Submitted by Following a number of delays, the Mozilla Project has confirmed that it plans to ship the seventh beta for version 4 of its open source Firefox web browser on Wednesday, the 10th of November. This seventh beta for version 4 of Firefox 4 is the first beta to include the new Jaegermonkey javascript engine for Firefox.
Nice, seems like we are going to see whether the stuff Mozilla has said about the Jaegermonkey performance holds true or not. Not that javascript speed makes a huge difference in my personal browsing experience, but it’s always interesting to see how much performance they can muster.
You can already see it is true with the nightlies. Firefox 4 will be at least as fast as the most recent webkit with nitro. And in some cases Fx4 is already faster than Opera11 and Chrome9.
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/4.0b7/
I’m downloading it right now, let’s see how it works…
Regards
…gobble up a lot more GPU than Chrome or IE9 (for example). As soon as I start running it my GPU temps jump up 5 degrees and it runs between 3% and 10%…
Edited 2010-11-10 20:20 UTC
java script performance is noticeably better than firefox 3.6.x but the actual firefox application GUI under linux is a lot more sluggish than 3.6.x
Well, it’s still a beta release so there’s a large chance that it still contains alot of debug code. Not until the final version is released will we know the exact performance. But the beta releases should give an indication. Weird that the GUI would be sluggish though, wasn’t that supposed to be faster?
Nope. when they say faster, they mean the JS performance. There is a current war between browsers in terms of JS performance.
In terms of GUI, it’s definitely slower. Menus are sluggish and switching tabs is a bit laggy.
Edited 2010-11-11 05:57 UTC
In terms of GUI, I can’t get Firefox menus to be any more sluggish, or tabs any more laggy, than any other application on my system.
http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/11/10/fasten-your-seatbelts-lates…
The Mozilla blog has quite a list of what’s new for the new Firefox beta.
Mozilla is being a bit cagy by comparing Firefox 4.0b7 only to earlier versions of Firefox, but the arewefastyet.com websites tells the story in comparison to other javascript engines.
BTW: The GUI (or any other part of it) isn’t at all sluggish on my system.
PS: Just prior to this release, which admittedly has been coming for a longish time, there was a spate of articles comparing IE9 preview in particular to the pervious beta (Firefox 4.0b6). Only now with Firefox 4.0b7 is the new Jaegermonkey javascript engine included. I’m betting that the mainstream media will go real quiet now on the topic of previews of upcoming web browsers.
PPS: Is Firefox 4.0 the only web browser that offers “hardware acceleration for Windows XP”? I think it might be.
PPPS: More comment on the speed here:
http://blog.mozilla.com/dmandelin/2010/09/08/presenting-jagermonkey…
Edited 2010-11-10 22:48 UTC
http://boomswaggerboom.wordpress.com/2010/11/10/firefox-4-for-mac-o…
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Mozilla-releases-Firefox-4-B…
According to Mozilla Vice President of Products Jay Sullivan, the latest development version includes a number of important performance improvements, helping pages load even faster than in previous beta versions and in the current stable 3.6.x branch.
The significant performance gains come from the inclusion of the J~A¤gerMonkey just-in-time (JIT) JavaScript compiler, allowing even faster start-up time, better page load speeds and increased web app performance.
…
Support for more hardware-accelerated graphics has also been added using DirextX technologies on Windows systems and OpenGL on Mac OS X based systems.
Release notes from Mozilla are here:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/4.0b7/releasenotes/
Within the “Whats New” section of the release notes, Mozilla claims:
“Responsiveness and scrolling improvements from the new retained layers layout system”
PS: The http://www.h-online.com website also says that next development preview, Firefox 4 Beta 8, is scheduled for the 12th of November. That cannot be right … Nov 12th is tomorrow.
Edited 2010-11-11 11:57 UTC