20 ms·

Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

651 points by francois2 12y ago

dude3 12y ago
Please now work on translate3d performance!
arthursilva 12y ago
Damn, where's the super like button on this. Kudos to all contributors (and donators)!
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
themechanic 12y ago
Kudos to all involved in making this happen.
vuldin 12y ago
Mozilla is one organization that I have no problems supporting. Thanks to everyone involved with Mozilla for contributing to a great organization that does awesome stuff.
- sphink 12y ago
  I pointed my smile.amazon.com account at the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. (Which isn't entirely altruistic; I am employed by the Mozilla Corporation. But hey, I do support Mozilla's mission; what can I say?)
dmix 12y ago
This reminds me of the cell phone industry competition. We all benefit from head-to-head fights for performance and value. It's a shame so many markets have little direct competition outside of technology either due to monopoly, regulatory capture, or market dynamics.
cddotdotslash 12y ago
While this is great for those keeping track of the stats, I doubt it will have much effect on the average consumer. Almost everyone I know uses Chrome; that includes family members, co-workers, tech-minded and non-tech-minded people alike. For them, it's been IE vs Chrome for awhile and telling them "Firefox is a tad bit faster" isn't enough to make them switch again. Unfortunately, I think Firefox lost too many people during its sluggish phase awhile back and it's going to be tough getting them back. Also, as much as I keep hearing "Google is evil" in the tech echo chamber, again, the average consumer doesn't care. Even I know Google's policies and still choose to use Chrome purely because it's more convenient.
- e12e 12y ago
  > Even I know Google's policies and still choose to use Chrome purely because it's more convenient. What do you find is more convenient with Chrome over Firefox? I don't (yet) use all of the sync features in Firefox, but just having a unified history on Android and desktop is quite convenient, as is syncing saved passwords -- and knowing both how data is handled, and that I can set up a personal sync-server if I want to (actually tried that with the previous generation of sync) -- gives me peace of mind.
  - cddotdotslash 12y ago
    Allow me to speak from the mindset of a consumer. The average consumer doesn't care about Firefox's data storage policies or how much they cooperate with the government. They care that things just work and are fast enough. For me, the convenience of Google Chrome comes from the fact that it is tightly integrated with all of Google services. I can use one Google account to log into my browser, access my email, set up a calendar, etc. Sure, Firefox can do syncing too, I just prefer using one company that does it all rather than two that do half. Also, unrelated, I think Firefox spent too long copying Google Chrome's interface and now they are playing catch up. Regardless, Firefox usage continues to decline month after month. I think they've lost the general consumer appeal.
    - e12e 12y ago
zobzu 12y ago
"Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance on arewefastyet, and is now leading V8 and JSC on Octane, Sunspider and Kraken." (ie faster than Chrome on Chrome V8 benchmark) Good job Mozilla!
rdtsc 12y ago
I have been very impressed by Firefox lately. Kudos to the whole team at Mozilla. Just about 5 years ago, it was looking to me like it was the end of Firefox. It was Chrome all the way. New features were coming out one after another. Faster rendering. Safe process isolation for each tab. Looked better. But I just switched back last month. It happened kind of randomly. Saw an announcement of a new release ( 33, I think ), downloaded, re-imported my bookmarks from Chrome and just kind of kept using it instead of Chrome since then. I like how the tabs look also I think it feels lighter and snappier on my (now old-ish) laptop.
- skrowl 12y ago
  I've been reminding everyone I know who still uses Chrome to try Firefox again. Many have switched back. It's simply a better browser. One e10s is in stable, it's going to be even better. Google is a for-profit company that makes money selling your data and targeted, personal ads. Mozilla is not-for-profit and just wants to make the web better.
  - taf2 12y ago
    I don't think there is actually any evidence they use Chrome for much more than 1. disrupt IE/MS - i can say for certain they originally backed Firefox for this effort and only decided to split away to build chrome in the first place because they felt starting fresh they could build a better core and i believe they did. 2. enabling more people to build on the web, enables more of their ads to be shown. Firefox achieves this just as well as chrome. IE was dominating not too long ago and you could argue much of google's ad revenue growth can be attributed to more people having access to a higher quality web. That said... I don't see why you should believe google would need or desire to sell data from what it might collect from Chrome. More likely they see it as a means to ensuring web dominance by ensuring the web is never locked down by one mega corp. It's similar in away to what they have done in the mobile space. Android is more of a technology to disrupt Apple and ensure it can't be dominate, but really does google have any control over Android?
    - chimeracoder 12y ago
EduardoBautista 12y ago
You know, I just don't know who to believe these days when it comes to browser benchmarks. All browser vendors pretty much say they lead all browsers in _something_. Honestly, I don't even know what all these benchmarks mean most of the time.
- nnethercote 12y ago
  There are enough browser benchmarks that you can typically find one that any browser wins on. Unfortunately many of them aren't very good. Here's how I think browser benchmarking should be done: https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/06/16/a-browser-benchmarking-manifesto/ https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/06/16/a-browser-be...
- hornetblack 12y ago
  The point in this one is SpiderMonkey is beating V8 in the benchmark designed such that V8 wins on it.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - ivanca 12y ago
