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:
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.
Subscribe to Twitter updates, or RSS, join Facebook for more Tech updates.