Firefox 3 Performance Gets a Boost

jason writes "Mozilla has been working hard at making Firefox 3 faster than its predecessor, and it looks like they might be succeeding. They've recently added some significant JavaScript performance improvements that beat out all of the competition, including Opera 9.5 Beta. And it comes out to be about ten times faster than Internet Explorer 7! Things are really starting to fall into place for Firefox 3 Beta 4 which should be available in the next week or two."

Safari

[adam1234]

Hopefully it can best Safari's Javascript performance. Firefox is pitifully slow compared to WebCore's javascript core.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Safari

[0xygen]

But with NoScript it's not so much surfing as paddling through the mud!

Re:Safari

[utopianfiat]

lynx = floaties and a shark-filled lagoon?

Re:

[myrmidon666]

Noscript slows down your browser a bit. This is especially true if you have "trusted" sites with a lot of scripts.I have definitely noticed a decrease in performance since I added Noscript.

Re:Safari

[prestomation]

According to TFA, Safari is beat out by Firefox 3 beta 3 and 4, and Opera.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Did the check against the WebKit SVN HEAD, though? There have been significant improvements which aren't in Safari yet.

Re:Safari

[Anonymous Coward]

Would it be fair to say the following actually occured to obtain these javascript performance improvements:

1. instrumented firefox (PGO technology)
2. ran the stinking benchmark with the instrumented code
3. used the feedback from the benchmark to automatically compile an optimized version of firefox optimized specifically for the benchmark.

4. Publish results of said benchmark for all to oooh and awwww over.

Isn't this as pathetic and useless as vendors manually tweaking their 3D drivers to artifically raise performance figures displayed in 3dmark? Did I totally misread TFA?

Re:Safari

[luserSPAZ]

No, we're just profiling on browser startup/shutdown right now. I did do a build profiled on the benchmark, and it was pretty fast, but that's probably overkill. Mostly we just want to hit enough common code paths to make things faster. Turns out sunspider perf correlates pretty nicely to overall JS speed, since the benchmark is made up of real world code that people complained was slow.

Re:

[insertwackynamehere]

nah you make two and there goes your market

Re:

[pixelpusher220]

No one will create "recordings" for sale anymore since they can be duplicated ad nauseum for squat.

There will still be a thriving market for LIVE music and plays and such things. Notice how the music industry never managed to die like it has always said it would? Started with the printing press, which is little different than me ripping a song off a CD, and now with the digitization of music and the internet. Both produced a cheap, easily duplicated copy without any harm to the original.

The only ar

Re:Safari

[Idiomatick]

I know, it really sucks that people don't write books anymore since the printing press came out. The whole industry collapsed, you probably haven't even heard of these jobs:

* Copyists, who dealt with basic production and correspondence
* Calligraphers, who dealt in fine book production
* Correctors, who collated and compared a finished book with the manuscript from which it had been produced
* Rubricators, who painted in the red letters
* Illuminators, who painted illustrations

Ohhhh wait, people still write books and the industry didn't collapse. It just changed. I'm sure in 50years we'll be saying 'wtf was a publisher again?'. And nothing of value will be lost. Artists have the HUGE opportunity of being able to cut out the middle men (there are lots of them) with current technology. With less hands in their pockets they will make big money from live shows and bigger profit from merchandise as well as profits from ad supported downloads and site page views. Artists will NOT starve, i don't see how cutting away the massive corporations which artists are carrying on their back atm will hurt the artists.

Re:Safari

[A beautiful mind]

RTFA (or just glance below):

1. Firefox 3 Nightly (PGO Optimized): 7263.8ms
2. Firefox 3 Nightly (02/25/2008 build): 8219.4ms
3. Opera 9.5.9807 Beta: 10824.0ms
4. Firefox 3 Beta 3: 16080.6ms
5. Safari 3.0.4 Beta: 18012.6ms
6. Firefox 2.0.0.12: 29376.4ms
7. Internet Explorer 7: 72375.0ms

The results are generated by using the Sunspider JS benchmark suite.

Re:Safari

[GenKreton]

These benchmarks are definitely lal done on a windows box, because if you compare the performance of JS in Firefox on Linux and Windows it is like night and day... I don't know why JS on Linux needs to be so much worse.

Re:Safari

[BZ]

A large part of this is that MSVC++ generates better assembly than g++ in a lot of cases.

Firefox 3 beta 3 on Linux is great

[LingNoi]

I had these problems with Firefox 2 exactly running the default Ubuntu version. I downloaded the firefox 3 beta 3 from the website and it is so much better it is unbelievable.

- Where as before FF2 would use around 500 meg it now only uses around 50 meg
- Flash no longer crashes the browser
- Javascript no longer crashes the browser
- Those long pauses as it is doing something that stalls the browsers operation are gone.

I couldn't believe the difference.

Re:Firefox 3 beta 3 on Linux is great

[Fallingcow]

I'm running the Hardy Heron alpha, featuring FF3 Beta 3.

