I'm all for speed improvements, feature parity, etc., but my question is why has it taken a (somewhat) radical change to versioning/release-schedules to realize these performance improvements?
If these latest benchmarks hold up, then Mozilla will have noticeably reduced the memory footprint in FF7 and then again noticeably sped up the browser itself in FF8 (all of this coming within a matter of weeks). Can it really be that these two (suddenly important) features went largely unaddressed in Firefox 3 and 4 because of a different release cycle?
I'm very happy to see the competition, but if Mozilla has been able to address these two long-standing gripes in a matter of weeks, then I find it somewhat implausible that it was ever a technical issue.
Firefox 4 was a lot faster than Firefox 3.6 in all sorts of ways.
Some of those improvements were checked in before Firefox 3.6 was even released.
The only reason it looks like they took a long time to do is because the release cycle for Firefox 4 was long, so you didn't see the improvements until the final release of Firefox 4.
So all the release schedule is doing here is getting improvements out to users closer to when the code is written.
This stuff has been brewing for a long time. Note that it takes four months to get from nightly to release and code may be under development for months before it even lands in nightly.
I wonder how this release schedule is affecting addons/extensions.
That was the only reason I ever didn't update was for plugin support (namely firebug/etc and 1password).
Any extension authors or power users care to comment?
If these latest benchmarks hold up, then Mozilla will have noticeably reduced the memory footprint in FF7 and then again noticeably sped up the browser itself in FF8 (all of this coming within a matter of weeks). Can it really be that these two (suddenly important) features went largely unaddressed in Firefox 3 and 4 because of a different release cycle?
I'm very happy to see the competition, but if Mozilla has been able to address these two long-standing gripes in a matter of weeks, then I find it somewhat implausible that it was ever a technical issue.