Firefox 3.5: The need for speed

All throughout the testing phase of Mozilla’s Firefox 3.5, we’ve been tracking the often very granular, very minor speed tweaks that developers have been making to the browser — a one percent improvement here, a two percent dip there. And some of our readers have been wondering why. With computers that are already fast enough for many consumers, will it matter much that Google Chrome completes some operations in two blinks of an eye versus Firefox’s three blinks?

We posed those questions to two of Mozilla’s browser engineers: Senior Director for Platform Engineering Damon Sicore, and infrastructure developer Vladimir Vukicevic. Their answers include items we can share with you directly, and demonstrate to you explicitly.

A few percentage points here and there is the complete difference between whether some of the browser’s new functionality works fluidly or doesn’t really work at all. One test you can see for yourself is on one of Vukicevic’s test pages: a high-contrast landscape photo complete with sliders that control the photo’s relative brightness and contrast. Live image manipulation isn’t particularly exciting, especially for folks who see this sort of thing in Paint Shop Pro.

Full Story: Beta News