11 ms·

Firefox 8 is 20% faster than Firefox 5, matches Chrome 14

• Tichy 15y ago
  I was expecting a parody of version number inflation, but it seems to be a real article. So FF really jumps to version 8?
  • thasmin 15y ago
    No, but 8 is the version in development right now. 6 and 7 are being tested.
• idan 15y ago
  What about type rendering? If FF on OSX no longer uses quartz to perform drawing operations, what implications are there for type rendering? Will OSX users be subjected to the (IMO) ravages of freetype? Or will each platform continue to use native type rasterization?
  • jbk 15y ago
    Could you detail what you call the "ravages of freetype"?
    • oldpatricka 15y ago
      Diffeent platforms use different font rendering algorithms. I'll avoid saying that one is better than the other, but it's off putting to see one rendering alongside another on the same display. Apple got into trouble with this when they ported Safari to Windows, and used OS X font rendering on that platform.
  • wmf 15y ago
    AFAIK Firefox still uses Quartz; in fact it's now supposed to be Quartzier with less Cairo overhead.
    • idan 15y ago
      RTFA: "Azure removes the Direct2D and Quartz (OS X) go-between and allows Firefox to write directly to the underlying 3D subsystems (Direct3D and OpenGL)."
      • illicium 15y ago
        Maybe for WebGL, not plain page content.
      • thristian 15y ago
        That seems like a journalistic misunderstanding; I'm pretty sure Azure is designed to replace Cairo as the layer between Firefox and Direct2D or Quartz.
• nextparadigms 15y ago
  So then Firefox will still be behind Chrome? Firefox 7 will be the one launched in the same time with Chrome 14. Chrome 14 should be stable in about 8-10 weeks. Firefox 8 won't be stable until 14-16 weeks from now. That's around the time Chrome 15 will be out.
  • freakwit 15y ago
    "it’s worth noting that Firefox 8 is as fast or faster than the latest Dev Channel build of Chrome 14. Chrome’s WebGL implementation is still faster, but with Azure, Firefox’s 2D performance is actually better than Chrome. JavaScript performance is also virtually identical." Fx8 vs Chrome 15 might be very very similar...
  • jlongster 15y ago
    The article said the "dev" channel of Chrome, which is equivalent to Firefox's nightly build, so they are about equal. It just happens that the current nightly channel of Chrome might be released earlier.
    • nextparadigms 15y ago
      It's not the same thing. How is Firefox 7 version called then? What about 6? Does Firefox have 4 modes instead of 3, like Chrome (dev, beta, stable)? Firefox's "dev" mode might be equivalent to "Chromium" mode for Chrome, in which case I suppose Chrome also has 4 modes, but their dev modes are still not equal to each other. The point was that Chrome 13 will become stable in 2-3 weeks from now (an Chrome 14 - beta), and then in another 6 weeks Chrome 14 will become stable. While Firefox 6 will become stable in 3-4 weeks, then another 6 weeks for FF 7, and then another 6 weeks for FF8, before it becomes stable. You do the math.
      • estel 15y ago
        "Modes" is perhaps not the right terminology, but the closest analogy to the Firefox nightlies is the Chrome Canary build.
  • 15y ago
• arkitaip 15y ago
  Mozilla needs to do something to de-dramatize what some people see as version inflation. A lot of people get anxious to see these very frequent bumps because major x releases are associated with add-ons not working, bloat, etc.
  • nodata 15y ago
    True, but on the other hand people will get used to it, just like they did with Chrome. The version number doesn't matter, all that matters is that it works. I like to see Mozilla responding. I don't know if development has speeded up, but it seems to have done. If they can keep this up without letting security slip I'll be impressed.
    • colinhowe 15y ago
      I don't think people were exposed to Chrome versions in the same way. I have no idea what version of Chrome I am running. I wasn't even aware that they had crept up major versions for a long time... in many ways this is ideal - I don't want or need to know 90% of the time :)
    • fredoliveira 15y ago
      The problem with Mozilla is that they make the actual number an important part of their communication. With Chrome on the other hand, you rarely hear about version numbers - you just know they exist and that you don't need to care.
