Firefox 3.6: is there any speed improvement?

hello all,

Have you updated your firefox to version 3.6 yet? If yes, have you noticed any difference in term of speed? For me, i could feel it a little bit faster and smoother.

 

Not really.... but i like it

 

Still starts up slow as hell compared to Chrome.

 

It might be smoother at scrolling - but that might be because its not a patchwork update but a new install.
(At least for me - taking across settings)

Any "speed improvements" - do you actually notice them? - I have a feeling you'd be limited by your internet connection first anyway.

And startup speed still hasn't improved.

3-4s on a SSD is way to slow.
Photoshop starts in 8 seconds, Dreamweaver in 8 - makes you wonder if there are some serious ability issues in the FF development team...

Instead of adding features that no one needs (this strange personas thing that I'm hearing about - and need and like are different) - they should focus first on the points that need fixing.
e.g. startup speed.

 

I'm waiting for the update to be detected... I closed a Firefox instance yesterday that I had used for just over a week. 755 MB memory usage... a new window take 55, ~140 after a short while of usage. Opera has no plug-ins and Chrome is just a bad idea, but Firefox needs to catch up.

 

Firefox takes about 1s to start on my machine and considering how much time I spent on it that's just fine. Plus all the extensions that improve it's abilities make it even better.

I find memory usage to be acceptable with FF, seems like you may have encountered a memory leak.

 

1s??? What do you run it on? 4 Intel SSDs in RAID? (so they form one drive - not sure which number it is)

 

Firefox 3.6 is much faster than 3.5.7. But still not as fast as Chrome.

On the T9300 and running Peacekeeper, Firefox scores 2759. This is better than the 2471 scored by a Core i7-920 running Firefox 3.5. In comparison, I got a score of 3250 running Chrome. The i7-920 running chrome scores 3865 (illustrating the difference between the T9300 and the i7). Despite the worse processor, Firefox 3.6 on my machine is still faster than i7 running 3.5.

The performance difference between FF 3.5 and 3.6 isn't just visible in benchmarks - it's noticeable in real world usage.

EDIT: Sorry, running a T9500, as in sig.

 

And how do you notice it? Text appears instantaneously in both cases...

 

I think the new Firefox supports asynchronous loading of webpage elements? (or something) IIRC, whereas 3.5 would have to download/display things in order, 3.6 can download things all at once.

It might be placebo - I'm running a T9500 (error in previous post) here, so we're splitting milliseconds - but pages just seem to finish loading much faster.

The Javascript engine has also been improved/faster, IIRC.

 

hm okay, here on an old machine with the samsung ssd and xp, the 3.6 is much, much faster. quite impressed

now i should find my laptop around somewhere

one could manually enable that on pre 3.6 firefox. i'm interested if they changed the default..

 

I definitely noticed it opening faster for me.

 

About 3 secs on a warm start.. Meaning that to start firefox the first time right after a boot is quite slow.. meh, i dont care... All the addons and my customizations makes up for it

 

When you click the firefox icon and I click the chrome icon, I'm already done looking at a webpage before your browser loads up.

 

LOL. Indeed. But, I am still using Firefox due to Instability of Chrome of some websites and downloads.

 

Agreed. I was actually using Chrome since it came out, then I recently went back to Firefox. Whenever I click on the icon, I find myself twiddling my thumbs waiting for it to load compared to Chrome, lol.

As for the speed, it seems slightly faster, maybe not at all and I may just be going nuts.

 

I don't know about opening speed... but once it's open, in my regular usage Firefox 3.6 is quite a bit faster than 3.5.7. It may not quite be Chrome speed yet, but this is a huge improvement.

 

Please start a Chrome thread and post your experiences there. Thanks.

 

No need. Just making a comparison between browsers in relation to speed (start up speed, to be exact).

 

It is noticeably faster than 3.5.7 for me.

I wish FF would just implement the multi-row for tab built-in already. I really don't want to install TMP just for that feature.

 

Start up speed on a browser has never been an important issue for me. I have been using FF 3.5.2 for about two Months after being an IE guy for ever previously.

And so far FF has been a gem (for me).

Suits my needs perfectly. The fact that once it has opened....it stays stable and gives me both a safe and pleasurable Web experience ...does it for me.

I will only upgrade to FF 3.6 if it's a "must do" thing.

 

My firefox just pops up right when i click on the icon, almost like no loading time.

 

Hmm, mine still needs its 3-4 seconds.

This makes me wonder - assuming they did improve something, maybe you have to fully uninstall it and reinstall after that...

 

I'm using an ssd, so maybe that's why. But your sig says intel ssd, so who knows. My 3.5 firefox was unisntalled like a month ago. Just installed 3.6 this morning. The only add-on i'm using is downloadhelper and adblock. I have superfetch on if that makes any difference.

 

Yepp, Intel SSD.

Now I completely wiped out my FF install using Revo uninstaller - then cleared out all temp files, rebooted - installed FF 3.6 again - faster - added my add-ons and it slowed down.

Restart (after it was open before) in about 2,5s ...

Edit:
I have more add-ons...

 

It sure feel' quicker and faster than 3.5... (not that I wasn't happy with 3.5!!!)

Also, the sunscript test gave the following,

1408.0ms +/- 5.6% (Firefox 3.5.7)

1167.2ms +/- 3.3% (Firefox 3.6)

* both test' run with 37 tabs open, and all addon' installed (except 5-6 which weren't compatible)

But I do miss some of my fav addon's I hope they bring out the compatible version' soon.

 

I tried chrome and it was too ugly. And anyways my firefox is so pretty.

