbers to feel good about themselves.
Apple aren't being childish with the whole issue and using sane version numbers. And Opera has been out for quite a long time, though they do seem to be jumping into the version bandwagon as of late.
Firefox 61 (Score:5, Interesting)
By my calculations, if Firefox had started this version numbering scheme with its start in 2004, we would now be running Firefox 61.
If they Mozilla had adopted it in 1998, this would be Firefox 113.
Bonkazoids.
Re:What about Firefox 6? (Score:4, Interesting)
Tell that to the extentions that constantly break on new major version.
Also, tell that to Mozilla's extension approvers, who won't approve any extension marked as having a maxVersion greater than 8, and that was 7 up until a few days ago.
Granted, you could distribute your Extension through your own site instead of the main Firefox Add-ons site...