    Yeah, no. They chose intensive process, many of them are ports of code from other languages and some the tests are using software made by Mozilla such as pdf.jz and zlib (Ecmascripten) and Microsoft (Typescript compiler) https://developers.google.com/octane/benchmark https://developers.google.com/octane/benchmark
    - roca 12y ago
      But they also included stuff like splay-latency which explicitly tests something that doesn't matter on the Web (support for incremental GC during script execution, which doesn't matter in browsers because the effects of a script are never made visible to the user until the script ends). Guess what, V8 has that and Spidermonkey doesn't.
orthecreedence 12y ago
Firefox is awesome and I love it, but my one complaint after all these years is that I have to restart the browser every day. It's not the end of the world, but it's still frustrating, especially when I'm in the throes of debugging or important research. Over the course of a day, the browser becomes unresponsive and CPU usage idles at 10-15%. Restarting with the same tabs brings it down to 0%. Yes, I know, disable addons, blah blah...doesn't work for me. Same problem. I'm really looking forward to the new threading model coming up. I have a feeling that once each tab has a thread, things like this will be much more self-repairing. It's not always easy to kill a rogue execution path in an event loop, but killing a thread is pretty straightforward =]. Also, congrats on the firefox team for really taking performance seriously.
- nnethercote 12y ago
  Resetting might help: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most-problems https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi... It resets your profile while preserving history, cookies, bookmarks, etc. > I'm really looking forward to the new threading model coming up. I have a feeling that once each tab has a thread, things like this will be much more self-repairing. It's not always easy to kill a rogue execution path in an event loop, but killing a thread is pretty straightforward =]. First, it's "process", not "thread" :) The plan is to start with just two main processes -- one for chrome (browser UI, mostly) and one for web content. So no processes will be killed in normal operation. This is because additional processes incur certain extra costs, particularly when it comes to memory consumption. Still, it might help with your problem; it's hard to say for sure.
- ibrahima 12y ago
  It's not threading, it's processes that's coming up. I would be surprised if each tab didn't already have its own thread, because eg. multiple tabs can load at the same time... And umm, not sure what I'm doing differently but I usually keep Firefox open for weeks at a time and have no issues. Though I cut back a bit on keeping tabs open, I used to keep like 60-80 tabs open all the time but now I usually clean up when I'm done with something (more to reduce cognitive overhead than resource utilization).
tkubacki 12y ago
kudos for Firefox team. I hope they put more love in speeding up css animations (like here: http://bartaz.github.io/impress.js/#/bored http://bartaz.github.io/impress.js/#/bored)
JohnBooty 12y ago
I am ridiculously proud of Mozilla and everybody who has contributed to Firefox over the years.
general_failure 12y ago
Kudos. But they should really invest time in making the UI responsive and fast. This is my biggest gripe about firefox. I also find it incomprehensible that it checks for updates on startup in a modal fashion. Very annoying.
- nathancahill 12y ago
  What version of Firefox are you using? It hasn't done that in ages. You have to open the About window to check for new updates and install them.
  - kbrosnan 12y ago
    Non-Windows still has modal update dialog. On startup for non-Windows you are blocked from using the browser until the update is complete. There is a dialog if you run out of date extensions. There is a nag dialog if you have an update pending for over 24h.
    - nly 12y ago
      What platform? Most Linux distros compile Firefox with "--disable-updater --disable-installer", such that Mozillas auto-update doesn't even exist.
      - kbrosnan 12y ago
        OS X and Mozilla Linux builds.
untilHellbanned 12y ago
I can really feel the swing back to Firefox happening like the switch to Chrome back 5-7 years ago. Go Firefox!!! p.s. Great work on Firefox OS too!
- zobzu 12y ago
  Yeah. Unfortunately for Mozilla, they don't have a download button on the #1 page on the web (google.com) and they dont bundle it either with any OS (Windows + IE, Mac/iOS + Safari, Android + Chrome) or software (Chrome auto installed from Flash upgrades, etc.) So I don't know how strong the switch back would be...
Jonanin 12y ago
Check out http://arewefastyet.com/ http://arewefastyet.com/ (the website mentioned in the article), which tracks javascript engine performance. Spidermonkey is faster than v8 and Safari's JSC on all three popular javascript benchmarks [1] [1] Octane (google's benchmark), Sunspider (Apple/Webkit's benchmark), and Kraken (Mozilla's benchmark).
- MBCook 12y ago
  Is there a reason they don't have the new Safari 8 FTLJIT in those numbers? JSC (Java Script Core?) was Safari 7 wasn't it?
  - azakai 12y ago
    FTL is shown there, but note that FTL only works on 64-bit machines. Click on "machines->mac os x 64-bit" to see the results. They are indeed much better than without FTL.
  - Jonanin 12y ago
    According to [1]: "Last week I asked for benchmarks of the new JavascriptCore Fourth Tier LLVM JIT. Arewefastyet from Mozilla now includes such results. FTLJIT does particularly well on asm.js examples." You can see JSC performing better than chrome on the asm.js benchmarks: http://arewefastyet.com/#machine=12&view=breakdown&suite=asmjs-apps http://arewefastyet.com/#machine=12&view=breakdown&suite=asm... [1] http://blog.llvm.org/2014/05/llvm-weekly-19-may-12th-2014.html http://blog.llvm.org/2014/05/llvm-weekly-19-may-12th-2014.ht...
cromwellian 12y ago
"This puts us in a position of strength, so we can say "these benchmarks are not very interesting; let's talk about other benchmarks (e.g. asm.js-related) and language features" without being accused of being sore losers." But are asmjs benchmarks interesting? They are not representative of the vast majority of real-world JS, so wouldn't an asmjs-laden benchmark suite really be a case of optimizing for your own set of benchmarks, tuned to your own idiomatic-JS? But anyway, congrats on the achievement. I like the fact that V8, JSC, and FF performance are converging. If the performance differential is too great, it creates additional headaches for the developer targeting a certain level of efficiency.
