Review: Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 no speed demon, lags behind Chrome

"Disney.com (not one of my

"Disney.com (not one of my favorite sites but a good test of load speed) took 30 seconds to load in Firefox 3.1 and 25 seconds in Chrome."

Whoa, those are seriously high load times, I'm on a college campus, mid afternoon on a rainy weekend, and Disney.com loads in, on average, 3.7 seconds over four trials. I'm using Firefox 3.1, too.

If it's taking you 30 seconds to a load a webpage on a 2 meg connection you've got some bloatware issues dude.

I realize my rig is very sick but 30 seconds? Really?
Core i7 920 on Asus P6T Deluxe
NVIDIA 8800GT
3gb RAM
500GB WD HDD SATA

Not my experience

In my experience FF 3.1 beta works as fast and perhaps even faster than Chrome. Something must be wrong on your side. BTW, on my computer at least, gamespot.com loads in about 2.5 seconds from hitting the enter key.

Give Firefox a chance to show its speed

As Mozilla had always prioritize reliability and compatibility over speed and features, it has disabled its more-than-lightning speed TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.

You can turn it by changing the value of javascript.options.jit.content to True in about:config

Apple's SunSpider (from WebKit) shows that Firefox 3.1b1 is 3.6 times faster than Chrome after enabling the TraceMonkey engine.

that is when Firefox is fully-featured browser while "Krom" is a stripped-down browser.

Chrome? Please

Try Loading nba.com on chrome and then you would realise that speed is not everything. Chrome is still work in progress so really comparing it to FireFox 3.1 beta is like comparing two faulty printers.

Firefox 3.1 beta

Yes, I agree Firefox is slower in compare to Chrome. But another fact is, Chrome is in very early mode 0.2. In Chrome 1.0 lots of new feature will be introduce. Also we use lots of addons in Firefox.

We want features first, if 2 product gives the same features then we go to compare its speed but as of now Chrome is not full featured browser. It is a preview of actual Chrome 1.0.

A couple of points. "It

A couple of points.

"It seems Mozilla has not included beefed up JavaScript V8 support in this release"

V8 is the name of Google's JavaScript technology so you shouldn't expect it to be included in Firefox. :)

Mozilla's equivalent is called TraceMonkey (TM), it's disabled by default in this beta. You can enable it by going to about:config and filtering on "jit" then enabling those two properties.

"Adrian Kingsley-Hughes pointed out that Google has a benchmark app available online for testing JavaScript."

TM doesn't currently work on this benchmark (AFAIK it will before 3.1 final), to compare V8 to TM you can try Apple's benchmark suite (where TM does work if you've enabled it):

http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html

"There's also support for CSS 2.1 and 3.0 properties, which is a little "heh" so far."

Many people have been pushing for browsers to adopt the latest web standards (especially allowing custom fonts on web pages) so seeing you so casually dismiss this is a little annoying.

Thanks.

3.1b2

Beta 2 is out, please update article.

the new firefox sucks.. i

the new firefox sucks.. i used to be able to have like 9 tabs open, all running fast.. i could switch between em no problem. the new firefox though eats up so much resources its disgusting. anything over 3 tabs open and its lagggggy as f**k. oh and if you're trying to watch movies, video clips, or even stream music- best of luck. I will be switching over to chrome tonight, i have had enough of the firefox bullshh with this release. oh and before it gets mentioned i went into the about config and its set up for max speed, still sucks.