I'm having terrible trouble with it. Bizarre image rendering issues (some render too high in their "frame", leaving a big black space at the bottom and the bottom half of the image rendered in the top half of the "frame", with the top of the image cut off, and other times images from WAY back in my browsing session will show up in odd places, like as a tiled background on another page), GMail hangs when I try to send e-mail every single time I try, and leaving it open too long has proven to be a great way to end up with an unstable mess.

Not refuting your post, just saying to anyone thinking about trying it, don't count on it being a great experience :)

Re:Firefox 3 beta 3 on Linux is great

[Curtman]

I would add to that list:

- Ctrl-MouseWheel zooming scales the images as well so the pages look normal without text overlapping the graphics

That feature alone is worth upgrading for.

Re:

[Donniedarkness]

Kind of like the "zoom" in Opera? If so, I may semi-jump ship. It's one of my favourite things about Opera.

Re:Safari

[dgatwood]

How about testing with a WebKit nightly?

Why is this marked as troll?

[Overly Critical Guy]

Why is the parent comment marked as troll? It was reported a few weeks ago that the next version of Safari, 3.1, would see major JavaScript performance gains due to the latest WebKit builds. This article uses the beta Windows 3.0 version to compare to.

Re:

[causality]

Why is the parent comment marked as troll?

Because there are too many knee-jerk idiot mods who don't consider context and can't be bothered to check facts.

At least when they mod me "Offtopic" they'll have done the job correctly.

Re:Safari

[Anonymous Coward]

The Webkit nightly builds are significantly faster. I don't have the same machine they've tested on obviously, but for comparison purposes here's the current release vs. the most recent nightly build on my Mac OS X 10.5.2 machine:

Safari 3.0.4: 10758.4ms +/- 0.5%
WebKi r30628: 3390.0ms +/- 0.3%

If the performance gain percentage is comparable on their test machine (big if, granted) the comparable time would be 5675.8 ms, 22% faster than the PGO Firefox build.

Re:Safari

[TheNetAvenger]

(or just glance below):

1. Firefox 3 Nightly (PGO Optimized): 7263.8ms
2. Firefox 3 Nightly (02/25/2008 build): 8219.4ms
3. Opera 9.5.9807 Beta: 10824.0ms
4. Firefox 3 Beta 3: 16080.6ms
5. Safari 3.0.4 Beta: 18012.6ms
6. Firefox 2.0.0.12: 29376.4ms
7. Internet Explorer 7: 72375.0ms
The results are generated by using the Sunspider JS benchmark suite.


This looks great, but everyone should notice a couple of things that may not be obvious.

1) Sunspider JS benchmark is designed by Apple developers and they use it to show the world how much faster Safari is, however Opera seems to outpace the Safari developers even with their own tests. However, yes some of the benchmarks used are 'picked' to favor Safari, and some are 'extended' to hurt IE.

2) Sunspider over does the tests of the Append String performance problem to make IE look worse than it really is. IE's JScript is coded as JScript was designed, and because of this, it doesn't optimize string append operations by using newer code. So by using this text extra, it artificially make IE look horribly slow. IE8 and possible additional IE7 releases are spending time optimizing the base JSCript code from the original implementations/specifications.

http://blogs.msdn.com/jscript/archive/2007/10/17/performance-issues-with-string-concatenation-in-jscript.aspx [msdn.com]

3) If you remove the 'string' routine from the test, IE7, consistently outperforms Firefox 2.0, and is very close to even Safari for with the results were cherry picked.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001023.html [codinghorror.com]

4) Some of the numbers are quite questionable as to the validity. For example IE7 is given 72375 in this article, and yet the slowest machine our tech lab has ever benchmarked is 2x the speed, and this is on a very old AMD 1ghz machine that barely runs Vista in which the test yeilded the horrible results. So where did they get the 72375 number from? A Pentium 200?

Again reference this link so see that even this person's results are no where near the 75K ms time reported for IE.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001023.html [codinghorror.com]

So it is quite questionable and inaccurate to try to portray IE7 as 10x slower, when without the 'emphasized' string append slowdown in IE7, it is faster than FireFox 2.0 and within a few 'ms' of even Safari and the new FireFox 3.0 results.

Good job to the FireFox team, btw.. Also does anyone have benchmarks of the new FireFox using a non-Apple test suite?

Re:Safari

[A beautiful mind]

I don't get it. They are doing exactly what I wanted about Firefox in 3.x.

While new features can be nice, I couldn't name a feasible feature that a significant number of people would want and it's not in core Firefox or in an extension already. What I want from Firefox now is to provide the existing features in a secure, stable, fast and memory conserving way, in this order. Heck, I've turned off most of the new features in Firefox 2.x and wished they'd fix some annoying bugs instead. In 3.x the developers did a lot of work to remedy a lot of those bugs and issues, so big big kudos for them!

Cleaner code matters - it results in less bugs and security vulnerabilities, easier to add features and most likely better code.

Re:Safari

[Tack]

Security isn't really a concern, that's what I run AV and a software firewall, ...