      • jlongster 15y ago
        Not anymore. Mozilla is dropping the version number everywhere, except where it matters. Notice how in the blog posts that there's no version numbers mentioned, anywhere: http://blog.mozilla.com/futurereleases/2011/07/07/firefoxaurora7/ http://blog.mozilla.com/futurereleases/2011/07/07/firefoxaur... http://blog.mozilla.com/futurereleases/2011/05/27/firefoxaurora/ http://blog.mozilla.com/futurereleases/2011/05/27/firefoxaur...
        • 15y ago
• w1ntermute 15y ago
  Firefox 8? What happened to 6 and 7? I see 7's mentioned in the article, but there's not hide nor hair of Firefox 6.
  • mrseb 15y ago
    re: 6 -- there were very few performance tweaks in FF6. Mostly CSS3 and HTML5 additions. FF7 is the 'performance' build (Azure, first round of start-up, smaller memory footprint). FF8 seems to have some performance bits -- and presumably it will have some feature additions, too (but I need to investigate).
  • artmageddon 15y ago
    Reminds me an awful lot of the jump from DirectX 3.0 to 5.0.
    • artmageddon 15y ago
      Others have pointed out that Mozilla is releasing 6.0 / 7.0 very soon, so my above comment is moot...
    • sp332 15y ago
      Or DOS 3.3 to DOS 5. (but that was because of a bug in DOS 4)
  • jlongster 15y ago
    The optimizations highlighted in the article are going in to Firefox 8. What would they talk about 6 and 7? 6 and 7 will include other improvements and features which can be discussed elsewhere. Mozilla will release a new major version every 6 weeks.
    • saurik 15y ago
      Wait, "will"? We are talking about Firefox 8 in the present tense (with "is"), and yet talking about 6 and 7 in the future (with "will")?!
• snow_mac 15y ago
  This is pretty crappy. What is the rendering difference of 5 to 8? How many versions am I as a web developer going to have to support. short dev cycles and fast releases like this are stupid.
  • AndrewDucker 15y ago
    FF is now autoupdating, so once 5 was out 4 stopped being supported, and this will now continue. So you only have to support the latest version.
    • CrazedGeek 15y ago
      And 3.6, at least for a little while.
  • arkitaip 15y ago
    Mozilla has moved away from the typical versioning system to one where major x.0 releases are shipped much more frequently per their rapid release development cycle [1] [2]. So even if there are no "major" changes you will see a new x.0 release. This shouldn't cause developers any major problems. Well, unless, for example, someone is using shoddy user agent detection scripts, the consequences which Opera experienced when it released version 10; turns out some scripts aren't designed to handle two-digit version numbers [3] ಠ_ಠ [1] http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/04/13/new-channels-for-firefox-rapid-releases/ http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/04/13/new-channels-for-fir... [2] http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/06/21/mozilla-delivers-new-version-of-firefox-first-web-browser-to-support-do-not-track-on-multiple-platforms/ http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/06/21/mozilla-delivers-new... [3] http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-ua-string-changes/ http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-ua-string-changes/
  • capnrefsmmat 15y ago
    Mozilla keeps documentation of what web developers should be aware of for each major release: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Firefox_6_for_developers https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Firefox_6_for_developers https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Firefox_7_for_developers https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Firefox_7_for_developers
• clistctrl 15y ago
  I find the innovation that competition spurs to be beautiful, even if that innovation is "just" squeezing performance out of every crevice you can find.
• macavity23 15y ago
  You couldn't have a better demonstration of why competition is good. I stick with FF because I prefer the interface, but there's no question that all web browsers have become much better since Chrome's introduction. And if you're willing to drop support for IE6, web development is really a pleasure compared to five years ago.
  • nhebb 15y ago
    I switched to Chrome because of all the memory issues and crashing. But there are so many little details as well as add-ons that I miss from FF that I'm pretty excited about version 8. If it proves out, I'll switch back.
