

Firefox 8 is 20% faster than Firefox 5, matches Chrome 14 - ukdm
http://www.extremetech.com/internet/89570-firefox-8-is-20-faster-than-firefox-5-matches-chrome-14

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arkitaip
Mozilla needs to do something to de-dramatize what some people see as version
inflation. A lot of people get anxious to see these very frequent bumps
because major x releases are associated with add-ons not working, bloat, etc.

~~~
nodata
True, but on the other hand people will get used to it, just like they did
with Chrome. The version number doesn't matter, all that matters is that it
works.

I _like_ to see Mozilla responding. I don't know if development has speeded
up, but it seems to have done. If they can keep this up without letting
security slip I'll be impressed.

~~~
fredoliveira
The problem with Mozilla is that they make the actual number an important part
of their communication. With Chrome on the other hand, you rarely hear about
version numbers - you just know they exist and that you don't need to care.

~~~
jlongster
Not anymore. Mozilla is dropping the version number everywhere, except where
it matters. Notice how in the blog posts that there's no version numbers
mentioned, anywhere:

[http://blog.mozilla.com/futurereleases/2011/07/07/firefoxaur...](http://blog.mozilla.com/futurereleases/2011/07/07/firefoxaurora7/)
[http://blog.mozilla.com/futurereleases/2011/05/27/firefoxaur...](http://blog.mozilla.com/futurereleases/2011/05/27/firefoxaurora/)

~~~
mhitza
And it matters to extension makers. And those need constant repackaging
especially for addons that are no more under active development.

~~~
bryanlarsen
That's no longer true.

<http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2387399,00.asp>

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macavity23
You couldn't have a better demonstration of why competition is good.

I stick with FF because I prefer the interface, but there's no question that
all web browsers have become much better since Chrome's introduction. And if
you're willing to drop support for IE6, web development is really a pleasure
compared to five years ago.

~~~
nhebb
I switched to Chrome because of all the memory issues and crashing. But there
are so many little details as well as add-ons that I miss from FF that I'm
pretty excited about version 8. If it proves out, I'll switch back.

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idan
What about type rendering?

If FF on OSX no longer uses quartz to perform drawing operations, what
implications are there for type rendering? Will OSX users be subjected to the
(IMO) ravages of freetype? Or will each platform continue to use native type
rasterization?

~~~
wmf
AFAIK Firefox still uses Quartz; in fact it's now supposed to be Quartzier
with less Cairo overhead.

~~~
idan
RTFA: "Azure removes the Direct2D and Quartz (OS X) go-between and allows
Firefox to write directly to the underlying 3D subsystems (Direct3D and
OpenGL)."

~~~
thristian
That seems like a journalistic misunderstanding; I'm pretty sure Azure is
designed to replace Cairo as the layer between Firefox and Direct2D or Quartz.

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jerhinesmith
I'm all for speed improvements, feature parity, etc., but my question is why
has it taken a (somewhat) radical change to versioning/release-schedules to
realize these performance improvements?

If these latest benchmarks hold up, then Mozilla will have noticeably reduced
the memory footprint in FF7 and then again noticeably sped up the browser
itself in FF8 (all of this coming within a matter of _weeks_ ). Can it really
be that these two (suddenly important) features went largely unaddressed in
Firefox 3 and 4 because of a different release cycle?

I'm very happy to see the competition, but if Mozilla has been able to address
these two long-standing gripes in a matter of weeks, then I find it somewhat
implausible that it was ever a technical issue.

~~~
bzbarsky
Firefox 4 was a lot faster than Firefox 3.6 in all sorts of ways.

Some of those improvements were checked in before Firefox 3.6 was even
released.

The only reason it looks like they took a long time to do is because the
release cycle for Firefox 4 was long, so you didn't see the improvements until
the final release of Firefox 4.

So all the release schedule is doing here is getting improvements out to users
closer to when the code is written.

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frodwith
Chrome's killer feature for me is still process separation. Slow pages kill my
entire browsing experience in firefox, and when I have 20+ tabs open, that can
be really annoying.

~~~
dochtman
You know Mozilla's working on that, right?

