Firefox 3.1: raising the bar

October 3, 2008 8:13 pm | 1 Comment

Last month I released UA Profiler – tests that automatically measure the performance characteristics of browsers. The thing I really like about this tool is that the web community generates the data. Anyone can point their browser at the site and run the tests. So far 1000+ people have run 2000+ tests on 100 different browsers.

One of the things that UA Profiler revealed was that a regression occurred between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3: Firefox 3 no longer cached redirects. I just found out that in the latest Firefox 3.1 dev builds, called “Minefield 3.1” in its User-Agent string, this regression has been fixed. As a result, the UA Profiler results now show that Firefox (Minefield) 3.1 has taken the lead capturing 9 out of the 11 performance traits measured. Chrome, Firefox 3.0, and Safari 4 are tied for second with 8 out of 11. Internet Exporer 8, Firefox 2, and Safari 3.1 all have 7 out of 11. Opera, IE6, and IE7 have 5 or fewer of these important traits.

I expect Firefox 3.1 and Chrome to soon come out with parallel script loading. If Chrome adds support for prefetch links, they’ll be tied with Firefox 3.1. Internet Explorer 8 has ground to make up, but I do credit them with being the first in the pack to support parallel script downloads. It’s great to see browser vendors raising the bar when it comes to performance.