
Firefox 4 with lots of speed improvements and inline SVG - jeff18
http://ajaxian.com/archives/firefox-4-with-lots-of-speed-improvements-and-inline-svg?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ajaxian+%28Ajaxian+Blog%29
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barredo
Just installed the Beta on OSX. It's Fast. I mean: Chrome fast.

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natmaster
Keep in mind the Jaegermonkey project, which will greatly improve javascript
performance is still under heavy work. So as of today, the javascript
performance is still significantly behind chrome. (<http://arewefastyet.com/>)

That being said, javascript performance currently has little impact on user-
perceived speed, and the "Reducing I/O from the main thread", GPU accelerated
rendering, and startup/shutdown perf improvements are already causing
incredibly noticeable perf gains.

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barredo
I didn't mean Javascript. Although it is better than 3.6.x — I meant the
application. It loads fast, it's light and robust. It feels incredible

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jmillikin
My current install of Firefox (3.6.4) supports inline SVG -- there's a demo on
Mozilla.org at < [https://developer.mozilla.org/presentations/xtech2005/svg-
ca...](https://developer.mozilla.org/presentations/xtech2005/svg-
canvas/SVGDemo.xml) >. The URL suggests this demo was published in 2005.

What's special about inline SVG in Firefox 4? Is it hardware-accelerated?

e: and this inline SVG demo <
[https://developer.mozilla.org/samples/svg/swarm-of-
motes.xht...](https://developer.mozilla.org/samples/svg/swarm-of-motes.xhtml)
> says it works in Firefox 1.5!

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ZeroGravitas
The first link you give is to an SVG document, the second is SVG in namespaced
XHTML.

SVG (and MathML) is now part of HTML5 so you can put it in HTML documents.
Firefox just replace their HTML parser with a new one which is faster, runs on
its own thread, understands HTML5 properly and supports SVG inline in HTML as
a feature too. This blog post goes into some details:

[http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/05/firefox-4-the-
html5-parser-...](http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/05/firefox-4-the-html5-parser-
inline-svg-speed-and-more/)

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euroclydon
What an absolute blast of new technology for the browser! I've got to believe
it's going to open a whole slew of new attack vectors though.

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cookiecaper
I don't have very high hopes for Firefox. They promised V8-like speed with
3.5, 3.6, and now they're promising it with 4.0, but they're still more than
twice as slow, and have been every single time I have tried them.

The only reason I use Firefox anymore is Firebug. All of my normal browsing
occurs in Chrome. Even if they eventually get Firefox's VMs as fast as V8 or
SquirrelFish Extreme, the interface is clunky and old and much, much slower
than Chrome, and really that's what makes it feel so much faster; Chrome
starts immediately, I can move tabs quickly, there's no needless address
bar/search bar segregation, and so on. I think I am a permanent Chrome user.

Firefox has had years to catch up to Chrome by this point and their results
have been pretty bad, imo. Unless they can get it together, I think that Fx is
destined to decline permanently soon.

