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It has been a very chaotic week. Earlier yesterday Mozilla had announced to postpone the release of Firefox 11 due to the upcoming security updates for Windows. Pleasantly it changed its mind overnight and released the brand new Firefox. There few shiny features. But few of them mark critical milestone for the very popular open source browser.
“Firefox releases so often that I don’t care!“
Many still dislike the six week rapid release cycle which was announced by Firefox to catch up with Chrome. To alleviate them Firefox released a ESR (Extended Support Release) that is Firefox 10. This release is for those who do not want to update their browsers every now and then. The neat point about this release is that it will be supported for 46 weeks. It will receive the security updates of the newer Firefox releases but no new features mind you.
Download: Firefox 11 [15.4 MB]
So what is new in Firefox 11?
- There is a new 3D inspector in Firefox if your PC supports WebGL. Firefox also adds handful of new features for developers including a new Style Editor. The 3D inspector is really cool.
You need a decent Graphics Card to have smooth 3D view. Also do not forget to turn on hardware acceleration
- Firefox now can import Bookmarks, Cookies and Browsing history from Google Chrome. This is extremely cool for those of us willing to migrate after getting on our nerves with heavy memory consumption of Chrome.
- Firefox now supports SPDY protocol. Another very critical achievement, though Chrome had implemented it long back. SPDY results in page loading to be much faster along with reduction in network connections and CPU required. On enabling SPDY we enabled very fast page loading times. More info on SPDY here.
SPDY is disabled by default in Firefox. To enable it, go to about:config and set network.http.spdy.enabled to true
- Firefox now supports add-on sync. Good god I can not exclaim more about the amount of time it saves for those using Firefox in multiple computers. Mozilla took annoyingly long time to implement this feature which is already present in the form of Google account sync in Chrome.
Firefox 11 vs Chrome 17 and other Browsers
Memory Consumption
There were times where Chrome was very light weight and Firefox was accused of notorious leakage. We at TechSplurge noticed the opposite trend starting from Firefox 8, and since then have witnessed massive surge in the memory consumption of Google Chrome at the same time when Firefox seems to be performing better and better. Just like the previous test we had opened the following sites
- YouTube, playing a 360p Video : Flash performance
- OMGUbuntu! and Phoronix (Linux Blog Sites) : for static content
- Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Google Reader , Google Plus Home page. : chosen due to heavy and very dynamic content.
- TechSplurge Home Page and an article page : WordPress Performance
Last time, Chrome had consumed around 1.15 GB of memory and the latest Chrome iteration is even worse in that regard consuming around 1.45 GB of memory. Firefox 11 was pleasantly consuming just 360 MB of memory while churning out all the tabs. At this point, for anyone who does not want their memory to be wasted, we would seriously recommend Firefox 11 now that it has support for SPDY protocol as well.
[note] The huge memory consumption by Chrome may be due to buggy integration of Flash within Chrome. Remember, Chrome uses customised version of Flash while Mozilla uses stock flash shipped by Adobe [/note]
Benchmarks
We pitted the latest iteration of Firefox against its predecessor and other major browsers, including Chrome 17.0.963 which was not released when we were reviewing Firefox 10. The other browsers were, Chrome 16, Opera 11.61 and Firefox 10.0.2. The benchmarks we performed were again
Kraken JavaScript Benchmark showed regressions in both Chrome 17 and Firefox 11 with slight decrease in performance. However, Firefox 11 was marginally better than Chrome 17 . Though, Chrome 16 is the overall winner in this test.
Coming straight to the point, Chrome 17 was invincible in Google’s Benchmark. Firefox 11 was at par with its predecessor and showed no improvements. Remember v8 is Google’s own benchmark.
When it came to Sunspider Benchmark however, Firefox 11 stayed at par with Firefox 10 beating Chrome massively. Chrome 17 has regressed quite a bit this benchmark compared to Chrome 16.
Hardware Acceleration Stress test Scores remained constant across all the browsers with every browser apart from Opera 11.61 scoring above 60 FPS.
