Firefox 8 Performance Will Blow You Away

By | July 13, 2011 | 18 Comments

Firefox 8 Performance Will Blow You AwayDespite the fact that Firefox 8 has appeared on the Nightly channel just days ago, Mozilla reports that it is already 20% faster than Firefox 5 in pretty much all the tests, including:

Startup times
First paint
Session restore
JavaScript performance
2D canvas
3D WebGL rendering

Furthermore, thanks to the reduced memory footprint in Firefox 7 and above, Firefox 8 will use much less RAM than its predecessors.

According to reports, Firefox 8 was tested against the Dev Channel build of Google Chrome 14 and beat in all but WebGL implementation tests, at least for now.

Although there is no exact ETA, some expect to see the release of Firefox 8 Beta by the end of this year.

Update: Firefox 8 is set for November 8th release.


About (Author Profile)


Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism carrier back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

  • http://twitter.com/bricky149 Shane Bundy

    I’m pretty sure I’ve read this somewhere and FF8 is apparently matching Chrome 14′s performance.
    Mozilla are making big changes to its codebase while Google’s just fixing small bugs and adding little.

    • kls

      So what the hundreds of Google Chrome engineers are doing instead of writing code? :)

      • http://twitter.com/bricky149 Shane Bundy

        You can find out for yourself at http://build.chromium.org/
        There’s the odd big change at times but it’s normally just code changes with no real benefit (although some changes do).
        Don’t you read the changelog for every new version of Chrome or are you one of the stupid ones?

  • Guesty Guest

    At the moment the various dates that have been pencilled in for Firefox are:

    August 16th = Firefox 6

    September 27th = Firefox 7

    November 8th = Firefox 8

    Those dates are all Tuesdays and they are the dates for the release of the final, stable versions. They are also the dates that subsequent releases should drop down to the next channel e.g. Nightly, Aurora or Beta.

    There was even talk that Firefox 9 would be out by 20th December, but that was noted only as a vague possibility.

    As much as people have been moaning about Fiefox 5 and 6 being largely featureless, there were 992 bug fixes in 5 and 1300 bug fixes in 6. Now yes, some of those bugs were fixing relatively minor errors that will only occur in rare circumstances, but others such as tab resizing, about:permissions, scratchpad etc are fairly big. That’s not too shabby for just 5 months work since the stable release of Firefox 4.

    From what I have been reading it seems like Firefox 7 and 8 are the versions that are really going to improve the performance of the browser with better graphics and less memory usage etc. There has also been talk that Sync is getting a makeover in 7 so it all happens almost automatically with little in the way of user intervention.

    It’s going pretty much as planned. Although each version may not be packed full of numerous noticeable changes, it does mean that new features are getting to the consumer faster than they would have done under the old system and I for one am a fan of it.

    • http://www.favbrowser.com Vygantas Lipskas

      Thanks for that!

    • Armin

      Seems like Mozilla is stepping up its game, and all it took was Chrome. :P

    • Asknobody

      So from now of FF development cycle
      FF9 – 854 bugs fixed, FF 10 – 947 bugs fixed, FF11 redesign according to IE10/Chrome18/Opera12, FF12 – 874 bugs fixed and at last fixing all memory leaks FF13 – 487 bugs fixed, FF14 – just for marketing because market share down to 15%, FF15 – all memory leaks are gone, FF16 – users are demanding more featurėes so 548 bugs are fixed, 15 bugs are called features, FF17 – improved memory efficiency, FF18 – new optinio skin that looks the same as Chrome (85% users are using it), FF19 – 845 bugs fixed, FF20 – in mozilla hq there are more firefoxes than devs FF21 – renamed to FireNetscape, FF22 – into the oblivion

  • Asknobody

    FF8 will blow you away or just will blow?

  • http://twitter.com/cyberstream_us CyberStream.us

    For some reason, “20% improvement” and that it “will blow you away” doesn’t mix in my mind.

    • http://www.favbrowser.com Vygantas Lipskas

      It’s a pre alpha build.

  • IE & Opera FanBoy

    Very good!! I like the startup speed and memory footprint !!
    Opera should also invest in these area.

  • IE & Opera FanBoy

    Very good!! I like the startup speed and memory footprint !!
    Opera should also invest in these area.

  • Guesty Guest

    What are peoples opinions on when Mozilla should end support for Firefox 3.6? It’s going to happen one day. I personally think that they should set a date for some time in early 2012 because by then we’ll be on at least Firefox 9 as the stable release, and I’m guessing that 9 will give people far more incentive to make the switch than 5 currently does.

  • Guesty Guest

    Yes I’m a Firefox fanboy I will openly admit that, but I’m not one of those fanboys that HATES every other browser by default. I have Chrome installed so that I can keep up to date with what Google are doing and because its a good browser but Firefox is my default browser. I have tried Opera, Safari and IE9 and I didn’t get on with them. Felt they were lacking compared to Firefox and Chrome.

    With regards to the support, and correct me if I am wrong, but I was under the impression that support for Firefox 4 ended when Firefox 5 was released. Shortly afterwards it was announced officially by Mozilla that they wouldn’t continue support. Likewise, support for 5 will end when 6 is released and support for 6 will end when 7 is released etc etc.

    Firefox 5 will only “exist” for 8 weeks and then Firefox 6 replaces it, so if there were any security and stability updates they just roll over to the next version number unless it’s urgent like the 5.0.1 fix for Mac users.

    What I am asking about is the support for 3.6. I’m not sure if you were aware but Mozilla are still supporting it because the last update released was 3.6.19 on Monday 11th July and they plan to bring out 3.6.20 on 16th August.

    That’s what I was asking about. When do the 3.6.X updates stop?

    I ask because the 3.6 users represent the very loyal, hardcore users who have loads of add ons installed and are basically refusing to move to the new release cycle for whatever reason e.g. there is no support for add ons, Mozilla is just copying Google, they don’t like the way the new browser looks yada.

    • Asknobody

      End of suport means that Mozila CAN release updates in the future but they won’t vouch that. So maybe some Mozilla devs or some others devs also will be in love with 3.6 so much that they will organize updates or maybe not. Situation in current web browser development is such if you will relocate resources to support old version of browsers you will be left behind with latest version of browser. Google for their web products and services also will support only 2 latest version of browsers. Nobody wants to waste resources just for a minor group of users. Mozilla even said that they don’t care about enterprise because home users are much bigger group. But hey, FF is open source so you can maintain and update 3.6 as long as you want. Isn’t that the argument that lots of people use while praising open source products? Hey anybody can take the code and make changes! 

  • Nmn

    It’s nice to see how in benchmarks firefox becomes faster and
    faster (in a couple of years probably we will need atomic clocks
    precision to measure it). Yet firefox becomes slower and slower on our
    computers. Looking forward for some more intelligent computers that will
    be able to understand the benchmark figures and run faster.

     

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