The dust hasn’t even settled on Chrome’s release and already Mozilla is feeling the pressure. The company today released a series of benchmarks showing Firefox 3.1 will be faster than anything Google can muster with Chrome.
Chrome is running V8, an open source Javascript engine, which Google claims, is faster than anything currently offered on the Web. And based on our tests of Chrome, we tend to agree.
But in the upcoming release of Firefox 3.1, which should be available by the end of the year, Mozilla will employ TraceMonkey, a new engine that according to one of its coders, Brendan Eich, will easily eclipse even the fastest instance of Chrome.
To prove it, Mozilla tested Firefox running on TraceMonkey and compared it to Google’s Chrome beta using its own benchmarking solution called SunSpider. According to the company, Chrome was 28 percent slower on Windows XP and 16 percent slower on Windows Vista.
Mozilla is quick to point out that TraceMonkey has only been in development for a few months and will only get better before it’s rolled out later this year, but the company has a vested interest in seeing Firefox come out on top in its benchmark testing, so all figures should probably be questioned, to say the least. And the same goes for Google’s five benchmarks.
For now, Chrome is the fastest browser in the market and anyone using both Firefox and Chrome will find that out quickly. But once Firefox 3.1 hits the Web, we’ll find out if Chrome has what it takes to stay on top after TraceMonkey becomes Mozilla’s engine of choice.
Wow, I see there is going lot of pressure out there. I just tested how fast Chrome is – FireFox has the reason to worry! I`m making big article too about Chrome features and how it will resemble to Firefox. Nice article!
And my words already come true?
I already said that Mozilla would be coming back with things that can be totally challenging to Chrome! And here it comes.
Not sure what all the hype is about, Chrome has crashed for me twice already and seems to be very slow on initial page loads.
And now you still sticking out with Chrome or shifting back to your previous web browser?
I am happy with Firefox as the Chrome offerings are not something I am currently interested it. I love the Gears concept and I think web-kit is awesome, but I will be a late adopter of those technologies.
Polling on who is going to wait for Firefox 3.1 or switch to Chrome today.
You should stop marketing Chrome because it has the biggest allowed spyware ever. It lets you surf and in exchange through its unified tool-search bar it can destroy domain names and brands, and it can stole all your content with your help.
Read EULA. It is quite interesting.
Interesting. I can see how it would affect domain names, but brands? Can you really lump those together?
You should do some research, the EULA is going to be changed.
Chrome is way faster according to our tests..
http://www.2020systems.com
Dhuude, just run the numbers. Or just fire up Gmail. Or anything Javascript heavy. The numbers speak for themselves. Firefox wouldn’t be pre-announcing if Chrome wasn’t burning a hole in the Internet. The real loser is IE8. Four times the footprint at 360MB vs 80 MB for Chrome. I think FF3 is around 92MB. I don’t really care about the wars because it is over for me. My Gmail, Maps, Picasa, and Docs are singing, thank you very much.
Just look at these results for SunSpider.
http://kourge.net/node/122
or these Javascript benchmarks. you can run these on your own machine if you go to google.com/chrome by only clicking one button.
http://www.paul...rome-benchmark/
This is great news. Browsers are finally focusing on the two things that really matter to most users when they’re using software (though they often don’t realize it): speed and stability. I can’t wait to see this play out in the long term.
Me too…And now the quest isn’t between Google(Chrome) vs Microsoft(IE8).
It’s actually between Google(Chrome) vs Google(Mozilla,but just for the deal sake)…At the end,Google lies in a Win-Win situation
good Ol’ Browser Wars! Man! This brings me back! *thems where the days!
Honestly I’m disappointed by Chrome and am not sure why all the reviews are so amazing and seem to hail it as the second coming of Jesus. Sure it has a great UI, and I’m a sucker for aesthetics, (the only reason why I’m running Vista is for the prettier version of spider solitaire.) but that seems to be all there is.
It’s not considerably faster. If anything it seems to load slower, and certain sites just don’t load, but load fine in FireFox. Was also getting some strange DNS errors, Chrome was having difficulty resolving hosts. It either didn’t load at all, or took forever.
I’m back on Firefox now.
Run the benchmarks. Or just fire up gmail. Or any Javascript heavy app. Then stand back. C’mon gang, look at the numbers.
Do you not read people’s posts or do you just spew spam? No freaking way…you’re telling me that the Google browser loads Google applications faster? Get outta town.
When the pages I’m interested in are loading twice as slow (yes, like tech blogs) and other pages are failing altogether, I’m going to give it a pass. You want some good bugs, try using it behind a proxy server. Portals like Yahoo and MSN will take upwards of 10 seconds to load a URL. Running Javascript isn’t the only thing a browser does.
