I have been very impressed by Firefox lately. Kudos to the whole team at Mozilla.<p>Just about 5 years ago, it was looking to me like it was the end of Firefox. It was Chrome all the way. New features were coming out one after another. Faster rendering. Safe process isolation for each tab. Looked better.<p>But I just switched back last month. It happened kind of randomly. Saw an announcement of a new release ( 33, I think ), downloaded, re-imported my bookmarks from Chrome and just kind of kept using it instead of Chrome since then.<p>I like how the tabs look also I think it feels lighter and snappier on my (now old-ish) laptop.
Check out <a href="http://arewefastyet.com/" rel="nofollow">http://arewefastyet.com/</a> (the website mentioned in the article), which tracks javascript engine performance. Spidermonkey is faster than v8 and Safari's JSC on all three popular javascript benchmarks [1]<p>[1] Octane (google's benchmark), Sunspider (Apple/Webkit's benchmark), and Kraken (Mozilla's benchmark).
"This puts us in a position of strength, so we can say "these benchmarks are not very interesting; let's talk about other benchmarks (e.g. asm.js-related) and language features" without being accused of being sore losers."<p>But are asmjs benchmarks interesting? They are not representative of the vast majority of real-world JS, so wouldn't an asmjs-laden benchmark suite really be a case of optimizing for your own set of benchmarks, tuned to your own idiomatic-JS?<p>But anyway, congrats on the achievement. I like the fact that V8, JSC, and FF performance are converging. If the performance differential is too great, it creates additional headaches for the developer targeting a certain level of efficiency.
Firefox is awesome and I love it, but my one complaint after all these years is that I have to restart the browser every day. It's not the end of the world, but it's still frustrating, especially when I'm in the throes of debugging or important research.<p>Over the course of a day, the browser becomes unresponsive and CPU usage <i>idles</i> at 10-15%. Restarting with the same tabs brings it down to 0%. Yes, I know, disable addons, blah blah...doesn't work for me. Same problem.<p>I'm really looking forward to the new threading model coming up. I have a feeling that once each tab has a thread, things like this will be much more self-repairing. It's not always easy to kill a rogue execution path in an event loop, but killing a thread is pretty straightforward =].<p>Also, congrats on the firefox team for really taking performance seriously.
Love hearing this. I have been a Firefox user since Netscape 5, if that makes sense. To me there might be some positives about Chrome but for me it is a culture / community issue. It is a foundation I am willing to support during the good times and bad, and I am not so hot about giving Chrome access to every keystroke I make.<p>While this may sound petty, one feature I'd really love to see come back in Firefox is the ability to see the <i>refresh button</i> match the style / movability of the back/home buttons. It is very annoying having to use precise clicking on the eeeency little arrow on the URL bar.<p>But thats the thing, even if I am annoyed by small issues or lacking features, I don't abandon a project based on that.
This reminds me of the cell phone industry competition. We all benefit from head-to-head fights for performance and value. It's a shame so many markets have little direct competition outside of technology either due to monopoly, regulatory capture, or market dynamics.
Kudos. But they should really invest time in making the UI responsive and fast. This is my biggest gripe about firefox. I also find it incomprehensible that it checks for updates on startup in a modal fashion. Very annoying.
"Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance on arewefastyet, and is now leading V8 and JSC on Octane, Sunspider and Kraken." (ie faster than Chrome on Chrome V8 benchmark)<p>Good job Mozilla!
I can really feel the swing back to Firefox happening like the switch to Chrome back 5-7 years ago.<p>Go Firefox!!!<p>p.s. Great work on Firefox OS too!
This is cool, but Firefox still <i>feels</i> a lot slower to me than Chrome.<p>I think Mozilla would get a lot of mileage out of improving the performance of the rendering engine. FF doesn't feel slow because of JS, it feels slow(-er than Chrome, at least on my Mac) because repaints and layout seem to take longer.
