mozilla mobile performance

by Christopher Blizzard

For the Firefox 3 release cycle, we’ve done a huge amount of work on various parts of the browser. Memory usage has been reduced, performance has been vastly increased and we’ve done a huge amount of work on building features that our users will love. Each of these add up to a really great browser.

But one of the nice side effects of all that work is how well it’s prepared us for the mobile market. We’ve been ramping up those efforts and we’ve been doing some measurement on ARM systems, in particular on the N800 and N810 series tablets.

The blue bar is the “MicroB browser” which is the Mozilla-based browser that Nokia included with their OS2008 release. It’s based on source code from around the Firefox Alpha 1 timeframe. The red bar above is the “Fennec browser” – the code name we’re using for our new mobile web browser and is based off of post-Firefox 3 beta 4 source code. The summary here is that on ARM that a Firefox 3-based browser is a whopping 5.9x faster than earlier Mozilla versions. The really interesting fact here is that multiplier is higher on ARM than it is on x86! So the great performance work that we’ve done has actually paid dividends more on ARM than it has on the desktop. A great side effect.

Note: if you feel like you want to take part in our mobile project you’re more than welcome to join us. We’re just getting started on the browser side and making some pretty good progress. A super early snapshot of a test browser is available from vlad’s page. If you click on that link from the N810 browser you will be prompted to install the browser. It will pull down two packages and install them and then it will put a Fennec browser in your Extras category on the N810. We don’t actually recommend that people try this on the N800 yet – we still need to add support for the soft keyboard but the N810 works pretty well. This UI has only seen work over the last week or two and we’re just starting to get a handle on the bugs and the the design.

If you use the browser above you’ll notice that we’re pretty early in the process. But it’s nice to know that we’re starting off from such a great place in terms of performance.

Update: Mark Finkle posted about XULRunner at just about the same time that I did! He lists a bunch of bugs we care about and also mentions that we’re cranking on extensions and add-ons as well for mobile.

It’s going to be a different world once we’re done.