Introduction
Mozilla Firefox is a world famous internet browser. It has a vast usage share in the browser market, second only to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Today, I’ll do a review on the latest version of Firefox—Firefox 5.
It seems that Mozilla is expediting the development cycle of Firefox. For just three months after Firefox 4 was released, Firefox 5 final is available now. The latest version of Firefox has tons of improvements plus performance enhancement compared to the former version. It also fixed several issues that the former version had. The main changes in the Firefox5 are listed as follow:
Added support for CSS animations;
The Do-Not-Track header preference has been moved to increase discoverability;
Tuned HTTP idle connection logic for increased performance;
Improved canvas, JavaScript, memory, and networking performance;
Improved standards support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL, and canvas;
Improved spell checking for some locales;
Improved desktop environment integration for Linux users;
WebGL content can no longer load cross-domain textures;
Background tabs have setTimeout and setInterval clamped to 1000ms to improve performance;
Fixed several stability issues;
Fixed several security issues.
Test platform
CPU AMD Athlon 64 939 3000+ at 1.8GHz
Mobo Abit KN8 NF4 standard
RAM Infineon DDR400 512M*2 Dual-Channel
VGA XFX HD4650 512M DDR2
HDD WD6400AAKS 7200RPM 16M Buffer
OS Windows XP Pro 32bit with SP3
Sample1 Firefox 5 en-us
Sample2 Firefox 4.01 en-us
Net 2Mbps ADSL plan
Graphics User Interface
Firefox 5 doesn’t bring anything new in terms of GUI. It stays the same simple and neat style GUI as Firefox 4.
Start-up time
In this section, I’m going to measure the start-up time of the browsers by using a little software called PassMark AppTimer (in short: PMAT). I set the windows dection method of the PMAT to WindowsNeam and inputed a keyword into the Windows Name block. The little software will record the start-up time of the browsers.
The test results suggest that Firefox 5 takes a little bit less time than Firefox 4.01 to get started.
Page loading time
In this section, I’ll measure the loading time of the homepages of 6 different websites via the help of Numion stopwatch. Each website will be tested 5 times in order to reduce measurement error. I’ll clear the caches and cookies before I start and repeat each test.
The two browsers perform largely the same and Firefox 5 is slightly faster than Firefox 4.01
Javascript performance
I’ll test the Javascript performance of the browsers with the aid of JavaScript Progressive Raytracer(JPR in short). JPR provides two test options: Basic Render and Full Render.
As you can see in the above chart, Firefox 5 outperforms Firefox 4 in this test. Well done, Mozilla.
Benchmark
I’ll do this part of the review with a website called Peacekeeper. Peacekeeper is a free on-line browser benchmark presented by Furmark. It helps you to measure the general performance of your browsers. Let’s see how Firefox 5 performs in this test.
As expected, Firefox 5 overwhelms Firefox 4.01 in this test too.
(Note: these scores may vary depending on your internet connection)
HTML5 compatibility
Since Mozilla claims that Firefox 5 supports the upcoming HTML5 standard. In this regard, I’ll do a test to see how well Firefox 5 supports HTML5. html5test is an ideal website for such a test. Both Firefox 4.01 and Firefox 5 scored 286 out 400 plus a 9 bonus points, which isn’t bad at all considering IE9 only got 141 out of 400 plus 5 bonus points.
Memory usage
Memory usage of Firefox4.01 : 50, 252K
Memory usage of Firefox 5 : 40, 540K
I re-tested this section multiple-times before I jumped to the conclusion that Firefox5 uses less memory than Firefox4 does.
Scoring
Performance 8.8 (30% of the final score)
Stability 8.6 (30% of the final score)
Artistic 8.4 (10% of the final score)
Easy-to-use 8.6 (30% of the final score)
Final score 8.6
Final thought
Firefox 5 is a fantastic web browser. It is faster and it uses less system resources than its predecessor. And on top of that, it’s more reliable. I had problem with Firefox 4.01 as it is prone to crash randomly on my Windows XP Professional with SP3. It seems that problem has been fixed in Firefox 5. I have been using Firefox 5 final for about a week and I don’t have any problem with it yet. If you are looking for a good web browser to replace Internet Explorer, you should try out Firefox5.
Review samples provided by Mozilla
Discussing this review on our forum.
Loading ...