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forums.mozillazine.org will open you up to a whole world of people who roll and smoke their own compilations of Firefox. I understand from what i read in “Firefox Hacks”, that the official Windows binary is compiled to support lots of different CPUs and therefore can’t take advantage of the enhancements of newer chips. If my system has a Dual Core 2 Gigahertz 64Bit chip and the official Firefox binary is compiled to operate on a 486, Firefox can’t fully take advantage of the power of my chip. If I installed a build compiled specifically for my processor I should see a performance enhancement. This should apply to other open source binaries like Gimp, Audacity and Eclipse.
But…

1. A third party “custom build” would be a great way to get some unsuspecting user to install something evil.
2. If there were serious enhancements to be had this way, there would be an effort to provide official binaries for many different chips, as the enhancements would make Firefox look better.
3. I think the chip in this computer is so fast that I wouldn’t notice the difference in a Firefox compiled locally.
4. If software wasn’t compiled and distributed or sold for specific chips, undermining the performance potential for all kinds of software, what incentive is there really to design new chips and for consumers to purchase them. Obviously there is an incentive and there must be big benefits for pure chip speed completely separate from the benefits of compiling specifically for your chip
5. compiling all the open source programs I use myself would be a hell of a lot of work every time there is an update.

As Steve pointed out regarding #2, maintaining lots of versions of any software would be a logistical nightmare. When it needed a security patch, the team would need to patch and compile and distribute 50 versions.

I want to see for myself. First problem is how to get Firefox to run two or more different versions on the same machine. If you download a third party version and launch it, it will just trigger your regular installed version to start. To get around this, create a new profile. (as explained here).

Shut down all Firefox. make sure there are no background processes running. Might want to copy this series of bullets to another app

Open Up Firefox Profile Manager by start –> run –> cmd and then navigate to the folder where firefox lives and type firefox.exe -profilemanager

Create Profile

name it “firefox64″ or something and save it. This will give a brand new profile to your original install of firefox, which we don’t want so…

open profiles.ini and make sure it says startWithLastProfile=0

Start your new version of firefox from the command line with firefox.exe -P firefox64 or by just clicking on a shortcut to the other version and get prompted for a profile.

I also read that if I uninstall my official firefox version, I can run as many third party versions as I want and they won’t conflict as the third party versions aren’t “installs”. I’ll test this later.

So, that is how i got Bon Echo x64 2.0.0.8 running alongside my regular Firefox. Is it really faster? That will wait until the next post. I found a great page on how to measure browser speeds. I won’t link to it because the page says

“This article is around 2 years old now (although it has been kept up to date), and has been retired - posting it simply shows how long it took you to find it.”

OK, Mr. More Than Enough Readers.
The article provides everything I need to test the difference between official firefox binary and the potentially faster Custom super binary.

1. Test browser startup time with ordinary stopwatch
2. Test CSS rendering with CSS Benchmark Test
3. Test Script speed with Benchmarking tool - jsbench seems to no longer exist. I tried this other one.
4. Test Loading multiple images with an ordinary stopwatch
5. Test use of caching by navigating through search results and then doing it again - used ordinary stopwatch

He listed more tests than this, but those should be good enough to test the various builds.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 10:44 am and is filed under Computers, firefox, open source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.