Expect 22.8% performance boost from next week's Firefox 3.6 beta

Betanews tested the latest available development and stable builds of all five brands of Web browser, on all three modern Windows platforms -- XP SP3, Vista SP2, and Windows 7 RTM. Once again, we threw the kitchen sink at them: our new and stronger performance benchmark suite, consisting of experiments in all facets of rendering, mathematics, control, and even geometry. Like before, we use a slow browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, the previous version, running in Windows Vista SP2) as our 1.00 baseline, and we produce performance indices representing browsers' relative speed compared to IE7.

Averaging all three Windows platforms, the latest Beta 1 preview of Firefox 3.6 posts a Betanews CRPI score of 9.02 -- just better than nine times the performance of IE7. Compare this against a 7.34 score for the latest stable version of Firefox 3.5.3, and 7.81 for the latest daily build of the Firefox 3.5.4 bug fix.