Concluding
Without much flashy features, Firefox 11 with Chrome Import, Add-On sync and SPDY support is a crucial release for Mozilla. With the really low memory consumption just being an icing on cake. At this junction of time, it has been a really disappointing experience to witness the increasing bloat in Google Chrome, which was once the fastest AND lightest browser. Not to mention that that Chrome was hacked within five minutes recently 
. You know which browser to choose now, dont you?
Download: Firefox 11 [15.4 MB]
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“Chrome was hacked within five minutes recently
” – that was a 0-day exploit (the company had been sitting on the info until the contest started, so they knew just what to go after), and had to do with plugins, so whether it was a Chrome bug or not is contentious. Not sure if they got the prize or not.
I love Firefox, and would recommend it to anyone over Google Chrome (or even the free and open source Chromium), but I like it because it’s a great browser and doesn’t have the same Google ties, not because of some theoretical security bug that’ll be fixed anyway.
Good point ,
but many users have migrated to Chrome just because of this “sandbox” feature. I had mentioned this to alleviate the notion that Chrome is simply more secure than Firefox.
I have seen many raving about Chrome’s apparent “security”.. so had to mention this
“The huge memory consumption by Chrome may be due to buggy integration of Flash within Chrome.”
Isn’t that…a bug in Chrome then? If they’re shipping their own customized version of Flash, then it’s effectively their responsibility. It seems silly to shirk responsibility for bugs based on that.
Hi Ted.
Flash is notorious for its terrible performance (even on Mac and Linux). Integrating it directly with the browser might definitely not be a great idea. That was the point i was trying to make
Flash is a plague, honestly. I would love to see it die asap. It was not so long back one of the most vulnerable products ever produced. Flash is around only because still many old sites use it.
Well, my 2cp.
As for Chrome security? Yes.. Chrome *is* more secure than FF, it simply is.
The very fact that it was such noteworthy news that it got hacked should be evidence enough for this, as it was the first time that a hole was found in their sandbox. This is *not* to say that FF was somehow weak in security, but it is definitely a notch beneath Chrome.
As for the memory? This is a different story. I have been a Chrome fan since its launch, and am now jumping ship for 2 reasons: memory and bugs.
Speaking of bugs, amazingly, you did not mention the bugs in the latest version of Chrome.
Chrome 17 suddenly stopped being able to handle magnet links… at all. Then there is their .svg support which just took a massive dive. Now, today, it has started simply suddenly closing on me, and when relaunched it states “Chrome did not shut down properly”. Every day, it seems, I am finding bigger and bigger problems with this release… and these bugs seem to persist between Windows and Linux (so I know it isn’t a virus, or an OS incompatibility).
I *like* chrome more than I do FF. I like the way they allow you to customize your search engines such that you can assign hotkeys for various searches (like YouTube, Hulu, etc. etc. etc.). I hate the way FF tabs scroll off to infinity and you need to scroll them over to find them all. I JUST LIKE CHROME BETTER.
It is a shame that I have to jump ship and run with FF until they start getting some of this stuff worked out.
well said steve.
. Chrome has way too many issues with Windows. I get weird 0×2222 error when i open new tabs..I am still waiting for official Firefox x64 builds…
I am running chrome(ium) on my Arch linux setup and i tell you its flawless… well apart from the high memory consumption… Actually in Linux, Chrome is the only way you can get flash as Adobe officially dropped flash support for Linux . Firefox is a weird tale. In Linux (Arch or Ubuntu ) I can open 100s of FF tabs without any lag in performace.. though i would use tab grouping to my aid (which is a BRILLIANT feature in FF actually).. But in windows it gets a bit laggy after 50 tabs. But all this is for a reason. Chrome and Firefox have official 64 bit builds for Linux from years now
Chrome feels fast, but even if you are a someone who is just not happy with 4 – 5 tabs, Firefox is all the way to go. It bogs down your memory and CPU in ways that makes me feel pity for Chrome Devs
I recently move back to Firefox, and download FF11, it is fantastic, reason why is due to Chrome 17 CPU usage keep hitting 100% and froze my PC end up I need to reboot to fix it. It seems to be happening whenever I play netflix which use Silverlight.
Syed I use a handy little app called process explorer (I got it free on CNET) to shut down my browser when these browser freezes you mention occur. It saves having to reboot.
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