Web Browser Grand Prix 3: IE9 Enters The Race

[agnickolov]

Also, the second page has the author name wrong - it says Chris Angelini instead of Adam Overa.

 

[alidan]

before i upgrade firefox to 4, i need to know 2 things, will the extensions i use commonly work, and the memory, as i keep 100's of tabs open for weeks at a time while i sort through all the crap.

 

[andy5174]

This article is clearly biased. If the comparison had waited 9 months, another week of waiting for the last browser to be updated wouldn't have hurt - it'd have been expected by everybody (as clearly seen in many of the comments so far).

The writer has already replied to this issue.

On the 16th he said RC1 would become the final code on the 22nd, but they released an RC2 since. I don't believe them anymore. Where is an official announcement or press release? RC1 was supposed to be here in November 2010. WBGP3 was going to feature FF4 at the end of 2010, then again at the end of this Feb. IE9 gave a date, so WBGP3 was made to coincide with its release. IF Firefox 4 launches tomorrow, it's purely coincidental. We stopped holding the WBGP series up for FF4 when MS officially gave their IE9 release date.

 

[Tamz_msc]

[citation][nom]alidan[/nom]before i upgrade firefox to 4, i need to know 2 things, will the extensions i use commonly work, and the memory, as i keep 100's of tabs open for weeks at a time while i sort through all the crap.[/citation]
Depends on which extensions you use.The ones I use work perfectly, and you can even force an addon to work with the Addon Compatibility Reporter extension.Also Panorama is pretty good in managing multiple tabs.

TH should have waited for FF4 to release as its just around the corner.

 

[Zeh]

It's not like TH's running out of interesting subjects for articles. So why not just wait out for FF4? Lots of other things to write about, imho, like:
- DA 2 Performance Analisys
- AC:Brotherhood Performance Analisys (when it is released); not to mention other new titles
- Another article about RAM (last article was awesome, but missed a few things like in-depth Gaming review with fps log using different ram settings and capacity)

 

[Benihana]

[citation][nom]adamovera[/nom]On the 16th he said RC1 would become the final code on the 22nd, but they released an RC2 since. I don't believe them anymore. Where is an official announcement or press release? RC1 was supposed to be here in November 2010. WBGP3 was going to feature FF4 at the end of 2010, then again at the end of this Feb. IE9 gave a date, so WBGP3 was made to coincide with its release. IF Firefox 4 launches tomorrow, it's purely coincidental. We stopped holding the WBGP series up for FF4 when MS officially gave their IE9 release date.[/citation]
That makes sense, if they keep delaying it then why not go ahead with browsers that come out when they say they will. Can't keep waiting forever!

However, I'd like to add that while they did say that RC1 would be the the final release, Mr. Beltzner did imply the reason for the RC2 is to include "two very small, very isolated fixes". "There is no change required to our schedule. We still expect to release the final version of Firefox 4 for Windows, OSX and Linux on March 22nd as planned."

I can understand that they may have delayed it months, hence losing faith in their dates. But March 22 is not really that far away. 1-2 days tops. To be honest, I don't recall them giving exact dates in the past. Just vague "November 2010" and "Early 2011" type of dates. To give a specific "March 22nd" on March 16th, and then to re-affirm that date on March 17th does hold more merit I think.

If anything, I would've just done the WBGP3 on March 23rd. Even if the FF team said they were delaying it to the 24th. They gave a very specific date this time (March 22), and if they miss it, well then that's their loss.

Just my 2 cents.

Again, the source: http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.planning/browse_thread/thread/d7cd3c9e9650b1b3

Quick Reads:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_4#Development
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/4/Beta

 

[turboflame]

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/download.html?product=firefox-4.0&os=win&lang=en-US

It's out.

Mere hours after this article was posted.

