Google Chrome Vs Firefox 3.1 (Minefield)

The browser wars are pushing browser technology to progress much faster than before. For example, a lot of work has been put into boosting JavaScript performance. Under Google Chrome or Firefox 3.1 (Minefield), web pages load incredibly quickly. One of the industry standard JavaScript benchmarks is SunSpider. This is a side by side comparison of the two running on my computer:

Google Chrome: Total: 1138.8ms +/- 0.9%
Firefox 3.1 (Minefield): Total: 984.6ms +/- 1.4%

You can see that Firefox is overall just over 10% faster than Chrome on this particular benchmark. Both of these versions are beta status.

For reference:
Firefox 3.1 Minefield) (JIT off to simulate slightly older versions of Firefox): Total: 1899.6ms +/- 0.7%
Internet Explorer 7: Total: 23412.2ms +/- 2.4%

Both Chrome and Firefox 3.1 are over 20x faster than Internet Explorer 7 at JavaScript in this benchmark. That's a pretty big improvement over last generation browsers. ;)

Firefox 3 Is Out!!

<-- (typical Firefox 3 user... you can tell by her chest... like the front of her shirt, I mean...)

I've been using the betas and release candidates of Firefox 3 for a while and I haven't gone back to 2.x since. Even though I don't use a lot of the new features, the browsing experience simply feels faster and the browser supposedly uses less memory, especially when having many tabs open. Typically I have at least 3-4 tabs open when I'm not really surfing the web. I keep Gmail and a couple of news type blogs open all the time. When I am looking things up and stuff, I can easily pass 10 tabs open, so more memory efficiency is a very welcome thing.

Go get Firefox here! They are trying to set a record for the most software downloads in one day, so grab it today to take part in the record attempt.