Firefox 3.5 Benchmarked, Close To Original Chrome 338
CNETNate writes "The tests prove it: It's the third-fastest browser in the world, and over twice as fast as Firefox 3. In terms of Javascript performance, Firefox 3.5's new rendering engine places it squarely above Opera 10's beta and Internet Explorers 7 and 8 (based on previous benchmarks), plus it's getting on for being almost as quick as the original version of Google Chrome. Also, the new location-awareness feature was testing in central London, and pinpointed yours truly to within a few hundred meters — easily enough for, say, a Starbucks Web site to tell you where your nearest Starbucks is."
Re:pffft (Score:5, Informative)
SunSpider says it all... (Score:2, Informative)
I ran the SunSpider [webkit.org] JavaScript benchmark on Chrome 2.0.172.33, Firefox 3.5, and IE8. Firefox was almost 7x faster than IE, and Chrome almost 8x faster. Of particular interest are the contraflow and recursive tests. Chrome: 4.4ms. Firefox: 55.4ms. IE...? 218.4ms. Chrome is fifty times faster than IE in those benchmarks. Embarassing!
Re:Big Brother... (Score:5, Informative)
You have the option of not using the web browser.
Beyond that, I tried one of the location demos. A Firefox prompt opened at the top of the window: "${site} wants to know your location: Share Location, Don't Share" with a checkbox to remember the settings for that site. Go ahead and explain how you could possibly be offended by that.
Re:Opera 10 not benchmarked in either link (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Using Chrome now, but.... (Score:2, Informative)
You might wanna recheck your preconceptions - a lot has changed in the past few releases for Firefox: http://dotnetperls.com/chrome-memory
It's too bad a lot of people still think Firefox is such a memory hog when really they've refined it to be one of the most quick and efficient browsers available.
That said, your mileage may vary depending on the add-ons you choose, but as long as you don't go overboard there's no reason your memory usage should be significantly different than those in the benchmark.
Re:Using Chrome now, but.... (Score:2, Informative)
You might wanna recheck your preconceptions - a lot has changed in the past few releases for Firefox: http://dotnetperls.com/chrome-memory [dotnetperls.com]
It's too bad a lot of people still think Firefox is such a memory hog when really they've refined it to be one of the most quick and efficient browsers available.
That said, your mileage may vary depending on the add-ons you choose, but as long as you don't go overboard there's no reason your memory usage should be significantly different than those in the benchmark.
I have the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome and my switchover was not all that long ago (a month, maybe two). I tend to use both browsers in the same way, about 6-10 tabs open at the same time, with all of them getting some use, and many of them being used at almost the same time.
After having stared at the task manager and seen FFX taking up over 400MB of RAM while I see Chrome using 150-170 to do the same things, I can pretty much tell you that there's no preconceptions involved, only data. I am not incredibly enthusiastic about the alternatives, but the facts are staring me in the face.
Perhaps my mileage varies. I am a very heavy browser user and I freely admit to being the guy who has all those tabs open. I'm not really complaining about FFX taking up a lot of memory, I'm more concerned that it takes up more to do the same things that other browsers seem to do for less.
Weird (Score:5, Informative)
Strange thing...when it restared, it of course had a tab opened saying it was upgraded, etc.
Trouble is...I can NOT close this fucking tab to save my life?!?!? I can close and open others, but, cannot close this one. I can go to other sites on it..but, cannot close it.
No speed improvement for those on x86_64 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:One pice of advice for users (Score:2, Informative)
Your experience was not mine. I installed 3.5 over the older version, and have had no problems at all so far. I've visited Digg, Facebook, plus many other sites, no worries (so far?). /shrug
Re:Weird (Score:5, Informative)
set browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab to false.
Re:Weird (Score:3, Informative)
Nope..didn't work.
I can close and open and whatever with all the other tabs I have open. But that one that opened when it restarted, I cannot seem to close it by any means.
Re:Weird (Score:5, Informative)
If you follow SecondaryOak's suggestion, you can close the tab and the whole Firefox window will disappear - because it's going from displaying 1 page to displaying 0 pages.
But I'm guessing that's NOT what you want - you don't really want to "close" the tab, you just want to hide it like you're used to.
So go to about:config and double click browser.tabs.autoHide to change it.
Re:Big Brother... (Score:3, Informative)
Then it's a good thing a computer-only browser implements this feature...
Someone has to make the first step. Also, Fennec [wikipedia.org].
Re:Weird (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Table (Score:2, Informative)
Nevermind that if you -now- want something to be bold, short of writing your own XML bits and pieces, you have do something insane like ".b { font-weight:bold } ...this is bold".