Well, what did you expect? Proxies make everything slower, even with fireproxy or similar addons on firefox.
I think you might be overstating the case with words like “fighting”. There’s a lot of discussion about how both types of JS JIT have merit (tracing vs. Chrome’s) and how some methods have more headroom than others.
If anything, Google is creating an incubator of sorts where advanced browser concepts can show up and gradually migrate to FF and Safari. I’m guessing IE will continue to live in a silo, however.
So let me get this right. Google basically keeps Mozilla in business through their deal to make Google the default browser in Firefox. Then Google launches their own browser, Chrome, which may just steamroll Firefox on it’s way to steamrolling IE. Does this seem crazy to anyone else?
Not really. What Google bought with Firefox is to make Google the Default Homepage and Search of Firefox.
2: By releasing Chrome, Google fired up the competition and this will encourage Firefox, Opera, and Safari (at least for the Windows platform) to do better than they already are.
3: At the end of the day, we have 2 FLOSS Browser in the Windows Platform (not counting the variations of Firefox of course, which are considered under the Firefox banner) – means a win for us
4: WebKit now have to take in comments, updates, etc. from Google, since Google is also using WebKit
5: Which will make Gecko and Opera’s layout engine to step up their efforts to compete with the combined Apple+Google WebKit layout engine
6: Keep IE out-of-the-picture, leave them behind, unlike:
7: Opera and Safari, who are more open (not the source code) to the competition and cares alot about the users AND webmasters
See for example CSS3 :p
Personally I don’t see chrome steam rolling IE in the near future… 25% of internet users are using IE6 – a browser created in 2001. Why? Because it came with XP.
Firefox’s next release is going to be as fast as chrome, and to me even *now* the additional speed of Chrome is not worth it. Most of the firefox users I know are pretty savvy and install loads of third party add-ons, and these addons create lots of value for the firefox platform. If chrome wants to compete in this market (one with fairly savvy internet users) then it will have to offer something similar.
One of it’s coders? Brendan Eich is the creator of Javascript.
Yup, same guy.
unfortunately from a developer’s perspective nothing much changes. One has to design applications that work with any browser that is more than 10% of the userbase. As far as we are concerned, the best features we can release are the ones IE6 can support.
Chrome means one more browser to ensure compatibility with, which is a nightmare in this Ajax world. Google should have improved the gears plugin to provide this power to all browsers, and sites could get users to install the plugin. A much better solution.
I have yet to see anything great. It will take more than a .5 sec load time decrease to stray people away from there broad array of Firefox plugins.
To be fare both chrome and firefox 3.1 are in a pre release stage at the moment so as far as chrome being the fastest in the market its not. So I’m sure chrome will still speed up as will FF before their final realse.. EG I can’t even run chrome on Linux yet.
Microsoft should backup or buy Mozilla
You cannot buy what has been open sourced – Damn dude!
Not only that, I’m sure the Free Community will be really angry.
todd..
get y.our foot out of your mouth!!
sure you can buy an “open source” company. or did someone forget to tell that to sun, when they purchased mysql???
in fact, mysql, firefox, or anyone could choose to simply put a line in the sand, and say from that day forward, they’re no longer going to have a “free” open source version of their future code.
you’d be completely free to pick up the current codebase, and start your own company around it!
peace…
I am always confused on the open source purchases, didn’t Novell buy something open source? and didn’t Sun purchase mySQL?
Or am I all wet?
You can buy the company, but jesus I cannot believe I have to explain this, once computer code is released under an Open Source license that’s it, Sam. There isn’t anything to “sell”. RTFL
They can buy Mozilla Corp. But will anti trust allow it ? I mean 95% of the browser market under one company. No chance
Who cares! Chrome is here now and it’s bad ass!
Agree to this!
Suck a dick
I can see that Mozilla is feeling the heat! Just using Chrome in the last day it can already show that this is the first step for the next web generation.
Speed is what matters most nowadays. And Mozilla needs to realize that if there’s one thing that FF doesn’t have it’s speed. I can compare FF to Vista. Completely bloated and a HUGE memory hog.
Once more Google is doing everything right.
Of course Chrome is not perfect, and the BETA subtitle points to that, but it’s on the right direction, for sure.
I do not know why, but Mozilla’s behaviour on the last few days resemble Microsoft a lot.
Starting from scratch, Google’s does not have to worry with legacy code as FF does. And the FF team must realize that their coding standards are completely crappy nowadays.
So, yes, Mozilla needs to be worried.
