Mozilla Investigates Potential Performance Decline In Firefox 4

[DKT27]

Perhaps Firefox 4 isn't quite finalized yet. The most recent meeting minutes suggest that changes in the two most recent betas have caused CPU and memory problems as well as a performance decrease.

Just before the finish line – Mozilla wants to close up the beta process for Firefox 4 this week – there are some unexpected performance problems. The company noted in its Wednesday meeting minutes that "many" beta users have suggested that Beta 11 is slower than Beta 10 and that there has been a "huge increase" in daily comments "about memory and CPU usage." A list of a dozen issues suggests that there are some major problems that are hitting the almost finished version of Firefox 4: Users are complaining that Hotmail does not work properly, that the Facebook chat does not work, failure of the DivX player, a broken Panorama feature and Gmail that simply locks up.

We recently ran an article showing that the Firefox 4 HTML5 performance especially in Canvas2D benchmarks has suffered between version B9 and B11. Some of our readers suggested that the reason may be a driver issue and after briefly talking to Mozilla about this issue, there is a good chance that this is indeed the case. We will rerun the benchmarks with modified drivers on multiple platforms this weekend and present our results next Monday.

However, the fact that there has been a performance decrease from B9 and B11 and that the B9 performs at a higher level than B11 with any driver should be a concern for Mozilla. There is no way Mozilla can expect its users, many of them mainstream users, to always keep their graphics drivers up to date and the company needs to find a way to at least keep a certain performance level stable. In contrast, Microsoft has been able to improve its hardware acceleration engine and dramatically enhance the Canvas2D performance of IE9 RC. If Mozilla wants to increase its market share, these are slips that cannot happen, especially since the company repeatedly blasted Microsoft for leaving XP users with IE9 behind. Mozilla needs to keep all users in mind – and, in our specific case, we are talking about "outdated" graphics drivers that are 3 months old.

Mozilla's own benchmark monitoring tool Perf-o-matic did not show any performance declines. However, the tool is limited to JavaScript benchmarks only. The company even mentioned that Firefox 4 is now the leading JavaScript browser, in terms of speed, at least as far as Facebook's JSGameBench 0.2 is concerned.

As far as the official release plan is concern, Mozilla said yesterday that there were only 8 hard-blocking bugs in the browser left and only one was without a patch. However, all Firefox versions have recently seen a surprising increase in crashes, hinting there may be additional problems.

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[HX1]

Mozilla always does this and I have seen a few others do it as well.. good idea faster browser.. and the finalized version is slower all the way around...