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Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 - Super fluid, beats everyone on sunspider

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Re: Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 - Super fluid, beats everyone on sunspider

#21

Post by SkyMarshal »

itistoday wrote: post #2

Congrats Mozilla on the release! Odd title though for this post, for where is the "everyone"? The link shows comparisons to previous versions of Firefox, not other browsers. One thing I hope they fix before final release though is the constant CPU usage when you have many tabs open. I thought the Panorama feature was supposed to address this. It's currently idling at around 25% CPU for me, and no, unfortunately I can…

>It's currently idling at around 25% CPU for me, and no, unfortunately I can't blame it on Flash. :-\

I sometimes notice this too, but always after running a bunch of Flash vids. Haven't methodically tested it, since it's not a priority and a quick restart fixes it. But how do you know it's not Flash?

Re: Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 - Super fluid, beats everyone on sunspider

#22

Post by bennysaurus »

diegob wrote: post #19

Browsers keep improving JS speed, but is there an upper limit to how fast it can be? How far off is it from something like C ?

JS speed has improved so much recently due to optimisations like JIT (Just In Time compiling). There will be an upper limit eventually but we haven't hit it yet.

It's damn fast but still a high-level interpreted language - time is taken for a program in the browser to compile it on the fly and run.

It wont hit the speed of well written C code, but most things don't need that speed anyway.

Re: Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 - Super fluid, beats everyone on sunspider

#23

Post by sliverstorm »

But does the user interface still respond like molasses in January? Last time I tried Firefox 4, I could have sworn my entire PC was locking up any time I clicked my mouse on any piece of the browser besides the web pages it was rendering.

No offense or anything, it was just an insurmountable obstacle, and without reasonable UI performance, render times and tab changes mean nothing.

Re: Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 - Super fluid, beats everyone on sunspider

#24

Post by SkyMarshal »

diegob wrote: post #19

Browsers keep improving JS speed, but is there an upper limit to how fast it can be? How far off is it from something like C ?

The Mozilla blog recently posted something about this, saying how all the major browsers are approaching the upper limit of JS speed. Can't find that post now though, but pretty sure it was a HN submission.

Re: Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 - Super fluid, beats everyone on sunspider

#25

Post by natmaster »

Asa Dotzler says we should 'move on' to other, more relevant benchmarks, since everyone is basically fast enough on this one: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2010/10/some_sun...

I definitely agree here - newer benchmarks are much more interesting, as sunspider doesn't really tax any VMs these days.

Re: Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 - Super fluid, beats everyone on sunspider

#28

Post by mrinterweb »

scorpioxy wrote: post #10

Can anyone elaborate on the XPCOM improvements? I thought the plan was to get rid of XPCOM all together in firefox 4. Very nice set of improvements though. Not sure about firefox 4, but firefox 3 was a memory hog.

>... but firefox 3 was a memory hog.

I really do not find Firefox 3 to be a memory hog at all. I find it to consume much less memory than Chrome running multiple tabs over a prolonged period of time. I have caught Chrome running way out of control with memory usage and nearly maxing out my page file. My usage generally has Firefox using between 300MB and 500MB or RAM depending on what I have open. The same usage on Chrome is tricky to track total memory usage, but I can get a rough idea of how much memory it was using when I quit Chrome and compare the available memory to how much memory was being used while Chrome was running.

What browser do you consider not to be a memory hog?

Re: Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 - Super fluid, beats everyone on sunspider

#29

Post by wahnfrieden »

mattiask wrote: post #6

Browsers are going mainsteam and it spells bad news for the browser vendors and good news for the users. All browers nowadays pretty much look the same, have the same performance and try desperately to distinguish themselves with surrounding features. The basic problem is that the browser is still "trapped in a sandbox", ie they're trying to become the OS but they're still just an application running in a limited con…

I don't know about your predictions, but I think that Google's Native Client for Chrome will be a significant differentiator in bridging the desktop/web app gap once it matures and gains traction, with the help of Chrome OS too. Mozilla has some ideas for this sort of thing -- Prism is a barely-alive project that makes desktop apps out of sites and gives extra privileges and desktop APIs to the JavaScript client. I wonder if they would or can just take NaCl from Google too though, or make their own compatible platform based on LLVM.

Re: Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 - Super fluid, beats everyone on sunspider

#30

Post by sliverstorm »

sliverstorm wrote: post #23

But does the user interface still respond like molasses in January? Last time I tried Firefox 4, I could have sworn my entire PC was locking up any time I clicked my mouse on any piece of the browser besides the web pages it was rendering. No offense or anything, it was just an insurmountable obstacle, and without reasonable UI performance, render times and tab changes mean nothing.

I have begun testing, and I can report it is drastically improved.
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