When you live on a dialup connection to the Internet, you covet and
cherish every bit of speed you can get. One of my broadband-dwelling
friends says that browser speed is essentially irrelevant to him, since
all modem browsers acquit themselves well in that department. I think
he has a point, but on dialup it's a different story.
Of course, page-load speeds aren't the whole story. General
responsiveness plays a role in making an application pleasant to use.
One of the big advantages of Open Source software, like Mozilla.org's
Firefox browser, it that it's
open to innovation and, specific to the context of this discussion, to
platform optimization.
There are a variety of platform-optimized builds of Firefox for Mac
OS X, fine-tuned for different CPU architectures. Each build is
compiled especially to take advantage of the specific features of a
particular processor in order to wring the absolute best performance
out of Firefox on your Mac.
You will find
G3 builds, G4 7400 builds, G4 7450 builds and Intel builds, including
3.5 and 3.6 alpha, at furbism.com. Chris Latko also has
posted "Shiretoko" Intel
optimized Mac builds of Firefox 3.5 final - and even a pre-alpha
build of Firefox 3.6 for the very adventurous.
I used one of Chris' optimizations of a Firefox 3.5 beta for a while
several months ago and found it provided a very noticeable improvement
over the until then pretty sluggish official version 3.1 and 3.5 betas.
Since then, Mozilla has done optimization of its own to the Firefox 3.5
final, which is satisfyingly lively, but the Shiretoko build still
speeds things up a bit more. And since it's otherwise transparently
identical to stock Firefox (except for the icon) and works just fine
with the Firefox plugins and skins I use, why not?
Chris says he's been using WebKit, Minefield, and increasingly
Opera as his main
browsers for a while now. I'm a big Opera fan too, particularly the
Turbo feature in Opera
10 beta, but like him I use several browsers.
As for Firefox 3.6 (Namoroka), Chris says:
"I've built a pre-Alpha 1 version of Firefox 3.6, also
known as Namoroka (following the park theme). Namoroka is a national
park in Madagascar - Shiretoko is a national park in northern
Japan.
"As with previous Shiretoko builds I've done, I'm
using the same .mozconfig file for optimization as well as fiddling
with the application defaults for speed. I am no longer changing the
User-Agent on these builds, as some people are reporting problems when
accessing sites such as Facebook that don't recognize the UA. When are
people going to stop browser sniffing?
"In this version, the 'parse HTML 5?' was off by
default. I've turned this on. One other thing is that the browser's
name is 'Minefield', as this is a pre-Alpha and things are supposed to
blow up (so be careful).
"You can find the Namoroka build on my downloads
page."