There are plenty of attacks (such as CSRF or XSS) for which your AV software and a firewall are useless against. You say security isn't a concern now, until you fall victim to one of these attacks that can only be thwarted by proper security in the browser.

Re:Safari

[CajunArson]

Yeah great, was anyone complaining about the speed?

Actually many people (myself included) were complaining about speed, and in some cases new "features" are just bloat. One feature that I would LOVE to see is to have isolation between tabs so that if one page in one tab causes a crash, the other tabs would be unaffected and the browser could continue. A multi-process model with better isolation could do this, and would also make more efficient use of multi-core systems (since FF is notoriously single-threaded, have a single thread per-tab instead of per-browser). FF does crash, and while sometimes a third party plugin is to blame, I really don't care about pointing fingers just in getting the browser more reliable.

Re:Safari

[Mr. Spontaneous]

They've been throwing around the idea of multithreading for Firefox 4, but right now its still in contention, I think, because it has to be done right. I recall reading some dev blogs that said they'd jump ship if the team decided to expose the threads to extension developers.

Re:Safari

[steelfood]

Threads add a whole new dimension of complexity to the engine. The "right" way to do it may not even exist.

Extensions definitely should not have direct access to the threads. It would be an absolutely terrible idea. In fact, extensions shouldn't even know that there's multithreading going on behind the scenes. At best, extensions would be able to indirectly spawn threads and manipulate the spawned threads in a roundabout manner through that context using a thread-safe API.

Re:

[snl2587]

1. None used, and
2. only one tab open.

It's been my experience that the extensions and multiple open tabs cause bloat, not Firefox itself.

Re:

[0xygen]

If you try the beta, you will actually notice a significant reduction in the memory used over previous versions.

However, as one of the other replies mentions, it is partly down to the caching, which has now been adjusted.
If you are in the "I would rather have a slow browser with no cache" crowd, you can actually tune the cache down in the prefs.

Re:Safari

[AaronW]

Just because I have a couple gigs of memory doesn't mean I want Firefox to consume it all. I run more than just a web browser. I don't want a lot of caching anyway, since most pages I hit are dynamic and I don't use back very frequently. I don't want a program to look and see I have a couple gigs of memory and assume it can use it all.

-Aaron

Re:

[bunratty]

I said for caching. Not all of Firefox's memory use is used for caching. I never said that Firefox will not use more than a hundred megs or so of total memory use. Sheesh!

Re:Safari

[squidinkcalligraphy]

As has been often discussed, Linux's reporting of memory usage is inaccurate. Firefox uses threads; in Linux each thread is treated as a process, and appears as such to programs like top, appearing to use it's own memory allocation plus the shared memory common to all firefox threads. So it _looks_ (approximately) like the memory being used all up is (thread's mem + shared mem) * Number of threads, where in fact it is thread's mem * number of threads + shared mem.

Re:

[Sam Douglas]

That is not correct, maybe you are thinking of Thread Local Storage. All threads share the same address space and memory allocations (memory management techniques used inside the application aside). Perhaps this page (found with a quick Google search) should clear up the confusion: http://virtualthreads.blogspot.com/2006/02/understanding-memory-usage-on-linux.html [blogspot.com]

It is more a matter that tools such as ps report the VSZ (Virtual Set size) and RSS (Resident Set Size) -- basically this is the amount of mem

Re:

[Sam Douglas]

http://blog.pavlov.net/2007/11/10/memory-fragmentation/ [pavlov.net] provides information about this issue. Supposedly a lot of the memory eating issues people bitch about are caused by heap fragmentation -- memory pages that get allocated to Firefox, then some of the data freed, but not all of the page.

Re:Safari

[dwater]

...I suspect our brain tries to do shortcuts...

What? Are we 'the borg' now? ...or some kind of massive Siamese poly-tuplet.

Re:Safari

[billcopc]

Are you sure it's actually swapping to disk, or is it merely reserving swap space in the map ?

Example: I have 8 gb in this system. Right now I only have FF and Thunderbird running (+ a few background processes). Current "commit charge" is 475mb, of which Firefox is using 150mb. The system says I'm using 280mb of swap, but it's not actually thrashing the swap disk at all. That swap space is reserved, presumably because it represents 280mb of idle memory that is eligible to swap out, should another process need it.

Windows allocates virtual memory quite aggressively (when properly coded). If a process requests 500mb, but only really uses 100mb of it, the remaining 400mb will be "allocated" to swap while the real memory remains available to other processes. The moment a memory page is accessed, it is marked "dirty" and moved to real memory.

It's very much like sparse files, where unused or 0-filled pages don't take up any physical space (except for the map entry). That's how virtual memory is supposed to work, and it lets developers simplify their code by not having to worry too much about the physical arrangement of memory. It's also partly why you should never run a system without a swap file, even if it has tons of memory. I've probably never used all 8 gb in my system, but I still keep a (small) swap file. If I didn't, and that process allocates 500mb, Windows needs to dedicate 500mb whether or not it is actually in use. It reminds me of real-estate players, who can "buy" million-dollar buildings with a relatively small amount of capital, the rest on credit. Swap is like a line of credit for the OS.