>This puts us in a position of strength, so we can say "these benchmarks are not very interesting; let's talk about other benchmarks (e.g. asm.js-related) and language features" without being accused of being sore losers.<p>I'm looking forward to such a statement from Mozilla. The web needs mature suppott for languages other than JavaScript and C++/C are very widely used languages(as opposed to some new hobby language) and compile to JS tools are the only realistic way of getting there. So I can hardly wait until browser venders and standards organizations embrace efforts like Asm.js and the nessary extensions to make it support other memory and language models and features (Shared memory, SIMD, JVM languages etc.).
Mozilla is one organization that I have no problems supporting. Thanks to everyone involved with Mozilla for contributing to a great organization that does awesome stuff.
I still use Firefox as my main browser, but while it has improved a <i>lot</i> in recent times, I don't know why are some root problems not getting fixed - memory hogging, browser hangs, crashes (yes, I still get them on my workstation - I've even reported the callstacks to them). Mostly, the answer is, "It's your add-ons" - oh yes, but when it comes to talking about their strengths, this is one of the first things they talk about - "add-ons".<p>For example, every other browser fixed this 12 year old bug [0] one by one, but Firefox doesn't care much about it. In fact, not only that they don't have <i>any</i> solution to it whatsoever, when people's resentment about the bug increased, they chose to just shut down their voices on it.<p>[0]: <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78414" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78414</a>
Firefox's hopeless video and audio implementation (especially on Mac OS X) remains a deal breaker for me. It means resorting to Flash in a lot of cases, which means I use another browser.<p>I'm glad to see strides being made in JavaScript performance, but basic browser functionality is far more important.
Octane now includes asm.js benchmarks, and V8 doesn't attempt to support "use asm". This gives SpiderMonkey an advantage in the benchmark.<p>I think it's quite impressive how close V8 is in performance to SpiderMonkey which actually goes out of it's way to support "use asm".
While this is great for those keeping track of the stats, I doubt it will have much effect on the average consumer. Almost everyone I know uses Chrome; that includes family members, co-workers, tech-minded and non-tech-minded people alike. For them, it's been IE vs Chrome for awhile and telling them "Firefox is a tad bit faster" isn't enough to make them switch again. Unfortunately, I think Firefox lost too many people during its sluggish phase awhile back and it's going to be tough getting them back.<p>Also, as much as I keep hearing "Google is evil" in the tech echo chamber, again, the average consumer doesn't care. Even I know Google's policies and still choose to use Chrome purely because it's more convenient.
You know, I just don't know who to believe these days when it comes to browser benchmarks. All browser vendors pretty much say they lead all browsers in _something_. Honestly, I don't even know what all these benchmarks mean most of the time.
I switched back to Firefox from Chrome a couple years ago, because I no longer trust Google to have my best interests at heart. It's been fine; I have a beefy machine with plenty of RAM, but I also use it on my horribly slow Android phone (an old HTC Sensation 4G that has never been worth a crap), and it works OK there, too.<p>My only complaint is that it requires a plugin to get a reasonable number of tabs in a window before requiring scrolling. It's downright absurd that it stopped being configurable many, many, many versions ago.
I keep going back and forth between Firefox and Chrome. Chrome is ahead right now for two reasons:<p>1. Support for Netflix on linux<p>2. Webapps as native applications (like the old project prism). We use slack at work and a Chrome webapp is how they choose to support Linux.<p>Admittedly though, I will switch to Firefox for the rest of the week to see if I can live with these caveats.
I had another look at FireFox the other day. Impressed with their editable layout and smooth interface. Less impressed with the Network tools pane in comparison with Chrome(chrome shows compressed/inflated size, can view and copy raw headers, etc). Still, it's in my to-do to give it some game time.
kudos for Firefox team.
I hope they put more love in speeding up css animations (like here: <a href="http://bartaz.github.io/impress.js/#/bored" rel="nofollow">http://bartaz.github.io/impress.js/#/bored</a>)
It would be interesting to now how Firefox performs with regard to battery usage. Apple in particular seems to be focussing on battery life as much as performance, given that the codebase is shared across iOS and OS X.
You know whats funny, I stopped using Chrome and use Firefox now because Firefox is so much faster. The exact same reason I switched to Chrome 5 years ago. Also I'm slightly less creeped out.