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Mozilla Firefox 64bit Build Performance Compared to 32bit

Posted By Raymond
Nov
17
2011

If you go to Mozilla’s website to download the latest version of Firefox web browser, there is only a 32-bit version of it which can be installed and ran on both 32bit and 64bit of Windows. However many wonder if there is a 64-bit version of Firefox since theoretically it should load quicker and is much more responsive than the 32-Bit build on a 64bit Windows. Actually there are 64-bit nightly builds available for Windows but it is not officially released due to incompatibilities and with popular plugins. Other than the official nightly builds, there is another 64-Bit version of Firefox called Waterfox where the Firefox source code is taken and compiled with optimizations so that it will run more efficiently and faster for 64-Bit Windows computers.

Since many modern computers comes pre-installed with Windows 64-bit operating system, I thought I should test if the Firefox 64-bit build is faster than the 32-build on Windows 7 64-bit.


To do a simple benchmark, I installed Firefox 8.0 32-bit, Waterfox 8.0 64-bit, Firefox Nightly 11.0a1 32-bit and 64-bit on a clean Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit with all latest updates. All history are cleared after each test because all 4 Firefox builds shares the same profile and followed by a restart before performing the next benchmark.

1. Application Cold Boot Startup Time
Firefox 8.0 32-bit: 2.1535s
Waterfox 8.0 64-bit: 1.7947s
Firefox Nightly 11.0a1 32-bit: 1.3266
Firefox Nightly 11.0a1 64-bit: 1.8571s
Pale Moon 8.0 32-bit: 2.4031s
Pale Moon 8.0 64-bit: 2.1067s

2. Application Warm Boot Startup Time
Firefox 8.0 32-bit: 0.3s
Waterfox 8.0 64-bit: 0.28s
Firefox Nightly 11.0a1 32-bit: 0.28s
Firefox Nightly 11.0a1 64-bit: 0.27s
Pale Moon 8.0 32-bit: 0.32s
Pale Moon 8.0 64-bit: 0.29s

3. Kraken JavaScript Benchmark
Firefox 8.0 32-bit: 5370.6ms
Waterfox 8.0 64-bit: 4961.4ms
Firefox Nightly 11.0a1 32-bit: 3401.8ms
Firefox Nightly 11.0a1 64-bit: 3870.3ms
Pale Moon 8.0 32-bit: 5163.1ms
Pale Moon 8.0 64-bit: 5046.7ms

4. Peacekeeper Browser Test
Firefox 8.0 32-bit: 1665
Waterfox 8.0 64-bit: 1701
Firefox Nightly 11.0a1 32-bit: 1811
Firefox Nightly 11.0a1 64-bit: 1761
Pale Moon 8.0 32-bit: 1679
Pale Moon 8.0 64-bit: 1743

5. SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark
Firefox 8.0 32-bit: 234.9ms
Waterfox 8.0 64-bit: 248.8ms
Firefox Nightly 11.0a1 32-bit: 236.4ms
Firefox Nightly 11.0a1 64-bit: 236.8ms
Pale Moon 8.0 32-bit: 232.0ms
Pale Moon 8.0 64-bit: 243.4ms

6. Idle Memory Usage
Firefox 8.0 32-bit: 29844K
Waterfox 8.0 64-bit: 41468K
Firefox Nightly 11.0a1 32-bit: 31944K
Firefox Nightly 11.0a1 64-bit: 40416K
Pale Moon 8.0 32-bit: 31748K
Pale Moon 8.0 64-bit: 42048K

7. Memory Usage after visiting 4 websites (Raymond.CC, Yahoo, CNN, YouTube)
Firefox 8.0 32-bit: 81652K
Waterfox 8.0 64-bit: 95920K
Firefox Nightly 11.0a1 32-bit: 82600K
Firefox Nightly 11.0a1 64-bit: 82212K
Pale Moon 8.0 32-bit: 86944K
Pale Moon 8.0 64-bit: 126408K

8. Memory Usage when simultaneously opening 10 tabs with different URLs
Firefox 8.0 32-bit: 173260K
Waterfox 8.0 64-bit: 223492K
Firefox Nightly 11.0a1 32-bit: 160092K
Firefox Nightly 11.0a1 64-bit: 211564K
Pale Moon 8.0 32-bit: 220516K
Pale Moon 8.0 64-bit: 303252K

From the benchmark results shown above, I can tell that Firefox 32-bit build definitely consume less memory usage if compared with 64-bit but the 64-bit build performs slightly better than the 32-bit build. The nightly build performs really well with better memory management so we can expect an improved Firefox in future. If you would like that extra performance from the current Firefox 8 on your Windows 64-bit, then go ahead and install Waterfox. Do note that Waterfox requires Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x64) to be installed. The Firefox Night Builds are for testing purposes only but you can still go ahead and use it if you’re the adventurous type.

[ Download Firefox 64-bit Nightly | Waterfox ] .

Source: http://www.raymond.c...mpared-to-32bit

--End

Steve

[ShyWriter]

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Review: Firefox's unofficial 64-bit variant Waterfox

By Matthew Nawrocki
April 20, 2012, 8:43 AM PDT

Takeaway: The Waterfox project attempts to take advantage of 64-bit processing power for web browsing. Matt Nawrocki uncovers a problem with that premise.

Mozilla Firefox is a very popular browser with its legion of fans. Though with that said, thanks to the open source nature of Firefox, there are bound to be fan-made and supported offshoots of the official browser with their own tweaks and improvements. One such unofficial project is called Waterfox, and its main objective is to offer a Firefox experience, only this time in a 64-bit package for Windows. Of course, 64-bit binaries are able to access much more memory than their 32-bit counterparts, potentially resulting in a positive change in performance.

Putting it to the test

To put that theory to the test, I decided upon using the Peacekeeper web browser benchmark by Futuremark Corporation on both the latest version of vanilla Firefox, version 11, and the 64-bit Waterfox build, also based on the latest version of Firefox, in order to measure the performance of each. For reference, I ran the tests on a computer touting a quad-core Athlon II clocked at 3.2 gigahertz, eight gigabytes of memory and Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. Although both browsers performed very similarly in real world testing, the Peacekeeper benchmark begs to differ, and the results might surprise you.

The Peacekeeper benchmark covers various aspects of the browser, including but not limited to HTML5 canvas and video as well as DOM operations and text parsing. There were a few HTML5 video tests that failed on both Firefox and Waterfox, but these failures were due to the lack of H.264 support in the browsers and were to be expected. After running each browser through the paces for several minutes, Peacekeeper generated the total scores of 1624 and 1415 for both Firefox and Waterfox respectively. This is a point difference of over 200, which is a bit disconcerting, considering that a 64-bit variant of Firefox was anticipated to have the edge in this contest.

Bottom line

So the moral of the story is this, just because the binary is built for a 64-bit operating system doesn’t necessarily indicate that the performance of the application is going to be better than its 32-bit counterpart. This is especially true if the Waterfox team decided to make unofficial modifications to the original source in a manner that could reduce performance.

It could be that the quality of the code is lacking or simply not mature enough. Over time though, it is possible that with more time and effort, the code will mature more and a 64-bit unofficial port of Firefox will make more sense from a performance perspective. For now, however, it’s best to stick with regular Firefox, particularly if you want to get updates and patches as soon as they are available, rather than waiting on a third-party to work them in later on.

SOURCE: http://www.techrepub...t-waterfox/6034

Steve

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