• nsomaru 15y ago
  Can we assume that the benchmarks mentioned for OSX apply equally to Linux?
  • wmf 15y ago
    No, but it looks like performance is improving on all platforms.
• frodwith 15y ago
  Chrome's killer feature for me is still process separation. Slow pages kill my entire browsing experience in firefox, and when I have 20+ tabs open, that can be really annoying.
  • dochtman 15y ago
    You know Mozilla's working on that, right?
    • frodwith 15y ago
      I didn't, but that's really good news :)
  • abhinavsharma 15y ago
    Process seperation isn't the only savior to this, its just one way to compartmentalize things, intermediately, as of Firefox 7 (Aurora), there's been a massive improvement on managing compartments of memory andreasgal.com/2010/10/13/compartments/
• cypherpunks 15y ago
  I might go back to Firefox when it no longer consumes gigabytes of RAM after a few hours of operation. Until then, I'm with Chrome. I don't care about speed as much -- so long as it's reliable, and doesn't grind the rest of my machine to a halt, it's all good.
  • bad_user 15y ago
    Chrome is very wasteful; only after many hours of operation in which you opened and closed dozens and dozens of tabs, it starts to be better than Firefox; as Firefox fragments memory and doesn't release it properly when closing a tab. But for my usage patterns; with many tabs opened after a few hours of operation, Firefox consumes less RAM for me. Also, don't confuse memory waist (coming from bloat and fragmentation) with memory used for improving the browsing experience, like caching. These browsers are doing a lot of caching and I personally don't like having 4 GB of memory and being left unused.
    • catshirt 15y ago
      memory footprint or not, chrome is faster than firefox. both in terms of page loading, and raw operation. i might reconsider firefox when it doesn't take 4 times longer to boot up.
      • sixtofour 15y ago
        Starting up a browser is a relatively rare even, for me at least. The only time I restart Firefox is when it's consumed or leaked too much memory, about once a day.
      • bad_user 15y ago
        I am on Firefox 5 and I don't see visible differences between them anymore. Yes, Firefox 3.x used to be visibly slower. I also don't see visible differences in boot time, but this depends a lot on how many extensions you have -- I only use Firebug and the Web Developer toolbar. And at least Firefox has plugins that aren't totally useless.
• fedorabbit 15y ago
  I am using it on my macbook pro. FF8 is faster compare to FF5 I was using. Schubert-it PDF plugin, Adblock, XMark, Flashgot works. Firebug, Google Dictionary, Download statusbar don't work... and there are some minor bugs with mouse hover effect.
  • newman314 15y ago
    How about 1Password?
  • Estragon 15y ago
    Yeah, I just downloaded firefox-trunk in ubuntu, and it certainly is fast, fast enough that I can go back to using it for Microsoft Exchange webmail (which was the real killer before.) But not having the extensions is going to be a pain. I think I might try to port "It's All Text!" to 8...
• brianbreslin 15y ago
  What happened to Firefox 6 and 7?
  • janv 15y ago
    Ain't released yet. https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar
• jasonkester 15y ago
  20% sounds good, but unless versions 5, 6 and 7 also had 20% improvements, it would still be slower than the current version of Chrome on canvas stuff. For the relatively simple canvas rendering I'm doing, I can watch Firefox chugging along at 10fps struggling to render a few dozen filled rectangles, while Chrome is happily pegged at 60fps (via RequestAnimationFrame). It's just night and day.
  • jlongster 15y ago
    Wow, that's not what I've experienced at all. Please post links to your example.
  • sid0 15y ago
    Canvas on Firefox is hardware accelerated (at least on Windows), so it's really fast. I don't have Chrome installed, but I'm pretty sure it chokes on the FishIETank benchmark with 1000 fish: http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/FishIETank/Default.html http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/FishIETank/Def.... Firefox on the other hand easily gets 60 fps with those many fish.