- sphink 12y ago
  Don't look at asm.js benchmarks if you're interested in real-world JS. Look at them if you want to know something about the performance of C++ code transpiled to run in a browser, which is an interesting thing to know. And it's getting to be more and more relevant these days. (Even "real-world JS" is going to start using asm.js libraries, I bet.) But asm.js execution is very different from JS execution, even in browsers that don't have specialized asm.js paths. Executing regular JS is all about balancing compile time and garbage collection with code execution. asm.js barely uses GC, and allows lots of opportunities to cache compilation in ways that would be invalid for regular JS. So the whole space of tradeoffs is different.
- roca 12y ago
  Being representative of "existing real world JS" is one way benchmarks can be interesting. On the other hand, asm.js benchmarks are interesting because improving asm.js performance expands the scope of what the Web can do. Ditto for new language features.
- cpeterso 12y ago
  The vast majority of real-world JS don't need JITs to perform adequately, but heavyweight asmjs games are CPU-bound and it makes sense to optimize for them. Watching Firefox creep up on Chrome performance on the arewefastyet.com charts, all JS engines seemed to be converging on some performance asymptote. asmjs changes the rules of the game and break through for specific content.
Igglyboo 12y ago
As soon as firefox gets per process tabs in stable I'll switch back, I really want to switch from chrome but that's a deal killer for me.
- gojomo 12y ago
  I could survive without processes-per-tab, if Firefox gave some hint – any hint! – which tabs are being naughty. Maybe just a per-tab counter of allocations, or timeouts, or DOM edits, or some other operation? Anything that serves as a proxy for "more active than average while not in foreground".
  - __david__ 12y ago
    Yeah, Firefox really needs some sort of "top". Right now, idling, my Firefox is taking between 20% and 40% of my CPU. I'm sure it's some tab running some dumb javascript, but there's no way for me to figure out which one. Sad, because spidermonkey must know which window a javascript context is associated with, so it could feasibly keep track of run time.
    - wiredfool 12y ago
      In my experience, with vanilla firefox on a desktop (linux, i7), 1 tab with twitter open takes about that much processor power.
    - bzbarsky 12y ago
      SpiderMonkey itself actually has no concept of windows at all. So it doesn't know what window anything has to do with. The browser itself does, though. Some sort of "top"-like utility is in fact being worked on, for both websites and extensions.
      - sp332 12y ago
        If a script hangs, Firefox has a little popup on that tab that asks if you want to kill it or let it keep running. So something in the browser knows which tabs are JS-intensive.
whoisthemachine 12y ago
Good job guys!
bobajeff 12y ago
>This puts us in a position of strength, so we can say "these benchmarks are not very interesting; let's talk about other benchmarks (e.g. asm.js-related) and language features" without being accused of being sore losers. I'm looking forward to such a statement from Mozilla. The web needs mature suppott for languages other than JavaScript and C++/C are very widely used languages(as opposed to some new hobby language) and compile to JS tools are the only realistic way of getting there. So I can hardly wait until browser venders and standards organizations embrace efforts like Asm.js and the nessary extensions to make it support other memory and language models and features (Shared memory, SIMD, JVM languages etc.).
Sephr 12y ago
Octane now includes asm.js benchmarks, and V8 doesn't attempt to support "use asm". This gives SpiderMonkey an advantage in the benchmark. I think it's quite impressive how close V8 is in performance to SpiderMonkey which actually goes out of it's way to support "use asm".
- xooyoozoo 12y ago
  Octane is Google's own benchmark suite. I don't think getting beaten on your own hand-picked set of performance metrics satisfies any definition of "impressive".
  - afsina 12y ago
    It sure is far better than idiotic SunSpider. They are close to real-life application examples. If they really wanted to hand-pick they would not include asm.js benchmarks, where Firefox has a certain advantage.
    - nnethercote 12y ago
      Octane is half good and half rubbish: https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/08/24/octane-minus-v8/ https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/08/24/octane-minus... The notable thing about this achievement is that for a very long time V8 was miles ahead of the competition on its own benchmark (first V8bench, and now Octane), as the graphs at http://arewefastyet.com/ http://arewefastyet.com/ show.
- nnethercote 12y ago
  This comes down to your definition of "support". Unlike SpiderMonkey, V8 doesn't have a special mode for "use asm" code, as far as I know. E.g. it still does JIT compilation, unlike SpiderMonkey, which does AOT compilation. But the V8 team is certainly working on making asm.js code fast. This is clear from the fact that V8's performance on asm.js benchmarks has increased significantly since asm.js was first announced. (As you note, they put an asm.js test in their own benchmark suite.) And even if V8 doesn't have a special mode for asm.js, they're benefitting from asm.js's existence, because asm.js makes clear exactly which subset of JavaScript they need to be optimizing for.
SwellJoe 12y ago
I switched back to Firefox from Chrome a couple years ago, because I no longer trust Google to have my best interests at heart. It's been fine; I have a beefy machine with plenty of RAM, but I also use it on my horribly slow Android phone (an old HTC Sensation 4G that has never been worth a crap), and it works OK there, too. My only complaint is that it requires a plugin to get a reasonable number of tabs in a window before requiring scrolling. It's downright absurd that it stopped being configurable many, many, many versions ago.
- barrkel 12y ago
  TreeStyleTabs.
notastartup 12y ago
You know whats funny, I stopped using Chrome and use Firefox now because Firefox is so much faster. The exact same reason I switched to Chrome 5 years ago. Also I'm slightly less creeped out.
- sphink 12y ago
