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

extremetech.com

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

#11

Post by mikemaccana »

w1ntermute wrote: post #6

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.

6 is in beta now. Nightlies were 7.0a a few days ago, but if you update.... yep, 8.0a1

PS. Nightly has been incredibly stable on my Mac. I actually use it in production, for no other reason than I was testing it and have no reason to get an old release since it's never crashed and is incredibly fast.

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

#12

Post by saurik »

jlongster wrote: post #9
w1ntermute wrote: post #6

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.

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.

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")?!

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

#13

Post by AndrewDucker »

snow_mac wrote: post #7

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.

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.

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

#14

Post by nodata »

arkitaip wrote: post #4

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.

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.

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

#15

Post by jlongster »

saurik wrote: post #12
jlongster wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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")?!

Are you seriously going to over-analyze specific tenses of words? Each major version will include different features. Stop just trying to distract the conversation.

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

#16

Post by yxhuvud »

arkitaip wrote: post #4

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.

The only thing they need to do is to continue to release versions. Then people will get used to it and will not notice it anymore.

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

#17

Post by mrseb »

mikemaccana wrote: post #11
w1ntermute wrote: post #6

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.

6 is in beta now. Nightlies were 7.0a a few days ago, but if you update.... yep, 8.0a1 PS. Nightly has been incredibly stable on my Mac. I actually use it in production, for no other reason than I was testing it and have no reason to get an old release since it's never crashed and is incredibly fast.

Can echo that Nightly (8) is very stable on Windows, too.

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

#18

Post by arkitaip »

snow_mac wrote: post #7

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.

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-fir...

[2] http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/06/21/mozilla-delivers-new...

[3] http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-ua-string-changes/

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

#19

Post by mrseb »

w1ntermute wrote: post #6

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.

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).
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