Everybody needs to remember this is just one review and it is an opinion. We all know opinions are like a _ _ holes everybody has one and they all stink.
W7NI
Mozilla today released the Beta 7 of Firefox 4. We had a chance to take the browser for a test drive through our benchmark parcours and compared it to IE9 Beta and IE9 PP6. The result: The ball is in Microsoft’s field again as Firefox posts huge gains in JavaScript performance.
Mozilla did not have an easy time lately. The critical feature freeze release was 57 days late, but finally showed up today. There are high expectations and, of course, we were interested, whether Mozilla would be able to keep them.
Features
We won’t spend too much time on the new features. You can head over to one of our previous articles to get all the details. In short, the Beta 7 now features a new password manager, a fine-tuned panorama tab manager, an URL bar that shows link destinations as well as the JaegerMonkey JavaScript engine. Over the first few hours with the browser, we found all features to be working well. Beta 7 is a much more stable and mature browser than Beta 6 from hat we can see now.
A First Performance Test
Beta 6 was not exactly the speedy Firefox we hoped for, so the expectations for Beta 7 were high. We prepped our regular Dell XPS 7100 test system with a Phenom II X6 processor (2.8 GHz) and took the browser through all 30 tests. We would have loved to provide comparison data of a dual-core system, but were confronted with an especially stubborn IE9 Beta/PP6.
Microsoft has made impressive advances with IE9 Beta and it is a much better browser than IE8 was. That is, of course, if you can get it up and running. We are testing web browsers on for different platforms and were able to install it only on two. The browser simply refused to install on a brand new, vanilla Gateway notebook with i3 processor and 4 GB of memory. It single-handedly killed the Windows Vista SP2 installation on our Intel quad-core system. We believe that Microsoft has a serious issue here.
The installation problem on the Gateway NV59C with Windows 7-64 is a major concern for us. Neither IE9 Beta nor IE9 PP6 could be installed. IE9 Beta starts the installation routine, but pauses and tells us that we have to “go online and install the required update(s)”. Can anyone from Microsoft explain to us why the installation routine can’t fetch the updates (nicely called “pre-requisites”) itself? It obviously knows that something is missing and likely knows what is missing so why doesn’t it download it and install it? Even worse, the installation routine of the first of the three required updates crashes Windows 7.
We would have liked to provide a comparison test result on a dual core system and not just on the hexa-core system. We will do this at a later point in time as soon as Microsoft finds a way to provide a normal installation routine for its browser.
This is not how you release a browser. Not even a beta browser. Never before have we seen a similarly confusing and aggravating installation routine. Microsoft needs to fix this one.
The Results
JavaScript
Firefox 4 Beta 7 is a much faster JavaScript browser than Beta 6. The performance gain is more than 30% in Sunspider (down from about 460 ms to 290 ms) and is ahead of IE9 Beta (368 ms) and IE9 PP6 (331 ms). In this specific test, the new Firefox is nearly three times as fast as the current Firefox 3.6.11 (841 ms). Beta 7 also showed substantial gains in Celtic Kane and Google V8 and posted a new record score of 7960 ms in Kraken (which compares to 19,309 ms of IE9 PP6 and 16,296 ms of Firefox 4 Beta 6 and 21,076 ms of Firefox 3.6.11). According to our combined test result, Firefox 4 Beta 7 is now 192% faster in JavaScript than Firefox 3.6.11, while IE9 PP6 has an 89% advantage and IE9 Beta is 51% ahead.
Offline web page loading
We did not observe any substantial gains or losses in web page loading performance and Futuremark’s Peacekeeper. Firefox 3.6.11 is still among the fastest browsers when it comes down to pure web page loading and actually outpaces IE9 Beta by about 2%. PP6 is 2 % ahead of Firefox 3.6.11, while Firefox 4 Beta 7 is about 11% ahead.
HTML5
IE9 Beta remains the fastest HTML5 browser as Mozilla has not made any changes to its hardware acceleration engine in Beta 7. Across our Asteroids game test, HTML5test.com and Microsoft’s Potato Gun test, IE9 Beta posts a 406% advantage over Firefox 3.6.11, followed by 393 of Firefox 4 Beta 7 and 386% of IE9 PP6.
Flash
IE9 Beta also remains a better Flash browser than Firefox. It is about 9% faster in GuiMark 2 than Frefox 3.6.11, while IE9 PP6 posted a 7% advantage and Firefox 4 Beta 7 was 2% ahead.
The Bottom Line
Firefox 4 Beta 7 shows a dramatic speed increase in JavaScript performance, while it does not reveal significant weaknesses in web page loading, Flash and HTML5 when compared to IE9 Beta. The result is a huge gain. The Beta 7 is, across all benchmarks, 102% faster than Firefox 3.6.11. IE9 Beta is 57% faster and PP6 67% faster.
Without doubt, Firefox 4 Beta 7 is a milestone release and incredibly important for Mozilla. It effectively outmuscled IE9 as of now and Microsoft will have to come back with major JavaScript improvements to match Firefox 4. As of now, it seems that Mozilla could take Firefox 4 within 10% of the JavaScript performance of Chrome 9 and Opera 11, while it has an edge in hardware acceleration over Chrome and especially Opera. The downside of Firefox 4 Beta 7 is pure web page loading performance, which is well behind Chrome, according to our most recent data. Chrome 9 loads our nine web pages in about 7300 ms, while Firefox needs 12,069 ms.
In total, Firefox 4 shapes up to become one of the best updates in Mozilla history. Given the strength of Microsoft’s IE9, this update arrives just in time.
