Mozilla has been working desperately to stay alive in the browser wars and Mozilla Firefox 3.6 is an improvement over Firefox 3.5 but only just. In the battle for JavaScript rendering Firefox 3.6 is 15 % faster than Firefox 3.5, three times as fast as Opera 10 and over four times as fast as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8.
Sadly, the Mozilla browser cannot compare to the browsing giants Safari and Chrome. Apple’s Safari browser is twice as fast as Firefox 3.6 and Chrome is almost at the same level. Between the two giants, Safari is only 6.5% ahead of Google’s Chrome browser according to the last benchmark test that was held between the two by Computerworld in November 2009. It is ironic that Firefox has been beaten at its own game as it was Mozilla about two years ago that was proudly parading the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which boosted JavaScript performance.
Mozilla’s push is a continuing trend in the browser wars; even Microsoft has woken up and announced an expected performance increase in the upcoming version of IE. According to Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft’s president of Windows and Windows Live, IE 9 will give Chrome and Safari a run for their money. Based on the surprising stability and optimization of Windows 7, this bodes well for IE users.
On the Acid3 benchmark test, Firefox 3.6 scores a respectable 92, only beaten (obviously) by Safari and Chrome who both score the maximum 100 points. IE can only manage 24 points.
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