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."
We're #3 (Score:4, Insightful)
According to Nike, this means that your the second loser.
Re:Another thread, another flamewar (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm very much looking forward to the <video> element - because every other solution tends to suck bigtime under Linux. There's a huge market for flash to do flash games and whatever but I really look forward to watching embedded video without it. I'll install x264 and not care about the codec wars as long it "just works". Opera is late to the party here, won't even be in 10.0 initial release :/. Too bad, because for various reasons I like it even better than Firefox...
Re:Big Brother... (Score:5, Insightful)
Opera 10 not benchmarked in either link (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sickeningly biased. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sickeningly biased. (Score:2, Insightful)
Firefox is the fastest fully open-source browser.
I don't care... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't care how fast it loads webpages. What I want to see is a browser that isn't riddled with bugs and easy ways for badware to end up infecting my machine. I'll gladly surf on the slowest browser in the world if it really is proven to be the most secure. So what if I save a few seconds surfing web pages. That is nothing compared to the hours spent trying to get rid of a virus/trojan/keylogger/etc.
Re:that's nice, but (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Another thread, another flamewar (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm very much looking forward to the element - because every other solution tends to suck bigtime under Linux.
I'm looking forward to it because every other solution tends to suck under every OS. Flash is a resource hog and crashes frequently-- and besides, why should I need flash just to view a video? I don't understand that one.
AFAICT, the only reason we're all using Flash is that it was a stop-gap measure to deal with the fact that normal video support in web browsers wasn't what it should have been. It's like all the various mutli-column HTML/CSS tricks that people use because HTML just doesn't directly support columns. It works well enough for now, but it should be seen as "something to be fixed".
Re:I don't care... (Score:1, Insightful)
Browse inside a VM. It will be slower, and if you do want to download a file you have to jump through hoops to copy it outside, but it's very secure.
Re:Another thread, another flamewar (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll install x264 and not care about the codec wars as long it "just works".
So far I haven't been able to get this to just work. If I point Safari at the YouTube HTML5 video demo, it all just works. But Firefox 3.5 doesn't have the x264 code, and fails silently, and I can find no mechanism to install that codec.
So, any pointers?
Re:Big Brother... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would I ever want to share my location?
Seriously? Imagine you could search Google for something like "sushi restaurant near me", let Google access your location information (once or every time), and get a list of nearby restaurants. Location services are shaping up to be the killer app for mobile computing.
Why would I want part of my window eaten up by an option I don't like?
It's not. When you choose "share" or "don't share" the prompt goes away. It's exactly like the "remember this site's username and password?" prompt.
What happens when I click the wrong one at 5am cause I'm tired?
Oh, it clears out your checking account, sells your dog, and dumps your girlfriend. Honestly, what does any other random program do when you make a dumb choice? Whatever you asked it to do.
Re:Another thread, another flamewar (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed. It's amazing how bad Flash is on the Mac. There is a reason Apple is trying to kill it (beyond lack of control).
HD video looks very nice. My Mac can play Apple's QuickTime h.264 clips, even those larger than the screen. It's not really a problem. It's a dual core 2.4GHz MBP.
Yet it drops frames on YouTube's 720p videos, and can do the same some times on other large (high pixel count) web videos (such as the HD 540p clips on GameSpot). There is no excuse for a 540p video not playing back smoothly and need ~85%+ of each core.
Download the same video in any format, no problem at all.
Flash video is just horrible. That's not even mentioning all the problems caused by every people on the 'net inventing their own Flash video player (some don't buffer content, some won't let you skip to arbitrary points, etc).
The video element is fantastic. I hope it catches on fast.
Re:Table (Score:2, Insightful)
b and i, at least, are in the working version of html5:
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/text-level-semantics.html [whatwg.org]
and 'strong' usually results in bold text (but I guess it might not if the CSS for a page goes all over the place).
Re:Firefox 3.5 freezes loading background tabs (Score:3, Insightful)
VMware is probably swapping to free memory. You can disable the swapping of memory by VMware which will significantly improve performance (as long as you do not run out of memory).
Basically it sounds like you're waiting for the hdd to load something while at the same time writing out swap data.
Re:SunSpider says it all... (Score:4, Insightful)
As with any benchmark, important questions to ask:
1) Does this measure things that are actually relevant? (For sunspider the answer is
"maybe".)
2) Does it do a good job of measuring them? (For sunspider the answer is "maybe".)
3) Do the scores on the subtests of the benchmark mean anything? (For sunspider, as for
any benchmark, the answer is "only if you're doing that exact thing that the subtest is
doing").
None of which makes V8 slower than what IE is using, of course, across a broad range of loads. But it's pretty easy to write script that's 4x slower in V8 than in Firefox... or 10x faster (as the benchmark above). What really matters to a web page developer is how fast the different browsers run his code, not how fast they run benchmarks. What matters to a user is how fast the different browsers run the code of the sites he visits, not how fast they run benchmarks. Benchmarks are a poor proxy for both, especially when dealing with these early-stage JITs. It's pretty easy to tweak the code just a bit and have it jit a lot worse (or a lot better). It's also pretty easy to tweak the JIT to make particular tests faster, since so much of the game is various heuristics.
All of which is to say that better sunspider performance may or may not translate into better performance on _your_ code, and in fact improving sunspider performance may regress performance on your code if the JIT is seriously being tuned for sunspider...
Chrome uses more memory (Score:3, Insightful)
I can run 100+ tabs in FF with no problem. Chrome starts choking after 10-15. At least in my humble experience.