 

[Guest]

I made an SVG animation with BlackBerry Theme studio composer. Firefox 4 Beta was the only one to run it correctly and smoothly. Opera ran it correctly, but a little jittery. Chrome ran it incorrectly in that there was a jump near the end. Safari displayed the shapes wrong. IE would not show the animation.

 

[eddieroolz]

Excellent story.

I think the IE9 development team has really outdone themselves and all expectations. We also see, for the first time, Internet Explorer becoming a great, usable browser that won't hurt developers and users.

Seconly I'm somewhat surprised at how well Firefox 3.6 has done, despite being over a year old at the core. And I agree that 1Google Chrome comes out as the loser in this, not being able to best IE9 in several key benchmarks.

I'm happy for Microsoft. Good job, guys.


P.s. This also proves that there's absolutely no reason in using Safari, period.

 

[adamovera]

[citation][nom]turboflame[/nom]http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/produ [...] lang=en-USIt's out.Mere hours after this article was posted.[/citation]
Where'd you get this?

 

[natmaster]

[citation][nom]adamovera[/nom]On the 16th he said RC1 would become the final code on the 22nd, but they released an RC2 since. I don't believe them anymore. Where is an official announcement or press release? RC1 was supposed to be here in November 2010. WBGP3 was going to feature FF4 at the end of 2010, then again at the end of this Feb. IE9 gave a date, so WBGP3 was made to coincide with its release. IF Firefox 4 launches tomorrow, it's purely coincidental. We stopped holding the WBGP series up for FF4 when MS officially gave their IE9 release date.[/citation]

Try reading the link: "Two issues popped up (hilariously, almost immediately after Damon sent his email) which have caused us to take two very small, very isolated fixes in order to better protect Firefox 4 users. These fixes will be included in Firefox 4 RC2 for Windows, OSX and Linux (which should be available tomorrow) and Firefox 4 RC1 for Android.

There is no change required to our schedule. We still expect to release the final version of Firefox 4 for Windows, OSX and Linux on March 22nd as planned. "

RC2 has been out for a while. They ARE shipping tomorrow. When tomorrow comes and they ship, and you going to issue an apology?

 

[injected_metal]

[citation][nom]adamovera[/nom]Where'd you get this?[/citation]

Just go act like you are downloading the RC2 and remove RC2 from the URL and you get what looks like the final version. It has probably been up on their servers a while.

 

[face-plants]

Good article once again Tom's...of course like the web browser I'm typing this comment from, it will be outdated within a few days but kudos for helping us keep up! I've switched browsers so many times the past few years and have yet to stick to one single browser that works well everywhere I go on the net. I love Chrome's seamless updating of both the browser and Flash automatically but my biggest complaint is CHROME STILL HAS NO DAMN PRINT PREVIEW!!!! How can a modern web browser leave this feature out for so long?!?! Anyone who has blindly hit the "Print" button without first previewing knows the dangers that come with trying to make web content magically fit on regular letter size paper.

Also I feel that bookmark syncing is a MUST HAVE for any browser nowadays with the amount of new versions coming out constantly forcing the early adopters to change browsers regularly.

 

[rhangman]

Kraken JavaScript Benchmark Results
IE9 x64: 93,558.6ms +/- 0.6%
IE9 x86: 16,662.0ms +/- 1.0%
FF4.0pre x64: 8,349.2ms +/- 0.7%

Guess MS didn't bother to port any of their assembly for the x64 build. Ignoring the x64 version, FF is still finishes in half the time, so 10x slower to 2x faster.

JSBenchmark
IE9 x64: 156
IE9 x86: 418
FF4.0pre x64: 517

SunSpider
IE9 x64: 1,199.7ms +/- 0.5%
IE9 x86: 250.8ms +/- 0.4%
FF4.0pre x64: 291.1ms +/- 1.4%

Google V8
IE9 x64: 488
IE9 x86: 2,305
FF4.0pre x64: 3,134

You would think given that the majority of OS' capable of running IE9 would be 64-bit installs, this is the 2nd version of IE to offer an x64 build and the fact that Adobe labs has offered 64-bit flash for some time now (with presumably a release version not too far off) that MS would have put a bit more effort into their x64 version?

