Firefox vs Opera

I don't know whether it is something that has to do with web panel design or not, but when I'm accessing panel with Opera it is faster than with Firefox. Anyone also experience this thing ?

If not... It maybe a quite useful information. The difference speed is quite significant really.

Dino

You should try with safari, it's even faster.
Or slower if you are on PC, because it's buggy there :-(

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You should try with safari, it's even faster.
Or slower if you are on PC, because it's buggy there :-(

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So... there is indeed a difference access speed between browsers ?

Is Safari available for Win2K ? But I'm on PC :P

Never mind... will check the Safari site.

Thanks for the info moua

Dino

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Is Safari available for Win2K ? But I'm on PC :P

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I am not sure about Win2K, the Apple download page only mentions WinXP and Vista, but you could give it a try.

http://www.apple.com/safari/download/

I have installed it on my WinXP box, and although Safari is fast at rendering, I much prefer Firefox and IE7.

My main gripe with Safari on Windows is that Apple have decided to bypass the Windows font rendering/smoothing system and implement their own. To me, the fonts in Safari look 'heavy' and blurry, I prefer ClearType.

Having said that, having Safari available on Windows is definitely handy for testing purposes.

Mark

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So... there is indeed a difference access speed between browsers ?

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Differences between browser speeds are mostly to do with the settings of the browsers. For example, you can increase the browsing speed of any Gecko-based browser (like Firefox) by tweaking the settings in about:config. The exception is Internet Explorer, which is nine kinds of bloated shite whichever way you look at it.

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I am not sure about Win2K, the Apple download page only mentions WinXP and Vista, but you could give it a try.

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I have, and it works !

Have compared it also with Opera, and still Opera operates on panel faster than Safari on my Win2K box.

Dino

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Differences between browser speeds are mostly to do with the settings of the browsers. For example, you can increase the browsing speed of any Gecko-based browser (like Firefox) by tweaking the settings in about:config

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At first I don't get you... after looking at Mozilla wiki, I just embarassed that I didn't know that for about 3 years I'm using Mozilla Firefox.

Thanks for the enlightment Simon.

Dino

You are right.

I've set max http coonection per server anpersistent to 4x times the regular and it's a lot faster.

As long as CPU is fast and internet connection too, it's faster on about all website (try neowin.net with and without for instance).

But if you have a 56k it doesn't change anything ;)

Rendering is maybe faster on opera and safari, but if cpu is fast enough, you don't need that.

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I've set max http coonection per server anpersistent to 4x times the regular and it's a lot faster.

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Those two are the real keys to faster browsing - it's almost always about overcoming latency rather than the actual cpu hoggishness of the browser - though I do find it useful to have multiple cpu cores for when one of my processes goes runaway!

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I do find it useful to have multiple cpu cores for when one of my processes goes runaway!

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That is one of the first things I noticed when I upgraded to a Core 2 Duo. The software that came with my HD-TV tuner occasionally decides to get itself into some sort of loop and locks the CPU at 100% usage. On my previous P4, the system would become totally unresponsive when this happened, making the task of shutting down the process frustrating. However, on the C2D only one core goes to full usage and the system stays responsive, making it easy to shutdown the errant process.

As for browser speed; I think it is a case of 'perceived speed'. When I moved from IE6 to Firefox, the first thing I noticed was that IE6 'felt' faster at rendering pages than Firefox. After a little experimentation, I discovered that both browsers were basically taking the same amount of time to render a given page, but IE6 was buffering the page contents and rendering the whole thing at once, while Firefox was rendering each page element as it was pulled down. This created the perception that IE6 was faster (well at least to me ). A little tweaking of the 'nglayout.initialpaint.delay' setting in Firefox fixed the issue and now both browsers appear to render at the same speed to me.

Mark

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A little tweaking of the 'nglayout.initialpaint.delay' setting in Firefox

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Where does one find that setting Raz? I've had a look for it in about:config and there is no sign of it, maybe it has been removed from FF 2.0.0.4.

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Where does one find that setting Raz?

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It's not there by default, just right-click on the about:config page and select New -> Integer, call the new value nglayout.initialpaint.delay, then give it whatever value you require.

Mark

For a list of firefox performance preferences, see http://www.vector64.com/PerfPrefs.html

Some areas where firefox takes a performance hit:
- It doesn't take advantage of -O2 and -GL compiler optimizations
- Firefox is really an environment where you can build browsers so there is some performance cost to the flexibility of the platform
- Firefox doesn't take advantage of SIMD instructions in modern chips
- Firefox doesn't take advantage of Profile-Guided Optimization in VS2005, mainly because they're still using VS2003 to build the release versions with.

Some reasons why Safari may be faster:
- I suspect that they use Intel's optimized multimedia libraries.
- I suspect that they use Intel's compilers which may provide better compiler optimization.

There are third-party builders of Firefox (that's the nice thing about Open Source) that produce Firefox kits using more advanced compiler performance options and code optimizations to produce a better-performing browser.

Internet Explorer and Firefox both are available in 64-bit native versions for those running 64-bit versions of Windows. The x86-64 architecture adds 8 general purpose registers and 8 vector registers which can improve processor IPC and therefor browser performance.

You can speed up FireFox if you want. Just search in google how to speed up FireFox.

I use FireFox because of so many useful plugins.

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