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I have heard from the V8 developers that Mozilla do some optimizations just to score better on benchmarks - i.e. they score really good on things that are speci

by amix 16y ago

I have heard from the V8 developers that Mozilla do some optimizations just to score better on benchmarks - i.e. they score really good on things that are specifically benchmarked. I have not verified their claim, but generally for me as an user Chrome and Safari feel a lot faster than Firefox.

jeresig 16y ago
Two quick points (I work at Mozilla, but not on the browser - I'm also the creator of the Dromaeo performance benchmark): All browsers implement things to get faster at these benchmarks. They implement caching in bizarre places just to make an, otherwise, useless loop faster. They optimize methods that are rarely used in modern JavaScript applications. This frustrates me immensely. Most modern browser performance benchmarks focus exclusively on JavaScript and completely ignore the DOM, rendering, painting, or any of the other operations that are critical to the performance of a web site. As to the faster claim - I've been using Firefox 3.6, Chrome, Safari 5, and Firefox 4 interchangeably and I've noticed a dramatic improvement in quality from Firefox 3.6 to Firefox 4 - they've really done a great job with the upcoming release.
- robin_reala 16y ago
  Especially Sunspider, which has the doubly whammy of developer and to a certain extent power-user mindshare, but yet doesn’t test normal site behaviour.
  - ergo98 16y ago
    Sunspider is a particularly bad benchmark: Virtually all of the components are heavily weighted by string concatenation. http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/String_Concatenation_and_Immutable_Strings_Speeding_Spidermonkey/ http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/String_Concatenation_and_Immuta...
- amackera 16y ago
  Agreed. I'm just using development builds (and lately the official beta), but Firefox 4 is leaps and bounds better than Firefox 3.6 (which was already pretty good!)
  - trafficlight 16y ago
    Have you had problems where Firefox 4 just fails miserably to render a page, but if you refresh it renders fine?

by amix 16y ago

jeresig 16y ago

Two quick points (I work at Mozilla, but not on the browser - I'm also the creator of the Dromaeo performance benchmark): All browsers implement things to get faster at these benchmarks. They implement caching in bizarre places just to make an, otherwise, useless loop faster. They optimize methods that are rarely used in modern JavaScript applications. This frustrates me immensely. Most modern browser performance benchmarks focus exclusively on JavaScript and completely ignore the DOM, rendering, painting, or any of the other operations that are critical to the performance of a web site. As to the faster claim - I've been using Firefox 3.6, Chrome, Safari 5, and Firefox 4 interchangeably and I've noticed a dramatic improvement in quality from Firefox 3.6 to Firefox 4 - they've really done a great job with the upcoming release.

robin_reala 16y ago
Especially Sunspider, which has the doubly whammy of developer and to a certain extent power-user mindshare, but yet doesn’t test normal site behaviour.
- ergo98 16y ago
  Sunspider is a particularly bad benchmark: Virtually all of the components are heavily weighted by string concatenation. http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/String_Concatenation_and_Immutable_Strings_Speeding_Spidermonkey/ http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/String_Concatenation_and_Immuta...
amackera 16y ago
Agreed. I'm just using development builds (and lately the official beta), but Firefox 4 is leaps and bounds better than Firefox 3.6 (which was already pretty good!)
- trafficlight 16y ago
  Have you had problems where Firefox 4 just fails miserably to render a page, but if you refresh it renders fine?