Administrator DKT27 Posted March 8, 2011 Administrator Share Posted March 8, 2011 Mozilla posted the first builds of the Release Candidate of Firefox on its FTP servers: Time for a first comparison with IE9 RC, its main rival. How fast is Mozilla's Firefox 4 RC1? At the time of this writing, Mozilla's Firefox 4 RC has not been released, at least not officially. However, the first build of the release candidate was available openly for some time last Friday and we accepted the invitation to take a closer look. According to Mozilla's developer posts, the Firefox team does not expect to make any more changes to the code of the posted RC (build1) and release it as the final version in the near future. In fact, the version posted on Mozilla's FTP server was built from the Firefox 4.0 beta 13-pre builds based on the Mozilla 2.0 core. The version number of the browser tested in this article is "4.0″ and not "4.0 RC". We feel confident that the browser on our computers is the version that will be released early in the week as Firefox 4.0 RC.The First ImpressionFirefox 4.0 RCBoth IE9 and Firefox 4 are beautiful browsers with dramatically enhanced user interfaces. Mozilla has slightly revised the Firefox 4 interface from Beta 12. There are minor changes to the shape of tabs, there is a new and much leaner start page with a clickable symbol to restore a previous browser session. The Panorama button has permanently disappeared from the first-level menu, which is rather unfortunate, given the significance of the feature. There is now a tiny triangle-arrow in the menu bar to the right, which opens a menu that holds the Panorama feature (which is now called Tab Groups). The overall impression is a much more lightweight browser than Firefox 3.6. Mozilla has made clever use of the available space and while we know that design is always a matter of taste, we believe that Firefox 4 arrives with a modern, attractive and somewhat unique interface. Firefox 4 carries a massive task on its shoulders, a task to retake lost market share, defend a very competitive new rival, IE9 and build a bridge to Mozilla's future, which will be represented much more by Firefox 5 than by Firefox 4. Firefox 5 is due before July of this year. Benchmarks If you are interested in web browsers, you may have followed recent browser benchmarks. If you have done that, then it is no secret to you that Chrome tends to be the fastest JavaScript browser (even if IE9 is the fastest browser in Sunspider on our test systems), while it trails the hardware acceleration performance of IE9 and Firefox 4. Opera still lacks hardware acceleration (we are waiting for an official build) and Safari 6 is in its early nightly build stages. Throwing all browsers into one pot would have been a bit unfair, so we limited the comparison to Firefox and IE – which makes sense, as the two browsers are the browsers with the largest market shares today and will go head to head in the coming months. We ran both browsers on two different hardware platforms: - a mainstream notebook: Gateway NV59C with a Core i3-330M processor, 4GB memory, 320 GB HDD and an Intel IGC (128 MB shared memory).- a desktop PC: Dell Studio XPS 7100 with a Phenom II X6-1055T processor, 6 GB memory, 1 TB HDD and AMD's Radeon HD 5870 graphics card (1 GB memory).Both systems are supplied by their manufacturers for the specific purpose of supporting ConceivablyTech's browser benchmarks. You can find more information about these systems here (Gateway) and here (Dell). Both systems used the most current graphics drivers available. Browser performance tends to be substantially different from platform to platform and we believe that providing test results on hardware with vastly different specs delivers a much better impression of the capabilities of each browser. As a general rule, a much more powerful processor will deliver a better browsing experience. As we are moving into an era of GPU acceleration, it is also reasonable to assume that a more capable graphics chip will deliver a better browsing performance in HTML5, WebGL and future content technologies, such as WebCL. Our first benchmark run focused on three core capabilities: JavaScript, Flash and HTML5. For JavaScript, we used Sunspider, Google V8, Mozilla Kraken and Celtic Kane. For Flash, we used the GUIMark 2 tests (Charting, Gaming, Text). Our HTML5 tests used GUIMark 2 (Charting, Gaming, Text) as well as Microsoft's Mr. Potato Gun test, Mozilla's Hardware Stress Test and the Asteroids Canvas 2D test. (At the end of this article, you can find a table with all results in numbers.)Results: FlashThe GUIMark 2 Flash performance of a browser is extremely dependent on the available version of the Flash player. We have seen performance differences of up to 80% with different versions of Flash. We used the latest Flash 10.2 for this test run. No surprises here – IE9 remains the