Firefox Quantum - oh, the speed!

[Dude]

My Firefox just updated itself to the new version called FireFox Quantum, and the speed is incredible! Even browsing these PureBasic forums is so much faster and immediate. Very happy!

My usual browsing with Firefox showed pages where you'd see each element loading and the page building up bit-by-bit, but now they pretty much just appear instantly in one go. I wonder what they did to gain such speed?

Seriously, if you're using Firefox and haven't upgraded to it, do it NOW!

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/1 ... x-quantum/

[J. Baker]

I'm glad you see improvement but it's slower here. Now when I launch Firefox, it takes like 3-4 seconds longer to load my home page, which is duckduckgo.com. Any page I open, it takes seconds longer. I don't have many plugins but 2 of them no longer work in the newer version, so I'm even loading less plugins than before. The older version was much faster here. I haven't tried any HTML5 games for a speed comparison yet.

On a side note. Even youtube's new layout is slower. Much slower. Maybe these speed increases use special cpu instructions that my cpu doesn't offer?

[J. Baker]

I just did the following test. Comparing Firefox 58.0 vs Safari 9.1.3 vs Chrome 63.0.3239.132. I didn't copy all the data in order to save a lengthy post but an old version of Safari wins hands down.
https://webkit.org/perf/sunspider/sunspider.html

Firefox

Code: Select all

============================================
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
--------------------------------------------
Total:                  832.4ms +/- 12.7%
--------------------------------------------

  3d:                   122.9ms +/- 4.0%
    cube:                57.3ms +/- 5.3%
    morph:               20.6ms +/- 11.8%
    raytrace:            45.0ms +/- 3.7%

Chrome

Code: Select all

============================================
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
--------------------------------------------
Total:                 1050.1ms +/- 2.7%
--------------------------------------------

  3d:                   182.8ms +/- 4.5%
    cube:                52.2ms +/- 7.6%
    morph:               40.9ms +/- 12.7%
    raytrace:            89.7ms +/- 7.8%

Safari 32 bit mode

Code: Select all

============================================
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
--------------------------------------------
Total:                  463.4ms +/- 4.8%
--------------------------------------------

  3d:                    70.1ms +/- 24.3%
    cube:                16.3ms +/- 2.1%
    morph:               23.5ms +/- 10.8%
    raytrace:            30.3ms +/- 50.6%

Safari 64 bit mode

Code: Select all

============================================
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
--------------------------------------------
Total:                  451.4ms +/- 2.1%
--------------------------------------------

  3d:                    57.4ms +/- 1.6%
    cube:                16.2ms +/- 1.9%
    morph:               20.3ms +/- 1.7%
    raytrace:            20.9ms +/- 4.1%

[wilbert]

I just did the following test. Comparing Firefox 58.0 vs Safari 9.1.3 vs Chrome 63.0.3239.132. I didn't copy all the data in order to save a lengthy post but an old version of Safari wins hands down.
https://webkit.org/perf/sunspider/sunspider.html

The SunSpider website mentions that SunSpider is no longer maintained and recommends JetStream http://browserbench.org/JetStream/
With SunSpider, on my computer also Safari comes out best but with JetStream, Firefox does.
Page loading time however feels very fast with Firefox.

[J. Baker]

The SunSpider website mentions that SunSpider is no longer maintained and recommends JetStream http://browserbench.org/JetStream/

Just did the JetStream test with Safari and Firefox. Firefox does show most of the test now beating Safari but not all. In real world, so to speak, Safari loads Amazon, Facebook, Youtube, my homepage, etc. much faster than Firefox. To me, the SunSpider was a much more accurate result. When I used the SunSpider test, Safari floated right through it and Firefox took a bit longer to run the test. Now when I used JetStream, the test seemed to run at about the same speed. I don't understand why Firefox is getting better scores with JetStream?

[J. Baker]

Ok. I found another test and this is where Firefox shines over Safari. At least on my system.
https://codepen.io/perbyhring/pen/LLVYKz

It appears to me, Firefox did make improvements when rendering on a canvas and so forth. But in "real world use", Safari loads webpages and all the content that comes with that much faster for everyday use. I think that speed increase for Firefox comes with some kind of pre-buffering or something and maybe that's why I see on my 1.4Ghz 2GB system it takes a hit when loading. Now after loading, there may be an increase in performance like I saw in the particle link I just posted above. If you have a faster system than I have, you may not notice this load delay.

So I would say. Firefox is not a faster browser but has a faster rendering engine. Once all is loaded, you can see its benefits.

[RASHAD]

FireFox Quantum is using multitask multi threading Tech.
Open the Task manager you will see that at least 5 Services are opened all together at the same time
So the speed will depend on the design of the URL opened
I like firefox for keeping the preferences for each URL
So you do not need to adjust the view each time
Unless it is there for Safari

[Dude]

I'm glad you see improvement but it's slower here.

Really? It's like going from dialup to broadband for me. I'm amazed by the difference with every website I visit.

[Samuel]

About time, firefox was a bit late to the party for multi core support.

@J.Baker
Have you tried opera? I switched to it from firefox about a half year ago and have been very happy with it. It even comes with a built in ad blocker and free vpn.

[J. Baker]

@J.Baker
Have you tried opera? I switched to it from firefox about a half year ago and have been very happy with it. It even comes with a built in ad blocker and free vpn.

It's been a while but will give it a try.

[Fangbeast]

From the paranoid side of the world, try Vivaldi as well. It's an offshoot of Opera without the security connotations.

People can read whatever the hell they want into that statement, I don't give a shit, but I am not using Opera.

[Shield]

AFAIK, the reason why the new Firefox feels faster hasn't much to do with JavaScript performance but more
with its CSS rendering engine that's now multi-threaded (thanks to the Servo project and the Rust programming language).
Browser vendors tried to parallelize this before but failed (Mozilla failed twice) and only succeeded with Rust.

[...]I don't give a shit, but I am not using Opera.

I'm using Vivaldi as well, simply because it's the browser that does exactly what I need it to do,
basically replacing the old version of Opera before it became a bad Chrome clone.

[Kurzer]

From the paranoid side of the world, try Vivaldi as well. It's an offshoot of Opera without the security connotations.

Fangbeast., thank you for letting me know about this browser. I am currently using Iron (a chrome clone without the google spy technology), but vivaldi looks promising, especially as it is portable and seemingly compatible with chrome extensions.

PS: It seems the Vivaldi "standalone installation" is not really portable. Vivaldi will still use the registry in this mode.

[Fangbeast]

It seems the Vivaldi "standalone installation" is not really portable. Vivaldi will still use the registry in this mode.

Bugger!! I didn't know that. We must send a message to them that this is not right, portable should mean exactly that. I think they are approacheable.

[Kurzer]

They already know that, but so far they have seen no reason to implement it correctly.

You can find portable (virtualized) versions of vivaldi on the world wide web, but this is not a solution for me, because the browser will no longer run natively in the system.