14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox 3.6 just came out last week and, among a long list of new features and updates, one thing that Mozilla touted is its performance improvements in several key aspects such as JavaScript rendering, startup time and the overall responsiveness of the software. The people over at Computerworld decided to put Mozilla's words to the test and find out just how much faster Firefox 3.6 really is and if it could challenge Chrome or Safari, the current leaders in JavaScript performance. It turns out that Firefox 3.6 is significantly faster than 3.5, though not by as much as previous bumps in performance, but it wasn't enough to catch up to the two swiftest browsers.
In the tests, Firefox 3.6 was 14.5 percent faster than 3.5, a good improvement, but not good enough of half a year's work if Mozilla plans on taking the speed crown any time soon. Still, it was three times faster than Opera 10 and four times faster than Microsoft's latest web browser, Internet Explorer.
Apple's Safari though was twice as fast as Firefox 3.6, with Google Chrome coming in close being almost twice as fast. The testing was done with the SunSpider JavaScript performance benchmark, so you can try to replicate the results for yourself if you want. As with any benchmarks, it isn't perfect and may not relate perfectly to real world performance but, for the most part, it is a pretty accurate test.
But JavaScript performance isn't anything, despite what Google would have you believe, and Firefox has made some strides in other area as well, resulting in a performance boost across the board. Startup time got a nice boost, especially on Mac where Firefox is ready to use 30 percent faster than before, thanks to a couple of fixes and tweaks. It will have to do a lot better though, as Google Chrome is currently the undisputed king in this metric loading up almost instantly.
The so-called Awesome bar, the address bar with integrated web, bookmark and history search, got some much needed attention and the results are clearly visible. The tool is great in concept, but in practice it was often too slow to provide any use. Now, even the fastest typists are no match and the bar updates the results almost instantly, comparable if not faster than Chrome's similar tool.
There are plenty of other performance improvements which add up to make the experience significantly better. By the looks of it, this is just the beginning, as Mozilla says the bulk of the performance updates haven't been implemented in 3.6 but are coming in the future builds. "Over 60% of the bugs fixed as part of our focus on startup performance have landed on trunk, but didn’t make it in time for the 3.6 release," Mozilla's Dietrich Ayala writes. And since Firefox dropped the regular big release update scheme, opting for smaller feature updates with run-of-the-mill 3.6.x releases, those improvements should be coming a lot faster than if we had to wait for 3.7 to arrive.