(1) What's wrong with and ? Okay, they aren't exactly the same, but they are pretty darn close.
(2) If you're working on a quick & dirty page or something like that, why not just use a version of HTML with it?
Re:Sickeningly biased. (Score:3, Informative)
Firefox is the fastest fully open-source browser.
Chrome has a very small amount of closed-source code in it, but Chromium is certainly fully open-source, and it's identical to Chrome for performance purposes. So no, Chromium is the fastest fully open-source browser.
Re:Another thread, another flamewar (Score:5, Informative)
I can't get that to work in anything but Firefox!
If the way it works out is that some sites work with Firefox, other sites work with every HTML5 browser other than Firefox, and none of them work with Internet Explorer...
Sites can provide video in one of two formats:
Microsoft has not commented on any of this as far as I know.
Of course, sites can provide fallback so that the content works in the absence of video tag support. The way to do it for the time being is 1) provide both Theora and H.264 in a video tag, 2) put Flash or something in the fallback for older browsers and IE. This can be automated through various tools, and will "just work" for the user. Eventually everyone will support the video tag with a single common format, hopefully, but you have to give it some time, it's new stuff.
Re:Using Chrome now, but.... (Score:3, Informative)
You might wanna recheck your preconceptions - a lot has changed in the past few releases for Firefox: http://dotnetperls.com/chrome-memory [dotnetperls.com]
That benchmark is worthless. Especially for Chrome. Quote: "When a process with the same name such as 'chrome.exe' is encountered more than once, its total size is accumulated, yielding a total of all the 'chrome.exe' figures together." Apparently the author has never heard of shared memory! See Google Chrome Memory Usage - Good and Bad [chromium.org] on the Chromium blog for some discussion on this.
The other browsers might not be using multiple processes, but the same flaws apply to a lesser degree. Every library they load will count against them, even if another app is using the library and so it would be in memory anyway. The only reliable way to tell how much memory a process is really using is to check memory usage, use program, check memory usage, kill program, check memory usage. If the first and third figures are equal, then you can get a correct figure by subtracting the second figure from their common value. (If they aren't equal, either the app hasn't actually exited fully, or some other program has eaten up more memory in the meantime and the results are no good.)
Granted, I doubt Firefox is such a comparative memory hog as people paint it to be, but the benchmark proves nothing either way.
Re:Another thread, another flamewar (Score:4, Informative)
No, there aren't, I'm afraid. There are numerous apps written that understand Youtube's naming scheme, but that's all. They don't actually parse the SWF, and any trivial changes to the site layout breaks them. Not to mention that FLVs on any other site still won't work.
Re:Big Brother... (Score:2, Informative)
How do I turn off Location-Aware Browsing permanently?
Location-Aware Browsing is always opt-in in Firefox 3.5. No location information is ever sent without your permission. If you wish to disable the feature completely, please follow this set of steps:
Re:Firefox 3.5 freezes loading background tabs (Score:3, Informative)
ClearType is optional in IE, has been for years. No idea where you got the idea it was forcing you to do anything. Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced -> First item under Multimedia. It does default to true in IE8, since most people are using flat panels by now and find antialiased text less readable, but it's still optional.
To set IE8's default fonts, click Fonts at the bottom of the General tab in Internet Options.
To override page-specified fonts, open Internet Options, click Accessibility (under the General tab), then click "Ignore font styles specified on webpages" and/or other options there.
I understand what you mean (Score:2, Informative)
I had the same annoying thing. Suppose I wanted to be on a blank page, I had to open a blank tab and close the last tab, till I discovered ctrl+W.
It will close the last tab and make it blank
Re:Another thread, another flamewar (Score:3, Informative)
Chromium is identical to Chrome in effectively every respect except branding
RTFA. We are talking here about official piece of alpha software released by Google called Chrome.
Until I have in Chrome the same functionality I have in vanilla FireFox + Google Toolbar, for me it is in deep "alpha", least 2.0 release.
But you aren't able to name specific, exact things that you can do in Firefox but can't in Chrome?
ZOMG. Where do I start?
1. AdBlock
2. FlashBlock
3. Bookmarks toolbar
4. Bookmarks menu
5. Keyword searches
6. Preserving text zoom level per domain
7. RSS feeds as bookmark folders
8. Searchable browsing history
9. Proxy configuration
10. Page Info screen which allows to save e.g. images used on the page.
Re:No speed improvement for those on x86_64 (Score:4, Informative)