Firefox 3 Performance Gets a Boost 550
jason writes "Mozilla has been working hard at making Firefox 3 faster than its predecessor, and it looks like they might be succeeding. They've recently added some significant JavaScript performance improvements that beat out all of the competition, including Opera 9.5 Beta. And it comes out to be about ten times faster than Internet Explorer 7! Things are really starting to fall into place for Firefox 3 Beta 4 which should be available in the next week or two."
Safari (Score:4, Informative)
IE7 is just slow anyway (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Safari (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Safari (Score:5, Informative)
I tried Firefox 3 today (Score:5, Informative)
Heads up for all those trying Firefox 3 is Oldbar [google.co.uk]. I suggest you get it if you don't like the new 'innovations' by Mozilla Corp.
Safari is getting up there (Score:4, Informative)
The Safari team recently introduced some native javascript functions [webkit.org], which showed very impressive speed. It looks like the next release Safari will be up there as well (if not even faster still).
I'm off to download the latest Firefox to see how the two compare (on both Windows and OS X platforms).
Firefox 3 also supports new Java plug-in (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox 3 is going to include support for the new Java SE 6 runtime environment.
This is a new implementation of the Java Plug-In that features increased reliability, ability to specify large heap sizes, ability to select a specific JRE version to execute a particular applet, and support for signed applets on Windows Vista.
The New Plug-in is designed to work with: - Internet Explorer 6 and 7 on Windows XP and Windows Vista - Firefox 3 on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Solaris and Linux
Personally, I've been wanting to use the Firefox 3 beta for some time, primarily because of the performance and speed boosts over Firefox 2, but my favourite add-ons still aren't compatible.Note: The new Plug-in does not work with Firefox 2, and no support is planned for this browser with the New Plug-in.
Re:Safari (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It still doesn't run on my computer (Score:4, Informative)
Back up your Firefox Profile [mozilla.com] and start clean.
Builds for Windows and Linux available (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Firefox Performance (Score:3, Informative)
a) efficient networking
b) lexical analysis
d) parsing.
e) DOM tree construction (required because it's available to javascript)
f) javascript lexical analysis
g) javascript grammar parsing
h) javascript compilation to bytecode
j) javascript execution by vm (including subtasks: initialization, execution, security checks, etc)
k) rendering output
It's probably even more complex than above, but it's a long process to go from <html><body><p>hi!</p></body></html> to a page that has "hi!" on it. Longer if it needs to execute javascript safely as well.
Re:I tried Firefox 3 today (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I tried Firefox 3 today (Score:1, Informative)
Here are your links for your request in Firefox w/out the use of an extension:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Location_Bar_search [mozillazine.org]
http://www.squarefree.com/2004/09/09/googles-browse-by-name-in-firefox/ [squarefree.com]
Regards,
Anonymous Coward.
Re:Memory leak? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Firefox Performance (Score:5, Informative)
I could have sworn that PDF was Portable Document Format. All your other points about it are correct though.
Re:CPU optimized? (Score:3, Informative)
OS X Results - Spoiler Safari Wins (Score:5, Informative)
Well someone had to, so I ran the numbers for OS X. All of the below were on OS X 10.5.2 running on a MacBook:
I guess if you're a Safari or Firefox person you can look forward to some really fast Javascript performance either way.
Re:Safari (Score:5, Informative)
Okay, I ran it on OS X anyway. I'm too lazy to run it on Windows too :) Here are the results [slashdot.org]. The new version of Webkit/Safari does beat the nightly of Firefox, but it is close and they're both a lot better than any regular release.
Re:OSX? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:I tried Firefox 3 today (Score:5, Informative)
I think I understand.
You see, the new location bar learns. Though this silly new 'innovation' does indeed search through the URLs *and* titles of bookmarks and history, it also learns what you select the most. Give it a few more days and slashdot should come to the top of the list.
I experienced the same thing in the beginning.
When I bookmark page now I try to throw on a couple common sense tags that way when I type the tag in the location bar in the future, those bookmarks come out on top.
If you're *really* dead set on the shortest route:
1) Click Bookmarks -> Show All Bookmarks
2) Find the slashdot bookmark and select it
4) Click "More" under properties
5) Make the keyword
6) Close the window
Now type
Why is this marked as troll? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Safari (Score:5, Informative)
Re:About time (Score:3, Informative)
We already have a perfectly good one. It's called HTTP. While the acronym may be misleading, it has nothing to do with HTML. In fact, no protocols (that I know of) have anything implicit to do with HTML.
I agree that we should be getting the damn code out of your hypertext, but that doesn't necessitate a new protocol.
Re:I tried Firefox 3 today (Score:4, Informative)
Next time, try it like this: "LMAO. You are a worthless, pathetic piece of shit. The word you're looking for is voilà, literally 'see there' in French, an idiom used to mean 'there you go'". (though the OP's spelling is pretty damn close to the correct phonetical spelling \vwä-'lä\)
Re:OS X Results - Spoiler Safari Wins (Score:4, Informative)
Replying to my own post, I probably should have included Firefox 2.0.0.12 as well. Here are the numbers for that and Firefox 1.5.0.8 which is still on my machine for testing purposes.
