Saturday, April 9, 2011

TenFourFox Final vs. Beta 12

On the TenFourFox development blog, the 4.0 final release came with a caveat that a last minute bug fix caused a 10% to 15% slowdown in javascript performance (stability wins over speed). This bug wasn't present in the betas, just the release candidate. The developer then released another quickie update that he said largely corrected the speed hit, so I wanted to check out which was faster, the last beta (12) or the updated final release (4.0s).

I tested both browsers with Sunspider and here were the results (lower number is faster):

Beta 12 - 7392.0 ms
4.0s - 7724.3 ms

Yeah, I know, but I'm on a Sawtooth. Cut me some slack.

Then I went over to Dromaeo, and the results were (higher number is faster):

Beta 12 - 18.89 runs/sec.
4.0s - 16.78 runs/sec.

So in Sunspider, the beta's javascript performance remains about 4% faster than the final, and slightly faster still in Dromaeo, though these results aren't always absolutely consistent when repeated. However, the beta was consistently very slightly faster.

So should you use the beta instead of the final? Well, the final had security fixes, but I have a need for speed so I'll stick with the beta.

Danger is my middle name.

Addendum: Lest you think the final release is some kind of slouch, it still beats the pants off Firefox 3.6, whose Sunspider score was 18786.2 ms, a full two and a half times slower. So if you're using Firefox 3.6 and not TenFourFox, then you probably haven't read this far yet 'cause your renderer is so slooooooooow.

4 comments:

  1. maybe offtopic, but would you reccomend Camino G4 version or Tenfourfox for my Imac g4 800 ? Thanx

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  2. TenFourFox will use more RAM than Camino, but it also has a newer rendering engine than Camino. So if you have only, say, 512MB of RAM, Camino would likely be your choice. Of course it wouldn't hurt to try both and compare.

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  3. Thanx a lot for your reply! Currently I have 512 MB ram in this awesome imac lamp I bought, and I ordered another 512 sodimm which I will install...

    I am fiddling around quicktime and vlc and such trying to achieve acceptable video playing , and learning around the forums to maximize its potental and your site I stumbled across this morning seems like a goldmine :)

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  4. Hi... I´ve found your blog looking for a way to play HD videos on my Powerbook G4 in a decent "non-slideshow" way. Well, i´m not able to do that yet, but thanks to you i´m right now using TenFourFox, and it rocks! Far better than Firefox 3.6, faster and smoother, it´s now my default browser. Thanks to this blog, too, i can now watch youtube videos perfectly with Mactubes, and i hope to find here a lot of useful and well done soft for PPC in the future. When first Apple and then Mozilla, and then everybody else, started to stop supporting PPC, i felt cheated. I really love my Powerbook, i bought it five years ago, tired of Window's bugs and problems, and i wanted to buy the best non-windows laptop i could afford, so the Powerbook seems a great choice, with an incredible design, a 15 inches screen, usb, firewire and supervideo ports, and of course, Tiger (i've tried Leopard and the lack of classic support made me discard it). It´s a wonderful machine, it costs me an important amount of cash and it isn´t out of date (my old AMD Duron with Windows had the half processor speed and ram and i could watch a fuckin youtube video on it perfectly) so what´s the point? The point is that they (Apple) doesn´t want to provide us of support, they want us to buy a fucking Intel Macbook made of plastic, or, if you want to come closer to the quality of a Powerbook, a fucking Macbook Pro, which i can´t afford. So, it seems we have to grow up and keep for ourselves and really learn to "think different", and this blog is a great place to start to do that.

    Sorry for my english, i know it´s bad... i´m from Argentina.

    Keep up the good work, it´s really useful!

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