Firefox 18 Posts Speed Gains Over Chrome, Mozilla Says

[Pherule]

[citation][nom]bytehead[/nom]The nightly is alpha, not pre-slpha.[/citation]Currently, Firefox 15 is stable.
16 is beta
17 is alpha (Aurora)
18 is pre-alpha (Nightly)

[citation][nom]lockhrt999[/nom]http://gnoted.com/3-hacks-for-fire [...] ing-speed/These few hacks have increased speed of FF noticably! Thumbs up if they increase your FF's speed too.[/citation]Hmm okay, let's see:

"Reduce the amount of RAM Firefox uses for it’s cache feature"
Cache speeds up browsing. This will slow it down, not speed it up.

"Increase the Speed in Which Firefox loads pages - pipelining etc"
Latest stable Firefox builds come with this enabled by default.

"Reduce RAM usage to 10mb when Firefox is minimized"
This isn't going to increase Firefox's speed.

We are talking UI speed here. The hacks you linked supposedly improve browsing speed, and browsing speed has next to NOTHING to do with UI speed.

 

[lockhrt999]

^oh yes. I don't use the cache thing myself and didn't know that pipelining came enabled these days.

 

[jwcalla]

[citation][nom]bytehead[/nom]I've been running the alpha version for over a year if not years. What have you done for Firefox lately? And have you done it as long as I have?[/citation]

You sound like a real douche.

 

[wlachan]

Flash/script freezing/crashing have been going on for ages but they don't give a xxxx. Now I have to click twice within Yahoo Mail for anything to happen with FF15. I still use FF but it is going down fast.

 

[Pherule]

[citation][nom]lockhrt999[/nom]^oh yes. I don't use the cache thing myself[/citation]Caching is enabled by default. He was talking about reducing the quantity of data cached, which would slow down browsing in the medium and long term.

[citation][nom]wlachan[/nom]Flash/script freezing/crashing have been going on for ages but they don't give a xxxx. Now I have to click twice within Yahoo Mail for anything to happen with FF15. I still use FF but it is going down fast.[/citation]Nah, Firefox 15 is waaaay better than Firefox 4. People just don't notice as much because the incremental increases are so gradual.

 

[srap]

[citation][nom]bytehead[/nom]I've been running the alpha version for over a year if not years. What have you done for Firefox lately? And have you done it as long as I have?[/citation]
Running a browser daily... even IE6 users can do that. If you did not find and report dozens of bugs/regressions during these years, your dev-version usage meant very little, other than the collected telemetry data.
[citation][nom]Pherule[/nom]"Reduce the amount of RAM Firefox uses for it’s cache feature"
Cache speeds up browsing. This will slow it down, not speed it up.[/citation]
Read this post on Cache usage.
[citation][nom]wlachan[/nom]Flash/script freezing/crashing have been going on for ages but they don't give a xxxx. Now I have to click twice within Yahoo Mail for anything to happen with FF15. I still use FF but it is going down fast.[/citation]
Maybe you did not hear it, but Adobe is at fault here. Those idiots at Adobe tried to fix a bug, what was mostly fixed years before with the Plugin-Container. They tried to fix this non-existing bug with basically the same method. And most possibly, they did not listen to the testers, as there were several beta builds for 11.3, and it is certain that with such crash-rate, the instability of 11.3 series was found out very fast.

P.s.: These enormous failures sometimes make me think that Adobe does this on purpose...

 

[tipoo]

[citation][nom]sarcasm[/nom]Chrome does have GPU acceleration. Smooth scrolling you can download an extension. Smooth font rendering, well I'm still looking for that one. I might have to give FireFox a whirl again.[/citation]

Not as extensive GPU acceleration as Firefox or IE9/10, it just uses the GPU for basic things, look at any GPU acceleration test. And I've yet to find a smooth scrolling extension for Chrome that didn't chunk out intermittantly. On my 1920x1080 15 inch laptop screen the font thing is particularly noticeable as I have to set the default browser zoom pretty high, Firefox font is nice and smooth, Chrome is chunky. Chrome is still my favorite browser, but I wish it had those three things from Firefox, or Firefox got a UI as snappy as Chrome.

 

[bytehead]

[citation][nom]srap[/nom]Running a browser daily... even IE6 users can do that.[/citation]

Yep, they do. But they don't tend to report bugs (to bugzilla, or follow the ones that they find that have already been submitted and report my findings), they don't tend to go find which version broke something, and they don't work on Fridays, trying to bust the current beta the week before it is supposed to be released. They don't participate in the forum that deals with the nightly version, either. They don't have to deal with extensions, popular ones at that, that all of sudden no longer work, and either figure out what went wrong, and/or report the issue the the extension author.

But those are the things that I have participated in with mozilla.org.

I'm not trying to be a douche here. You (or anybody else for that matter) may not like or appreciate what I do, but to put people down without knowing crap is already pretty douchey.

 

[lockhrt999]

[citation][nom]tipoo[/nom]Not as extensive GPU acceleration as Firefox or IE9/10, it just uses the GPU for basic things, look at any GPU acceleration test. And I've yet to find a smooth scrolling extension for Chrome that didn't chunk out intermittantly. On my 1920x1080 15 inch laptop screen the font thing is particularly noticeable as I have to set the default browser zoom pretty high, Firefox font is nice and smooth, Chrome is chunky. Chrome is still my favorite browser, but I wish it had those three things from Firefox, or Firefox got a UI as snappy as Chrome.[/citation]

What you're saying is true. But I didn't know that was related to GPU acceleration.
Chrome doesn't even anti alias fonts from google's own library where as FF and IE do.

Also it'll be great if FF comes with flash, JRE, pdf reader pre-installed.

 

[Guest]

Not sure I care anymore about the frequent upgrades. Google does them with little fanfare anymore.
If you want speed Chrome is the browser hands down. If you want extensions that may or may not break each time Firefox is updated then Firefox is the most flexible browser. IE of course just sucks. It will never keep up with the rest having a lumbering bloated corporate giant like Microsoft developing it.

 

[RyQril]

i'll stick with chrome until they fix the freezes, they dropped so many updates and didnt fix it

 

[Pherule]

[citation][nom]lockhrt999[/nom]Also it'll be great if FF comes with flash, JRE, pdf reader pre-installed.[/citation]Not necessarily. Some users consider these 'features' potential security holes and would prefer for Firefox to come without them. What might be an idea is to release Firefox with them, but during installation, give the user the option to uncheck them.

[citation][nom]jescott418[/nom]If you want speed Chrome is the browser hands down.[/citation]Nope. With regards to speed, Opera > Chrome > Firefox.

 

[srap]

[citation][nom]lockhrt999[/nom]...[/citation]
PDF support is under construction, it is already present in 15, disabled by default.

about:config
pdfjs.disabled; false

 

[David Neveroski]

recently my experience with google chrome is that it has slowed down tremendously. to the point of I dont want to use it any more. on the other hand firefox is at least 5 times quicker now, loads pages quicker.I am surprised because originally chrome was my pick but like anything good thing they usually find a way to screw it up.kudos to firefox.!