Now that Firefox 3 is approaching the home stretch it is important that Mozilla starts to throw in performance improvements to really make the browser purr. Over in our forum xpgeek pointed out that a Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) build of Firefox 3 had been created which greatly improved the performance of JavaScript in the browser. While PGO itself hasn’t yet landed in the nightly builds there have been some significant improvements to the JavaScript engine.
I’m sure what most of you care the most about are the facts, and so I’ve compiled the results of the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark test for each of the different browsers. All of the tests below were performed on the same Windows machine, and the Firefox 3 nightly builds definitely came out on top. Here are the results sorted from best to worst (each one is hyperlinked to the full stats):
- Firefox 3 Nightly (PGO Optimized): 7263.8ms
- Firefox 3 Nightly (02/25/2008 build): 8219.4ms
- Opera 9.5.9807 Beta: 10824.0ms
- Firefox 3 Beta 3: 16080.6ms
- Safari 3.0.4 Beta: 18012.6ms
- Firefox 2.0.0.12: 29376.4ms
- Internet Explorer 7: 72375.0ms
It’s important to know that every time you run the SunSpider Benchmark it conducts each test five times, and the result is the average of the five tests. So it is a rather thorough test, and definitely shows off the speed improvements that Firefox 3 is going to be bringing to the table.
What does this all mean for you? Depending on what browser you typically use you may not notice a huge speed difference, but the change will be the most noticeable on sites that use JavaScript heavily. With the Web 2.0 era upon us all JavaScript speed enhancements are welcomed with open arms.
Firefox 3 Beta 4 is expected to be released in the next few weeks, and you can expect to see these (and many more) improvements shining through!
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Tags: Firefox, Freeware, Pre-Release, Software, Beta, Browser, Firefox 3, Performance
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With all the stuff there adding you’d think it would be slower.
Is there any difference between Opera 9.26 and 9.5.x? I knew using the nightlies the the javascript felt a lot more responsive, but boy this test really shows how much it shines above 2.x. It’s results like this that make me want to use FF3.x as my default browser. Once Foxmarks works with 3.x it’s bye bye 2.x. Everything else I care about already works.
Good news all around, think I’ll still wait for the RC1 to come out before trying to dedicate myself to using it 24/7.
Yep, Opera 9.5 has a rewritten JavaScript engine, so it should be much faster in the tests. Besides, according to Jeff Atwood, who made some tests in his blog back in November, Opera 9.2x fails some tests, don’t ask why.
FF3…well lets just say I really can’t use any other browser out there.
IE7 sure is incredibly slow. I wonder if they will join this speed race with IE8.
That’s true, but this is not the overall performance of the browser. This test only analyzes the JavaScript engine, but I would actually say that the overall performance of the browser has significantly improved as well.
I tested Opera 9.26 and there was an error that caused it not to display the results of each test. That’s the reason that I didn’t include it in the list, but it looked generally the same as 9.5.
I’m hoping that Microsoft will get with the program because competition in the performance arena is the only way that other contenders will push to be better.
Just one issue about the tags: “Freeware”. Well, it is actually Open Source not Freeware.
We do realize that, but for the sake of simplicity we consider open source software to also be freeware since it technically is. Freeware encompasses all software that is delivered without charge, and you don’t have to pay for Firefox.
Can some one run it against this:
http://glimr.rubyforge.org/cake/canvas.html
WebKit is awesome on this one. I tested this with cairo-openvg+shivavg and some of them give ~200fps where Firefox gives me ~30fps.
I hope they get cairo rendering right!
I don’t know what was going on with your firefox 2.0.0.12 test…but i did the test with the same version and get significantly faster numbers.
Total: 13387.4ms
http://webkit.org/perf/sunspid.....,375%5D%7D
It should be noted that both IE6 and IE7 exhibit pathologically bad performance on one of the SunSpider tests in particular. I forget which one exactly, but on that single test their performance is 10-15X worse than all the other browsers. If that one test is removed, IE still doesn’t come out on top, but it’s at least in the same general range as the others.
