Smoothwall Firewall project

Wednesday 7 October 2009

Firefox performance is fighting back with 3.6


I have just installed the latest nightly build of Firefox - Namoroka - which up until tonight has failed to live up to the performance of Chromium, but boy has that just changed. It is the 64 bit version I have been testing on Ubuntu 9.10 beta, which is also a first for Firefox directly from their nightly download sites, and it would appear that there will be a native 64bit version of 3.5.4 as well.

They have been busy with the overall performance but page rendering would now appear to be as fast as Chromium, or of such a small difference to be of little noticeable difference.

Using the Sunspider test, which is just one measure, but one none the less, I got this for FF 3.6b1

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RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
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Total: 2869.0ms +/- 2.4%
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but I then got this with Chromium

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RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
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Total: 781.8ms +/- 5.9%
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So the libV8 javascript engine with Chromium still rules the roost on this test, but there is more to a browsers performance than just this, and Firefox 3.6 is clearly demonstrating that.

It is definitely worth a look to see how it performs on your machine.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Even i agree with you, i was also not getting good speed in this new version, but alternatively on chromium the was satisfying speed.configuration management