Browser Performance Benchmark – Firefox 3.6: 23 Percent Faster

The race of browsers had been inevitable since the launch of Chrome. Google came out of no-where and gave public the fastest browser, leaving Firefox and Safari in shame. The developers at Mozilla continue to innovate and fine-tune their Javascript execution engine.

Mozilla , next week, is rolling out first Firefox 3.6 public Beta. The Release is supposed to be the first one, with big fixes for Firefox 3.5.

My experience with Firefox 3.5 had been the worst ever. The crashes were more frequent than any other previous versions, Tab restore was almost useless, worked rarely. With large no. of tabs opened (of the order of 20), it can eat 500MB of RAM and taking your CPU to adventures of peeks.

I won’t lie, But Firefox was jealous that I prefer Chrome 4 for reliability, and for the heavy web 2.0 apps. I use Firefox for causal general purpose surfing. All-in-all, it’s the only one that can fulfill taste-buds with so many addons.

Finally, I decided to take the latest nightly build of Firefox 3.5, 3.6, 3.7 to benchmarking adventures. Since, we are pretty close to planned code freeze, the results of Firefox 3.6 nightly will be 99% similar to public beta.

The Result was something that makes me glad: 3.6 is faster at JavaScript execution and much faster at page rendering.

Benchmark:

Hardware: The benchmarks were done on a core 2 duo 2.4Ghz with Nvidia 8 Series and 4GB of RAM on Windows 7. Windows 7 was chosen because it nears in performance to XP., and has continued to grow even before the release.

Reference: Of course, like other benchmarks, IE7 is held as the reference point for all tests.

Tests: Variety of benchmarking tools are employed to nail down the performance.

  • NonTroppo: CSS Rendering, Page load test
  • SunSpider: Javascript execution test

Results from all tests were combined to prepare Comprehensive Relative Performance Index, CRPI, Values.

Here are the CRPI scores:

BrowserScoreFirefox 3.5.37.14Firefox 3.6 Beta 19.1Firefox 3.7 Alpha8.23Safari 4 531.9.114.04Opera 106.05Chrome 3.0.91514.98Chrome 4.0.221.6 Dev15.29IE 81.67

Overall, The Winner is  Chrome 4, again. Though, on Windows XP Chrome 3 takes the lead. Firefox 3.6 comes with 23% or 1/4times faster than it’s predecessor Firefox 3.5.3

The pace of speed boost for Firefox is still lower than Chrome or Safari. Safari 3 to 4 was a giant leap in performance. On the other hand, Firefox speed boost ad been slow and steady. But, what is more important is that it has continued to improve, overall.

So today, Chrome 4 is almost 15x times faster than IE7, and Firefox 3.6 is 9x times.

Chrome 4 will get performance boosts as it comes out of Dev to the mainstream and with plugins on Chrome 4, it’s gaining popularity.

Firefox 3.6 can max jump from Firefox 3.5 by 25%. But what is more awaited is the bug fixes, better stability which makes it more attractive among it’s fans.

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Browser Performance Benchmark - Firefox 3.6: 23 Percent Faster, 7.0 out of 10 based on 1 rating

6 thoughts on “Browser Performance Benchmark – Firefox 3.6: 23 Percent Faster”

  1. I can't understand why your Firefox 3.5 crashes, I use it 11/13 hours per day – yes, I work too much 🙁 – and I don't remember any crash. Maybe it's a bad written addon, or two conflicting ones, it happens very often. That's why I disable tthe most of them and enable only when I have the need.
    Instead I find the last Chrome version not very stable with pages involving flash or javascript.
    I use Chrome with Google applications, but I don't like it for daily browsing, too many lacking features compared to Firefox or Opera.

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  2. I use firefox 3.5.3 crash is one of this browser's favorite activities. And now I use maxthon2 which is executing ie's engine. I also use google chrome frame for ie. And the speed are increased many times faster than any other browser. I was using chrome but no adblock so I uninstall it besides this browser eat my memory similar to firefox.

    And the first reason I uninstall any of google's product is because their product's update cannot be scheduled (they set the schedule) and I have no control over my own machine. When I need internet connection without interuption it just updating and cannot be stopped with any firewall.

    Many people already complaining about this.. just search for googleupdate.exe

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  3. i remember on vista firefox ALWAYS crashed. now on 7 its hasen't crashed yet at all.

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  4. i remember on vista firefox ALWAYS crashed. now on 7 its hasen't crashed yet at all.

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