When it comes to fast browsers, Firefox 3.0.* tops them all but hold up…it has competition coming and that competition comes in the form of none other than Firefox 3.1, due near the end of the year.
When the folks at Mozilla first started work on Firefox 3.0 and began releasing the nightly builds thereof I took an immediate interest in testing this new version as it was being built so I could have first hand knowledge as to where Mozilla was headed with this frisky little browser of theirs. The results of the Firefox development team’s effort, if I may be so bold to say, are pretty decent. Firefox 3, currently at 3.0.1, has gained well deserved credit for being the fastest, safest web browser out of those currently available. For the majority of users, it’s overall speed and behavior is excellent. Of course there’s always quirks to be found but that can be easily said about any browser. And so when work began on next version of Firefox, I had no choice but to call up the Firefox Profile Manager and make a new home for the Firefox 3.1 nightly builds to live.
Now I’m using these nightly builds for testing purposes, my daily perusing of the news, online emails and every badly coded and over-bloated site I can possibly find just to see how she fairs. Since the nightly builds are still only pre-Alpha 2, it’s not time yet to provide any real performance details but one thing does stand out—it’s already faster than current version of Firefox.
I first noticed this while viewing Google News’ main page in that the images almost instantly appeared during the page load or at least it seemed that way. So just out of curiosity I ran the same SunSpider Java Script Benchmark tests that Percy Cabello of Mozilla Links had run on the Firefox 3.0 beta’s back in march of this year. Here’s the results graph from his second round of tests he published on March 16th post (results are measured in milliseconds and “WebKit” referred to the latest build of Safari for Windows):
Why is this important? Percy explains in an earlier post that included his first round of tests:
As you may know, JavaScript is progressively becoming more important as we, users come to expect web applications to behave more like their desktop equivalents. For web developers, the top tool for doing this is JavaScript, the language used to program the different web page elements and in some cases, query the server for small pieces of data.
For Firefox, it is even more critical since the whole interface (extensions included) runs on JavaScript: open a context menu, a menu, a tab or a window, and there’s JavaScript at work all around connecting the underlying pieces.
This was a huge jump from Firefox 2 which came in at over 19,000ms in the first round of tests. The second round of Percy’s tests showed over a 3 times improvement in speed for that beta build of FX3 over it’s predecessor. And now it’s well into August already and I just had to run these same tests on the current development builds of Firefox 3.1 and these were the results:
Note: This is just a poor-boys test, nothing official here and not nearly as pretty as Percy’s.
Tests were run 3 times. Took best times out of three.
Okay, so it’s not the same type of huge difference and that stands to reason since 3.1 is just continuing on with what 3.0 started. However, considering the developers are still working on a Firefox 3,1 alpha 2 release, I was surprised to see that there indeed was a speed increase even if it was a slight one. When multiplied over all the Java scripts that Firefox has to handle even that small increase you see in the chart can be definitely noticeable. By the way, Opera 9.5 (final) shows nearly a 1900ms improvement over the previous beta version so those folks haven’t been slacking either and when the Internet Explorer development team delivers IE 8.0 beta 2 later this month, I’ll run another set of tests and include those as well as updated results for the latest FX3.1 builds.
Good to see the folks at Mozilla still working hard to improve my favorite browser.
Did you notice any improvements in loading time?
Chrome loads instantly, something for the Mozilla team to look up to!
Vladimir, (Welcome!)
I really didn’t see any difference in loading times with the trunk builds but I’m waiting until they get most of the bugs out of TraceMonkey (replaces the current SpiderMonkey Java script engine for Firefox) which, I believe, is still turned off by default at the moment, to see if it makes any difference in Firefox loading times. The link above takes you to some initial tests made with TraceMonkey turned on. Strangely enough, when I tried the SunSpider test myself, the current nightly build (at the time) crashed and burned. I’ll try it again sometime and see if I have any better luck.