Notices

In my desktop experience beta 5 is worlds better than 4 in terms of stability. Hopefully we'll get a tablet release soon.

Also, Opera has traditionally been multiples faster than the other browsers, but it is looking like firefox has tied if not surpassed it. Opera speed + Firefox rendering and extensions = WIN!

Indeed, and ditto memory usage.

Article on Ars about this:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...er-market.html

"Comparing MicroB with the latest build of Fennec on an N810 provides some insight into just how much mobile Firefox performance has improved during the Firefox 3 development cycle. Blizzard ran SunSpider benchmark tests with both browsers on the N810 and found that Fennec's JavaScript execution performance is 5.9 times faster than that of MicroB."

"The performance gains that are visible in the benchmarks are quite apparent in regular day-to-day use. We tested Fennec on the Nokia N810 with a number of web sites (including our own) and found that it is noticeably more responsive than MicroB."

And this was interesting:

"The biggest win in Fennec's feature set is support for inertial scrolling. "

Yum.

Javascript 5.9x faster? That means Google apps become more usable.

Yes. I tried it and it is amazing. But after a couple of minutes running, it crashes. We will have to wait for a more stable release or a MicroB update.

Agreed, this really feels like browsing Firefox on a much more powerful machine when it works. I am going to do a lot of testing this weekend and see if I can file some bugs for these guys. A nice version 3 of firefox along with all the extensions and what not would be a great addition to the Maemo ecosystem and totally replace MicroB and its sluggish perfomance for me.

It's gonna need a major GUI overall before could be considered as a replacement for MicroB for me. I'm really hoping SSU will significantly decouple application updates from major releases. Going back to frequent MicroB updates would be a very significant benefit, especially with the speed that Gecko is rolling along.

At least Diablo should be bringing MicroB inline upstream, though. Which means we get that 5.9x Javascript speedup, too (perhaps more if there is more tablet-specific optimization taking place).

The speed increase is definitely whats needed. Also what I really like is the ability to run a wide range of XUL extensions/apps with very little change needed from desktop to mobile.

When following the link from the ars article, it actually installs two browsers; Fennec and Minefield. From what I can gather, Minefield is just the codename for the nightly builds (which tracks correctly, as it seems to be essentially a full version of Firefox). Fennec is, as previously stated, the mobile version.

-In Fennec, I seem to be having the same experience with it as most of you, crashing but blazing fast speed.
-Minefield takes ages to load (just the application), and then seems to be more stable, but not really much different in terms of speed (on simple webpages anyway). The UI itself seems to be extremely slow, but has the same set of options and such that full, desktop Firefox does.

I presume that they are both installed because Fennic requires the same backend stuff that Minefield does...

What have your experiences been with either browser?

Edit: They both work great in portrait mode too!