    • sapphirecat 15y ago
      > Canvas on Firefox is hardware accelerated (at least on Windows), so it's really fast. If your video drivers aren't blacklisted, after I found out by whining about the lack of speed with hwaccel--which wasn't actually active. Check it out at the bottom of the super secret "about:support" URL.
    • jasonkester 15y ago
      Excellent example. On my system, Chrome12 will do 100 fish at 25-30 FPS, while FF5 chugs along at 7-10fps. Neither is particularly good, but the Chrome one is at least watchable.
      • sid0 15y ago
        That just means your Firefox isn't benefiting from GPU acceleration. It could either be because your OS or hardware doesn't support it or because your graphics drivers are out of date.
• jerhinesmith 15y ago
  I'm all for speed improvements, feature parity, etc., but my question is why has it taken a (somewhat) radical change to versioning/release-schedules to realize these performance improvements? If these latest benchmarks hold up, then Mozilla will have noticeably reduced the memory footprint in FF7 and then again noticeably sped up the browser itself in FF8 (all of this coming within a matter of weeks). Can it really be that these two (suddenly important) features went largely unaddressed in Firefox 3 and 4 because of a different release cycle? I'm very happy to see the competition, but if Mozilla has been able to address these two long-standing gripes in a matter of weeks, then I find it somewhat implausible that it was ever a technical issue.
  • wmf 15y ago
    This stuff has been brewing for a long time. Note that it takes four months to get from nightly to release and code may be under development for months before it even lands in nightly.
  • bzbarsky 15y ago
    Firefox 4 was a lot faster than Firefox 3.6 in all sorts of ways. Some of those improvements were checked in before Firefox 3.6 was even released. The only reason it looks like they took a long time to do is because the release cycle for Firefox 4 was long, so you didn't see the improvements until the final release of Firefox 4. So all the release schedule is doing here is getting improvements out to users closer to when the code is written.
  • r00fus 15y ago
    I wonder how this release schedule is affecting addons/extensions. That was the only reason I ever didn't update was for plugin support (namely firebug/etc and 1password). Any extension authors or power users care to comment?
• mmuro 15y ago
  It seems to me that the point of having a version for a browser is for developers. Otherwise, it shouldn't matter. What browser do you use? Safari. Chrome. Firefox. IE.
• ycombiefan 15y ago
  im still on firefox 5 and chrome 12. lol
• dave1010uk 15y ago
  Just had a play with Firefox 8. It's certainly fast but they've copied Opera & Chrome with removing the "http:// http:// from the URL bar. I can see the arguments for the change but this feels really wrong to me. I hope there's an about:config tweak somewhere to change it back; even if there is, it's a shame Mozilla have gone down this route.
  • sid0 15y ago
    browser.urlbar.trimURLs I don't like the change either. It's one of the many reasons Chrome's UI is terrible. Opera actually implements it pretty well through, since when you click in the location bar the part to the left gets replaced with http:// http://.
• minikomi 15y ago
  Hmm.. If a browser really wants to make a dent I think they need to diversify their marketing push. It needs to be cool to the people who need cool, safe and trustworthy to the people that need that, technically sound, exciting and promising to us geeks.. At the moment it seems that they try to do a bit of all this at once, but maybe separate voices focussed on these markets would be more effective?
• powerslave12r 15y ago
  Why don't they just make 5 faster and make five be the top number and make that a little faster?
• dspace 15y ago
  Peacekeeper Benchmark Firefox 5.0 - 1650 Firefox 8.0a1 - 1972 19.5% improvement. Pretty much dead on. Specs: Core i3 M330 2.13 GHz, Linux i386 http://clients.futuremark.com/peacekeeper http://clients.futuremark.com/peacekeeper
• hermanthegerman 15y ago
  Firefox 18 is going to be 23% faster than Chrome 34
• nvictor 15y ago
  wow guys, slow down a little bit...
• funkyboy 15y ago
  So Firefox took 10 years to go from version 1 to 3. And took 1 year to go from version 4 to 8.