If you have followed the news of the last days about Firefox’s new JavaScript engine and the implementation of gpu hardware acceleration you can stop reading here. Everyone else, especially the Mozilla Firefox users among them, will most likely be happy to notice that the Mozilla developers have plans to improve the performance of the web browser. Firefox, unlike Opera and Google Chrome which both offer fantastic JavaScript performance, is somewhat lacking behind in JavaScript performance. That’s cause for concern for many Firefox users.
The last two days have seen blog posts by Mozilla developers like Asa Dotzler about changes to the Firefox web browser that affect the performance. The first big upcoming improvement will be a new JavaScript engine called JaegerMonkey which in its current stage speeds up the JavaScript performance of the web browser by 30% to 45% which lots of room for improvement.
It will take some time before the new engine will be included in an official Firefox release but the time will come and it will be interesting to see how that new engine compares to that of other browsers.
The second big change is the introduction of gpu hardware acceleration in Firefox nightly builds. Firefox nightly builds are developer builds and it again will take some time before this will be added to public release versions of the web browser. The feature is currently turned off by default in the nightly builds as well and the developers state that there will be some bugs and add-on incompatibilities. Firefox users who want to give it a go can download the latest nightly build and enable the feature by doing the following:
1. Enter ‘about:config’
2. Click through the warning, if necessary
3. Enter gfx.font in the ‘Filter’ box
4. Double-click on ‘gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled’ to set it to true
5. Below this, right click and select New > Integer to add a pref setting
6. Enter ‘mozilla.widget.render-mode’ for the preference name, 6 for the value
7. Restart
Make sure to backup the web browser with a tool like Mozbackup before trying any of those new features as some users have already reported that it can make the browser crash.
Related Articles:
Firefox 9 Gets Big JavaScript Performance BoostFirefox 4 JavaScript Benchmarks – Showing Improvements
Test Your Browser’s JavaScript Performance
Firefox 7 Aurora Shows Significant Memory Usage Improvements
Mozilla Firefox Gets Major Memory Improvements
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If only they would address the main issue: startup speed!
I know i wish they would but i bet that they all have super computers and can’t tell what the problem is.Within the 2 minutes i use some other of my 9 bowsers.
A slow start-up speed has more to do with the perception and selective loading in other browsers. I did a side by side comparison of Chrome and a clean profile of FF (no addons) a while back, both loading my homepage Google instead of Chrome with it’s cute homepage. Sure enough Chrome’s chrome came up in 1/2 a sec and FF’s about 2 sec. The actual page content happened to be slightly faster on FF though at around 3 seconds.
In the end it’s the only thing that matters. No matter how fast other users test it, if it’s slow for me, it might be perception… but it’s slow!
you can also set html5.enable = true
@libeco – Are you using FF 3.6? I find startup speed to be very quick (and I have around 60 tabs that need to be opened).
IMO, what FF really needs to address is memory allocation and freeing. I have to shut FF down each day before I go to bed to get it to release all the memory it it has allocated.
I just started FF about one hour ago and I am nearly up to 600k total memory usage, By the end of today, I will likely be over 1gb, maybe even 1.2GB!
Yes, I know that my memory issues might be due to the 50 or so add-on’s that I have installed. But unless FF gives me the tools to monitor/manage individual add-on’s memory use, then there is nothing I can do but blame FF (short of uninstalling add-on’s but I don’t have any intention of doing this).
@Jojo: Startup on my 2,5 year old Core 2 Duo T5600 (1,83GHz) with 4 GB RAM laptop takes 10-15 seconds. Memory consumption is huge too. Maxthon is still my preferred browser (fastest I have), even though there’re quite some disadvantages nowadays. It’s faster than Chrome, IE8, and Opera (in that order).
I do have some web development modules installed as that’s the only reason I use firefox.
@Jojo: check out the Memory Fox add-on. It periodically frees up most of the memory Firefox uses… works wonders here and allows me to keep Firefox running as long as I like.
@Dan – I’ve experimented with Memory Fox. It doesn’t work well (in at least the 1.3 version and backward). One very major problem is that it completely overwrites the application event log in Windows, obliterating any messages any other app writes there.
He is supposed to fix this problem is the 1.4 release. Is that version released yet?
I am also not sure of what MF is really doing to release memory. Each add-on allocates it’s own memory and is supposed to manage that memory. I am not sure that another add-on would have any ability to control what another add-on is doing.
@Jojo — Memory Fox is still at version 1.3. I never knew that about the Application Event Log; just checked and it’s true! No idea why that should be happening. Thanks for that info.
@Dan – Why should “it” (Event log overwrite) be happening?
It is solely because the application chooses to write a new event log record. He needs to turn this off. Apparently, since he hasn’t fixed it yet, it must be more difficult than simply removing the code statement that makes the call to write the record. Or he is lazy.
You may find an overall speed improvement in Ff with this:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/136862-8/15_undocumented_firefox_tips.html
I have used it for a bout two years, with several versions of Firefox. I have had no problems, but make no promises either.
I’m not to sure the fascination for this start up time. The only thing that I look for is the main performance of the browser itself. I’ve been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix (I think), and it’s never failed me. I think FF is much more smother than the other browsers, and the pages seems to render better. I’ve tried Chrome & Chromium, and they aren’t bad at all but I’ll stick with the Fox.
By now I use “Memory Fox” (new version available) and “MinimizeToTray Plus” (which also minimizes on exit as an option) Firefox extensions, and the result is having access to Firefox (after initial cold start of course) in 0+ seconds with a RAM occupation under 30MB when Firefox “closed” or minimized.
Works nice, with 80 extensions.