Firefox 18 Posts Speed Gains Over Chrome, Mozilla Says

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By Wolfgang Gruener
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Mozilla's Mark Côté has reminded us that the arewefastyet page, which the browser maker launched prior to the introduction of Firefox 4, is still alive and is now tracking the progress of Mozilla IonMonkey JIT.

Though not an official statement made by Mozilla, Côté says that Firefox 18 (with IonMonkey) is now 16 percent faster than Chrome 21 in Mozilla's own Kraken benchmark, while it remains behind Chrome in V8 and behind Chrome in Sunspider. Mozilla's own test page suggests that IonMonkey has improved from a time of 1991 ms with the first release of IonMonkey in Firefox in mid-August to currently 1933 ms. Chrome has improved from 2038 ms to 2019 ms in the same time frame.

Mozilla does not yet support Google's latest browser benchmark Octane in its comparison. In a recent evaluation on Mozilla Hacks, Alon Zakai argued that Octane has some flaws and that there may be, for example, too much emphasis on Mandreel, which Google uses in its Chrome Web Store but may not be so important on web pages overall.

Zakai noted that "Octane is an interesting new benchmark that, even with [some] problems […], does contain good ideas and is worth focusing on." Yet he points out that no single benchmark is perfect and we "should always be aware of the limitations of any single benchmark, especially when a single benchmark claims to represent the entire modern web."

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Wolfgang Gruener
38 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Pherule
    Good. Now focus on the UI latency. Having the entire browser (Firefox) freeze up completely while a background tab is loading is not right. It's not the fault of single-process either, because Opera is also single-process and doesn't have the freeze problem.
    Reply
  • Shin-san
    Nice, but we're still at v15
    Reply
  • vittau
    PheruleGood. Now focus on the UI latency. Having the entire browser (Firefox) freeze up completely while a background tab is loading is not right. It's not the fault of single-process either, because Opera is also single-process and doesn't have the freeze problem.Yeah, on Linux I've had it freeze so bad because of a script, that I had to kill the process.
    Reply
  • srap
    PheruleGood. Now focus on the UI latency. Having the entire browser (Firefox) freeze up completely while a background tab is loading is not right. It's not the fault of single-process either, because Opera is also single-process and doesn't have the freeze problem.One of the few Projects that get constant progress reports is Snappy (related to responsiveness of FF), you may take a look at it here. It may not be much of a consolation, but it shows that they are working on it seriously.
    Reply
  • tipoo
    I agree with the UI speed comment, no matter how fast Firefox gets in benchmarks it never FEELS as fast as Chrome or Opera, things like opening a bunch of links in background tabs never feels as snappy, often lagging and appearing to freeze, the startup time isn't as fast, it doesn't stay as snappy over days of leaving it open, etc.
    Reply
  • tipoo
    That said, I wish Chrome had Firefoxs GPU acceleratoin, smooth scrolling, and smooth font rendering. Give it those things and it would be near perfect.
    Reply
  • sarcasm
    tipooThat said, I wish Chrome had Firefoxs GPU acceleratoin, smooth scrolling, and smooth font rendering. Give it those things and it would be near perfect.
    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.
    Reply
  • nebun
    i really like firefox but lately it's been acting up....a lot
    Reply
  • Thunderfox
    Just stop Firefox from freezing up on scripts and Flash. I keep Flash disabled for that reason more than anything.
    Reply
  • A Bad Day
    If I load one too many Flash stuff onto version 15 Firefox or Aurora (or Waterfox), it has a tendency of freezing or crashing...
    Reply