  I think this is pretty common. In fact, this can happen even if neither browser changes at all. Your profile builds up and your history searches etc. slow down, so you switch browsers and get a clean profile to start with. Repeat. (I'm not saying that that is what you are experiencing, but I think it's a factor for every browser user.)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Rapzid 12y ago
I had another look at FireFox the other day. Impressed with their editable layout and smooth interface. Less impressed with the Network tools pane in comparison with Chrome(chrome shows compressed/inflated size, can view and copy raw headers, etc). Still, it's in my to-do to give it some game time.
BorisMelnik 12y ago
Love hearing this. I have been a Firefox user since Netscape 5, if that makes sense. To me there might be some positives about Chrome but for me it is a culture / community issue. It is a foundation I am willing to support during the good times and bad, and I am not so hot about giving Chrome access to every keystroke I make. While this may sound petty, one feature I'd really love to see come back in Firefox is the ability to see the refresh button match the style / movability of the back/home buttons. It is very annoying having to use precise clicking on the eeeency little arrow on the URL bar. But thats the thing, even if I am annoyed by small issues or lacking features, I don't abandon a project based on that.
- Kliment 12y ago
  right-click on the page and you have a refresh button right where your pointer is
  - BorisMelnik 12y ago
    good call on that! did that get added within the last major version or two?
pjmlp 12y ago
Great work! Improvements like this and Rust, is where I like seeing Mozilla spending their resources.
bruceboughton 12y ago
It would be interesting to now how Firefox performs with regard to battery usage. Apple in particular seems to be focussing on battery life as much as performance, given that the codebase is shared across iOS and OS X.
Tloewald 12y ago
Firefox's hopeless video and audio implementation (especially on Mac OS X) remains a deal breaker for me. It means resorting to Flash in a lot of cases, which means I use another browser. I'm glad to see strides being made in JavaScript performance, but basic browser functionality is far more important.
- dbcooper 12y ago
  Media Source Extensions are a high priority right now, so problems with html5 video (esp. with youtube) should be solved soon. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=778617 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=778617 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1083588 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1083588
- kevingadd 12y ago
  HTML5 video and audio in Firefox works perfectly in every site I visit. What problems do you hit? I haven't used it on Mac so perhaps the support is less good there. Some sites don't attempt to use <video>/<audio> in Firefox for me, but that's a site issue, not a browser issue - h264 and webm both work fine.
  - dbcooper 12y ago
    There are a few google related ones in Karl Dubost's list: http://www.otsukare.info/2014/10/28/google-webcompatibility-bugs-list http://www.otsukare.info/2014/10/28/google-webcompatibility-...
  - Tloewald 12y ago
    MP4 video support is completely absent on Mac. And MP3 audio is also not supported.
joemccall86 12y ago
I keep going back and forth between Firefox and Chrome. Chrome is ahead right now for two reasons: 1. Support for Netflix on linux 2. Webapps as native applications (like the old project prism). We use slack at work and a Chrome webapp is how they choose to support Linux. Admittedly though, I will switch to Firefox for the rest of the week to see if I can live with these caveats.
- dethstar 12y ago
  I use Netflix on Linux (firefox) with pipelight.
- magicalist 12y ago
  There's also nothing that says you can't have two different browsers open at once :)
piyush_soni 12y ago
I still use Firefox as my main browser, but while it has improved a lot in recent times, I don't know why are some root problems not getting fixed - memory hogging, browser hangs, crashes (yes, I still get them on my workstation - I've even reported the callstacks to them). Mostly, the answer is, "It's your add-ons" - oh yes, but when it comes to talking about their strengths, this is one of the first things they talk about - "add-ons". For example, every other browser fixed this 12 year old bug [0] one by one, but Firefox doesn't care much about it. In fact, not only that they don't have any solution to it whatsoever, when people's resentment about the bug increased, they chose to just shut down their voices on it. [0]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78414 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78414
- irv 12y ago
  memory is has been getting better over the years, thanks to the memshrink project though. https://www.areweslimyet.com/ https://www.areweslimyet.com/
- kbrosnan 12y ago
  That bug is intractable with the current NPAPI and plugin vendor landscape. Slowly plugins are being replaced by web accessible technology. That is the way forward. There are some things a user can do to avoid the issue as much as possible. Setting all plugins to ask to activate in about:addons resolves a number of common occurrences where plugins take focus on load. Set YouTube to use the 'HTML5' player [0]. Use pdf.js. If you are on OS X 10.7+ use Mozilla's Aurora branch to get h264 playback [1]. If you develop sites check for support of h264 playback instead of assuming Firefox does not have it. [0] https://www.youtube.com/html5 https://www.youtube.com/html5 [1] https://aurora.mozilla.org https://aurora.mozilla.org
kevincennis 12y ago
This is cool, but Firefox still feels a lot slower to me than Chrome. I think Mozilla would get a lot of mileage out of improving the performance of the rendering engine. FF doesn't feel slow because of JS, it feels slow(-er than Chrome, at least on my Mac) because repaints and layout seem to take longer.
- agapos 12y ago
  They are working on it on several fronts, constantly cutting off tasks from the main thread onto their own ones (downloading, cache v2, Awesomebar), making other things asynchronous (project snappy), garbage collection improvements also help in some cases. Most of these are smaller wins, and several big ones like OMTC, tiled rendering or e10s are yet to come. Edit: It may not be as responsive as Chrome (I don't know as I don't use it), but I believe it is miles ahead of it's former self.