Unfortunately not everyone using Windows can use Chrome. It seems terribly incompatible with certain popular Antivirus software (and uninstalling it isn’t an option for many people who are under IT lockdown; it requires an IT admin password to uninstall in some cases).
Check out the growing Google Groups thread about it: https://groups....60b78ca6a2bcfe4
I agree the lack of add-ons for Google Chrome make it lag behind Firefox, but surely this will only be a matter of time before there is something similar for Chrome.
I also think Firefox may start to lose out on some of the users that would ordinarily be switching from IE to Firefox.
Good! Now we’re seeing a real Browser War here. It’s time to forget about the existence of IE. Today it is about Chrome vs Firefox vs Safari vs Opera vs Konqueror – those 5 only and their variations.
seriously :p
By the end of the year, it COULD all be too late for Firefox to release a faster 3.1 version of their browser!
Over thousands of people ‘found’ my review of Google Chrome yesterday and there’s coverage of it everywhere – mostly very positive.
By the time FF3.1 launches, Chrome will have captured a massive share of the market.
Also, are we sure Google Chrome won’t get faster with additional releases / fixes?
Jim
http://www.thetechnewsblog.com
FF is so yesterdays news that it hurts to read these Mozilla PR. Like watching a very old pet.
Go Google! Chrome FTW!
As a web developer we always checked that things worked fine on Mozilla and IE, we didn’t give a damn of how it looked for Safari (Webkit)… now we’ll have to do that as well… the web will grow at 1/3 of how fast it could grow if we only had Firefox. Sucks that they didn’t use mozilla. They stabbed in the back their Firefox buddies and all the web developer community (in a way)
You don’t really have to check it against WebKit, most of the time, the layout engine mentioned is the most W3C compliant of all. If it works under Gecko (Mozilla and others) and Presto (Opera – Proprietary), it will surely work fine and might even be better in WebKit. That is the edge of WebKit and I believe that is the reason why Google chose WebKit over Gecko, GtkHTML, KHTML (the FLOSS layout engines other than WebKit).
Yeah, just listen to JC here, no need to test anything before you deploy, just trust that it will all work out.
Competition breeds better products. I hope FF can pull it off.
Opera stays on top with Acid3 test.
Bye,
Alex
http://www.contido.com.br
Firefox has just got a big help from the new Zend Framework at least for us developers. With the new framework, firebug and firephp (an extension for firebug) you can dump error logs directly to the firebug (which still being way superior to the javascript debugger that Chrome has). If Firefox can came up with a faster and less memory consuming browser, Chrome might not stand a chance at least in the developers world.
Dear php boy,
Your language + framework of choice represents a very small percentage of all web development done. Better yet, web developers represent a smaller percentage of all users browsing the web. Your words are the words of the stupid. Please refrain from clicking any more “Add Comment” buttons.
Love,
your moms
AcctionScript is at least 50% faster on non UI tasks then .js on chrome, and more than 10X on UI tasks, and it runs on all browsers, including ie6, and next version does HW acceleration. And all the fonts always look the same on all browsers engines. .js is just pita, a way to hang on dhtml.
Fast, better, ….but at what cost?
Anybody else find this clause in the Chrome EULA to be disturbing?
By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.
Meaning they can use work without paying you a dime. More here -> http://tapthehi...le_s_EULA_Sucks
I prefer Chrome’s simplified look and feel (a breath of fresh air) but I don’t notice a speed difference. If someone came out with a Firefox theme that matched Chrome I’d add it in a heartbeat and wouldn’t even think of giving up my extensions.
What really strikes me about the graph above is Vista’s time lag. Even the slower javascript on XP beats out the faster javascript on Vista. Why is an operating system affecting javascript so much? I’d love to see Linux and Mac OS X added to this chart
The browser is very important to the evolution of web based applications. There are basically 4 browser engines, Mozilla, Microsoft, Opera and Web Kit. They all will continue to improve and push each other to improve. Competition is a good thing. What Google has done is to bring Web Kit for fully into the race in a way that Apple really failed to do with their Safari for Windows. Google now has two of the four horses in the race and this demonstrates how important the browser is to their future.
Microsoft has a vested interest in slowing the transition to web-based applications by failing to implement key features in their browser. Chrome further marginalizes IE in terms of mind-share and accelerates the day when web-based applications will give up on running on native IE without plug-ins needed to make up for it’s short comings. When that day arrives and everyone can use features like Canvas and HTML 5 offline access (or Gears) the browser as a platform will really come of age.
