Firefox 8 is faster than Firefox 5, equals Chrome 14

Firefox hightly

According to our own benchmarks, start up, session restore, and first paint — how long it takes Firefox to appear after you click its icon, and how long it takes to re-open your previous tabs — have been continuously tackled since Firefox 7 first emerged, about two months ago. There’s a 10% difference between Firefox 5 and 7 — and a further 10% speed-up between FF7 and FF8. This isn’t merely an under-the-hood, synthetic-benchmark, on-paper thing either: the difference between FF5 and FF8 is very, very noticeable.

On the 2D canvas front, the huge 20% speed-up is due to the addition of a new graphics backend in Firefox 7 called Azure, which is a unified 2D graphics API that Firefox can use across every platform. At the moment, Cairo handles the interface between Firefox and the host OS’s 2D rendering libraries. Cairo’s performance on top of Direct2D (Windows 7/Vista) is excellent, but it’s not great on either XP or Mac OS X. Azure removes the Direct2D and Quartz (OS X) go-between and allows Firefox to write directly to the underlying 3D subsystems (Direct3D and OpenGL). At the moment, the performance gains are around 20% on Windows — but on OS X, the gains could be even higher. You can follow the Azure implementation on Bugzilla to keep up with the latest changes.

3D WebGL performance has also improved by around 20% between Firefox 5 and 8, but this won’t be because of Azure; it’s probably just the result of further tweaking to make WebGL less insecure and to ready-up for primetime. Finally, Firefox 8 is considerably faster at JavaScript execution, posting benchmark results that are about 15% faster than Firefox 5 (FF8 vs FF5).



Download links:
Firefox 8 (Nightly) or Firefox 7 (Aurora)