651 points by francois2 12y ago

dude3 12y ago

Please now work on translate3d performance!

arthursilva 12y ago

Damn, where's the super like button on this. Kudos to all contributors (and donators)!

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

themechanic 12y ago

Kudos to all involved in making this happen.

vuldin 12y ago

Mozilla is one organization that I have no problems supporting. Thanks to everyone involved with Mozilla for contributing to a great organization that does awesome stuff.

sphink 12y ago
I pointed my smile.amazon.com account at the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. (Which isn't entirely altruistic; I am employed by the Mozilla Corporation. But hey, I do support Mozilla's mission; what can I say?)

dmix 12y ago

This reminds me of the cell phone industry competition. We all benefit from head-to-head fights for performance and value. It's a shame so many markets have little direct competition outside of technology either due to monopoly, regulatory capture, or market dynamics.

cddotdotslash 12y ago

While this is great for those keeping track of the stats, I doubt it will have much effect on the average consumer. Almost everyone I know uses Chrome; that includes family members, co-workers, tech-minded and non-tech-minded people alike. For them, it's been IE vs Chrome for awhile and telling them "Firefox is a tad bit faster" isn't enough to make them switch again. Unfortunately, I think Firefox lost too many people during its sluggish phase awhile back and it's going to be tough getting them back. Also, as much as I keep hearing "Google is evil" in the tech echo chamber, again, the average consumer doesn't care. Even I know Google's policies and still choose to use Chrome purely because it's more convenient.

e12e 12y ago
> Even I know Google's policies and still choose to use Chrome purely because it's more convenient. What do you find is more convenient with Chrome over Firefox? I don't (yet) use all of the sync features in Firefox, but just having a unified history on Android and desktop is quite convenient, as is syncing saved passwords -- and knowing both how data is handled, and that I can set up a personal sync-server if I want to (actually tried that with the previous generation of sync) -- gives me peace of mind.
- cddotdotslash 12y ago
  Allow me to speak from the mindset of a consumer. The average consumer doesn't care about Firefox's data storage policies or how much they cooperate with the government. They care that things just work and are fast enough. For me, the convenience of Google Chrome comes from the fact that it is tightly integrated with all of Google services. I can use one Google account to log into my browser, access my email, set up a calendar, etc. Sure, Firefox can do syncing too, I just prefer using one company that does it all rather than two that do half. Also, unrelated, I think Firefox spent too long copying Google Chrome's interface and now they are playing catch up. Regardless, Firefox usage continues to decline month after month. I think they've lost the general consumer appeal.
  - e12e 12y ago

zobzu 12y ago

"Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance on arewefastyet, and is now leading V8 and JSC on Octane, Sunspider and Kraken." (ie faster than Chrome on Chrome V8 benchmark) Good job Mozilla!

rdtsc 12y ago

I have been very impressed by Firefox lately. Kudos to the whole team at Mozilla. Just about 5 years ago, it was looking to me like it was the end of Firefox. It was Chrome all the way. New features were coming out one after another. Faster rendering. Safe process isolation for each tab. Looked better. But I just switched back last month. It happened kind of randomly. Saw an announcement of a new release ( 33, I think ), downloaded, re-imported my bookmarks from Chrome and just kind of kept using it instead of Chrome since then. I like how the tabs look also I think it feels lighter and snappier on my (now old-ish) laptop.

skrowl 12y ago
I've been reminding everyone I know who still uses Chrome to try Firefox again. Many have switched back. It's simply a better browser. One e10s is in stable, it's going to be even better. Google is a for-profit company that makes money selling your data and targeted, personal ads. Mozilla is not-for-profit and just wants to make the web better.
- taf2 12y ago
  I don't think there is actually any evidence they use Chrome for much more than 1. disrupt IE/MS - i can say for certain they originally backed Firefox for this effort and only decided to split away to build chrome in the first place because they felt starting fresh they could build a better core and i believe they did. 2. enabling more people to build on the web, enables more of their ads to be shown. Firefox achieves this just as well as chrome. IE was dominating not too long ago and you could argue much of google's ad revenue growth can be attributed to more people having access to a higher quality web. That said... I don't see why you should believe google would need or desire to sell data from what it might collect from Chrome. More likely they see it as a means to ensuring web dominance by ensuring the web is never locked down by one mega corp. It's similar in away to what they have done in the mobile space. Android is more of a technology to disrupt Apple and ensure it can't be dominate, but really does google have any control over Android?
  - chimeracoder 12y ago

EduardoBautista 12y ago

You know, I just don't know who to believe these days when it comes to browser benchmarks. All browser vendors pretty much say they lead all browsers in _something_. Honestly, I don't even know what all these benchmarks mean most of the time.

nnethercote 12y ago
There are enough browser benchmarks that you can typically find one that any browser wins on. Unfortunately many of them aren't very good. Here's how I think browser benchmarking should be done: https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/06/16/a-browser-benchmarking-manifesto/ https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/06/16/a-browser-be...
hornetblack 12y ago
The point in this one is SpiderMonkey is beating V8 in the benchmark designed such that V8 wins on it.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- ivanca 12y ago
  Yeah, no. They chose intensive process, many of them are ports of code from other languages and some the tests are using software made by Mozilla such as pdf.jz and zlib (Ecmascripten) and Microsoft (Typescript compiler) https://developers.google.com/octane/benchmark https://developers.google.com/octane/benchmark
  - roca 12y ago
    But they also included stuff like splay-latency which explicitly tests something that doesn't matter on the Web (support for incremental GC during script execution, which doesn't matter in browsers because the effects of a script are never made visible to the user until the script ends). Guess what, V8 has that and Spidermonkey doesn't.

