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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

#91

Post by jgroome »

sorbus wrote: post #87
alttag wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't use chrome—thus, most people aren't used to it. It's good Mozilla is moving forward at a rapid pace (particularly with the memory issues), but as long as the remainder of the software world is still in either the 90's slow release cycle or the 00's everything-is-a-beta-v0.x mindset, Firefox/Chrome will be aberrations. I may learn to tolerate it, but that doesn't mean I'll get used to it.

Chrome's market share is above 20% now (Firefox's is below 30%, and IE's is below 50%).

I was going to say I'd heard different figures, but you're right: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/05/google-browser-idU...

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

#92

Post by bzbarsky »

jgroome wrote: post #91
sorbus wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome's market share is above 20% now (Firefox's is below 30%, and IE's is below 50%).

I was going to say I'd heard different figures, but you're right: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/05/google-browser-idU...

You probably _have_ seen different figures.

Chrome market share is anywhere from 13% to 20% depending on the source.

Firefox market share is between 22% and 29% depending on the source.

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

#93

Post by bzbarsky »

jerhinesmith wrote: post #74

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…

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.

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

#94

Post by abhinavsharma »

frodwith wrote: post #47

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.

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/

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

#96

Post by r00fus »

jerhinesmith wrote: post #74

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…

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?

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

#97

Post by sapphirecat »

sid0 wrote: post #88
jasonkester wrote: post #69

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.

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/Def... . Firefox on the other hand easily gets 60 fps with those many fish.

> 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.

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

#98

Post by [deleted] »

mbrubeck wrote: post #78
smackfu wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, changing the meaning of the version numbers without changing the version numbering scheme seems to have been a big mistake.

People said the same things when Chrome switched to their similar 6-week release cycle in July 2010, but about twelve months later the choice of version numbers has not caused any important problems that I've seen.

[deleted]

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

#99

Post by sapphirecat »

mbrubeck wrote: post #78
smackfu wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, changing the meaning of the version numbers without changing the version numbering scheme seems to have been a big mistake.

People said the same things when Chrome switched to their similar 6-week release cycle in July 2010, but about twelve months later the choice of version numbers has not caused any important problems that I've seen.

Chrome doesn't interrupt you, throw up a UAC prompt, or break half your extensions when it updates. Though Mozilla is certainly working on improving the experience, invoking it many times more frequently before doing so was fairly anti-user.
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