dominant Flash browser. IE9 loses only one discipline – however with a significant distance. The Flash Text test, a test which simulates dynamically changing text and column sizes, yielded a very low score on the notebook. Firefox 4 shows much improved scores over Firefox 3.6, but trails IE overall. IE wins this category 5:1 for a cumulative standing of 7:7.Results: HTML5 GUIMark2 runs the three Flash tests in HTML5 versions and we are seeing a different picture here. Firefox wins all three tests on the desktop system with the fast graphics card while IE claims two wins on the notebook. The new standing is 11:9 in favor of Firefox. If we add the result of HTML5test.com (Firefox4: 249, IE9:135), the lead grows to 13:9.Asteroids C2D is among the best independent Canvas 2D tests available and simulates scenarios of complex HTML5 games and effects with drawImage, drawImage scaling, alpha, composition, shadows and text functions. IE9 excels in this test and seems to be at least one generation ahead of its rivals. It distances Firefox by a factor of almost 4:1. The new standing: 13:11.Microsoft's Mr. Potato Gun test has also been among our favorites and it appears as if Microsoft has made tremendous progress in this particular benchmark since IE9 Beta. IE9 is about three times as fast and Firefox in this acceleration test. 13:13.Since there is reason to believe that Microsoft could give its IE9 an unfair advantage in its own benchmarks over its rivals, we have added Mozilla's HW acceleration stress test to our lineup. Both browsers score 64 fps on the notebook, but IE9 virtually destroys Firefox on the desktop with 287 vs. 91 fps. The final standing is 14:15 for IE9.ConclusionAll right. Take the 14:15 result for IE9 with a grain of salt. There are plenty of benchmarks out there that cater to the individual strengths of browsers and if you wanted Mozilla to win, you surely can set it up that way. We haven't set this benchmark up with that result in mind and it does not matter anyway. Firefox 4 and IE9 are substantially upgraded browsers when compared to their predecessors and show few weaknesses in any benchmark. It is somewhat obvious that Firefox has a great JavaScript engine, while it is apparent that IE9′s greatest potential lies in hardware acceleration. IE9′s hardware acceleration engine is the one to beat today. Firefox 4 is a solid and modern browser that, however, may arrive a bit too late. It delivers on its expectations, but it lost its excitement somewhere between beta 7 and beta 12. The browser is competitive, but Mozilla cannot waste any time with Firefox 5. Firefox 4 could possibly stop the market share bleeding, but it does not have the unique feature set and appeal to win users back from Chrome. Once there is a conclusive web app integration and the sync feature is much easier to use, we should see Firefox gaining traction again. View: Original Article Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mosaji Posted March 8, 2011 Share Posted March 8, 2011 The strength of FF over IE/GC is its addons and simplicityI don't think both the browsers could ever beat that factI would anytime settle for FF than IE/GC even if it is slower Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gabben Posted March 8, 2011 Share Posted March 8, 2011 The strength of FF over IE/GC is its addons and simplicityI don't think both the browsers could ever beat that factI would anytime settle for FF than IE/GC even if it is slowerGC has addons too, sometimes far more better addons than FF Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bizarre™ Posted March 8, 2011 Share Posted March 8, 2011 Alright people, let's just say each browser has their own perks and just leave it at that ^_^ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bashar Posted March 8, 2011 Share Posted March 8, 2011 obviously IE is better handling flash , and that's very important , for video and animation stuff the best thing about it i can use both for free :lol: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atasas Posted March 8, 2011 Share Posted March 8, 2011 Let me weird and completely unfairly dismiss IE only because it is made M$ :P I have not even tested it properly myself...shoot me! :evil: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
majithia23 Posted March 8, 2011 Share Posted March 8, 2011 tried IE 9 RC just a few days back ....dint go for a full throttle ride , though it seemed nice . esp than its predecessor IE 8 .but it stands no chance when compared to the Firefox ....>>>just look at it .....aint it so cute and adorable ....!!! :wub:who wouldnt want to have one ..!!!its Firefox for me please .... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darker_Than_Black Posted March 12, 2011 Share Posted March 12, 2011 Firefox rules :D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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