orthecreedence 12y ago

Firefox is awesome and I love it, but my one complaint after all these years is that I have to restart the browser every day. It's not the end of the world, but it's still frustrating, especially when I'm in the throes of debugging or important research. Over the course of a day, the browser becomes unresponsive and CPU usage idles at 10-15%. Restarting with the same tabs brings it down to 0%. Yes, I know, disable addons, blah blah...doesn't work for me. Same problem. I'm really looking forward to the new threading model coming up. I have a feeling that once each tab has a thread, things like this will be much more self-repairing. It's not always easy to kill a rogue execution path in an event loop, but killing a thread is pretty straightforward =]. Also, congrats on the firefox team for really taking performance seriously.

nnethercote 12y ago
Resetting might help: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most-problems https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi... It resets your profile while preserving history, cookies, bookmarks, etc. > I'm really looking forward to the new threading model coming up. I have a feeling that once each tab has a thread, things like this will be much more self-repairing. It's not always easy to kill a rogue execution path in an event loop, but killing a thread is pretty straightforward =]. First, it's "process", not "thread" :) The plan is to start with just two main processes -- one for chrome (browser UI, mostly) and one for web content. So no processes will be killed in normal operation. This is because additional processes incur certain extra costs, particularly when it comes to memory consumption. Still, it might help with your problem; it's hard to say for sure.
ibrahima 12y ago
It's not threading, it's processes that's coming up. I would be surprised if each tab didn't already have its own thread, because eg. multiple tabs can load at the same time... And umm, not sure what I'm doing differently but I usually keep Firefox open for weeks at a time and have no issues. Though I cut back a bit on keeping tabs open, I used to keep like 60-80 tabs open all the time but now I usually clean up when I'm done with something (more to reduce cognitive overhead than resource utilization).

tkubacki 12y ago

kudos for Firefox team. I hope they put more love in speeding up css animations (like here: http://bartaz.github.io/impress.js/#/bored http://bartaz.github.io/impress.js/#/bored)

JohnBooty 12y ago

I am ridiculously proud of Mozilla and everybody who has contributed to Firefox over the years.

general_failure 12y ago

Kudos. But they should really invest time in making the UI responsive and fast. This is my biggest gripe about firefox. I also find it incomprehensible that it checks for updates on startup in a modal fashion. Very annoying.

nathancahill 12y ago
What version of Firefox are you using? It hasn't done that in ages. You have to open the About window to check for new updates and install them.
- kbrosnan 12y ago
  Non-Windows still has modal update dialog. On startup for non-Windows you are blocked from using the browser until the update is complete. There is a dialog if you run out of date extensions. There is a nag dialog if you have an update pending for over 24h.
  - nly 12y ago
    What platform? Most Linux distros compile Firefox with "--disable-updater --disable-installer", such that Mozillas auto-update doesn't even exist.
    - kbrosnan 12y ago
      OS X and Mozilla Linux builds.

untilHellbanned 12y ago

I can really feel the swing back to Firefox happening like the switch to Chrome back 5-7 years ago. Go Firefox!!! p.s. Great work on Firefox OS too!

zobzu 12y ago
Yeah. Unfortunately for Mozilla, they don't have a download button on the #1 page on the web (google.com) and they dont bundle it either with any OS (Windows + IE, Mac/iOS + Safari, Android + Chrome) or software (Chrome auto installed from Flash upgrades, etc.) So I don't know how strong the switch back would be...

Jonanin 12y ago

Check out http://arewefastyet.com/ http://arewefastyet.com/ (the website mentioned in the article), which tracks javascript engine performance. Spidermonkey is faster than v8 and Safari's JSC on all three popular javascript benchmarks [1] [1] Octane (google's benchmark), Sunspider (Apple/Webkit's benchmark), and Kraken (Mozilla's benchmark).

MBCook 12y ago
Is there a reason they don't have the new Safari 8 FTLJIT in those numbers? JSC (Java Script Core?) was Safari 7 wasn't it?
- azakai 12y ago
  FTL is shown there, but note that FTL only works on 64-bit machines. Click on "machines->mac os x 64-bit" to see the results. They are indeed much better than without FTL.
- Jonanin 12y ago
  According to [1]: "Last week I asked for benchmarks of the new JavascriptCore Fourth Tier LLVM JIT. Arewefastyet from Mozilla now includes such results. FTLJIT does particularly well on asm.js examples." You can see JSC performing better than chrome on the asm.js benchmarks: http://arewefastyet.com/#machine=12&view=breakdown&suite=asmjs-apps http://arewefastyet.com/#machine=12&view=breakdown&suite=asm... [1] http://blog.llvm.org/2014/05/llvm-weekly-19-may-12th-2014.html http://blog.llvm.org/2014/05/llvm-weekly-19-may-12th-2014.ht...

cromwellian 12y ago

"This puts us in a position of strength, so we can say "these benchmarks are not very interesting; let's talk about other benchmarks (e.g. asm.js-related) and language features" without being accused of being sore losers." But are asmjs benchmarks interesting? They are not representative of the vast majority of real-world JS, so wouldn't an asmjs-laden benchmark suite really be a case of optimizing for your own set of benchmarks, tuned to your own idiomatic-JS? But anyway, congrats on the achievement. I like the fact that V8, JSC, and FF performance are converging. If the performance differential is too great, it creates additional headaches for the developer targeting a certain level of efficiency.