In the interest of accuracy, there are four rendering engines used in today’s most popular browsers: Gecko (used in Mozilla, Firefox, Flock), Trident (used in IE and browser shells like AOL and Avant), Presto (used in Opera), and WebKit (used in Apple Safari and Google Chrome, namely). Those are not the only four rendering engines used these days (poor Linux – you neglected it altogether!), and those are not the only browsers each rendering engine is used in (with the exception of Presto, which is used only in Opera) but that covers the basics, I guess.
I think Mozilla shoud not be afraid of the new Google Chrome.
Google Chrome´s competitor is IE, like the Firefox´s one and the Opera´s one. It is the one that has more users.
JS bla bla bla… what Firefox needs is faster HTML-rendering…
Be all that as it may, at least FF doesn’t try to claim copyright to any and every file that I send through my browser.
Google has perverted the normal understandings.
I gave quite a bit of thought about this why not Google continue to encourage Mozilla instead of having its own browser. Here is what I figured.
Firefox increased the market share quite a bit to 20+% in the past two years. However it is not able to enter into average Joe’s mind .
I am in software enginering field and many of my friends and collegues still use IE. After many attemps to convert them, very few of them started using firefox. Google wanted to use its brand name to push firefox with the deals, it helped firefox a but but still not much.
Google wants to kill IE, and sees this is not happening in near future with Firefox.Google is a nerd company, it appeals to avergae Joe where as firefox is still seen as nerd’y. Google wants to cash this to their benefit and created their own browser. They know firefox is already good and takes a while for Google to reach to that point (I see chrome is lil bit faster but when installed it crashed my outlook and firefox – still a long way to reach a stable point). Still Google knows all the Google-crazy world will download the browser and will give it a chance to kill IE’s dominance some day.
The response is a perfect example of why TechCrunch’s focus on Chrome taking down MS is overblown and typically, breathlessly over hyped. The first target is Firefox and it is far more vulnerable because, for one, they depend on google for their livelihood and secondly because the kind of people who switched away from IE to firefox are the exact same people who will again switch to Chrome. If Chrome takes off Firefox marketshare will drop way faster than IE’s because the remaining 60% is obviously pretty stubborn. Once it comes to OS X safari is vulnerable too because speed is its greatest feature and it seems chrome bests even that.
Truth. I really don’t see FF or Chrome (or Safari) as denting IEs position. Those that haven’t switched to FF are unlikely to switch to Chrome. So the competition is for those that are willing to try a new browser. My guess is FF and Chrome will share the 40% that switched.
This is a no-brainer for Google.
They pay Mozilla roughly $50M per year. For less than half that amount (probably more at Google since they are bloated) you can likely finance Google Chrome development. If they can eventually knock off Mozilla and at the same time move them up the OS layer, then it makes sense for them to do it.
On speed, it is faster than Mozilla, but Chroma has some major bugs. Some sites trigger a massive amount of hard-drive activity for no apparent reason. Shut down Chrome, and it stops. Not sure what it is but its annoying as hell. They’ll fix it though. In 1 year they will have 10% market share.
I think no matter what I will sticking with Google Chrome. The UI is easy, does not strain the eyes and isn’t busy.
Firefox and Internet Explorer are both great browser don’t get me wrong. All I am saying is once a new browser is introduced there is bound to be some controversy or some sort of comparison. And my comparison result is Chrome is much faster and user intuitive than Firefox. The facts only.
chrome is faster than the others, i like it but i cant change with mozilla now. Also i want to google toolbar with google chrome
As usual, new competition will be great for the browser. With open source, everyone benefits. I’m also wondering where the Safari will stack up when they release their new JS engine.
A Chrome browser without atextensions is useless. Example: One of my login iMacros saves me about two minutes each time I run it! So why should I care if a browser renders 1/1000 second faster?
well, “the browser war” is ON again!
Now I know why microsoft “forcefully” pushed IE 8 on my machine few days back !
Although I’m as excited as anyone about the browsers fighting on speed, it’s really unfair to say:
“For now, Chrome is the fastest browser in the market and anyone using both Firefox and Chrome will find that out quickly.”
because the Firefox version that is slower is released and the Chrome version that is faster is beta. If you compare stable, released code, Firefox and WebKit destroy Chrome, since Chrome *doesn’t have* a stable, released offering. And if you compare unstable nightly builds, FF and WebKit are pretty competitive, since both of them are concentrating on JS performance already.
Once again, I’m psyched about Chrome/V8 and Firefox/TraceMonkey and WebKit/SquirrelFish fighting on speed, but let’s compare apples to apples.
I installed and tried chrome the only thing that stopped me from continue using it is the non-availability of the tool bar option…. I personally found individual tabs working much faster than FireFox.
