71–80 of 124 posts
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.
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.
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.
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…
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 fast release cycles make me less anxious... I like the fast release cycles... I think extension writers get lazy with long release cycles. The move from 3.6 to 4.0 was brutal.
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.
For example:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666058#c31
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=656120#c44
The second bug specifically should help resolve the "Firefox has been open for two days and now it eats my entire system" problem.
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.
Yes, changing the meaning of the version numbers without changing the version numbering scheme seems to have been a big mistake.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
FF6 is in beta, should be out by the end of summer (or early autumn), FF7 is in alpha and should be released before end-of-year. I guess FF8 (which just arrived on the nightly channel) will be up for release in late 2011-early 2012.
They are employing 6 weeks for each version number, like Chrome, so they'll be out much sooner.
* August 16 - Firefox 6 * September 27 - Firefox 7 * November 8 - Firefox 8