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Comments: 338 +- Technology: Firefox 3.5 Benchmarked, Close To Original Chrome on Wednesday July 01, @01:39PM
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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."
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Web browsers, bah! (Score:5, Funny)
I prefer to read the html code and interpret them myself...
Re:Web browsers, bah! (Score:5, Funny)
I prefer to read the html code and interpret them myself...
You young punks make me sick. Back in my day, we used Gopher and were grateful for the upgrade over the teletype!
I still prefer content distributed via mimeograph, though. Get enough enough of that sweet blue text!
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Re:Web browsers, bah! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm still waiting for my last pigeon or else I'd have responded faster.
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Re:Web browsers, bah! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Web browsers, bah! (Score:5, Funny)
Your clients are a bunch of Neanderthals too, eh?
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I don't even see the code anymore (Score:5, Funny)
"All I see is 'blonde...brunette...redhead...'"
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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.
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Re:Weird (Score:5, Informative)
set browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab to false.
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Re: (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, Funny)
Until you appreciate its value, you won't be able to close that tab.
So, start appreciating tabbed browsing, OK?
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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.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Another thread, another flamewar (Score:5, Funny)
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...
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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".
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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.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
yes, but "zomg you're not supposed to use tables for layout!"
which of course has led to the similarly quaint removal of b, u, s and i tags for the sole reason that content and presentation should be separate. 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 "<style>.b { font-weight:bold } </style>...<span class="b">this is bold</span>".
At some point, the scales tilted completely the other way and
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?
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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.
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Re:Another thread, another flamewar (Score:5, Interesting)
Before Flash came along, web video on Linux was a great thing. MPlayer supported the big tree formats very well (Quicktime, Real, and Windows Media) and performed extremely well. Open Source browser plugins didn't disabled the controls, and made it easy to download the source of the video, no matter how obfusticated the web page code.
In fact, MPlayer supports all types of FLV video as well... The problem being the way its embedded into a page requires a SWF interpreter to even find the URL to the FLV file, and as of yet, nobody has written-up what should be a rather simple bit of code to do that, and pass the URL back to the user, or directly to a video player.
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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.
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Re:Another thread, another flamewar (Score:5, Funny)
You forgot the complaints that FireFox is a memory hog when you have 389 tabs open.
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We're #3 (Score:4, Insightful)
According to Nike, this means that your the second loser.
Not even 1st loser... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Not even 1st loser... (Score:4, Funny)
I was high when I said that!
What the hell does that even mean?
You could be second, you could be third, hell you could even be fourth!
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
We're #3 - wow that's something to boast about.
Number three always gets the chicks in high school!
"Hey baby, I'm on the bench!"
Will it be fast enough to view slashdot? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Or maybe make Anonymous Cowardon go away?
pffft (Score:5, Funny)
Re:pffft (Score:4, Funny)
Sadly, lynx fails Acid3 [acidtests.org] for some reason.
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Re:pffft (Score:5, Informative)
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This is such great science... (Score:4, Funny)
Opera 10 not benchmarked in either link (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Opera 10 not benchmarked in either link (Score:4, Informative)
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Using Chrome now, but.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Having used Chrome now for a little while after becoming irritated with FFX's memory utilization in particular, I'm going to have to admit that while it is quantifiably better than FFX (and Opera) in many ways, I don't find the speed difference compelling. Indeed, I find myself occasionally wondering if Chrome is actually slower than FFX in some ways. I am still using it, as the memory utilization is significantly better, but the little inconsistencies in presentation and the weird sensation that it feels slower makes me really want to switch back to Firefox. If Mozilla can get off their ass and really plug the memory leaks and utilization, I'd probably switch back today.
That's not to say that Chrome is bad. It's 100% usable, and its much more compatible with sites I use than Opera is. (I tried Opera first after I started looking around). The problem is that it still breaks some sites that aren't broken in IE or Firefox. And whether or not you blame the browser or the non-standards compliant webmasters, the reality is that I cannot switch their sites, but I can switch browsers that I am using. That means I have opened IE 7 windows more while using Chrome, than I have with Firefox.
Does it really matter? (Score:3, Interesting)
I tried to do something pretty seemingly simple [ark42.com] with Javascript (1 draggable line to redraw the background colors of the table), and it drags its ass on IE8. It is fast and smooth in FF/Opera/etc, but with so many people using IE still, it hardly matters.
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.
Seattle (Score:4, Funny)
Presumably in Seattle it could tell you where your nearest 100 Starbucks are...
No speed improvement for those on x86_64 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No speed improvement for those on x86_64 (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Big Brother... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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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.
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Re: (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:Sickeningly biased. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
From just poking around the web with gecko and webkit browsers I found a bunch of pages that looked fine rendered by gecko, but had elements in the wrong place or other visual problems rendered with webkit. The majority of sites render fine in both, but not all and other then acid tests I haven't visited any that rendered better in webkit.
I'd rather have the page look good than be super fast, so I'll stick with firefox until sites render as well in webkit or firefox becomes unusable slow.
Yes, but the Acid3 scores and JS benchmarks show that webkit is better. Now just stop using the internet and switch to using Acid3 and JS benchmarks for all your computer needs and you'll be fixed.
Re:Firefox 3.5 freezes loading background tabs (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspect some configuration problem on your end, to be honest. I'm running FF3.5 on XP SP3 inside of VirtualBox. I do not see that behaviour. Using snaplinks, I just opened six tabs, and the current tab remained responsive while they loaded in the background.
Whether the configuration problem is in your VM, within Windows, or in Firefox, I couldn't even begin to guess. In my case, I have 1 gig of memory allocated to the VM - if you have less memory, that might be something to look at.
Of course it's possible that my FF is different than yours in some subtle way. I upgraded from FF 3.5 b4 to FF 3.5 RC1 and then to FF 3.5 final. I really wouldn't EXPECT there to be any real difference, but crap happens, right?
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Re: (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...
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