I just tested 2.0.0.12 again and got a faster yet result.
Total: 12394.6ms
http://webkit.org/perf/sunspid.....,297%5D%7D
Huh, I don’t know what to tell you. I did all of the tests on the same machine though so the results should be accurate relative to each other.
A different pc perhaps?
You should thank the FreeBSD devs, they made it possible
http://ventnorsblog.blogspot.c.....eta-3.html
I would like more detail on your results because I get:
IE 7 38412.0
Opera 9.5 17497.2 but it appears to get stuck on ‘crypto-aes’ and I have to click the mouse to make it continue.
In a real world test, Google Maps barely moves under Opera 9.5 and IE has no problems and it is quick.
You are probably running the test on a significantly faster computer. The numbers are not the important part, the numbers will vary between computers, the percentage differences are the important parts.
WinXP/Sp2-C2D@3GHz/2GB RAM
Safari 3.1 Beta (525.7): 2575.2ms
Firefox 2.0.0.12: 13087.6ms
Internet Explorer 7: 20844.4ms
On my 10-month-old MacBook Pro, running the latest Safari (WebKit) nightly, I get 3294.2ms…is my machine *that much faster* than the machine used in the article, or is WebKit just that far ahead of FF?
results here
I don’t know what other information I can give you. The full results are already linked to for each test.
Exactly.
Webkit nightly is way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way faster than FireFox can ever be. XPCOM hello? Webkit doesn’t use that heavyweight abstraction, it gets speed through shear simplicity. The webkit guys are mostly bored apple developers who don’t want to actually do their work so they spend all day going aspie on the speed tests, the #include src files into singular units to take advantage of optimization they pad out structs to match base2 boundaries. You cannot claim you are fast without comparing yourself to Webkit nightly.
Sure you might eventually beat them because they are too scared to do anything about their VM other than to tweak it and complain about the KHTML patches.
I thought the guy above was a troll but a friend redid the bench mark with his browsers:
* Nightly Webkit r30627 - 3205
* Firefox Nightly3.0beta4pre - 8930
“On my 10-month-old MacBook Pro, running the latest Safari (WebKit) nightly, I get 3294.2ms…is my machine *that much faster* than the machine used in the article, or is WebKit just that far ahead of FF?”
I think that their benchmark numbers are generated on Windows, and that the Safari port to Windows is slower than the Mac OS X version of Safari.
WinXP/Sp2-C2D@3GHz/2GB RAM
Safari 3.1 Beta (525.7): 2575.2ms
Firefox 3 Nightly (02/27/2008 build): 2719.4ms
Firefox 2.0.0.12: 13087.6ms
Internet Explorer 7: 20844.4ms
How about this?
http://www.planetlowyat.com/bl.....ory-usage/
I can verify that my WebKit nightly build (unmodified) is edging out FF3 beta, and that IE7 is really, really slow.
The test on which IE7 really falls behind is called “string-base64″. IE7 does this test about 40 times slower than my FF beta from two days ago.
On the upside, the beta is extremely stable, and has been running for about two days straight, heavy browsing, and has about a constant 10 or so tabs open. I haven’t seen any major delays or hangs, only minor pauses here and there.
It’s really silly to fight over which browser is the fastest, when it comes to a difference in milliseconds usually.
The important fact is that they’re all (Except the IE team, perhaps) working on improving their javascript execution speed, and that’s good news for most of us.
With that said, I, personally, am waiting anxiously for the performance improvements of Firefox 3.
It would be great if you actually used a benchmark test that:
1) Was standards compliant.
2) Actually checked to make sure the results were correct.
3) Didn’t spew out skewed results because the lack of #1 caused #2 to fail, which causes some browsers to report insanely bad results (IE 7).
4) Wasn’t based off code written by one or more of the browser developers.