Re:IE7 is just slow anyway (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Browser speeds (Score:3, Informative)
I realise that it mostly is amazing, and I'm not satisfied with Firefox by any means, but Opera just feels alien; a bit like when you start messing about with WINE after a long period of not needing to.
I realise that seems woolly as fuck, but I guess Opera is sufficiently advanced that such intangible and abstract criticisms become the only valid ones.
Re:Safari (Score:3, Informative)
However, as one of the other replies mentions, it is partly down to the caching, which has now been adjusted.
If you are in the "I would rather have a slow browser with no cache" crowd, you can actually tune the cache down in the prefs.
Re:I tried Firefox 3 today (Score:3, Informative)
I've also got huge problems with image rendering (images that I browsed several pages ago showing up as a tiled background on the page I'm browsing now? WTF?), and Gmail is very, very broken (I can't send e-mail from it). I'm on Beta 3 in Ubuntu. Those are all bugs, though; the address bar thing seems to be a "feature", and I fear that the general UI unresponsiveness isn't going anywhere, either. Just give me back the address bar that used to be there, and make the suggestions pop up instantly. That's what I want, not slower with more "features" that I've never, ever wanted, and, after trying it out, still don't want.
Re:OS X Results - Spoiler Safari Wins (Score:3, Informative)
That's why that line in my comparison reads, "Safari with Nightly Webkit r30628." Safari is an actual browser, I just replaced the back end. It's not like I'm going to write my own minimalist front end for it, after all, when it is so easy to plug into Safari. In fact, if anything I'd say Firefox was getting the advantage since I tested the newest versions of their front end and back end whereas I used the old front end for Safari which could, theoretically, be optimized to work better with the latest version of WebKit.
I guess I don't see the difference between running a nightly build of Firefox (including Gecko) and running the nightly build of Webkit plugged into Safari. I didn't compile either one and both are just a download and then you double click on them. It is one of the nice things about separating the rendering engine and the front end. Try it yourself. This page [webkit.org] has links for Windows and OS X. You just download the image and run it like you would any other application.
Firefox 3 beta 3 on Linux is great (Score:5, Informative)
- Where as before FF2 would use around 500 meg it now only uses around 50 meg
- Flash no longer crashes the browser
- Javascript no longer crashes the browser
- Those long pauses as it is doing something that stalls the browsers operation are gone.
I couldn't believe the difference.
Re:Safari (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Firefox Performance (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hi, I'm the parent (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Firefox Performance (Score:4, Informative)
Um, PDFs can be made just as accessible as HTML documents [alistapart.com], and Adobe's PDF tools have good integrated support for assistive technologies [adobe.com] built in.
PDF accessibility is a lot like HTML accessibility; you have to know what you're doing to make it happen, but you can make it happen.
Re:Firefox 3 beta 3 on Linux is great (Score:5, Informative)
- Ctrl-MouseWheel zooming scales the images as well so the pages look normal without text overlapping the graphics
That feature alone is worth upgrading for.
Re:Safari (Score:1, Informative)
suffix. with sense 'having the qualities of' r 'recurring at intervals of'
'notoriously single threaded' => having the quality of being ill famed for being single threaded
quite so.
Re:Firefox Performance (Score:3, Informative)
If the memory in question are rendered page caches, which aren't going to get touched unless they're viewed. As long as the allocation tables are efficiently indexed, i don't see how memory usage is directly related to speed.
Re:Safari (Score:5, Informative)
Example: I have 8 gb in this system. Right now I only have FF and Thunderbird running (+ a few background processes). Current "commit charge" is 475mb, of which Firefox is using 150mb. The system says I'm using 280mb of swap, but it's not actually thrashing the swap disk at all. That swap space is reserved, presumably because it represents 280mb of idle memory that is eligible to swap out, should another process need it.
Windows allocates virtual memory quite aggressively (when properly coded). If a process requests 500mb, but only really uses 100mb of it, the remaining 400mb will be "allocated" to swap while the real memory remains available to other processes. The moment a memory page is accessed, it is marked "dirty" and moved to real memory.
It's very much like sparse files, where unused or 0-filled pages don't take up any physical space (except for the map entry). That's how virtual memory is supposed to work, and it lets developers simplify their code by not having to worry too much about the physical arrangement of memory. It's also partly why you should never run a system without a swap file, even if it has tons of memory. I've probably never used all 8 gb in my system, but I still keep a (small) swap file. If I didn't, and that process allocates 500mb, Windows needs to dedicate 500mb whether or not it is actually in use. It reminds me of real-estate players, who can "buy" million-dollar buildings with a relatively small amount of capital, the rest on credit. Swap is like a line of credit for the OS.
Linux probably does the same thing, but I'm not as knowledgeable about its inner workings.
