Firefox 3
Firefox 3 is in the works, approaching the release. The beta4 is out and runs.
I tried to benchmark it a bit, especially on JavaScript performance and memory consumption.
Javascript Testing: Methodology
The javascript has been used with the sunspider javascript test that was run 5 times, on freshly installed firefox.
The tests were run using Firefox 2, Firefox 3 beta3 and Firefox 3 beta 4.
The tests were done on Windows XP and Linux, using 3 different machines:
- Thinkpad T61p Core2 Duo 7500, with 2GB of RAM
- Dell Pentium 4 3,4 Ghz, with 1GB of RAM
- HP Celeron 2Ghz, with 512 of RAM
Javascript Testing: Results
Those results are an average of the complete 5 times tests.
The results show a 5x to 3x speedup in Javascript performance from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3!
From Firefox 3 beta 3 to Firefox 3 beta 4, the speedup is between 2x and 3x.
I will detail the results for the fastest and the slowest machine on Windows.
Faster machine
- Firefox 2 : 15688.1ms
- Firefox 3 beta3 : 10016.8ms
- Firefox 3 beta4 : 5158.4ms
Speedup : 304%
Slower machine
- Firefox 2 : 51456.1ms
- Firefox 3 beta3 : 27556.2ms
- Firefox 3 beta4 : 10923.8ms
Speedup: 471%
Memory Benchmark: Methodology
On windows XP and Linux, I opened a fresh browser and opened
- lemonde.fr
- www.nytimes.fr
- slashdot.org
- pcinpact.com
Then I reclosed the browser and opened many many tabs.
I monitored the stabilized memory consumption.
Memory Benchmark: Results
I wasn’t impressed by the results, because I have found that Firefox 3 beta 4 takes around 10% more memory than Firefox2 on Windows and Linux on the first test on the faster machine (56MB vs 50.5MB).
On the second test, with many more tabs, I have found that the memory is usually around the same, but not really better.
On a long way use, I didn’t have any huge memleaks with Firefox using 400MB of RAM quite suddenly, but I am working on it to make it do that too :D
Conclusion
Firefox 3 is way faster in Javascript handling, a bit better in memory consumption, (it takes more memory but seems to not leak like a madman) and overall it seems faster to load pages (just a feeling), compared to Firefox 2.
According to my tests, it is faster than IE7/IE8beta1, Opera 9.5 in Javascript performance.
Then GO and USE it.