 

[natmaster]

Only running performance test on the browsers that get 100 on Acid3? It's old news that both Firefox and IE9 do not score 100 because they refuse to support the deprecated svg-fonts that the other browsers partially implemented just for this test. If anything it is BETTER to not get 100. Maybe you should be testing only browsers that pass the tests on features that ARE standards.

http://limi.net/articles/firefox-acid3

 

[proton9]

i prefer ff4 rc with abp and no script, its faster than chrome

 

[HalfHuman]

with all the hype about ie9 it seems that it's a lot better than ie7/ie8 in performance, respecting standards etc. you knew that you would take a lot of heat for not including ff4 but you did it anyway. you could have included ff3.6 and ff4 using a disclaimer (stating your lack of confidence). i've been using ff4 and i can say it's pretty good (aside from some ocasional memory issues). you absolutely knew that you could have included ff4, but you beat around the bush saying that it did not have the official gold release stamp. ie9 may be swell but i bet it's the same bitch job to remove malicious plugins, not that it has too many (useful plugins). ie9 may be swell but it's still single platform... vista and 7... ahem. ff is also not perfect but i'd rather have it.

i feel that your article is a bit biased and driven by personal passions rather than desire to do an useful review.

 

[natmaster]

HTML5test is a terrible test. It only checks for the existence of features, not that they are implemented properly (remember the box model in IE6?). It also gives improper weighting to forms, making it silly to compare cross-browser (though showing progress from one version to another is reasonable).

It also tests non-standards features like Web SQL Database and H.264

 

[cjl]

I look forward to seeing the rematch tomorrow when FF4 is released.

 

[Guest]

Rushed article for obvious reasons.

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]HalfHuman[/nom]with all the hype about ie9 it seems that it's a lot better than ie7/ie8 in performance, respecting standards etc. you knew that you would take a lot of heat for not including ff4 but you did it anyway. you could have included ff3.6 and ff4 using a disclaimer (stating your lack of confidence). i've been using ff4 and i can say it's pretty good (aside from some ocasional memory issues). you absolutely knew that you could have included ff4, but you beat around the bush saying that it did not have the official gold release stamp. ie9 may be swell but i bet it's the same bitch job to remove malicious plugins, not that it has too many (useful plugins). ie9 may be swell but it's still single platform... vista and 7... ahem. ff is also not perfect but i'd rather have it.i feel that your article is a bit biased and driven by personal passions rather than desire to do an useful review.[/citation]

You're kidding, right? Adam is the one who does all of our Linux guides to move folks over from Windows.

We made a decision back when the first Grand Prix happened to use *final* code, which has often meant leaving out alpha and beta builds.

The feedback is appreciated, but we were just trying to be timely in putting this piece together. When FF4 is ready, you can bet that Adam will be all over it with a story on it. Until then, kudos to MS for fixing some of what it previously got wrong in the Web browser space!

Best,
Chris

 

[rainwilds]

And you couldn't wait a few more days to add Firefox 4? Must be money under the table.

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]rainwilds[/nom]And you couldn't wait a few more days to add Firefox 4? Must be money under the table.[/citation]

That's absolutely not how we do things here.

Adam is looking at the previously-linked build right now (in other words, we're actually playing ball, despite Mozilla's rush to take the wind out of MS' sails). We'll update once we have data from a final build of FF4.

Thanks much!
Chris

 

[Guest]

I'm surprised that a site with the reputation of Tom's Hardware wouldn't actually be aware of the release date of FF4 Final, which has been in the public domain for a number of weeks. It certainly looks like there's been some shady deal done (especially as this browser article is accompanied by a selection of ads for Microsoft products...)

 

[Guest]

Isn't "20 tenths of a second" 2 whole seconds?