Mozilla speeds up Firefox

By Gregg Keizer, Computerworld, 03/14/08

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Firefox 3.0 is dramatically faster than its predecessor and rivals, benchmark tests claim -- the result of hundreds of performance improvements designed to make the open-source browser the best at running complex Web 2.0 applications, Mozilla's chief developer said Wednesday.

"We've been working on performance for a long time," said Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering. "Each beta of Firefox 3.0 got better. Beta 1 was better than Firefox 2.0, Beta 2 was better than Beta 1 and so on. Some of the big architectural changes [we've made] had begun paying off. Now we're at the point where we can turn the knob to get it to perform well."

Firefox 3.0 Beta 4, which Mozilla released late Monday, has been put through its paces by users and bloggers, some of whom have published the results of head-to-head benchmark tests between Firefox, Opera, Apple Inc.'s Safari and Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer. According to Percy Cabello, who posted his results on the Mozilla Links blog, Firefox 3.0 Beta 4 is 53% faster than Opera 9.5 beta, twice as fast as Apple Inc.'s Safari and three times faster than Microsoft Corp.'s IE7 on the SunSpider benchmark, which tests JavaScript performance.

Schroepfer, however, refused to be drawn into a conversation about benchmarks. Instead, he talked about what the open-source project is looking to do.

"There are lots of ways to 'game' the system [in benchmarks], but what we're trying to do is speed up the things that enable people to run the really heavy-duty applications on the Web."

Saying that a browser is a browser is a browser when rendering basic Web pages, Schroepfer added that the challenge Mozilla took on was how to build a browser that performs well when asked to run much more complex Web 2.0-esque applications, such as Yahoo's Zimbra, the online collaboration and document suite.

"Web apps today are magnitudes more complex than those from five years ago," said Schroepfer. "When Yahoo started out, it wasn't anything more than a bullet list. Now it has widgets and word processing. It's important for us to make it possible for Web designers to create complex applications. They can be confident building [big Web applications] knowing that Firefox can handle them."

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