Linux probably does the same thing, but I'm not as knowledgeable about its inner workings.

Re:Safari

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

They should have run it against the latest webkit.. it's supposed to be pretty fast..

Okay, I ran it on OS X anyway. I'm too lazy to run it on Windows too :) Here are the results [slashdot.org]. The new version of Webkit/Safari does beat the nightly of Firefox, but it is close and they're both a lot better than any regular release.

IE7 is just slow anyway

[jtroutman]

One of the ways I usually demonstrate to people the advantage of Firefox 2 over IE7 is to show them the difference in time it takes to open multiple tabs. With Firefox, they open as fast as I can hit CTRL-T, but with IE it takes about a second for each one.

Re:IE7 is just slow anyway

[ivarneli]

I tend to have the opposite experience. When I need to use it, IE7 is quite fast and responsive for me, and it will certainly open tabs as quickly as I can hit Ctrl-T. On the other hand, Firefox (on any computer I've used) occasionally has a bit of a delay when opening new tabs, especially if other pages are rendering in the background, you have a few complex sites (like gmail) open, or you have more than 3-4 tabs open.

There are a bunch of great reasons to use Firefox - adblock, keyword bookmarks, decent standards support, Firebug, etc. But in my experience (especially post-1.5), the responsiveness of the UI is not one of those reasons.

Re:

[jrumney]

I just tried it now. On Firefox (2), I opened about 10 tabs, and they opened almost as fast as I could hit Ctrl-T. On IE7, the first 3 tabs opened immediately, after that there was a few seconds delay for every tab.

Re:IE7 is just slow anyway

[A beautiful mind]

3* tabs should be enough for everybody.

*For older versions of IE, 3 equals 1.

I tried Firefox 3 today

[celardore]

To be honest, I hate it. WTF have they done with my handy URL bar? It used to be a place where I could type "slas" and get the slashdot URL come up. Even worse for "news", as it "handily suggests" all the pages in my history that have "slas" or "news" in my history.

Heads up for all those trying Firefox 3 is Oldbar [google.co.uk]. I suggest you get it if you don't like the new 'innovations' by Mozilla Corp.

Re:I tried Firefox 3 today

[christopherfinke]

It learns as you use it. Type 'slas' and choose Slashdot from the list. After doing that once or twice, Slashdot should automatically float to the top each time after that.

Re:I tried Firefox 3 today

[arth1]

Sorry, copying the bad eyecandy from Microsoft doesn't classify as an improvement in my opinion.

The learn-as-you-go menu behaviour which they copied from Windows didn't work well in Windows either. The main problem is that it causes inconsistent behaviour. Repeating something doesn't necessarily give you the same menu items. It's good for newbies who read every single line before choosing one of them, but it's very bad for people who memorize what they do so they can repeat it quickly without even looking.

Re:I tried Firefox 3 today

[ucblockhead]

Gah! I don't want software that fucking "learns"! I don't want software that tries to think for me. I want software that just fucking works in the first place!

It's the KISS principle [wikipedia.org]. I'd rather have stupid software that works in a clear manner than all this crap that tries to figure out what I maybe might be wanting.

Re:I tried Firefox 3 today

[TheSkyIsPurple]

>I don't want software that tries to think for me.

In which case you don't want the browser to autocomplete the URL for you at all, and the fact that it finds seemingly irrelevant matches shouldn't matter.

Re:I tried Firefox 3 today

[Blkdeath]

Gah! I don't want software that fucking "learns"! I don't want software that tries to think for me. I want software that just fucking works in the first place!

It does. Your "just fucking works" is slightly different from my "just fucking works", so it learns how we each work and adapts accordingly. It not only learns your habits in entering URLs in the address bar, but it also learns from your browsing history and bookmark use. When I type "sl" lo and behold, Slashdot is the first entry. When I type "gl" the first entry is for my Globe And Mail portfolio listing, when I type "bm" my online banking page comes up #1. Now, if I wanted to view other pages that I select often I can scroll further down, but in general all I need is two letters, down, enter and I'm at the page I want based on my own browsing habits. Now, your online banking might start with "sc" or "ba" or any other combination so you wouldn't want "bm" associated with that. Maybe "bm" links to your social networking site or something else you want. Why bother with one-size-fits-all when you can have custom tailored for the same price?

Re:

[Fallingcow]

It also seems slower to me (then again, so does the whole damned browser), and that was one of my biggest complaints about FF2: it took a *tiny* bit too long for those to pop up, so that if I hit "slash(DOWN)(ENTER)" too quickly, I'd end up browsing to the word "slash" rather than "slashdot.org". Throwing more processing power at the problem doesn't seem to fix it (if a dual-core 2.2Ghz won't fix a little problem like this, nothing will).

I've also got huge problems with image rendering (images that I brows

Re:

[kestasjk]

The old behavior is always better, until you start to use the new behavior.

When FF2 came out I didn't like the close buttons on the tabs, or the way that they were curved and didn't fit in with Windows' tabs, I didn't like the bland new icons, and it all seemed like a bunch of hype.

