

Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 - Super fluid, beats everyone on sunspider - ashish01
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/beta/features/

======
bambax
Browser vendors talk about benchmarks all the time but what really matters to
me is startup and closing times; here Chrome really shines and FF3.6 is slow
as hell.

It's probably about perception; maybe the browser should show a window even if
it's not really ready (and maybe there is a problem with plugins and add-ons
that need to initialize themselves, etc.)

Anyway, how is FF4b7 doing in this regard...?

~~~
natmaster
Strange, how often do you open/close your browser?

~~~
mhb
Whenever Firefox memory use has ballooned to over 1GB.

~~~
smackfu
Which is pretty much daily.

------
fliph
Changes noticed on Mac since Beta 6:

* The stop/reload button has moved to the right end of the URL bar.

* The status bar is gone; URLs appear in ghosted text on the right side of the URL bar when you hover over a link.

* You can enable an "add-on bar", which appears to be a replacement status bar that add-ons can add icons to. None of the add-ons I have installed (about 20) are making use of it, so the transition from overlaying the status bar to overlaying the add-on bar must not be automatic.

* In the Add-ons Manager, an explicit "Remove" button has replaced the small "X" icon that used to be used for uninstalling an add-on.

* A more colorful throbber.

~~~
sudont
The performance _is_ much better. I’m getting sub-one second app launch times,
page load is much faster than safari, page render is comparable.

The app is still a bit of a bad citizen in that it doesn’t have any of the
native text views allowing for system spell-check or any of the system
services, and the app’s cpu usage still runs at 4% with no windows open
(expected behavior is that windowless apps use 0)

And to be pedantic, there’s something still Java-y about the interface. Fonts
are just a _little_ bit bigger in places, and the main bar, despite being 7px
smaller than safari’s (amazing feat, firefox dev’s) still feels chunkier.

Weird things in the interface vein: The feedback button’s dropdown hangs left
_automatically._ Proper system behavior is to drop it down to the right, and
then push it left based on the monitor’s viewport. The textfield resize grab
changes the mouse cursor.

Weird stuff like that. Since it’s a beta I can understand the rough edges
strapped to the oversized V12 engine. I still have nightmares about trying to
run Firefox 2 on Tiger in 2005 or so.

------
natmaster
Asa Dotzler says we should 'move on' to other, more relevant benchmarks, since
everyone is basically fast enough on this one:
[http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2010/10/some_sun...](http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2010/10/some_sunspider_numbe.html)

I definitely agree here - newer benchmarks are much more interesting, as
sunspider doesn't really tax any VMs these days.

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mattiask
Browsers are going mainsteam and it spells bad news for the browser vendors
and good news for the users. All browers nowadays pretty much look the same,
have the same performance and try desperately to distinguish themselves with
surrounding features.

The basic problem is that the browser is still "trapped in a sandbox", ie
they're trying to become the OS but they're still just an application running
in a limited context. If all browsers looks the same and perform the same it's
going to be real difficult to differentiate yourself from the competion.

It makes sense from big guys point of view. Apple, Microsoft and Google must
be present in the browser space to be competitive, especially google whose
strategive agenda involves moving application from the OS to the web. For
Firefox and Opera things look a bit more bleak IMO.

I think browsers will be commoditized to the degree it will be very difficult
to compete, it will all come down to brand awareness and surrounding features.

My hunch is that Firefox and Opera is dying a slow death and will be
irrelevant within 3 years.

~~~
wahnfrieden
I don't know about your predictions, but I think that Google's Native Client
for Chrome will be a significant differentiator in bridging the desktop/web
app gap once it matures and gains traction, with the help of Chrome OS too.
Mozilla has some ideas for this sort of thing -- Prism is a barely-alive
project that makes desktop apps out of sites and gives extra privileges and
desktop APIs to the JavaScript client. I wonder if they would or can just take
NaCl from Google too though, or make their own compatible platform based on
LLVM.

------
mrinterweb
I would use 4.0 Beta full-time if Firebug and Yahoo's Delicious extensions
were updated. The memory utilization is great just like Firefox 3.6. Compare
sometime the memory utilized while running many tabs in Chrome vs. Firefox
over a prolonged period of time.

Update: I found Firebug has an alpha release supporting Firefox 4.
<http://getfirebug.com/releases/firebug/1.7X/>

~~~
instcode
I'm using 4.0 "full-time" and it's the nightly build :). The only thing you
need is Compatibility Reporter extension. It's here:
<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/15003>

------
ilitirit
Seems very buggy. This is what mine looks like:

<http://imgur.com/64D7h>

Also, here are a few other issues:

* Navigating to www.google.com gives me a 302 page before redirecting me to the localized version (seems like it does this on other sites as well)

* The AdBlock icon is missing

* No status bar means I can't access my NoScript, MultiProxy Switch, or FireBug addons easily

* Sometimes tabs just refuse to close

* It didn't seem to want to upload the above image to imgur.com. Might have been some other problem but it worked in IE8.

