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March 13, 2008

Superfast Firefox 3.0 beats IE7, Opera & Safari

Mozilla speeds up new Firefox web browser

Gregg Keizer, Computerworld US

Firefox 3.0 beta 4 users report that Mozilla's new browser is dramatically faster than its predecessor, as well the newest versions of Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari.

Mozilla's chief developer said the speed increase is the result of hundreds of performance improvements designed to make the open-source browser the best at running complex Web 2.0 applications.

"We've been working on performance for a long time," said Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering. "Each beta of Firefox 3.0 got better. Beta 1 was better than Firefox 2.0, beta 2 was better than beta 1 and so on. Some of the big architectural changes [we've made] had begun paying off. Now we're at the point where we can turn the knob to get it to perform well."

Firefox 3.0 beta 4, which Mozilla released on Monday, has been put through its paces by users and bloggers, some of whom have published the results of head-to-head benchmark tests between Firefox, Opera, Apple's Safari and Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Mozilla Firefox 3.0 beta 2 review

According to Percy Cabello, who posted his results on the Mozilla Links blog, Firefox 3.0 beta 4 is 53 percent faster than Opera 9.5 beta, twice as fast as Apple's Safari and three times faster than Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7.0 (IE 7.0) on the SunSpider benchmark, which tests JavaScript performance.

Schroepfer, however, refused to be drawn into a conversation about benchmarks. Instead, he talked about what the open-source project is looking to do.

"There are lots of ways to 'game' the system [in benchmarks], but what we're trying to do is speed up the things that enable people to run the really heavy-duty applications on the web.

"Web apps today are magnitudes more complex than those from five years ago. When Yahoo started out, it wasn't anything more than a bullet list. Now it has widgets and word processing. It's important for us to make it possible for web designers to create complex applications. They can be confident building [big web applications] knowing that Firefox can handle them."

Firefox's developers have dealt with more than 400 performance-related bugs and changes, Schroepfer said. "There are a bunch of things that have to come together to get these kind of results," he said, as he ticked off several. "We optimised Jpeg encoding, developers took advantage of more and newer compiler options and we found a way on Mac OS X to keep it from throttling page rendering."

Larger-scale modifications included new graphics- and text-rendering architectures in Gecko, Firefox's engine, and a completely revamped JavaScript engine.

Boosting Firefox's performance is also important, Schroepfer said, for the mobile market, which Mozilla has begun exploring. "The performance gains carry over into mobile, where underpowered devices are the rule," he said. "It should really help us there."

Mozilla is at the end of the line in the mobile space. There, Opera leads all others in popularity on handsets. IE, found on Windows Mobile-powered smartphones and Safari on the iPhone trail Opera in installations, but are ahead of Firefox by miles.

"I think better performance goes back to the mission of Mozilla," concluded Schroepfer. "That mission is to move the web as a platform forward." That's happening, he argued, with Firefox leading the way.

"I'm happy to see that other browsers are working on performance now, too."

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Comments received


SteveP said on Thursday, 13 March 2008

I like the idea of a faster browser, but wonder about whether the new, faster ones are as secure as the slower ones!

SteveP said on Thursday, 13 March 2008

I like the idea of a faster browser, but wonder about whether the new, faster ones are as secure as the slower ones!

jenny campbell said on Thursday, 13 March 2008

I kind of wonder how any browser can, by itself, be faster. Surely much is determined by your internet connection.

dms05 said on Thursday, 13 March 2008

Jenny C - rendering the page (so we can read it) is a complex task and a good rendering engine can make browsing a much more satisfying experience. Apple have always claimed Safari is twice as fast as anyone else but it seems v3 of Firefox could be twice as fast as Safari. That makes it fast!

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