Firefox 3 Performance Gets a Boost

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."

Firefox Performance

[matts-reign]

The first thing that comes to mind when these massive improvements are being made is that the codebase is poor to begin with. However, all the other browsers seem just as bad. I realize html renders are very complex pieces of software, but why does it seem like they're all flakey? Is it HTMLs fault? Why do we even still use html? While proposed jokingly before, why not use something like PDF or flash for a fully graphical web? While it would make writing crawlers and accessibility harder, I think that is something that could be worked on, by providing an open standard for the files that can be parsed easier than html.

is the speed RAM based ?

[Anonymous Coward]

because RAM (us|suck)age in FF2.0 almost makes me want a Firefox Lite which means we havent really progressed with Browsers since Mozilla Suite/Netscape days FF (phoenix) was supposed to be a Lite version of Moz lets hope we don't need a lite version of FF3, be nice to keep those old computers working especially in poorer countries where nobody really has access/cash for a core duo with gigs of ram

Re:Safari

[GenKreton]

These benchmarks are definitely lal done on a windows box, because if you compare the performance of JS in Firefox on Linux and Windows it is like night and day... I don't know why JS on Linux needs to be so much worse.

Re:Safari

[dgatwood]

How about testing with a WebKit nightly?

Microsoft's Biggest Mistake

[TheNarrator]

Microsoft's biggest mistake was thinking people wouldn't write complicated apps in Javascript. They supported it, in their usual half broken style, but it created the only widely deployed cross-platform system for running code that Microsoft has ever implemented. Now, with Firefox 3 running so fast javascript might become THE platform. It's hilarious because Javascript started out as such a kludgy platform and now it is becoming a serious contender if only because it's the only cross-platform thing Microsoft ever supported.

How about the frickin' memory?

[Reality Master 101]

Speed is great, speed is fine. I like speed. But how doing something about the fact that Firefox was that 550 megabytes of memory with only about 10 windows / tabs open? And I don't want to hear any nonsense about caching. Sorry, but I have NOT downloaded 550 megabytes of data today, and even if I had, I don't want it ALL cached.

This has to be the #1 complaint about Firefox -- that it's such a memory pig. Is the design so brain damaged that it just can't be fixed? Or do the developers just not care?

Yeah, my computer has a lot of memory, but I'd like to devote that to VMWare, Photoshop, video editing, etc. Not a browser!

Re:IE7 is just slow anyway

[ivarneli]

I tend to have the opposite experience. When I need to use it, IE7 is quite fast and responsive for me, and it will certainly open tabs as quickly as I can hit Ctrl-T. On the other hand, Firefox (on any computer I've used) occasionally has a bit of a delay when opening new tabs, especially if other pages are rendering in the background, you have a few complex sites (like gmail) open, or you have more than 3-4 tabs open.

There are a bunch of great reasons to use Firefox - adblock, keyword bookmarks, decent standards support, Firebug, etc. But in my experience (especially post-1.5), the responsiveness of the UI is not one of those reasons.

Re:Safari

[A beautiful mind]

I don't get it. They are doing exactly what I wanted about Firefox in 3.x.

While new features can be nice, I couldn't name a feasible feature that a significant number of people would want and it's not in core Firefox or in an extension already. What I want from Firefox now is to provide the existing features in a secure, stable, fast and memory conserving way, in this order. Heck, I've turned off most of the new features in Firefox 2.x and wished they'd fix some annoying bugs instead. In 3.x the developers did a lot of work to remedy a lot of those bugs and issues, so big big kudos for them!

Cleaner code matters - it results in less bugs and security vulnerabilities, easier to add features and most likely better code.

Re:Safari

[Anonymous Coward]

The Webkit nightly builds are significantly faster. I don't have the same machine they've tested on obviously, but for comparison purposes here's the current release vs. the most recent nightly build on my Mac OS X 10.5.2 machine:

Safari 3.0.4: 10758.4ms +/- 0.5%
WebKi r30628: 3390.0ms +/- 0.3%

If the performance gain percentage is comparable on their test machine (big if, granted) the comparable time would be 5675.8 ms, 22% faster than the PGO Firefox build.

