The New Firefox 3 Everywhere

BrendanW, commented on our Firefox 3 Download article. He has got a very good analysis capability. I liked his analysis so I’m putting his analysis as an article rather than a comment. This is what he says:

Even as an avid and vocal Opera user, I have to admit that it seems Mozilla did a very nice job with the new version. While the verdict isn’t out on many of the performance benchmarks, it is doing significantly better than FF2 did. As an example, FF3 is currently besting Opera 9.5 on the memory usage benchmarks with regards to single/small amounts of tabbed browsing. Opera has been the king of having a small memory footprint for quite some time, but it looks like Firefox has made huge leaps in that department.

The verdict isn’t out yet on whether or not its a good thing, as some are suspecting Firefox to be using more hard drive access and more CPU usage. After that, some are also arguing Opera still provides better performance for its memory, as it is saving into RAM the immediate history of your current tabs (to make forward/backward navigation faster). At any rate, both of them are significantly doing better than Internet Explorer 7 in terms of performance; your move Microsoft.


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One response to “The New Firefox 3 Everywhere”

  1. BrendanW

    Hi Sanix,
    Thank you for the kind words.
    For those interested in further reading, and so I can give credit where credit is due, here is a great sight monitoring the ‘browser wars’.
    http://avencius.nl/
    The two articles of note are:
    http://avencius.nl/content/firefox-3-vs-opera-950-memory-usage
    http://avencius.nl/content/firefox-3-vs-opera-950-performance
    Although you have to fish through the ‘fanboy’ comments, there are also some well-informed posts where I draw my impressions from.
    I’ve been significantly spoiled since the beginning of Tabbed browsing. My friends and colleagues often comment on the number of tabs I have open. I’m only doing some light browsing right now on Opera 9.5 and I have 12 tabs open. I keep around 5 tabs that are never closed (mostly email, and forums that I regularly read), plus my browsing takes me to many places. Therefore, one of the statistics that I hold in high regard is the “Multiple tabs performance” test. Opera still won this handedly according to Avencius as indicated by the following metrics:
    – Firefox: 0-41-49% (low, avg, high), switch tabs has a delay of ~1s.
    – Opera: 0-29-41% (low, avg, high), switch tabs has almost no delay.
    Great to see both browsers did very well with their releases. Firefox was downloaded ~11.7 million times in two days, while Opera reports 4.7 million downloads in the first five.
    -BrendanW