Of course now I like FF2, I like how the icons are less colorful and draw less attention, and FF3 seems like the scary new release threatening to ruin something that was perfectly good before.

Same goes for new releases o

Re:I tried Firefox 3 today

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, I have been using it for a couple months now (nightlies) and I absolutely love the awesomebar. Just typing "s" gets me slashdot. the various environments I work with can be gotten with "l" (localhost), "d" (the development server), "bug" "sprint" "-1h" "me" (our bug tracker), "qa" (our qa environment), etc.

Best of all, if I visit any site and then want to get back to that site again sometime, all I need to remember is something in the title or url of the page I was at.

Re:I tried Firefox 3 today

[balster neb]

I agree with you totally. I've been toying around with the Firefox 3 Betas for a couple of weeks and I think the awesomebar is the best new feature. It's not broken -- it's different. Once you get used to it, finding pages you frequently visit becomes much easier.

Say you visited the Wikipedia page on the Tunguska event a couple of weeks. If you want to revisit the page, all you do is start typing the first few letters of "Tunguska" and the page comes to the top of the list. With the old type of address bar, you'll have to type the whole Wikipedia URL or search your browser history separately. This speedup is well worth the relatively shallow learning curve.

I find it pretty stupid to compare this feature with Windows' "adaptive menu" feature. There's only a superficial resemblance. Remember, the traditional address bar still "learns" in the way you hate by ordering URLs by the frequency with which you visit them. What is it with the Slashdot crowd and being insanely conservative about their software?

Re:I tried Firefox 3 today

[caspy7]

You've only tried it for one day and you hate it?
I think I understand.
You see, the new location bar learns. Though this silly new 'innovation' does indeed search through the URLs *and* titles of bookmarks and history, it also learns what you select the most. Give it a few more days and slashdot should come to the top of the list.
I experienced the same thing in the beginning.

When I bookmark page now I try to throw on a couple common sense tags that way when I type the tag in the location bar in the future, those bookmarks come out on top.

If you're *really* dead set on the shortest route:
1) Click Bookmarks -> Show All Bookmarks
2) Find the slashdot bookmark and select it
4) Click "More" under properties
5) Make the keyword /.
6) Close the window

Now type /. in the location bar and vwala!

Re:I tried Firefox 3 today

[xouumalperxe]

vwala!

LMAO. You are a worthless, pathetic piece of shit.

Next time, try it like this: "LMAO. You are a worthless, pathetic piece of shit. The word you're looking for is voilà, literally 'see there' in French, an idiom used to mean 'there you go'". (though the OP's spelling is pretty damn close to the correct phonetical spelling \vwä-'lä\)

Re:I tried Firefox 3 today

[upside]

You don't realize "vwala" is the de-frenchified, freedom-loving, non-retreating version of the word from the Freedom Fries crowd. It means "Behold, believe and profess. Else you will be classified an enemy combatant".

Expect to find it in a GWB-approved dictionary any day now.

Re:

[LingNoi]

You must be using windows, on Linux it doesn't do this, you just download the zip file, extract and run.

Safari is getting up there

[The Ancients]

The Safari team recently introduced some native javascript functions [webkit.org], which showed very impressive speed. It looks like the next release Safari will be up there as well (if not even faster still).

I'm off to download the latest Firefox to see how the two compare (on both Windows and OS X platforms).

Re:

[jesser]

Firefox nightlies also have native getElementsByClassName, fwiw. I don't know how many sites currently use native implementations when available, but after Firefox 3 and Safari 3.1 ship, I bet lots of sites will.

Firefox 3 also supports new Java plug-in

[kaos07]

From the Mozilla blog:

Firefox 3 is going to include support for the new Java SE 6 runtime environment.

This is a new implementation of the Java Plug-In that features increased reliability, ability to specify large heap sizes, ability to select a specific JRE version to execute a particular applet, and support for signed applets on Windows Vista.

The New Plug-in is designed to work with: - Internet Explorer 6 and 7 on Windows XP and Windows Vista - Firefox 3 on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Solaris and Linux

Personally, I've been wanting to use the Firefox 3 beta for some time, primarily because of the performance and speed boosts over Firefox 2, but my favourite add-ons still aren't compatible.

Note: The new Plug-in does not work with Firefox 2, and no support is planned for this browser with the New Plug-in.

http://gemal.dk/blog/2008/02/24/firefox_3_gets_a_new_java_plugin/?from=rss-category/ [gemal.dk]

Builds for Windows and Linux available

[The Ancients]

in this thread [mozillazine.org]

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[Pearlswine]

Short answer, maybe [mozilla.org] Long answer: If FF3 isn't using a processor specific optimization, you can always Download your own build [mozillazine.org], I like pigfoot's (scroll down) [pigfoot.org] build for windows.

Microsoft's Biggest Mistake

[TheNarrator]

Microsoft's biggest mistake was thinking people wouldn't write complicated apps in Javascript. They supported it, in their usual half broken style, but it created the only widely deployed cross-platform system for running code that Microsoft has ever implemented. Now, with Firefox 3 running so fast javascript might become THE platform. It's hilarious because Javascript started out as such a kludgy platform and now it is becoming a serious contender if only because it's the only cross-platform thing Microsoft ever supported.

