Mozilla releases Firefox 3.0.11 update as Chrome 3 explodes in Win7

Though a formal announcement is expected any time now, a stability and reliability update for the stable track of Firefox 3.0 was moved out of the beta stage and to the public release area of Mozilla's servers this morning. Version 3.0.11 was under development for several weeks, as the organization worked to implement what has mainly been described over the past several, eventful weeks for Mozilla as stability enhancements.

The code freeze for revision 11 began way back during the first week of May, and a check of the build notes shows that Linux editions were being especially pesky throughout the past few weeks. The exact nature of security fixes have not yet been made public, though the organization could provide descriptions as soon as tonight.

Mozilla's updates come in the wake of Microsoft's massive Patch Tuesday, which saw the first round of Internet Explorer 8 patches for Windows XP, Vista, and surprisingly Win7. That prompted us to perform a fresh round of browser tests on IE8 after the patch. We only recorded a very minor downtick in IE8 performance in Win7 and Vista, certainly not enough for folks to visibly notice. Our relative IE8 performance index for Vista now stands at 2.07 -- meaning 207% the performance of IE7 in Vista -- and 2.26 in Windows 7.

In an indication that Google's developers are concentrating on Windows 7 performance, its latest development build of Chrome 3.0.187.0 posted a definitive speed boost there...at the unexplained cost of a speed drop in Vista, enough to give Apple Safari 4 the lead for that operating system for the time being.

The new Google build posted the fastest regular expression handling score we've ever seen on the SunSpider benchmark: 18.4 ms, versus 29 ms for the final Safari 4 and 244 ms (no, we're not missing a decimal point there) in Firefox 3.0.11. Scores like this, coupled with Chrome 3 recapturing the six points of 100% Acid3 compliance it inexplicably lost in the last round, helped it climb to a record score on our physical platform of 14.18, versus 13.86 for the previous Chrome 3 build in Win7. The previous record was 14.12, posted by the final Safari 4 Beta in Vista, not Win7.

But the needle went the other direction for Chrome 3 in Vista, tallying an 11.93 versus the final Safari 4's 12.11. General JavaScript performance was slower for Chrome 3 in Vista for all categories -- it wasn't just one test that did it in.