The “Break it Down” Blog

(Author’s Note: No, using a half topless woman is not a cheap gimmick to get you to read this article… it’s… art… with boobs… so technically, it’s boobs-art. Whatever, you wouldn’t understand, you aren’t as artistic as I am)

Grant Gochnauer and Marc Chung sent in a slew of benchmarks for the nightly builds of Firefox 3 (post Beta 3) that are showing some insane performance improvements to the browser.

If you are a big  Firefox 2 user and can’t stand the piggish nature of the browser, you are in for a surprise it seems.

The first benchmark provided the following numbers (no machine specs given):

1. Firefox 3 Nightly (PGO Optimized): 7263.8ms
2. Opera 9.5.9807 Beta: 10824.0ms
3. Safari 3.0.4 Beta: 18012.6ms
4. Firefox 2.0.0.12: 29376.4ms
5. Internet Explorer 7: 72375.0ms

That’s almost a 4x increase in speed over the Firefox 2 release.

Marc then sent in some additional stats from other folks that ran the benchmarks, and they are looking like:

Machine Specs: WinXP (SP 2), Core2 Duo 3.0 GHz, 2GB RAM

1. Safari 3.1 Beta (525.7): 2575.2ms
2. Firefox 3 Nightly (02/27/2008 build): 2719.4ms
3. Firefox 2.0.0.12: 13087.6ms
4. Internet Explorer 7: 20844.4ms

Not too shabby at all, over a 4x increase in speed on those machines specs.

Overall Firefox 3, combined with the updates to the JRE that we are going to see integrated directly into Firefox 3, hopefully Java in Firefox will stop being fucking useless, bloated and randomly stop working (even if you reinstall the JRE over and over again).