sphink 12y ago
Don't look at asm.js benchmarks if you're interested in real-world JS. Look at them if you want to know something about the performance of C++ code transpiled to run in a browser, which is an interesting thing to know. And it's getting to be more and more relevant these days. (Even "real-world JS" is going to start using asm.js libraries, I bet.) But asm.js execution is very different from JS execution, even in browsers that don't have specialized asm.js paths. Executing regular JS is all about balancing compile time and garbage collection with code execution. asm.js barely uses GC, and allows lots of opportunities to cache compilation in ways that would be invalid for regular JS. So the whole space of tradeoffs is different.
roca 12y ago
Being representative of "existing real world JS" is one way benchmarks can be interesting. On the other hand, asm.js benchmarks are interesting because improving asm.js performance expands the scope of what the Web can do. Ditto for new language features.
cpeterso 12y ago
The vast majority of real-world JS don't need JITs to perform adequately, but heavyweight asmjs games are CPU-bound and it makes sense to optimize for them. Watching Firefox creep up on Chrome performance on the arewefastyet.com charts, all JS engines seemed to be converging on some performance asymptote. asmjs changes the rules of the game and break through for specific content.

Igglyboo 12y ago

As soon as firefox gets per process tabs in stable I'll switch back, I really want to switch from chrome but that's a deal killer for me.

gojomo 12y ago
I could survive without processes-per-tab, if Firefox gave some hint – any hint! – which tabs are being naughty. Maybe just a per-tab counter of allocations, or timeouts, or DOM edits, or some other operation? Anything that serves as a proxy for "more active than average while not in foreground".
- __david__ 12y ago
  Yeah, Firefox really needs some sort of "top". Right now, idling, my Firefox is taking between 20% and 40% of my CPU. I'm sure it's some tab running some dumb javascript, but there's no way for me to figure out which one. Sad, because spidermonkey must know which window a javascript context is associated with, so it could feasibly keep track of run time.
  - wiredfool 12y ago
    In my experience, with vanilla firefox on a desktop (linux, i7), 1 tab with twitter open takes about that much processor power.
  - bzbarsky 12y ago
    SpiderMonkey itself actually has no concept of windows at all. So it doesn't know what window anything has to do with. The browser itself does, though. Some sort of "top"-like utility is in fact being worked on, for both websites and extensions.
    - sp332 12y ago
      If a script hangs, Firefox has a little popup on that tab that asks if you want to kill it or let it keep running. So something in the browser knows which tabs are JS-intensive.

whoisthemachine 12y ago

Good job guys!

bobajeff 12y ago

>This puts us in a position of strength, so we can say "these benchmarks are not very interesting; let's talk about other benchmarks (e.g. asm.js-related) and language features" without being accused of being sore losers. I'm looking forward to such a statement from Mozilla. The web needs mature suppott for languages other than JavaScript and C++/C are very widely used languages(as opposed to some new hobby language) and compile to JS tools are the only realistic way of getting there. So I can hardly wait until browser venders and standards organizations embrace efforts like Asm.js and the nessary extensions to make it support other memory and language models and features (Shared memory, SIMD, JVM languages etc.).

Sephr 12y ago

Octane now includes asm.js benchmarks, and V8 doesn't attempt to support "use asm". This gives SpiderMonkey an advantage in the benchmark. I think it's quite impressive how close V8 is in performance to SpiderMonkey which actually goes out of it's way to support "use asm".

xooyoozoo 12y ago
Octane is Google's own benchmark suite. I don't think getting beaten on your own hand-picked set of performance metrics satisfies any definition of "impressive".
- afsina 12y ago
  It sure is far better than idiotic SunSpider. They are close to real-life application examples. If they really wanted to hand-pick they would not include asm.js benchmarks, where Firefox has a certain advantage.
  - nnethercote 12y ago
    Octane is half good and half rubbish: https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/08/24/octane-minus-v8/ https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/08/24/octane-minus... The notable thing about this achievement is that for a very long time V8 was miles ahead of the competition on its own benchmark (first V8bench, and now Octane), as the graphs at http://arewefastyet.com/ http://arewefastyet.com/ show.
nnethercote 12y ago
This comes down to your definition of "support". Unlike SpiderMonkey, V8 doesn't have a special mode for "use asm" code, as far as I know. E.g. it still does JIT compilation, unlike SpiderMonkey, which does AOT compilation. But the V8 team is certainly working on making asm.js code fast. This is clear from the fact that V8's performance on asm.js benchmarks has increased significantly since asm.js was first announced. (As you note, they put an asm.js test in their own benchmark suite.) And even if V8 doesn't have a special mode for asm.js, they're benefitting from asm.js's existence, because asm.js makes clear exactly which subset of JavaScript they need to be optimizing for.

SwellJoe 12y ago

I switched back to Firefox from Chrome a couple years ago, because I no longer trust Google to have my best interests at heart. It's been fine; I have a beefy machine with plenty of RAM, but I also use it on my horribly slow Android phone (an old HTC Sensation 4G that has never been worth a crap), and it works OK there, too. My only complaint is that it requires a plugin to get a reasonable number of tabs in a window before requiring scrolling. It's downright absurd that it stopped being configurable many, many, many versions ago.

barrkel 12y ago
TreeStyleTabs.

notastartup 12y ago

You know whats funny, I stopped using Chrome and use Firefox now because Firefox is so much faster. The exact same reason I switched to Chrome 5 years ago. Also I'm slightly less creeped out.

sphink 12y ago
I think this is pretty common. In fact, this can happen even if neither browser changes at all. Your profile builds up and your history searches etc. slow down, so you switch browsers and get a clean profile to start with. Repeat. (I'm not saying that that is what you are experiencing, but I think it's a factor for every browser user.)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

Rapzid 12y ago

I had another look at FireFox the other day. Impressed with their editable layout and smooth interface. Less impressed with the Network tools pane in comparison with Chrome(chrome shows compressed/inflated size, can view and copy raw headers, etc). Still, it's in my to-do to give it some game time.

