I have a version of Firefox that is faster than Firefox itself. Don’t believe it? Still guessing? Yes you read it right. How fast Firefox performs on your computer not only depends on your computers performance but also on how tailored Firefox is for your particular hardware.
Let me describe. People all over the world use Firefox. These users have computers and operating systems from MacOSx to flavors of Linux. Some run Firefox on Windows 98 and others on Vista. Beyond the operating system its the hardware on which everything rests. Some have a Pentium-III and others have a Pentium IV. Some have a memory of 256MB and others have a huge 4GB. Thus Mozilla builds Firefox to run on a variety of computers out there so that everyone can use Firefox.
What if Firefox was custom built to your particular CPU and even operating system? Wouldn’t it perform faster? The answer to that is a definite yes. And that’s exactly what I did this weekend. I compiled Firefox for particular CPUs and optimized it to run specifically for Windows. I built two specific versions one for Pentium III and other for Pentium IV. Not only that, I also optimized them according to the real world uses so that it performs the best when the end user uses it. I further went and ran some benchmarks on them to find out which performs faster. Here are the results.
What else? You want these optimized Firefox packages, don’t you? Check under the software section. In case you want to know the build options used just type “about:buildconfig” (without quotes) in the address bar.
Disclaimer — I’m not responsible for any loss or profit caused by these special distributions of Firefox. Use at your own risk. You can report issues to me but these are still unsupported.
Enjoy the faster than Firefox releases!
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{ 6 comments on A Firefox Faster Than Firefox… read them below or add one }
nice, a 0.23% speed boost
i’ll definitely notice that
excellent
Are you going to release colorful tabs for firefox 3 ?
my results, not optimized: http://tinyurl.com/63ny8f
“Total: 2818.6ms +/- 2.4%”
Seeing as my current install is horribly bloated, I’m thinking I could squeeze quite a bit more out of it. I might try the self-compilation thingy myself once I upgrade from XP to Ubuntu. XP can’t properly handle a quad core* or even see all 8 GB of ram
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*Not that Firefox knows how to either.
uhh…. the difference isn’t statistically significant, is it?
optimized build: 5295.6ms +/- 1.7% which means 5205.6 to 5385.6 ms.
unoptimized build: 5306.4ms +/- 0.9% which means 5258.6 to 5354.2 ms.
the confidence interval of the unoptimized build is a subset of that of the optimized build, so the math says that a claim that one is faster than the other is invalid
sorry to burst your bubble
The benchmarks are done under strictly controlled conditions making several observations and averaging their readings. I don’t know how you claim the optimized builds to be slow. But one thing is certain — it’s definitely a fight for miliseconds — that’s what tweakers and overclockers crave for.