Happy happy browser benchmarks

[jducoeur]

For those who, like me, generally have a few dozen browser tabs open at a time, and spend much time annoyed at how huge and slow the browser process gradually gets, hope may be in sight. Check out these delightful benchmarks of the current Firefox beta. Summary: this sucker is *fast* -- five times faster than Firefox 2 on a Javascript-heavy page, almost ten times faster than IE7. Also, they've apparently clamped down hard on the memory leaks that browsers are prone to, which should greatly ease the tendency of the browser to slowly... grind... to a... crawl. And it's apparently the most standards-compliant browser so far, to boot.

It's yet another browser that I'm going to need to support for CommYou, of course, so it's a slightly mixed blessing -- standards compliance is lovely, but not a panacea when I still have to support those other pieces of crap Internet Explorer. But the speed improvement should be a real boon for heavy Web users.

(Caveat for the non-techies: keep in mind that this is just improvements in rendering and running speed. If you've got a slow connection, it can't help you. But some pages will likely show up a lot faster.)

Since the browser is so crucial to my work, I'm waiting until release before I actually install it on my main computer. But I'm waiting eagerly...

Comments

[doubleplus.livejournal.com]

It's great that they've decided to focus on that. Fixing memory leaks is definitely at the top of my list for Firefox, way ahead of any other features.

[laurion]

I'm *very* happy with the Firefox 3.0 betas (and even some of the nightlies on occasion). Fast, good UI integration, and getting better with each release.

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

I'm looking forward to FF3 being the default: I actually surfed with it for a couple weeks back on alpha8, but was too frustrated by lack of extensions meaning I kept having to switch back to FF2 to do any work to actually stick with it.