Is this a legitimate benchmark for a browser?

[NevarMore]

I've seen the SunSpider benchmark come up before, and it is a great benchmark for JavaScript as a language, but it may be inappropriate for a browser.

This test mostly avoids microbenchmarks, and tries to focus on the kinds of actual problems developers solve with JavaScript today, and the problems they may want to tackle in the future as the language gets faster. This includes tests to generate a tagcloud from JSON input, a 3D raytracer, cryptography tests, code decompression, and many more examples. There are a few microbenchmarkish things, but they mostly represent real performance problems that developers have encountered.

Raytracing? Crypto? These aren't things I'd consider running in a browser and certainly not with JavaScript. Just because JaveScript and a modern browser on a mid-range machine CAN do these things doesn't mean it should.

JSON, code decompression, and traversing XML are things that a browser does with JavaScript, some more often than others. Even in those cases, I wouldn't be surprised if browsers had parsers that 'helped' the common browser JavaScript tasks with faster native-library interfaces instead of purely native JavaScript interpretation.

Re:IE7 is just slow anyway

[jrumney]

I just tried it now. On Firefox (2), I opened about 10 tabs, and they opened almost as fast as I could hit Ctrl-T. On IE7, the first 3 tabs opened immediately, after that there was a few seconds delay for every tab.

Re:I tried Firefox 3 today

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, I have been using it for a couple months now (nightlies) and I absolutely love the awesomebar. Just typing "s" gets me slashdot. the various environments I work with can be gotten with "l" (localhost), "d" (the development server), "bug" "sprint" "-1h" "me" (our bug tracker), "qa" (our qa environment), etc.

Best of all, if I visit any site and then want to get back to that site again sometime, all I need to remember is something in the title or url of the page I was at.

Re:I tried Firefox 3 today

[Threni]

Is there going to be a volume control for Firefox 3, or are we still going to have to pretend that it's not the browser that's producing the audio output?

Not really what matters to me ...

[jopet]

Luckily many pages don't need Javascript or at least not a lot of JS to render.
What I find more important are the lockups I get because of limitations to multi-threading in FF, at least under Linux. There are situations where one window locking up means all windows lock up. There are situations where some initial connection to a host being stuck means all of the browser locks up. One can only guess, because FF does not indicate what the problem is -- but more frequently than is funny, I have FF get unresponsive, not re-painting windows anymore and just eating up CPU and memory without reacting until I kill it.
This sucks and this doesn't seem to have changed in FF 3.

Focusing on the wrong aspects

[abigsmurf]

I always see these benchmarks and wonder "why does this matter?". The only time I ever see Javascript run too slow or tax my CPU is when it's buggy and then it'll probably throw up all sorts of warnings anyway. This is on any browser I've used and any system.

What matters to me is the imperfect implementation of Flash (it's not really their responsibility but it is their problem) which often eats up 100% CPU from random flash objects or causes firefox to freeze. Another annoyance is Firefox being frankly poor at displaying large HTML files (when you go on websites with insanely large lists for instance). Where as IE and Opera display these as the page is downloaded. Firefox, for me, freezes, much like notepad will when you open a 2meg+ file . Sometimes it'll recover and display the page after a minute or so, sometimes I have to ctrl+alt+delete.

Re:Microsoft's Biggest Mistake

[kabz]

Yes, and the most interesting thing about JavaScript is that it is arguably the most successful and widely deployed Lisp ever. Before you laugh, it has procedures as first class objects, can eval code, has lexical closures ... it's an absolutely rocking language if you want to do functional things. I love it for prototyping up algorithms.

Take a look at Functional JavaScript [osteele.com]. Extensions for functional programming.

Or the great Prototype [prototypejs.org]Library. Note the functions like 'reduce' that can apply to array.

Re:Safari

[bunratty]

I said for caching. Not all of Firefox's memory use is used for caching. I never said that Firefox will not use more than a hundred megs or so of total memory use. Sheesh!