* The back button doesn't work (backspace does though)

* ctrl-shift-t doesn't work ("Restore recently closed tabs" is greyed out)

* When I submitted this comment I wasn't redirected to the comment page - a blank page was all I got (same thing that happened on imgur, so I'm assuming it's a related issue)

* Sometimes I get stuck in the Tab Groups window and I can't return to the main view

This is all within 10 minutes of installation, so I'm expecting to find more
bugs.

~~~
robin_reala
The status bar has been replaced with the addon bar. If it’s not showing up
for you then look under View / Toolbars / Add-on Bar. Regarding your other
problems, something’s definitely wrong because I can’t reproduce any of them.
Maybe try with a new profile? Check the troubleshooting section on
<http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/4.0b7/releasenotes/>

~~~
nfg
> The status bar has been replaced with the addon bar.

Is there some alternate way to check where a link is pointing with a
mouseover?

~~~
robin_reala
Yep, look in the location bar. Link targets are shown on the right hand side.

~~~
nfg
Aha sure enough! That's actually quite elegant, thanks very much.

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scorpioxy
Can anyone elaborate on the XPCOM improvements? I thought the plan was to get
rid of XPCOM all together in firefox 4.

Very nice set of improvements though. Not sure about firefox 4, but firefox 3
was a memory hog.

~~~
mrinterweb
>... but firefox 3 was a memory hog.

I really do not find Firefox 3 to be a memory hog at all. I find it to consume
much less memory than Chrome running multiple tabs over a prolonged period of
time. I have caught Chrome running way out of control with memory usage and
nearly maxing out my page file. My usage generally has Firefox using between
300MB and 500MB or RAM depending on what I have open. The same usage on Chrome
is tricky to track total memory usage, but I can get a rough idea of how much
memory it was using when I quit Chrome and compare the available memory to how
much memory was being used while Chrome was running.

What browser do you consider not to be a memory hog?

~~~
cookiecaper
What platform do you run? I am on Linux x86_64 and Fx4b7 takes almost 10% of
my RAM and ~20-30% CPU with two tabs open. With the same tabs open in
Chromium, I get 2.7% RAM usage and 0-5% CPU usage. Maybe Fx has been really
optimizing for Windows lately, but the performance on Linux x86_64 is not very
satisfactory.

~~~
mrinterweb
I am on OS X (10.6.5). I did not see FF4 CPU usage anything near what you are
seeing. My CPU is ~2-3% with 6 tabs open (2 being Gmail). RAM usage is steady
after a day of using the same browser process.

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pca
The changing of the Panorama hotkey from ctrl+space to ctrl+e ist slightly
annoying. I know that ctrl+k does the same trick and has been there for far
more versions, but I've always used ctr+e for the search bar, mainly because
that's the one that also works in other browsers. Of course I'm sure it will
only take two seconds to find out how to change this back...

------
diegob
Browsers keep improving JS speed, but is there an upper limit to how fast it
can be? How far off is it from something like C ?

~~~
bennysaurus
JS speed has improved so much recently due to optimisations like JIT (Just In
Time compiling). There will be an upper limit eventually but we haven't hit it
yet.

It's damn fast but still a high-level interpreted language - time is taken for
a program in the browser to compile it on the fly and run.

It wont hit the speed of well written C code, but most things don't need that
speed anyway.

~~~
unfasten
I was browsing the language shootout the other day and came across the page
for the regex test. I'm not sure how it's doing it or if something is wrong
with the test but V8 is outperforming everything else, including C. That's the
only test it leads though.

Here are the results:
[http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/performance.php?test=r...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/performance.php?test=regexdna)

Also worth noting that TraceMonkey isn't too far behind. Does anyone know why
the JS engines, especially V8, are performing so well on this test?

P.S. Here's how V8/TraceMonkey stack up for all the tests:
[http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-
lang...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-languages-
are-
fastest.php?calc=chart&gpp=on&java=on&ghc=on&csharp=on&sbcl=on&go=on&v8=on&hipe=on&tracemonkey=on&python=on&yarv=on&perl=on&php=on)

~~~
pdhborges
Look at the source code of the C program. It uses glib and the TCL libraries
and it even includes locking for the multicore benchmark.

~~~
igouy
Look at the source code of the other C regex-dna programs which don't use glib
or Tcl libraries.

------
leppie
Re-introduces the PDF focus bug they made in FF 3.6. Beta 6 did not have this
problem.

------
Garbage
Nice work Mozilla.

Sometimes I wonder why we give so much importance for 1-2 second page load /
javascript improvements. Does average user _really_ care about 1-2 second
difference?

