Last week I posted an entry comparing IE 7 with Firefox 1.5 and the venerable IE 6. Lot’s of folks have since asked for Firefox 2 to be added to the mix. The reason we didn’t initially include Firefox 2 is because it was not at the time officially released and so we felt it unfair for it to be included.
The graph below shows the cumulative time it took for IE 7 and Firefox 2 to execute the Zimbra Web Client (ZWC) peformance tests at various dates leading up to the final release of each browser. As can be seen, both IE and Firefox showed improvement in their final release, and so we think leaving Firefox 2 out of last week’s tests was indeed the fair thing to do.
So now that Firefox 2 has been officially released, how does if fare against IE 7?
We ran each browser over a common set of Zimbra Web Client (ZWC) operations such as logging in, viewing messages, navigating around various folders, changing options, viewing contacts, and performing various calendar operations. As the graph below shows, Firefox 2 beat out IE 7 in just about every operation - sometimes by significant margins.
We also tested Firefox 2 vs Firefox 1.5. As seen below, Firefox 2 has not made substantial performance improvements over Firefox 1.5, and has certainly not shown the same order of gain as IE 7 has over IE6.
I think the net result is that for highly JavaScript intensive AJAX applications such as the ZWC, Firefox is still the winner by quite a wide margin. Of course your mileage will vary depending on the type and footprint of your client.
I would like to end by saying that we are able to present this data thanks to lots of hard work by Raja Rao of the Zimbra QA department who has spent many long hours building our AJAX client testing framework, and executing the performance tests against the various browsers.
on October 26th, 2006 at 10:23 pm
links for 2006-10-27
Zimbra - Blog - Firefox 2 vs IE 7 for Zimbra, at least, FF 2.0 beats IE 7 (tags: Firefox IE Zimbra Ajax browser metrics reference) Mono Meeting and the Olive Project. - Miguel de Icaza “On Monday Atsushi…
on October 28th, 2006 at 10:15 pm
Very cool. Many thanks for sharing this comparative data set, guys
on October 31st, 2006 at 5:06 am
Did you test ’sorting’ of a table? I found IE 6 started to go slow after 5000 rows w/5 fields or more.
on November 3rd, 2006 at 7:14 am
Thank you for doing the test and for providing us with the results.
I would also like to know if you perform any kind security tests on the browsers as well?
Thanks
on November 6th, 2006 at 11:25 pm
Opera JS processing is magnitudes faster than that of IE or Firefox - you guys should try to port zimbra over to Opera.
on November 13th, 2006 at 2:23 am
I think FF 2.0 is the way to go
on March 7th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
AJAX Performance : IE 7 vs Firefox
Ajaxifying web application has become an easy task when using AJAX frameworks such as t elerik r.a.d.ajax.
on October 9th, 2007 at 6:39 am
Soon the time for Firefox 3 comes then is surely interesting a comparison of the Browser.
on October 31st, 2007 at 10:50 am
I beg to differ. I am just coding an, admittedly quite bloated, form page which loads very slowly (about 90 rows of data, each with about 3 selects, 1 textarea and 5 radio buttons).
Since the lag didn’t seem to come from the server, from the javascript (commented out), or the css (also commented out), I tried rendering the base html using IE 7 instead of my development FF.
Subjectively, IE 7 (7.0.5730.11) renders way faster than FF (2.0.0.9). Say 1 sec vs. 3+ sec. (Now I know to simplify the html rather than tuning the js or the server).
In other words, there is at least 1 type of web page (badly-written complex forms) on which IE 7 beats FF hands down, which your test doesn’t show.
For the record, I don’t use IE 7 normally, only FF.
Fanboys, flame away
on November 1st, 2007 at 10:28 am
Anti Firefox Virus
I need some feedback from other Firefox users on the Comcast access to internet.
I’ve picked up some kind of disabling virus which prevent Firefox from reaching
ANY servers, and I don’t know how to get rid of it.
HELLLLLLP!
stevnewb
on November 29th, 2007 at 3:59 am
I am a web developer and we have found that radio buttons that used to work in fire fox 1 and IE dont work in fire fox 2.
on December 30th, 2007 at 3:46 pm
I’ve got a problem with Firefox not updating Ajax, but instead locks up my FF until all the AJAX has finished (I’m trying to write Domain Name lookups in AJAX for http://www.domainnamesoup.com). IE works fine and Firefox portable. I’m running Firefox 2.0.0.11
on May 29th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
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