However when I started the browser with MS Outlook at the background (downloading 200 mails) the browser just froze completely… Firefox though slow managed to open all the previously set tabs.
I’m pretty confident that the idea is to keep the pressure on the other browsers so that they deliver what Google really needs: stability so people don’t get pissed, speed so people don’t get bored, and security so people trust more and more that buying on the internet is OK.
From Mozilla’s reaction, it worked. We should all be very happy with it, IMO.
In the end, we win. Not MSFT, GOOG or anyone else. The user wins.
Those benchmarks are only for javascript. They don’t benchmark drawing XHTML or rendering regular hypertext.
Most people have missed the point I think. First the application is in Beta, early beta at that. There does need to be some add in function in the next version. However most of the issues I have found with it is applets, games, etc are not designed for it yet. The point is we have a real challenge to the standing leaders. I am quite courious what systems they tested them against? As far as running it on linux, if you want to beta it on linux one is going to be released soon. I think velioncho has made a good point, most people dont understand that the mosaic web browers is the core to most current browers. This brings a new technology into the mix, does two things forces the others to improve, add new features, and rethinks the way we do computers. Microsoft & Apple have one thing in common, Greed, this has been their undoing. As a computer professional I support all current OS systems on the Market, and likewise their browsers. The induction of this new tool, will drive all others to add their best features into the code, just as IE has added “applets” in version 7 & Beta 8 has added more Firefox code. As far as testing this on L inux if you dont want to wait to have the beta, and you know linux, you can do one of two things, wait or try a recompile of the code (how you extract the code is up to you, I like repack software) . Either way though, I am benchmarking this on an HP 2c/dp, 2.11 with 2 g dimm, 1 Gig Rdy Boost, Vista pached to current standards (a must). I am compareing it IE 8 Beta, IE 7 Current, Firefox (stable) Firefox ( unstable release- working open code) , and have tested against all current standads. I think the new features are a welcome move, I find the same results I have seen other professionals post, response times faster, load times faster, features need worked on. As for others switching, from IE to Firefox, or this, or anything else. You will always have hold-ons, people who are afraid to change. I remeber the fight we had to get people to switch to XP from NT4.0 , funny part is the same arguments they are using for vista were used then, and with 3.0, and 2.0..etc. People fear new, always want to use the old and try to hold on to software that is out of date. This is a fresh view, fresh software, lets move forward and take the best of what it has to offer, and the others will improve for it.
Here are some unofficial benchmarks comparing the two, in addition to IE8: http://lifehack...hich-is-fastest
Where are the standard error bars?
Just sayin’
Overtime there would be decline in Mozilla’s market share, that’s inevitable.
New features would first make it to Chrome, for example, support for DB in a browser first came to Gears then to HTML 5 (Draft spec) and Mozilla FF..More on my blog about Chrome here: http://tinyurl.com/6owq9t
Anand
http://www.byteonic.com
Chrome is a great simple browser with tabbing. I’d load it up for my grandmother to use.
But I’m sticking with firefox. I like using my plugins. The speed difference isn’t that noticeable to be an issue right now.
Great post about why Chrome and its developers suck: http://www.osne...sidered_Harmful
I tried Chrome and found it a bit frustrating. One thing I wanted to view was a web page I made stored locally on my PC. In IE or Firefox I could easily find a way to access my file just by using their drop-down menu but not in Chrome. Eventually I got to it by first typing “file” in the address bar along with hard drive and file folder name before I got a page with links to my files.
After getting to the file and running it, the Javascript code wasn’t working properly in Chrome but was fine in IE 6, 7 and Firefox 2, 3.
Maybe it’s a code problem or a Chrome problem. I suspect the latter so one needs to be less enthusiastic about this browser. Better speed is great but lets wait and see how things pan out once it’s been tested in the wild more.
This is getting more and more interesting, competition is all what we need and faster updates
I bet the usage of the word *Chrome* on the web / or the search of that word in past two days must have broken some kind of record..
But I’m saddened by the fact that very few are talking about IE8 Beta 2 (http://www.micr...ta/default.aspx), which has, believe it or not, more or less all the features that Chr0me boasts of.
* Tab-crash resistant – each tab in a different process
* Private sessions
* Omni-bar
et cetera..
Sad that Microsoft doesn’t know how to publicize their products well
but the general Microsoft bashers should give IE8 Beta2 a look..
Wonder what would’ve happened if Microsoft had release a geeky explanation of IE8 on a comic book format…
Dear Don you’re wrong saying “Chrome is the fastest browser in the market”, i think you never really tried Opera