Comments on: Firefox 3 beta 2 JavaScript benchmark plus why Flock is faster than Firefox 2

By: Pathfinder Development » 37 JavaScript benchmarks

Pathfinder Development » 37 JavaScript benchmarks — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 04:39:03 +0000

[...] Firefox 3 beta 2 JavaScript benchmark plus why Flock is faster than Firefox 2: A rather controversial blog post about testing the SunSpider benchmark on Flock vs. Firefox. [...]

By: munim

munim — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 13:09:25 +0000

Flock is faster than Firefox2? thats surprising!
The other interesting thing is that Opera still beats Firefox 3 beta2..

By: frmad

frmad — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 03:00:20 +0000

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By: Aditya

Aditya — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 15:49:12 +0000

Hi Mike,
Thanks for pointing out the Flock development part. It is quite possible that the differences in extensions is creating the problem (there are quite a few of them in common installed on my machine though). I have found Flock to be more responsive than Firefox 2 and I know of a few persons who have switched to Flock for this reason.
My results are not that objective as I have noted, and I did think of running the tests in safe mode. Let me see when I can do that.
Another thing of note is that the differences reported by Jeff are relatively smaller, which can be explained by his much more powerful setup. I was also wondering whether we could check out how much impact the CPU has on these tests. Maybe the guys at Anandtech or Techreport might be of help.
As for the Yahoo and Live mail problems, let’s see whether the next beta/RC fixes that. My bit on the tweaked JS engine resulting in the problems was merely speculation, in the absence of other details.

By: Mike Shaver

Mike Shaver — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 14:36:10 +0000

The Flock guys will tell you, if you ask, that they haven’t done anything on the core (and that if they did it’d be upstreamed to Mozilla’s CVS, naturally). I had just this conversation with them quite recently!

I think it’s much more likely that differences in configuration — especially the presence of different extensions — account for that performance difference. I don’t think you’re really saying anything about “why Flock is faster than Firefox 2″, as your title claims, when you take the browsers with different extension configurations intentionally. Even just running them both in Safe Mode would give you a better picture of the performance difference, if any; I’d be quite interested to see such a followup!

I don’t think any of the JS engine improvements are related to the issues with Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Mail; there’s at least one fix on the Yahoo side that will be pushed out soon, AIUI, but in both cases I think the problems are related to a change we made for better DOM specification conformance. If there are JS-engine changes that broke any web page, we haven’t heard of it, so if you’re seeing otherwise please do report them through our bug system (or, if for some reason you can’t do that, just send me mail with the details).

Thanks!

Mike