I make no secret of that I am a big fan of the Firefox web browser. Except of a few things that I will name later I am/was always impressed by the speed improvements that are made over the past few years, which seems very important to me, because many pages you use in you daily life are more and more based on heavy JavaScript functionalities. A few days ago I decided to give a try to the newest development version of the Firefox – named Minefield – and make some tests.

Building

Instead of using a nightly build I decided to to compile it by myself, which was not that hard. If you like to do it yourself could simply follow the instruction on that page: Simple Firefox build. I used slightly modified the mozconfig file in hope to get the best performance:

. $topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/objdir-ff-release
mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS="-j4"
ac_add_options --disable-tests
ac add_options --disable-crashreporter

Testing

As performance test I used the Sunspider JavaScript Benchmark from the Webkit developers. To make it short, here are the result for 3 versions of Firefox:

a

time in milliseconds, faster is better

time in milliseconds, faster is better

Results

When I switched from from Firefox 3.0.x to the 3.5 branch of Firefox I was really amazed by the performance boost gained through the new JavaScript engine Tracemonkey. As the results above show the next Firefox releases will get another boost. Good news!

P.S.: Other things I like Firefox for is because of all the very useful add-ons, I hardly could imagine a day as a web-developer without the use of Firebug. AdBlock saves my nerves every day. Linkification, TinyURL generator and Greasemonkey are just a few other I really like and needed to be named here.