Re:Microsoft's Biggest Mistake

[chelsel]

I have nightmare's about JavaScript being the one language to rule them all... please, let's have no such talk.

Re:Microsoft's Biggest Mistake

[kabz]

Yes, and the most interesting thing about JavaScript is that it is arguably the most successful and widely deployed Lisp ever. Before you laugh, it has procedures as first class objects, can eval code, has lexical closures ... it's an absolutely rocking language if you want to do functional things. I love it for prototyping up algorithms.

Take a look at Functional JavaScript [osteele.com]. Extensions for functional programming.

Or the great Prototype [prototypejs.org]Library. Note the functions like 'reduce' that can apply to array.

OS X Results - Spoiler Safari Wins

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Well someone had to, so I ran the numbers for OS X. All of the below were on OS X 10.5.2 running on a MacBook:

• Safari 3.0.4 - 11112.0ms
• Safari with Nightly Webkit r30628 - 3525.8ms
• Firefox Nightly3.0beta4pre - 4330.2ms
• Opera 9.26.3727 - failed (but all those that ran were slower than Safari 3.0.4 so it is the slowest overall for what worked.)

I guess if you're a Safari or Firefox person you can look forward to some really fast Javascript performance either way.

Re:OS X Results - Spoiler Safari Wins

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Replying to my own post, I probably should have included Firefox 2.0.0.12 as well. Here are the numbers for that and Firefox 1.5.0.8 which is still on my machine for testing purposes.

• Firefox 2.0.0.12 - 13840.0ms
• Firefox 1.5.0.8 - 16849.6ms

Re:

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I think comparing firefox3b4p to webkit is like comparing apples and oranges. Firefox3b4p is a beta version of an actual product, whereas webkit is a rendering engine.

That's why that line in my comparison reads, "Safari with Nightly Webkit r30628." Safari is an actual browser, I just replaced the back end. It's not like I'm going to write my own minimalist front end for it, after all, when it is so easy to plug into Safari. In fact, if anything I'd say Firefox was getting the advantage since I tested the newest versions of their front end and back end whereas I used the old front end for Safari which could, theoretically, be optimized to work better with the latest ve

Is this a legitimate benchmark for a browser?

[NevarMore]

I've seen the SunSpider benchmark come up before, and it is a great benchmark for JavaScript as a language, but it may be inappropriate for a browser.

This test mostly avoids microbenchmarks, and tries to focus on the kinds of actual problems developers solve with JavaScript today, and the problems they may want to tackle in the future as the language gets faster. This includes tests to generate a tagcloud from JSON input, a 3D raytracer, cryptography tests, code decompression, and many more examples. There are a few microbenchmarkish things, but they mostly represent real performance problems that developers have encountered.

Raytracing? Crypto? These aren't things I'd consider running in a browser and certainly not with JavaScript. Just because JaveScript and a modern browser on a mid-range machine CAN do these things doesn't mean it should.

JSON, code decompression, and traversing XML are things that a browser does with JavaScript, some more often than others. Even in those cases, I wouldn't be surprised if browsers had parsers that 'helped' the common browser JavaScript tasks with faster native-library interfaces instead of purely native JavaScript interpretation.

Re:

[fireboy1919]

Agree about ray tracing, but crypto is very relevant. If you aren't using javascript md5 in your login page, then your password is wizzing around the internet in plain text - not a good idea.

Only if you don't use https, or NTLM, or Kerberos (all browser supported mechanism that don't require javascript). Depending on javascript for encryption is silly.

MD5 is extremely broken for passing passwords about.

stalling

[rubycodez]

and does a single tcp socket's stalling not cause the whole damn thing to seize up?

Re:stalling

[roca]

Actually in Firefox 3/Gecko 1.9, external CSS loads do not block the parser. Woohoo! However, we do block the parser if the page tries to execute script while there are pending CSS loads.

Have they discovered threads yet?

[RelliK]

Or does a single tab still cause the entire browser to freeze up?

Re:Have they discovered threads yet?

[Wolfier]

Exactly what I think.

Who cares about Javascript performance when a single script running at any speed can freeze the entire browser?

Or a few Youtube tabs can slow the browser to a halt? (Hint: Firefox REALLY need to delegate Flash rendering to an external process, something I can renice 19. Just like how Konqueror uses nspluginviewer)

Re:Have they discovered threads yet?

[multi io]

If you can find a way to magically thread javascript in a way that allows multiple windows and tabs to communicate with each other (as the DOM requires), I'm sure the mozilla folks would absolutely *love* to hear about it.

How about just implementing it? No magic needed. If the whole UI is slow and tends to lock up because it uses only a single thread, and the reason for that is that the language/runtime the UI is written in doesn't support threads, then you have three options:

• keep everything as it is, maybe pretend the problem doesn't exist
• rewrite in a language that does support threading
• extend Javascript resp. its runtime/libraries to support threading

The last one is probably the best option if you want to solve the problem, minimize the amount of work required to do so, and don't want to force all the plugin writers to use another language.