~~~
frodwith
I didn't, but that's really good news :)

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w1ntermute
Firefox 8? What happened to 6 and 7? I see 7's mentioned in the article, but
there's not hide nor hair of Firefox 6.

~~~
mikemaccana
6 is in beta now. Nightlies were 7.0a a few days ago, but if you update....
yep, 8.0a1

PS. Nightly has been incredibly stable on my Mac. I actually use it in
production, for no other reason than I was testing it and have no reason to
get an old release since it's never crashed and is incredibly fast.

~~~
w1ntermute
> Nightly has been incredibly stable on my Mac.

As stable as Chrome dev channel? I use Chrome dev channel (on Linux), but I'm
still a bit hesitant about using the Firefox nightlies.

~~~
mikemaccana
Zero crashes, zero manual restarts, zero lag.

~~~
w1ntermute
And addon support?

~~~
Osmose
I run Aurora and use the Add-on Compatibility Reporter[1] to disable version
checks and run any add-on I want. For most of my add-ons this works fine, but
if there is a significant API change an add-on might not work correctly. But
if you were scared of that you wouldn't be using Nightly or Aurora.

[1]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-
compat...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-
compatibility-reporter/)

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dave1010uk
Just had a play with Firefox 8. It's certainly fast but they've copied Opera &
Chrome with removing the "<http://> from the URL bar. I can see the arguments
for the change but this feels really wrong to me. I hope there's an
about:config tweak somewhere to change it back; even if there is, it's a shame
Mozilla have gone down this route.

~~~
sid0
browser.urlbar.trimURLs

I don't like the change either. It's one of the many reasons Chrome's UI is
terrible. Opera actually implements it pretty well through, since when you
click in the location bar the part to the left gets replaced with <http://>.

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Tichy
I was expecting a parody of version number inflation, but it seems to be a
real article. So FF really jumps to version 8?

~~~
thasmin
No, but 8 is the version in development right now. 6 and 7 are being tested.

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jasonkester
20% sounds good, but unless versions 5, 6 and 7 also had 20% improvements, it
would still be slower than the current version of Chrome on canvas stuff.

For the relatively simple canvas rendering I'm doing, I can watch Firefox
chugging along at 10fps struggling to render a few dozen filled rectangles,
while Chrome is happily pegged at 60fps (via RequestAnimationFrame).

It's just night and day.

~~~
sid0
Canvas on Firefox is hardware accelerated (at least on Windows), so it's
really fast. I don't have Chrome installed, but I'm pretty sure it chokes on
the FishIETank benchmark with 1000 fish:
[http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/FishIETank/Def...](http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/FishIETank/Default.html).
Firefox on the other hand easily gets 60 fps with those many fish.

~~~
jasonkester
Excellent example. On my system, Chrome12 will do 100 fish at 25-30 FPS, while
FF5 chugs along at 7-10fps.

Neither is particularly good, but the Chrome one is at least watchable.

~~~
sid0
That just means your Firefox isn't benefiting from GPU acceleration. It could
either be because your OS or hardware doesn't support it or because your
graphics drivers are out of date.

~~~
jasonkester
The reason why is unimportant. The end result is the same: terrible
performance on Firefox, good performance on Chrome. It's not up to the end
user to know or care why.

~~~
sid0
Terrible on YOUR machine. On something like 45% (and increasing) of vista or
win7 machines the story is the opposite.

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cypherpunks
I might go back to Firefox when it no longer consumes gigabytes of RAM after a
few hours of operation. Until then, I'm with Chrome. I don't care about speed
as much -- so long as it's reliable, and doesn't grind the rest of my machine
to a halt, it's all good.

~~~
bad_user
Chrome is very wasteful; only after many hours of operation in which you
opened and closed dozens and dozens of tabs, it starts to be better than
Firefox; as Firefox fragments memory and doesn't release it properly when
closing a tab.

But for my usage patterns; with many tabs opened after a few hours of
operation, Firefox consumes less RAM for me.

Also, don't confuse memory waist (coming from bloat and fragmentation) with
memory used for improving the browsing experience, like caching. These
browsers are doing a lot of caching and I personally don't like having 4 GB of
memory and being left unused.