Screw Adobe; I use Foxit Reader. (Score:2, Informative)
FF3 is using FreeBSD's new malloc (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Firefox 3 beta 3 on Linux is great (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Safari (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Safari (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Safari (Score:3, Informative)
That is not correct, maybe you are thinking of Thread Local Storage. All threads share the same address space and memory allocations (memory management techniques used inside the application aside). Perhaps this page (found with a quick Google search) should clear up the confusion: http://virtualthreads.blogspot.com/2006/02/understanding-memory-usage-on-linux.html [blogspot.com]
It is more a matter that tools such as ps report the VSZ (Virtual Set size) and RSS (Resident Set Size) -- basically this is the amount of memory mapped in the virtual address space, and the size of the physical memory pages currently assigned to the process (this can grow or shrink with the operating system's page replacement -- moving pages into swap).
The memory in the virtual address space is not necessarily 'memory' that was allocated by the program for storage: memory-mapped file access, shared libraries and shared memory all counts into this address space, and this memory is managed by the operating system kernel or application. For mmap files, you can access a file like an array in memory and the operating system will deal with loading and saving the appropriate pages of data.
Depends on application (Score:2, Informative)
For instance Gmail in FireFox is really fast, almost as if it weren't a web application.
However, Gmail in Opera is a lot slower.
Possibly due to how FireFox caches and similar, but either way, theend result is that Google Apps is a lot faster on FireFox.
Re:I tried Firefox 3 today (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why is this marked as troll? (Score:3, Informative)
Long and short, Safari's native implementation of getElementsByClassName is astronomically faster [webkit.org]. Firefox 3 shows similar improvements [ejohn.org] over the JavaScript implementation of the same function.
On the other hand, it *does* beg the question of why on earth we haven't begun to design something a bit more friendly and efficient than JavaScript, which is (at best) an obfuscated nightmare, and pitifully slow on even the fastest of machines when performing simple tasks.
Re:Firefox Performance (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Safari (Score:5, Informative)
1. Firefox 3 Nightly (PGO Optimized): 7263.8ms
2. Firefox 3 Nightly (02/25/2008 build): 8219.4ms
3. Opera 9.5.9807 Beta: 10824.0ms
4. Firefox 3 Beta 3: 16080.6ms
5. Safari 3.0.4 Beta: 18012.6ms
6. Firefox 2.0.0.12: 29376.4ms
7. Internet Explorer 7: 72375.0ms
The results are generated by using the Sunspider JS benchmark suite.
This looks great, but everyone should notice a couple of things that may not be obvious.
1) Sunspider JS benchmark is designed by Apple developers and they use it to show the world how much faster Safari is, however Opera seems to outpace the Safari developers even with their own tests. However, yes some of the benchmarks used are 'picked' to favor Safari, and some are 'extended' to hurt IE.
2) Sunspider over does the tests of the Append String performance problem to make IE look worse than it really is. IE's JScript is coded as JScript was designed, and because of this, it doesn't optimize string append operations by using newer code. So by using this text extra, it artificially make IE look horribly slow. IE8 and possible additional IE7 releases are spending time optimizing the base JSCript code from the original implementations/specifications.
http://blogs.msdn.com/jscript/archive/2007/10/17/performance-issues-with-string-concatenation-in-jscript.aspx [msdn.com]
3) If you remove the 'string' routine from the test, IE7, consistently outperforms Firefox 2.0, and is very close to even Safari for with the results were cherry picked.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001023.html [codinghorror.com]
4) Some of the numbers are quite questionable as to the validity. For example IE7 is given 72375 in this article, and yet the slowest machine our tech lab has ever benchmarked is 2x the speed, and this is on a very old AMD 1ghz machine that barely runs Vista in which the test yeilded the horrible results. So where did they get the 72375 number from? A Pentium 200?
Again reference this link so see that even this person's results are no where near the 75K ms time reported for IE.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001023.html [codinghorror.com]
So it is quite questionable and inaccurate to try to portray IE7 as 10x slower, when without the 'emphasized' string append slowdown in IE7, it is faster than FireFox 2.0 and within a few 'ms' of even Safari and the new FireFox 3.0 results.
Good job to the FireFox team, btw.. Also does anyone have benchmarks of the new FireFox using a non-Apple test suite?
Re:Have they discovered threads yet? (Score:3, Informative)
1) Web content expects all JS that might interact with each other (which includes JS in different windows) to run on a single thread. Not doing that breaks websites.
2) All the DOM code is single-threaded. Changing that would involve some nontrivial locking overhead. Might be worth it as processors become more and more parallel.
3) A lot of other application code is single-threaded in Firefox (though a number of worker threads _is_ used). This would need to be addressed.
Making the runtime support threading is the easy (and done long ago) part.
Re:Safari (Score:4, Informative)
Re: No Script (Score:2, Informative)
So, even with NoScript which stops the webside JS, there is still tons of JS to execute...
Re:Safari (Score:3, Informative)
That changed with the new threading system in 2.6. A threaded process appears as a single entry in top.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_POSIX_Thread_Library [wikipedia.org]