Is Firefox dying a slow death?
March 23, 2009 by MK
Filed under Online Media, Tech News, web development
Google launched this morning a new beta version of Chrome 2.0. The best thing about this new beta is speed — it’s 25% faster on V8 benchmark and 35% faster on the Sunspider benchmark than the current stable channel version and almost twice as fast when compared to original beta version. Other enhancements include user script support (greasemonkey-like) and form auto-fill.
Wait a minute? Isn’t this article about Firefox dying a slow death … YES, it is and I am getting there.
Run Chrome and Firefox side-by-side, and Firefox is embarrassingly slow. It’s not even in the same league. It’s an old man on the running track trying to compete against a 20 year-old.
IE 8, Chrome and Firefox
The latest IE 8 absolutely smoke Firefox in performance and stability. What an absolute humiliation for the Firefox developers. They had years to get their there stuff together. But they sat on their asses and now they have been left in the technological dust by both Google and Microsoft.
In Firefox All tabs and Javascript run in one giant mess. One execution heavy tab drags down the performance of the entire browser No memory protection. Everything is in one gigantic soup of data. One tab crashes, down goes the whole browser Clunky and slow cross platform UI implementation
When I use to run Firefox a few months ago before switching to Chrome I could feel Firefox getting slower and slower and slower as the hours of use ticked by until finally getting annoyed enough to have to quit the app and restart it. Doesn’t seem like a big deal but I would end up restarting Firefox three to four times every day just to clear out whatever junk it seems to accumulate.
Sadly, Firefox developers shifted from “fast and simplified feature set” to “include lots of features to make the web fun and easy.” They’re working on Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 right now, both of which are feature-driven releases. Astonishingly, the one feature for Firefox 3.5 that makes the release competitive with Chrome and Safari—the new JavaScript engine, TraceMonkey—was almost cut from the release because it is/was too buggy to fit into their release schedule.
The Mozilla 2.0 [mozillazine.org] project, which is supposed to refactor a good deal of the Gecko code in order to make it leaner and easier to deal with, is not getting much attention at all while the feature-driven point releases consume everyone’s attention. Mozilla developers have lost any focus they once had on the fundamentals of browser innovation, and are now given over to the same level of feature bloat that killed the original Mozilla browser (now SeaMonkey). Extensions were supposed to be the solution for this: extra features could be implemented by users so that developers could focus on making the browser faster. Not anymore.
It will not surprise me if the hard core of geeks that abandoned Mozilla Suite for Firefox now abandon Firefox for Chrome and IE 8. The first one of those browsers to get an extensions/plugin framework allowing for ad-blocking and development tools will start sucking a lot of folks over.
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This is a joke, right? The upcoming release of Firefox will be competitive speed-wise with the upcoming releases of Safari and Chrome. The Firefox beta is not sluggish at all.
That is exactly what this post is about my friend. Firefox needs this new release with a bit of changes for firefox javascript rendering engine.
As mentioned in the article - the one feature for Firefox 3.5 that makes the release competitive with Chrome and Safari—the new JavaScript engine, TraceMonkey—was almost cut from the release because it is/was too buggy to fit into their release schedule.
But I am sure Firefox will come back, its just a matter of putting some more time into development and not taking it easy.
You can’t be serious! Geeks abandoning firefox for chrome? Chrome isn’t worthy to eat the dust of FireFox. If you’re talking about speed, the new safari leaves Chrome far behind.
As skylight pointed out, the new FireFox will have an upgraded engine that will be comparable if not better than chrome. It doesn’t even support pressing the middle mouse button and cruising!
I think Google’s work on Chrome is a waste of time. Hell they didn’t even support Google toolbar on it yet!
This is no joke. Running FF 3.08 on my home PC is painfully slow. Chrome, IE and Safari fare much better. I’ve also been wondering how FF have gotten behind the curve on performance. All the new features are nice, but not at the expense of useability surely?
Firefox is getting crazy slow. Each point release seems slower.
Why have they filled it up with useless junk like the Awful Bar?
Sorry - I meant the “Awesome Bar”. Whatever.
They need to sort out the bloat and get back to the speed and elegance of the early days of FF.
My Firefox at work has been getting progressively slower over time, maybe because of some virus issues, i’m not sure.
I’ve been running both Chrome and FF lately and I’ve actually fallen in love with Chrome.
the 2 things that I still like FF for is
- the web developer plugin (and a few others)
- the built in spell check is better in FF then Chrome (is that better in the beta?)
@Sean It’s funny that you say web developer is one you favorite plugins.
I have spent some time trying to find out what was making firefox suck up 100% of my cpu.
I started removing the plugins one by one and unfortianatly the one that that was slowing me dow was the web developer (which I use often).
So… that pretty much sucks for me cause I use that plugin alot and without it installed my CPU usages is below 10%. And with it installed my CPU goes so high my whole computer starts to crash.
It’s not like I am on a totally weak computer ether.
2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Mac OS 10.5.7
I hope this helps someone.
“The latest IE 8 absolutely smoke [sic] Firefox in performance and stability.”
Uh, ‘MK’, do even know what the heck you’re talking about? IE8 is not even *close* to being as fast as FF3, let alone FF3.5 (run some page/js rendering benchmarks and you’ll see what I mean) - what HAVE you been smoking my friend? And what evidence can you present for FF3’s supposed instability vis-a-vis IE8??
*cough* shill for M$ *cough*
There are alot of other browser that are good 2
I currently use Opera but google chrome and safari are better than ie or firefox in my books. Opera is super fast!!!!
The only thing that makes me start FF from time to time is its extension FireFTP.
If I had some decent & free FTP-client I would probably forget where shortcut to FF is.
What a change from a year or two ago! I’ve switched to Chrome recently.
I think the title is quite spot on, only that I would replace “Firefox” with “Mozilla”. :(
Amazing how fast things have really changed. Now Chrome is a real contender and firefox is playing catch up. I really hope firefox catches up. I loved firefox.