In this case the difference isnt milli8seconds, but for example, FF3 is TEN TIMES as fast as IE 7. Thats hardly a small difference!
And if you surf a lot, even small improvements add up to a lot of time. Surfing a whole day, IE 7 users would be waiting ten times as long as FF3 users - this may be a lot of work time!
But then again, I dont consider IE 7 a browser. Its not standards compliant etc.. But the major players are going into a lot of effort it seems.
good job guys and gals!
Back in FF2 times I just had to use Opera, Firefox experience on Linux was so bad. Now Ive been using Swiftfox 3 betas for a few months already, since its been so good even in beta (Swiftfox is a optimized build for Linuxes). Its stabler, hugely faster (on my AMD x2 pages render in an instant, I can barely bat my eyelashes and its rendered), and its got great features I love - like the new address bar / history thing. Im loving it
Opera 9.26: http://webkit.org/perf/sunspid.....,360%5D%7D
Firefox 3.0b3:
http://webkit.org/perf/sunspid.....,282%5D%7D
Firefox 2.0.0.12:
http://webkit.org/perf/sunspid.....,388%5D%7D
Epiphany 2.20:
http://webkit.org/perf/sunspid.....,322%5D%7D
http://mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Tamari.....mingMonkey
Thanks for performing the test with the Safari nightly versus Firefox 3 on the same machine. While Safari might still be faster the difference is pretty small, and from what I’ve heard from Mozilla they haven’t finished optimizing the JavaScript. So by the time that Firefox 3 is released we might just find out that it is faster.
http://webkit.org/perf/sunspid.....,150%5D%7D
Opera 9.5 beta (build 3807)
so? i hate javescript! i always uninstall it and never visit sites that use it…
fd, then Lynx is your browser! You can do away with the mouse and fancy high resolution GUI too in favour of a lightning fast console.
Impressive improvements on the latest build of Firefox 3.
Hope Opera guys put its hands on the JS engine to improve its performance.
I do not care too much about this actually. At least the pages I browse do not need JS too much and definitely as much as that benchmark is going with its testing. Rendering speed is much more important.
And what really pisses me off about FF under Linux is that the multithreading is still sucking that much. It still occurs rather frequently that some action in one window locks up all other windows for some time or forever. That a plugin problem in one window can lock up and crash the whole browser with all windows is also a nuisance.
Well, you visited our site and we use it. If you came from Slashdot then they used it. It would be pretty hard to specifically not visit sites that don’t use JavaScript.
Taking a closer look at the benchmarks being run, these numbers don’t seem to have much impact on typical Web 2.0 websites, because SunSpider does not run any DOM tests (anyone knows why?).
So I wouldn’t expect too much of a performance gain on a typical AJAX heavy website.
the fastest opera now
Ok speed is great. But these alternate browsers will NEVER gain more then a few % marketshare (nd from home users only) if they do not add:
- Central installation via Active Directory
- Central patching/reporting via WSUS
- Central control via Group Policies
It’s the companies where the big marketshare is. Internet Explorer 6 and higer support these critical centralised and intergrated administration features. It’s a Windows world, deal with it. No admin can roll-out Firefox or Opera without these features..
Descargar en ESPAÑOL para Windows
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/moz.....taller.exe
Download
Other Languages: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/moz.....n/?C=D;O=A
But will FF3 use less RAM? I have only 64mb of Ram on Windows 98, Firefox 2 just gets too sluggish and takes too long to start up and uses up too much ram for me so I have to use Opera 9.25, which works just fine on 64mb ram on W98.
I’m afraid Firefox 3 won’t run on Windows 98..
I think it’s time for you upgrade young chap.
Nice work guys,
One thing i have noticed though is how javascript performance degrades very much when using linux instead of windows. Is this a known behaviour? OS bug?
Especially redraw operations like Drag and drop manipulation of the dom, cause the brwoser to crawl under linux