~~~
fhars
Yes. Two seconds is usually regarded as the rection time threshold where an
ineractive system starts to turn into a batch system. It is long enough for
the user to start to forget what he expects from the system or to think about
swiching to another activity while the current one loads. That is also the
reason why database transaction benchmarks are always defined by number of
transactions per second at a response time of slightly under two seconds, that
is the threshold where they can still claim that the benchmark measures
something about a system that is actually usable in practice.

So cutting response times by a second from say two seconds to one second
changes the percieved delays from barely tolereble to barely noticable, which
is unually beneficial for interactive apps.

------
LordLandon
The "Web Console" is pretty awesome, but I don't see a way to close the
detailed view things. Also I don't see POST contents in the detailed view
things.

~~~
dangoor
Thanks! Glad you like it. We've got some really nice improvements landing in
beta 8/9.

You should be able to close the detail panel by using the OS-standard close
control on the window. If you don't see that control, that's a bug! (The
control certainly shows up on my Mac.)

Request/response bodies are not logged by default because they can be _large_.
If you right-click on the output area, the context menu there has an option to
log request/response bodies. I believe beta 7 is the one in which we put in a
change so that only the first 1MB of the body is logged.

------
sliverstorm
But does the user interface still respond like molasses in January? Last time
I tried Firefox 4, I could have sworn my entire PC was locking up any time I
clicked my mouse on any piece of the browser besides the web pages it was
rendering.

No offense or anything, it was just an insurmountable obstacle, and without
reasonable UI performance, render times and tab changes mean nothing.

~~~
sliverstorm
I have begun testing, and I can report it is drastically improved.

------
netcan
Definitely feels snappier. I wonder if that's because it's missing some of my
plug ins.

------
kevinburke
Nice, although I need Netflix & Firebug to work before I upgrade.

~~~
robin_reala
Firebug 1.7 alphas are compatible:
<http://getfirebug.com/releases/firebug/1.7X/>

------
itistoday
Congrats Mozilla on the release!

Odd title though for this post, for where is the "everyone"? The link shows
comparisons to previous versions of Firefox, not other browsers.

One thing I hope they fix before final release though is the constant CPU
usage when you have many tabs open. I thought the Panorama feature was
supposed to address this. It's currently idling at around 25% CPU for me, and
no, unfortunately I can't blame it on Flash. :-\

~~~
jmillikin
> _Odd title though for this post, for where is the "everyone"? The link shows
> comparisons to previous versions of Firefox, not other browsers._

<http://arewefastyet.com/>

Sunspider’s not a very good benchmark; more interesting to me is that they’re
nearly even with V8 in V8’s own benchmark.

Though I wonder why they can’t backport TM, or at least a subset, to 3.6; is
Firefox so monolithic that improvements to the scripthost can’t be separated
from the rest of the browser?

~~~
kylemathews
I ran the tests on my Ubuntu 10.10 laptop running Firefox-4.0 Beta8pre and
Chrome 9.0.570.0 (64571) and Firefox actually beat Chrome 2943 to 3645 (or a
23% improvement) averaged over two runs.

Gotta love browser competition!

~~~
baq
don't ever average software benchmarks, it doesn't make sense. always take the
best run.

------
jijoy
All I want is a light weight FireFox .

~~~
koenigdavidmj
Funnily enough, that's why we got Firefox in the first place---they wanted a
lightweight (browser part of) Mozilla.

Of course, SeaMonkey is pretty fast nowadays too.

~~~
jijoy
more robust they are trying to make it , more heavy it is becoming ...

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angrycoder
Since they are ripping off the chrome UI part and parcel, I wonder why they
still haven't switched to a unified search and location bar.

~~~
trafficlight
I still prefer the Firefox's Awesome bar over Chrome's unified bar. I like
having the drop down list of my most visited sites.