BorisMelnik 12y ago

Love hearing this. I have been a Firefox user since Netscape 5, if that makes sense. To me there might be some positives about Chrome but for me it is a culture / community issue. It is a foundation I am willing to support during the good times and bad, and I am not so hot about giving Chrome access to every keystroke I make. While this may sound petty, one feature I'd really love to see come back in Firefox is the ability to see the refresh button match the style / movability of the back/home buttons. It is very annoying having to use precise clicking on the eeeency little arrow on the URL bar. But thats the thing, even if I am annoyed by small issues or lacking features, I don't abandon a project based on that.

Kliment 12y ago
right-click on the page and you have a refresh button right where your pointer is
- BorisMelnik 12y ago
  good call on that! did that get added within the last major version or two?

pjmlp 12y ago

Great work! Improvements like this and Rust, is where I like seeing Mozilla spending their resources.

bruceboughton 12y ago

It would be interesting to now how Firefox performs with regard to battery usage. Apple in particular seems to be focussing on battery life as much as performance, given that the codebase is shared across iOS and OS X.

Tloewald 12y ago

Firefox's hopeless video and audio implementation (especially on Mac OS X) remains a deal breaker for me. It means resorting to Flash in a lot of cases, which means I use another browser. I'm glad to see strides being made in JavaScript performance, but basic browser functionality is far more important.

dbcooper 12y ago
Media Source Extensions are a high priority right now, so problems with html5 video (esp. with youtube) should be solved soon. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=778617 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=778617 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1083588 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1083588
kevingadd 12y ago
HTML5 video and audio in Firefox works perfectly in every site I visit. What problems do you hit? I haven't used it on Mac so perhaps the support is less good there. Some sites don't attempt to use <video>/<audio> in Firefox for me, but that's a site issue, not a browser issue - h264 and webm both work fine.
- dbcooper 12y ago
  There are a few google related ones in Karl Dubost's list: http://www.otsukare.info/2014/10/28/google-webcompatibility-bugs-list http://www.otsukare.info/2014/10/28/google-webcompatibility-...
- Tloewald 12y ago
  MP4 video support is completely absent on Mac. And MP3 audio is also not supported.

joemccall86 12y ago

I keep going back and forth between Firefox and Chrome. Chrome is ahead right now for two reasons: 1. Support for Netflix on linux 2. Webapps as native applications (like the old project prism). We use slack at work and a Chrome webapp is how they choose to support Linux. Admittedly though, I will switch to Firefox for the rest of the week to see if I can live with these caveats.

dethstar 12y ago
I use Netflix on Linux (firefox) with pipelight.
magicalist 12y ago
There's also nothing that says you can't have two different browsers open at once :)

piyush_soni 12y ago

I still use Firefox as my main browser, but while it has improved a lot in recent times, I don't know why are some root problems not getting fixed - memory hogging, browser hangs, crashes (yes, I still get them on my workstation - I've even reported the callstacks to them). Mostly, the answer is, "It's your add-ons" - oh yes, but when it comes to talking about their strengths, this is one of the first things they talk about - "add-ons". For example, every other browser fixed this 12 year old bug [0] one by one, but Firefox doesn't care much about it. In fact, not only that they don't have any solution to it whatsoever, when people's resentment about the bug increased, they chose to just shut down their voices on it. [0]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78414 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78414

irv 12y ago
memory is has been getting better over the years, thanks to the memshrink project though. https://www.areweslimyet.com/ https://www.areweslimyet.com/
kbrosnan 12y ago
That bug is intractable with the current NPAPI and plugin vendor landscape. Slowly plugins are being replaced by web accessible technology. That is the way forward. There are some things a user can do to avoid the issue as much as possible. Setting all plugins to ask to activate in about:addons resolves a number of common occurrences where plugins take focus on load. Set YouTube to use the 'HTML5' player [0]. Use pdf.js. If you are on OS X 10.7+ use Mozilla's Aurora branch to get h264 playback [1]. If you develop sites check for support of h264 playback instead of assuming Firefox does not have it. [0] https://www.youtube.com/html5 https://www.youtube.com/html5 [1] https://aurora.mozilla.org https://aurora.mozilla.org

kevincennis 12y ago

This is cool, but Firefox still feels a lot slower to me than Chrome. I think Mozilla would get a lot of mileage out of improving the performance of the rendering engine. FF doesn't feel slow because of JS, it feels slow(-er than Chrome, at least on my Mac) because repaints and layout seem to take longer.

agapos 12y ago
They are working on it on several fronts, constantly cutting off tasks from the main thread onto their own ones (downloading, cache v2, Awesomebar), making other things asynchronous (project snappy), garbage collection improvements also help in some cases. Most of these are smaller wins, and several big ones like OMTC, tiled rendering or e10s are yet to come. Edit: It may not be as responsive as Chrome (I don't know as I don't use it), but I believe it is miles ahead of it's former self.