Not really what matters to me ...

[jopet]

Luckily many pages don't need Javascript or at least not a lot of JS to render.
What I find more important are the lockups I get because of limitations to multi-threading in FF, at least under Linux. There are situations where one window locking up means all windows lock up. There are situations where some initial connection to a host being stuck means all of the browser locks up. One can only guess, because FF does not indicate what the problem is -- but more frequently than is funny, I have FF get unresponsive, not re-painting windows anymore and just eating up CPU and memory without reacting until I kill it.
This sucks and this doesn't seem to have changed in FF 3.

Focusing on the wrong aspects

[abigsmurf]

I always see these benchmarks and wonder "why does this matter?". The only time I ever see Javascript run too slow or tax my CPU is when it's buggy and then it'll probably throw up all sorts of warnings anyway. This is on any browser I've used and any system.

What matters to me is the imperfect implementation of Flash (it's not really their responsibility but it is their problem) which often eats up 100% CPU from random flash objects or causes firefox to freeze. Another annoyance is Firefox being frankly poor at displaying large HTML files (when you go on websites with insanely large lists for instance). Where as IE and Opera display these as the page is downloaded. Firefox, for me, freezes, much like notepad will when you open a 2meg+ file . Sometimes it'll recover and display the page after a minute or so, sometimes I have to ctrl+alt+delete.

Re:Focusing on the wrong aspects

[dido]

The fact that Firefox, being an XUL application, has significant chunks of core code written in JavaScript, is probably the main reason why this matters very much. Even if you never visit a site in the wild that uses JavaScript or run with JavaScript totally disabled, you should still see some general improvements in Firefox's performance.

Re:It still doesn't run on my computer

[ajayrockrock]

It still doesn't run on my computer and Firefox 2.latest_stable_release works fine. What's up with that? It just crashes immedietly upon opening.

Back up your Firefox Profile [mozilla.com] and start clean.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Firefox Performance

[Vombatus]

but PDF is the Page Description Format.

I could have sworn that PDF was Portable Document Format. All your other points about it are correct though.

Re:

[larry bagina]

OS X proves that a PDF reader can be as fast as HTML. Faster in some cases -- no need to lay out and render large tables, complex CSS, etc.

Re:Firefox Performance

[jalefkowit]

Flash has more and more accessibility support, but PDF is the Page Description Format. It's meant for print output and says nothing about the meaning of the contents of the document, just how they are supposed to look on the screen and on the page.

Um, PDFs can be made just as accessible as HTML documents [alistapart.com], and Adobe's PDF tools have good integrated support for assistive technologies [adobe.com] built in.

PDF accessibility is a lot like HTML accessibility; you have to know what you're doing to make it happen, but you can make it happen.

Re:

[ashridah]

note that this is a javascript test, not a html test, but the main problem is, you need to break the problem down into many components, including, but not limited to:

a) efficient networking
b) lexical analysis
d) parsing.
e) DOM tree construction (required because it's available to javascript)
f) javascript lexical analysis
g) javascript grammar parsing
h) javascript compilation to bytecode
j) javascript execution by vm (including subtasks: initialization, execution, security checks, etc)
k) rendering output

It's pr

Re:

[CoughDropAddict]

You haven't even mentioned the number one problem that makes Firefox slow when it's been open for too long: memory allocation costs associated with heap fragmentation [pavlov.net].

Re:

[ashridah]

I've got to agree with you. Memory usage, per se, isn't going to affect speed, *if* that memory isn't constantly being addressed.
If the memory in question are rendered page caches, which aren't going to get touched unless they're viewed. As long as the allocation tables are efficiently indexed, i don't see how memory usage is directly related to speed.

Re:Memory leak?

[bersl2]

It wasn't so much a memory leak issue as it was memory fragmentation.

Re:Memory leak?

[bunratty]

No, recently the developers have found that few leaks are left, so that to reduce memory usage further they had to change their focus to reducing fragmentation. Originally, the problem was leaks, it's just that once the worst ones were fixed fragmentation became responsible for a larger fraction of the memory usage. This a continuation of people trying to find one single cause of high memory use. As I and others have been saying for years, there is no one cause. There is no "the memory leak" or "the memory issue", just as there is no "the crash problem" or "the security problem".

Re:Memory leak?

[fontkick]

There is no "the memory leak" or "the memory issue", just as there is no "the crash problem" or "the security problem"

Once upon a time there was this OS named Windows Millennium Edition, also known as "the" in your examples above.

Re:JavaScript, huh.

[jesser]

The benchmark used in this article is a JavaScript benchmark, but PGO was enabled for most components of Firefox, not just the JavaScript engine. And even if only the JavaScript engine improved in speed, you'd see a speed boost despite having JavaScript disabled in web pages, since parts of Firefox itself are implemented in JavaScript.

Re:

[XaXXon]

I disagree that it looks bad on os x (using it right now), but it has already been addressed. If you have ff3b3, you can download the os x theme.

