Firefox 8 May Catch Up to Chrome for Speed

We’ll see… but I am, at least, hopeful!

Firefox 8 is 20% faster than Firefox 5, matches Chrome 14

“Firefox 8, which only just appeared on the Nightly channel, is already 20% faster than Firefox 5 in almost every metric: start up, session restore, first paint, JavaScript execution, and even 2D canvas and 3D WebGL rendering. The memory footprint of Firefox Seven (and thus Eight) has also been drastically reduced, along with much-needed improvements to garbage collection.

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.”