~~~
catshirt
memory footprint or not, chrome is faster than firefox. both in terms of page
loading, and raw operation. i might reconsider firefox when it doesn't take 4
times longer to boot up.

~~~
bad_user
I am on Firefox 5 and I don't see visible differences between them anymore.
Yes, Firefox 3.x used to be visibly slower.

I also don't see visible differences in boot time, but this depends a lot on
how many extensions you have -- I only use Firebug and the Web Developer
toolbar. And at least Firefox has plugins that aren't totally useless.

~~~
daed
I think it depends on what hardware you're running. On my laptop Chrome is so
noticeably better I only keep Firefox around for testing. On my maxed out
desktop I can't tell the difference.

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minikomi
Hmm.. If a browser really wants to make a dent I think they need to diversify
their marketing push. It needs to be cool to the people who need cool, safe
and trustworthy to the people that need that, technically sound, exciting and
promising to us geeks.. At the moment it seems that they try to do a bit of
all this at once, but maybe separate voices focussed on these markets would be
more effective?

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dspace
Peacekeeper Benchmark

Firefox 5.0 - 1650

Firefox 8.0a1 - 1972

19.5% improvement. Pretty much dead on.

Specs: Core i3 M330 2.13 GHz, Linux i386

<http://clients.futuremark.com/peacekeeper>

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fedorabbit
I am using it on my macbook pro. FF8 is faster compare to FF5 I was using.
Schubert-it PDF plugin, Adblock, XMark, Flashgot works. Firebug, Google
Dictionary, Download statusbar don't work... and there are some minor bugs
with mouse hover effect.

~~~
Estragon
Yeah, I just downloaded firefox-trunk in ubuntu, and it certainly is fast,
fast enough that I can go back to using it for Microsoft Exchange webmail
(which was the real killer before.) But not having the extensions is going to
be a pain. I think I might try to port "It's All Text!" to 8...

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snow_mac
This is pretty crappy. What is the rendering difference of 5 to 8? How many
versions am I as a web developer going to have to support. short dev cycles
and fast releases like this are stupid.

~~~
AndrewDucker
FF is now autoupdating, so once 5 was out 4 stopped being supported, and this
will now continue.

So you only have to support the latest version.

~~~
CrazedGeek
And 3.6, at least for a little while.

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mmuro
It seems to me that the point of having a version for a browser is for
developers. Otherwise, it shouldn't matter.

What browser do you use? Safari. Chrome. Firefox. IE.

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powerslave12r
Why don't they just make 5 faster and make five be the top number and make
that a little faster?

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funkyboy
So Firefox took 10 years to go from version 1 to 3. And took 1 year to go from
version 4 to 8.

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nsomaru
Can we assume that the benchmarks mentioned for OSX apply equally to Linux?

~~~
wmf
No, but it looks like performance is improving on all platforms.

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hermanthegerman
Firefox 18 is going to be 23% faster than Chrome 34

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brianbreslin
What happened to Firefox 6 and 7?

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janv
Ain't released yet. <https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar>

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nvictor
wow guys, slow down a little bit...

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clistctrl
I find the innovation that competition spurs to be beautiful, even if that
innovation is "just" squeezing performance out of every crevice you can find.

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nextparadigms
So then Firefox will still be behind Chrome? Firefox 7 will be the one
launched in the same time with Chrome 14.

Chrome 14 should be stable in about 8-10 weeks. Firefox 8 won't be stable
until 14-16 weeks from now. That's around the time Chrome 15 will be out.

~~~
melling
The release number should just be the date. That way geeks can stop worrying
about the number, and get back to work.

~~~
drats
It's incredible the sound and fury generated by version numbers. Ubuntu is
almost there if they would just drop the rather silly animal names and stick
with 10.04, 10.10, 11.4, 11.10 et cetera. Also having such a easy to remember
and unique string makes searching for support and technical questions nice.

~~~
Scaevolus
Ubuntu's animal names make it _easier_ to search for support and technical
questions-- "maverick", "natty", and "lucid" are all much more likely to be
associated with Ubuntu than numbers like 10.10.

