Until only recently, Mozilla Firefox was the only browser alternative to Internet Explorer. In the years since its introduction, Firefox users – from the most causal internet surfer to web development and design experts – have come to agree that the Firefox browser has improved dramatically on the usability, interface aesthetics, speed and Internet standards-compliance of web browsers. Firefox has raised the bar for all web browsers.
Since then, dozens of alternatives to Firefox have appeared on the market. Many of these browsers are passable knockoffs, some are decent rivals, some even attempt to surpass Firefox for the top spot. The question now stands: does Firefox still represent the ideal of a perfect web browser?
With each new version of Firefox, Mozilla has announced major improvements to its JavaScript management engine. We love bluster as much as the next feller, but we had to put all that talk to the test. The result, without being amazing, manages to still come off as compelling: 694 ms on SunSpider. This is a much better result than the older versions of the browser, which is encouraging, but in the context of this web browser comparison, the showing is rather lackluster. Compared to other web browsers tested, Firefox is on the low end in terms of javascript management.
Tests for HTML5 also show rather average results overall. With 6.7 frames per second test vector (on average), 5.15 in the simulation game (the worst score …) and 12.19 for the dynamic text (the best of the low scores, surpassing IE9 only barely, with 12.35 images), While Firefox shows potential in this area, the browser is slowed by issues affecting the rapid display of dynamic graphics.
As for memory consumption, Firefox results are interesting. Firefox consumes 154 MB to 1 MB of RAM while browsing web pages. Interestingly, this is the exact same result as our tests six months Firefox 7 version produced. What’s surprising is that despite this lack of improvement, all the other browsers were still far more memory-intensive, allowing Firefox to maintain the top spot this area. Go figure.