Firefox 3 beta4: Performances improvements.

JBK — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 12:22:00 +0100

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.

Yet another blog for JBKempf - Tag - beta4