Re:Firefox 3 beta 3 on Linux is great

[Fallingcow]

I'm running the Hardy Heron alpha, featuring FF3 Beta 3.

I'm having terrible trouble with it. Bizarre image rendering issues (some render too high in their "frame", leaving a big black space at the bottom and the bottom half of the image rendered in the top half of the "frame", with the top of the image cut off, and other times images from WAY back in my browsing session will show up in odd places, like as a tiled background on another page), GMail hangs when I try to send e-mail every single time I try, and leaving it open too long has proven to be a great way to end up with an unstable mess.

Not refuting your post, just saying to anyone thinking about trying it, don't count on it being a great experience :)

Re:Safari

[billcopc]

Yes and no.

Sure, I have tons of memory and I'm not overly concerned if FF eats up 250mb... On the other hand, my office PC has only 1 gig of Ram and I'd very much like for FF to stay under 50mb, so that my other, more lucrative apps don't spend their time thrashing the swap file.

The caching done in Firefox is a great feature and works well, but it needs to be more mindful of other running processes. A cache should never take memory away from an active process. If Photoshop wants 100mb and FF's cache is using 100mb, I would expect FF to yield its memory rather than forcing swap usage.

Pentium M Ubuntu 7.10 Beat Win XP

[blazerw]

I have a Pentium M 1.86Ghz running Gutsy and I got 6867 with last night's nightly. Full benchmark results:
Benchmark Results [webkit.org]

Re:stalling

[roca]

Actually in Firefox 3/Gecko 1.9, external CSS loads do not block the parser. Woohoo! However, we do block the parser if the page tries to execute script while there are pending CSS loads.

Browsing History?

[Anonymous Coward]

So as I understand it, this "awesomebar" learns from my browsing activities to determine which site I want to visit.
But what about the Clear Private Data option? If I delete my browsing history, will the awesomebar also forget that those sites were ever visited, or even exist?

Re:Safari is getting up there

[jesser]

Firefox nightlies also have native getElementsByClassName, fwiw. I don't know how many sites currently use native implementations when available, but after Firefox 3 and Safari 3.1 ship, I bet lots of sites will.

Re:Safari

[FrankieBaby1986]

Except Those who generate power... presumably replicators turn energy into matter, so, energy will be in demand, as will energy storage technology, energy transport, maintenance of those systems, etc

Re:Screw Adobe; I use Foxit Reader.

[Genocaust]

Concur. I actually hated PDF for the longest due to how slow and crash prone (I thought) it was. Just a bad experience with Adobe reader and browser plugins, though. After learning of, and switching to, Foxit -- PDF is a beautiful thing all over again.

Re:Safari

[Sam Douglas]

http://blog.pavlov.net/2007/11/10/memory-fragmentation/ [pavlov.net] provides information about this issue. Supposedly a lot of the memory eating issues people bitch about are caused by heap fragmentation -- memory pages that get allocated to Firefox, then some of the data freed, but not all of the page.

Re:Have they discovered threads yet?

[Abcd1234]

If you can find a way to magically thread javascript in a way that allows multiple windows and tabs to communicate with each other (as the DOM requires), I'm sure the mozilla folks would absolutely *love* to hear about it.

Re:Have they discovered threads yet?

[Wolfier]

Exactly what I think.

Who cares about Javascript performance when a single script running at any speed can freeze the entire browser?

Or a few Youtube tabs can slow the browser to a halt? (Hint: Firefox REALLY need to delegate Flash rendering to an external process, something I can renice 19. Just like how Konqueror uses nspluginviewer)

Re:Safari

[luserSPAZ]

No, we're just profiling on browser startup/shutdown right now. I did do a build profiled on the benchmark, and it was pretty fast, but that's probably overkill. Mostly we just want to hit enough common code paths to make things faster. Turns out sunspider perf correlates pretty nicely to overall JS speed, since the benchmark is made up of real world code that people complained was slow.