Re:OSX?

[BrainInAJar]

I have. Still ass. doesn't go lighter when it's backgrounded, stays the same dark grey as if it were foregrounded.

Open-Source seems good for getting a job 90% finished and completely ignoring the 10% polish required to make it an app of the same quality as closed-source

Re:

[Surt]

That's the 10% that takes hard work.

Re:How about the frickin' memory?

[ServerIrv]

Mark this as off-topic if you like. I'm responding partially to the parent comment, but mostly to its score and reason.

This is a discussion board. How can you mark someone's comment as redundant? Is this an attempt to invalidate their statement? Don't blame them when it's actually a limitation of the forum system. There is no simple way to increment an "I agree" or "I have the same problem" counter, there has to be a new comment for each person who agrees. There is no way of adding weight to a comment except by increasing child nodes, or adding as many individual argument nodes that are similar. Yes, there is already one branch in this thread that talks about the memory issues, but relax not everyone perfectly gets all their statements in exactly the right location in the discussion tree. Judge it simply on what it says, not the comments location.

For what it's worth, I agree. I also have problems with memory bloating with FF. I don't really care if they are memory leaks, or memory fragments, it's still a problem that I would like to see fixed. Unfortunately I cannot fix the problem, so I will patiently wait for the next great release of FF. I have no solution, but this is my informal bug report.

Increase in speed on JavaScript will be great. There are many times when my FF instance gets temporarily grayed out when it loads a page with lots of JavaScript. This is the window manager thinking that FF is locked up and not responding.

Re:

[XaXXon]

What the internet desperately needs is an application transfer protocol completely distinct from HTML.

We already have a perfectly good one. It's called HTTP. While the acronym may be misleading, it has nothing to do with HTML. In fact, no protocols (that I know of) have anything implicit to do with HTML.

I agree that we should be getting the damn code out of your hypertext, but that doesn't necessitate a new protocol.

Re:About time

[LingNoi]

You may freely use and distribute the code presented in these tutorials under any license EXCEPT the GPL or any other license which denies authors their right to do as they please with their own code.

Hypocrite

Re:

[Naughty Bob]

Just to give you the alternate perspective- I love the idea of Opera, and use the kick-ass mini (and mobile) versions every day. But on my desktop, it just seems so foreign. It's like a swiss army knife, with inbuilt functionality poking out every which way, and (in my head) obstructing the work I've got planned- It doesn't feel like it's mine.

I realise that it mostly is amazing, and I'm not satisfied with Firefox by any means, but Opera just feels alien; a bit like when you start messing about with WINE a

Re:

[bunratty]

I've seen similar complaints, but have never been able to reproduce any such problem. I can open and close tabs all day, and Firefox does not suck up all my memory, or even a significant portion of it. I can't even run it long enough to come close to sucking up all of my memory (it would take several weeks of use every day without ever closing it). Could you explain how the rest of us could see the problem? If you do, we could report it and the problem could be fixed.

Re:CPU hogging bug fixed?

[LithiumX]

I've also known other people to complain about it - while others have no idea what they're talking about. You have to love sporadic issues.

I'm pretty sure it has to be a combination of minor flaws in Firefox (as not every program I run has this issue), Windows XP (with memory handling far better than previous versions, but still not exactly the gold standard of memory management), and all the myriad changes to my system's configuration over time.

It does it on both my work computer and my home computer. Then again, they're both XP Pro machines. They're very different in terms of hardware, which tentatively rules out a specific hardware config. The memory on my home machine is double that of my work machine, but the highpoint seems to be about the same - so I doubt it has much to do with total system memory. What sites I hit seems to have no relevance. The only other common factor I can think of is that I run NoScript on both - though if I remember right the problem predated my use of that (I first noticed it a while back, and had actually hoped 2 would fix it).

The main issue seems to be that a specific amount of memory is eaten up when you open a site in a tab - but closing that tab often doesn't clear up the space. I just now closed every tab except Slashdot - and it went from 157mb (when I had 14 tabs open) to a minuscule 153mb. From experience, waiting for it to dump cache is ineffective. If I close the program, the memory clears itself just fine - but only if there is no other Firefox window open. I'm guessing that multiple Firefox app windows share a footprint.

Then again, saying "all" of my memory was an exaggeration. I've rarely seen it hold on to much more than 150mb after closing all but one window, though if I go on for very long without at least shutting down firefox, that minimum can creep up - and on a few occasions really has taken more memory than I actually have on my machine (virtual cache trash time). It's also probably not a noticeable problem unless you're a heavy multitasker (in which case that footprint becomes painfully obvious).

I've noticed it doesn't happen on my fiance's Vista machine, or on any 2003 Server boxes I've run it on. It may be a problem that only occurs on XP, or it just doesn't like the way I smell.

However, if you are able to reproduce it, you'll see it happen whenever more than one tab has been opened. Opening one tab, then clearing it, seems to work - but once a second tab opens, clearing the original tab clears it's footprint, but any tab opened after that exhibits the problem.