mozilla mobile performance

April 1, 2008 in Firefox, GNOME, Mobile, Mozilla, N800, N810 | 56 comments

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.

  2. jag’s avatar

    jag on April 1, 2008 at 11:09 pm

    Chris, do you have any data on memory usage on the N8×0? I imagine it has gone down in a similar manner as Fx on the desktop, but a rough idea of numbers would be appreciated.

  3. Asa Dotzler’s avatar

    Asa Dotzler on April 2, 2008 at 1:50 am

    Chris, do you have any data on how Fennec compares to other mobile browsers that run on ARM?

  4. Arty’s avatar

    Arty on April 2, 2008 at 7:21 am

    April 1st ?? :)

  5. Benson’s avatar

    Benson on April 2, 2008 at 8:53 am

    It’s not _that_ non-useful on the N800; we do have USB/BT keyboards, and (some of us) xkbd.

    I’ll be giving it a shot here…

  6. blizzard’s avatar

    blizzard on April 2, 2008 at 2:10 pm

    Jag, I’ve done some measurement of memory usage on these devices and they are not out of line with what we’ve done in the FF3 time frame. We generally grow at about half the rate of other browsers and peak off pretty quickly. We also start a little larger than other browsers, but that gap vanishes pretty quickly after only a few page loads.

    Asa, stop baiting me. Of course I have data on other browsers that run on ARM. We generally run about 1.6x – 2x faster than WebKit/GTK+ on the N810 on the SunSpider benchmark. (Compiled WebKit with -O2.) Those builds are a pain in the ass for others to set up, so I didn’t post those numbers because it would be hard to reproduce the data.

  8. Frederic Crozat’s avatar

    Frederic Crozat on April 4, 2008 at 1:35 am

    Maybe a stupid question but what is the best way to report bugs against vlad “early snapshot” of FF3 for n810 ? I guess bugzilla but should be mark bugs blocking another bug or use specific keyword ?

  9. Mobiledivide’s avatar

    Mobiledivide on April 4, 2008 at 8:39 am

    I second Frederic’s question, I’m not a coder but would love to help in testing this browser and filing bugs somewhere

  10. blizzard’s avatar

    blizzard on April 4, 2008 at 11:20 pm

    We have an N810 tracking bug you can use!

    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=426341

    Or you can use just the alias ‘n800′ as the bug it should depend on. Also add the ‘mobile’ keyword if you don’t mind.

    Mark Finkle has been working pretty hard on our front end and keeps making checkins to the fennec code. We need to make semi-regular releases.

  16. swambo’s avatar

    swambo on April 10, 2008 at 11:24 am

    Can you also do benchmarks with Html Viewer 3 (Hv3)?: http://tkhtml.tcl.tk/hv3.html

    I bet Hv3 will beat the score. The easiest way to try this is probably using eTcl (there are binaries for arm available). You can find information and download links at http://www.evolane.com/software/etcl/

  19. Steve’s avatar

    Steve on April 10, 2008 at 12:39 pm

    Yawn. This is still no match for the iPhone.

  34. Marcelo Lopez’s avatar

    Marcelo Lopez on April 20, 2008 at 6:24 pm

    I’m sorry…but without a build for PocketPC phones ( smartphone or touch-capable ), this isn’t much of a win. Sure, Maemo-based devices will have their place, and if Nokia actually DOES get their act together a release a smartphone based on the Maemo codebase, there could be a nice win there. However, the “heart and soul” is still the WM based smartphones and pda phones. Minimo was a good try, but not backed enough to make enough of an impact, and riddled with issues.

    When will the Mozilla community understand this….just because it “will look spiffy” doesn’t mean that is where focus should be placed upon. Release a WM6 version of this browser, and to use the vernacular of the day….Mozilla will OWN mobile browsing.

  35. blizzard’s avatar

    blizzard on April 21, 2008 at 7:39 am

    Yep, we know! :D We’re working hard to get to a set of real phones. The N810 is a great platform for development and testing but we understand that the real win is on a real mobile platform.

  37. Charlie Bradley’s avatar

    Charlie Bradley on April 27, 2008 at 7:21 pm

    How about the neo freerunner?

  38. Naveen’s avatar

    Naveen on May 5, 2008 at 11:43 pm

    This is very nice idea to use XUL for user interface, So then only they can reach the point to reduce the memory consumption and boost up the performance. fennec is 5.9 times faster than MicroB. So how can I change the style without effecting the performance.

  45. enrico’s avatar

    enrico on August 10, 2008 at 8:53 pm

    Is Fennec open source?

  47. I want Fennec on Windows Mobile!!!’s avatar

    I want Fennec on Windows Mobile!!! on August 15, 2008 at 12:54 pm

    I see a lot of references made to Fennec on the n810 and being prepared for a Linux and Android release, but I have seen little if any plans regarding Fennec on Windows Mobile 6/6.1. Could you elaborate on any of Mozilla’s plans for a Windows Mobile release or at least quell any WM owner’s interest by telling us it’s not coming to WM 6/6.1 devices. Testing on one platform and then writing for the masses to read is like torture when you’re only writing about the progress being made on one platform (Fennec for the N810) but the press saying it’ll be available for untested platforms. I am really interested in Fennec, as nearly all the browsers available for WM6/6.1 are awful, even SkyFire. Also, will this browser have built-in flash support?

  48. blizzard’s avatar

    blizzard on August 15, 2008 at 4:44 pm

    We’re in the middle of bringing up Windows Mobile as a platform. Once the platform bits are up and running Fennec should be running on Windows Mobile in short order. We’ve got somewhat separate timelines for the front end browser work and the backend platform work. But it’s coming!

    You should check out the last mobile newsletter. It’s got information about Windows Mobile. Check out one of the last blog entries here:

    http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/

    Thanks!

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