 

yeah, you can save 2s per day of time compared to my firefox. rest of the day, i prefer the added functionality of my browser, which is why i don't care much about those 2 secs, thanks

 

Didn't sound like it was merely a comparison. Anyway, enjoy saving that extra 1-5 seconds by using Google Chrome - you only have 86 400 seconds a day, as I'm sure you know.

 

Chrome has add-ons as well, and MOST of the add-ons I use on FF are on Chrome, so I don't quite get the "added functionality" you are talking about.

Lol, no it just sounds that you got hurt when I "dissed" or made a slight pitfall of your beloved Firefox. Don't get me wrong, I still like FF and even use it from time to time...its just when I want to do look at something quickly, I will open Chrome. Plus, the fact that I can install a plethora of add-ons in Chrome (WITHOUT the need to restart the browser) AND not have it slow down my browser is obviously a huge advantage over FF.

 

No need for SSD, 3.6 starts up around 2sec max on my as well (with google as homepage)

 

Strange.... it takes 2,5s to restart on a SSD... removed completely and reinstalled after that...

 

well, a) i don't have to redetermine all my functionality in chrome by checking out their addons and b) their addon functionality is much less powerful than firefox and c) i know some of my addons wouldn't work on chrome.
but mostly, i know my stuff works the way i want right now. changing it to maybe get to the same point is not really worth it.

which is based on chrome being much less than firefox. but i agree that this can sometimes be a good thing.

then again, det and me checked out what might slow down firefox, and interestingly, it's adblock + easylist (+german easylist) which costs some seconds each boot.

without it, it opens in around 1.3 secs or so, here. granted, chrome is <1 second, but is that really that much gain? i'd like to see firefox get that speed bump just so i have no reason to look at chrome in envy at all

 

Chrome = do you trust Google to not spy on you?

Yeah, Chrome looks like Fisher Price.

 

I can't believe they still haven't fixed the slow Firefox startup. It seems like it takes a minute or two. I'm not clearing my history-- I WANT my history going back as far as possible.

It's a known bug so why can't they just fix it? It seems like it should be really simple to have it just look at fewer files for its randomization process
http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2009/07/workaround-for-firefox-3-5-slow-startups-on-windows/

 

I just restarted my computer and opened Firefox and it took all of a couple seconds. I really don't know why yours is so slow starting up. I have tons of addons too.

 

Apparently it builds some kind of random number for security functions by looking at the files in your temp folder. If your temp folder is empty it won't be slow

 

just create a new profile (firefox.exe -P) and check out if you can set it up like your previous one without having it slowed down. maybe your profile IS borked. maybe the only way to get it fast IS killing everything and starting fresh? i know, i don't like it as well. but so far, i had to do this, i think, 2 times in the history of firefox since the 1.0 release.

 

so if you have a lot of bookmarks (i mean many many), does that slow down firefox startup?

 

For me start up time is irrelevant. However it only takes a fraction of a sceond (almost instant) on a standard hard disk.

For normal internet use I do notice a speed improvement with firefox 3.6 over 3.5.5 (never used 3.5.7). Firefox 3.6 does appear faster to me.

 

not really, but if your database of bookmarks evolved from 1.0 towards 3.6, chance is high that it is messed up and corrupted by now, slowing down the process.

 

Well this Windows install is only 3 months old. Firefox has been slow since I first installed Server 2008 R2 and installed Firefox, but on XP it was fine. I thought it was a Win 7 only problem until I saw this Youtube video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cWzWil_h8s

 

Well I just upgraded since I found out the 5-addons I use got updated, and it feels the same. Maybe a bit faster! Oh well I cannot stand Chrome's UI ughhh. So I'll stick with FF for now I mean the speed difference isn't big enough for me to switch.

 

anyone that feels firefox is still quite slow should completely disable or uninstall adblock for a moment (not just 'turn off adblock' in the adblock menu, disable it in the addons list).

it could give you much speed gain. i switched from the easylist + easylist (de) to dr. evil + some lines of own blockers because of that. huge speed gains.

adblock + easylist == slow.


easylist (+de) = >6200 lines of filters, each has to get compiled into a regular expression (not that fast..), most likely by using javascript (not that fast as well).

dr. evil is ~900 lines of filters.

so it's around 7 times faster to initialize that filter list.

would be nice if one could precompile it in some form, though..

 

Raid 0 (10char)

 

anyone having problems running Ad Block Plus on 3.6? It works fine on my W7 machine but on XP it says add on incompatible

 

No problem here with ABP and FF 3.6 on any of my XP computers.

 

For anyone who's into speed but dislikes Chrome for whatever reason, Opera 10.50 might be worth checking out. It feels faster than Chrome (4.XX) on my netbook. I'm using both Firefox and Opera 10.50, though I have IE and Chrome installed as well.

 

thanks for the info. i too was noticing that FF was loading pretty slow on my ssd drive. i went ahead and disable adblock and then noticed FF opening up much faster then before. I try switching from the easylist + easylist (de) to dr. evil and for some reason it goes back to easylist.

 

Anyone else has problem loading pages on Firefox 3.6? My Firefox won't load any pages at all, it was even extremely slow/almost cannot load a page stored in another computer in my LAN. I have to resort using Chrome for now. It happened suddenly two days ago, and I didn't install/uninstall any extensions during when the problem occurred. I feel like I actually have to use my back-up browser more than I use my actual browser (FF). I reported this problem to Mozilla and still hoping for a reply.

I really hope to fix this problem because Chrome is lacking in functionalities for me, some extensions I need don't exist in Chrome yet and some which do exist aren't as powerful as their FF counterpart.

Again, extensions are the main reason I'm into FF. I've used to be a loyal Opera user years ago but back then it has too much rendering issues (I don't know about now) and the extensions FF was offering is enough to make me switch.