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.
Firefox beta 3.1 | 20-Oct-08 at 12:42 am | Permalink
Wow, It’s great I love to see these new changes