Code-frozen Firefox 3.5 beta gains 4% more speed against Chrome 2

We may see the latest Mozilla Firefox 3.5 public beta -- now with the whole numbering thing straightened out -- as soon as next Wednesday, and quite likely a Firefox 3.0.9 update in the same timeframe. In the meantime, as Mozilla's developers test the final nightly build prior to the opening of the floodgates, Betanews tests reveal that regular Firefox users should appreciate about double the speed and performance of Firefox 3.0.8, and 450% the performance of the final release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.

But as Mozilla's developers make tweaks to its rendering engine and its new TraceMonkey JavaScript interpreter, Google's developers (some of whom, admittedly, are the very same people) are making tweaks to its development series browser, Chrome 2.0.172.6. (Google's development browser now co-exists with its Chrome 1 series, which represents finalized code.) As a result, our latest tests show Apple may not hold claim to "the world's fastest browser" for much longer, as Chrome 2 pulls within 2% of Safari's general performance, and as Firefox 3.5 makes up some ground.

The latest performance scores for the April 16 Firefox 3.5 nightly build (intended for private testing) in Betanews tests are 17% better overall than for Firefox 3.1 Beta 3, a public beta released last month. This is on the strength of 18% better CSS rendering performance, 13% better JavaScript object handling, and 27% better overall JavaScript processing scores, in a suite of performance tests produced by independent developers and collected by Betanews.

So as Chrome 2 improves, Firefox 3.5 improves even faster...though it still has quite a lot of ground to make up. Using Betanews' cumulative index scoring in which a 1.0 score represents the performance of Internet Explorer 7, the latest 3.5 nightly build scored a 9.19 -- meaning, when all the tests are ironed out, 919% the speed and performance of IE7, which even Microsoft has acknowledged to be something of a dog. Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 scored a 7.85 in these same tests, which were conducted on a Windows Vista-based Virtual PC environment (not the fastest, but still sufficient to gauge relative performance).

The Safari 4 Beta scores from last month still represent the latest available index scores, with a 14.39 -- and Apple maintains the lead. But not by much, as Chrome -- the #2 chariot being driven by Charleton Heston -- pulls up uncomfortably close with a new score of 14.09, nearly 10% better than last month's build.

Now, do you remember the non-competitive days of Web browsers, so very long ago...2008? Imagine if Web browsers got faster at a rate of 10% per month, every month? Real competition can certainly change the landscape.