

Firefox 3 launching tomorrow, but does it beat Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera? - aitoehigie
http://techdigest.tv/2008/06/firefox_3_launc.html

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tx
Safari beats FF on a Mac (speed, UI, multi-touch, nicer rendering) while Opera
simply destroys it on Linux. But on Windows FF is really sweet: it doesn't
feel so terribly slow as it does on Linux and its less-than-perfect look
matches Windows perfectly

P.S. In case anybody knows how to make FF scroll faster on a machine with
800Mz CPU with Compiz, please share! I need "800Mz scrolling" for laptops in
power-saving mode under conservative scaling governor. It may be GTK+ issue,
though. Qt-based Opera scrolls fine, pretty much instantly, mostly using GPU,
just like it should.

~~~
BrandonM
I don't have scrolling issues at all, and I'm currently running Gentoo Linux
on a laptop that is throttled at 800 MHz. I'm not sure what exactly I can tell
you, though...

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pmjordan
Conclusions from that test:

\- Safari is really fast at rendering CSS and slow to start up. \- Firefox 3
uses the least memory (though this isn't based on a "soak" test. \- Opera 9.5
is generally quick but is beaten on CSS and uses a fair bit of RAM. \- IE 7
isn't really good at anything except maybe loading time. No surprise on the
loading time, but it uses the most RAM for open tabs!

JavaScript performance appears to vary less than some browser developers like
to emphasize, IE is less than 3x slower than the fastest browsers in the JS
test. (Opera + Safari)

I can anecdotally confirm the Safari start-up times on Windows, although it's
a very different story on OS X. It does have to load its own GUI toolkit,
although Firefox (XUL) and Opera (some in-house thing so it runs cross-
platform and on phones?) also don't use native Win32 widgets.

~~~
reggplant
On OS X I find safari starts in less than a second, though it doesn't have a
full library of addons like firefox.

Although FF3 has had a great boost in its performance and load times for web
pages, the WebKit nightlies kick its ass IMO.

And again, the mac theme isn't quite right with non-native menus etc.

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snewe
Blog spam? [http://lifehacker.com/396048/speed-testing-the-latest-web-
br...](http://lifehacker.com/396048/speed-testing-the-latest-web-browsers)

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ajbatac
I don't think it beats IE, Safari and Opera. But hey, they've improved some
memory leaks.

Better something than nothing.

