The developers at Mozilla have set next week as the tentative rollout window for the first public beta of Firefox 3.6 -- the first edition of the organization's big fixes for 3.5 where it's accepting analysis and advice from the general public. Betanews tests this week on a late version of the 3.6 beta preview, close to the organization's planned code freeze, indicate that users will be visibly pleased by what they see: Generally faster JavaScript execution and much faster page rendering will result in a browser that's almost one-fourth faster than its predecessor -- by our estimate, 22.78% faster on average.
Betanews tested the latest available development and stable builds of all five brands of Web browser, on all three modern Windows platforms -- XP SP3, Vista SP2, and Windows 7 RTM. Once again, we threw the kitchen sink at them: our new and stronger performance benchmark suite, consisting of experiments in all facets of rendering, mathematics, control, and even geometry. Like before, we use a slow browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, the previous version, running in Windows Vista SP2) as our 1.00 baseline, and we produce performance indices representing browsers' relative speed compared to IE7.
Averaging all three Windows platforms, the latest Beta 1 preview of Firefox 3.6 posts a Betanews CRPI score of 9.02 -- just better than nine times the performance of IE7. Compare this against a 7.34 score for the latest stable version of Firefox 3.5.3, and 7.81 for the latest daily build of the Firefox 3.5.4 bug fix.
Betanews tested the latest available development and stable builds of all five brands of Web browser, on all three modern Windows platforms -- XP SP3, Vista SP2, and Windows 7 RTM. Once again, we threw the kitchen sink at them: our new and stronger performance benchmark suite, consisting of experiments in all facets of rendering, mathematics, control, and even geometry. Like before, we use a slow browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, the previous version, running in Windows Vista SP2) as our 1.00 baseline, and we produce performance indices representing browsers' relative speed compared to IE7.
Averaging all three Windows platforms, the latest Beta 1 preview of Firefox 3.6 posts a Betanews CRPI score of 9.02 -- just better than nine times the performance of IE7. Compare this against a 7.34 score for the latest stable version of Firefox 3.5.3, and 7.81 for the latest daily build of the Firefox 3.5.4 bug fix.