Firefox 4 with lots of speed improvements and inline SVG

barredo · on July 1, 2010

Just installed the Beta on OSX. It's Fast. I mean: Chrome fast.

natmaster · on July 1, 2010

Keep in mind the Jaegermonkey project, which will greatly improve javascript performance is still under heavy work. So as of today, the javascript performance is still significantly behind chrome. (http://arewefastyet.com/)

That being said, javascript performance currently has little impact on user-perceived speed, and the "Reducing I/O from the main thread", GPU accelerated rendering, and startup/shutdown perf improvements are already causing incredibly noticeable perf gains.

barredo · on July 1, 2010

I didn't mean Javascript. Although it is better than 3.6.x — I meant the application. It loads fast, it's light and robust. It feels incredible

Groxx · on July 1, 2010

That being said, javascript performance currently has little impact on user-perceived speed

Especially now with workers. I'm still hoping for OpenCL-for-JS, though. That would revolutionize the web & gaming.

Sadranyc · on July 1, 2010

Could you post the link for the download? I can only find 3.6.4 build 7

mbrubeck · on July 1, 2010

Firefox 4.0 beta 1 is not released yet, but it probably will be within a few days. (There was a candidate build yesterday, but we decided to wait for a second build with some more fixes.) When it is actually released, it will be announced on http://blog.mozilla.com and available from http://mozilla.com/firefox/all-beta.html

For now you can download the latest nightly "Minefield" build from http://nightly.mozilla.org/

See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases/Firefox_4.0b1 to track progress of the release.

Sadranyc · on July 2, 2010

Thank you very much for such an informative comment.

jmillikin · on July 1, 2010

My current install of Firefox (3.6.4) supports inline SVG -- there's a demo on Mozilla.org at < https://developer.mozilla.org/presentations/xtech2005/svg-ca... >. The URL suggests this demo was published in 2005.

What's special about inline SVG in Firefox 4? Is it hardware-accelerated?

e: and this inline SVG demo < https://developer.mozilla.org/samples/svg/swarm-of-motes.xht... > says it works in Firefox 1.5!

ZeroGravitas · on July 1, 2010

The first link you give is to an SVG document, the second is SVG in namespaced XHTML.

SVG (and MathML) is now part of HTML5 so you can put it in HTML documents. Firefox just replace their HTML parser with a new one which is faster, runs on its own thread, understands HTML5 properly and supports SVG inline in HTML as a feature too. This blog post goes into some details:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/05/firefox-4-the-html5-parser-...

mbrubeck · on July 1, 2010

SVG in XHTML - works in almost all browsers: http://limpet.net/test/svg.xhtml

SVG in HTML - works only in Firefox 4: http://limpet.net/test/svg.html

euroclydon · on July 1, 2010

What an absolute blast of new technology for the browser! I've got to believe it's going to open a whole slew of new attack vectors though.

cookiecaper · on July 1, 2010

I don't have very high hopes for Firefox. They promised V8-like speed with 3.5, 3.6, and now they're promising it with 4.0, but they're still more than twice as slow, and have been every single time I have tried them.

The only reason I use Firefox anymore is Firebug. All of my normal browsing occurs in Chrome. Even if they eventually get Firefox's VMs as fast as V8 or SquirrelFish Extreme, the interface is clunky and old and much, much slower than Chrome, and really that's what makes it feel so much faster; Chrome starts immediately, I can move tabs quickly, there's no needless address bar/search bar segregation, and so on. I think I am a permanent Chrome user.

Firefox has had years to catch up to Chrome by this point and their results have been pretty bad, imo. Unless they can get it together, I think that Fx is destined to decline permanently soon.