1. The update offer of Firefox 3.6 to users of Firefox 3 and Firefox 3.5 is the first time we’ve ever done an offer to a .0 release to our user base. We’ve always waited until the .1 release or later. We did this because we were able to measure improvements over 3.5 in terms of performance, reliability and add-ons compatiblity.

2. This is the fastest uptake we’ve ever seen. From the metrics blog. Check out the fancy hockey stick:

Basically we’re learning how to get people to adopt and how to drive the release process even faster. We’re also doing this in our beta and alpha channels. We’re doing preview releases of Firefox.next every couple of weeks now, testing out new features and themes and driving the feedback process faster and faster.

It’s a crazy ride.

In terms of claims some members of the V8 team have been bragging a little bit about how V8 is “many times faster” than TraceMonkey. In fact, some guarantees may have been made.

Based on the data above, we’re running about 20% faster than V8 on SunSpider. While I’m sure there will be changes to each of the engines in the coming months I think that the claim that “many times faster” is ludicrous on its face and should be tempered by actual data. [ Note that the Google test is recursion heavy, something we're adding to TraceMonkey right now. This explains the gap on that one type of test. See Brendan's post above or John's post below for more details. ]

It’s also important to realize another fact. Google has had a small army of people working on the V8 engine for two whole earth years. We’re about 60 days into TraceMonkey and we’re already starting to match the performance characteristics of V8. As Brendan put it:

What spectators have to realize is that this contest is not a playoff where each contending VM is eliminated at any given hype-event point. We believe that Franz&Gal-style tracing has more “headroom” than less aggressively speculative approaches, due to its ability to specialize code, making variables constant and eliminating dead code and conditions at runtime, based on the latent types inherent in almost all JavaScript programs. If we are right, we’ll find out over the next weeks and months, and so will you all.

If you want data across browsers you should look at this post from John Resig that contains some graphics that give relative performance of various browsers including Safari, Firefox 3.0.1, IE, etc. His overview is great and gives a much wider view of relative browser performance.

Also as a side note because I have your attention. There are some bizarre and incorrect claims made in the comic about garbage collection. Brendan puts things right as a comment in John’s post:

@Ben: Chrome has a nice GC: exact rooting, generational with copying. Single-threaded, too (not an option for SpiderMonkey, which is used in AT&T 1-800-555-1212 and 411 AVR massively multi-threaded services built by tellme.com, now owned by Microsoft!). It definitely helps cut down on pauses and keep memory use flatter.

The Chrome comic book did have one piece of misinformation, though: it said other browsers’ engines use conservative GC, and have false positive problems because they can’t distinguish random integers from pointers into the heap. This is not true of Firefox, IE, or Opera.

We do live in interesting times.

Firefox 3 is about to be released and we’re trying to set a world record for the most number of downloads in a day. So sign up for the list and get ready. Our release date will be announced soon!

I personally like posts / followers, which helps understand how many people you’re reaching. In my case that’s about 337/164 – or about 2.05. Should that number be lower-is-better? Scobleizer has 25,186 followers and 12,232 updates. (Seriously, 12k posts? Who has that much time?) That gives him a reach of about 0.48 – a healthy low number.

But maybe it should just be a multiplier. For me that would be 55k, for him it would be about 308 million. A ratio that probably reflects reality.