Ubuntu, Chromium and Adobe Flash!
July 12th, 2009
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Archive for July, 2009
Firefox 3.5 vs. Chromium on Ubuntu 9.04
July 11th, 2009
Speed
With the recent release of Firefox 3.5 the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine is really available for the ‘normal’ user (ie. not the alpha/beta users). It gives you a major speed increase in JavaScript intensive webapps. But how does it compare to Google’s Chromium?
To find out I ran the SunSpider JavaScript performance tests on both browsers. I know the SunSpider tests come from the WebKit team, who provide the HTML rendering for Google Chrome, but it was the best test for JavaScript I could find.
The results can be found here: Firefox 3.5, Chromium.
What it comes down to is that Firefox 3.5 used 3691ms and Chromium used 1476 ms to complete the tests. So Chromium is still significantly faster then Firefox.
Features
Since Chromium is still in the alpha stages of development it is not fair to compare the browsers on the feature level. Chromium doesn’t support much more then the pure browsing experience. It shows the first signs of form prefill, which works quite good and it is able to remember your passwords, which also works. But that’s it. Comparing that to Firefox’s feature list doesn’t make sense.
Firefox is still the clear winner here, Chromium still has a long, long way to go before it can compete with the build in features of Firefox. And then I’m not even discussing the add-ons that have been written for Firefox already, Chromium still has a lot of caching up to do on that front.
Conclusion
I’ll keep using Firefox for a while. Chromium is still too unstable and just doesn’t have enough features to make every day usage possible for me. I see that Chromium is moving in the right direction with it’s development, but I’m wondering how long it will take them to get there. Mozilla’s Firefox has improved a lot with the release of 3.5. It shows that they woke up and are looking to make the browser not only feature rich, but also fast.
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