Mozilla Firefox 3.6 RC1 released: Faster than Google Chrome

The Mozilla product development and engineering teams are hard at work again, this time with a rollout of the first Release Candidate build for the long anticipated Firefox 3.6. We received notification a couple days ago that the build is now available for download and is intended to be used for pre-release testing. As many know, the final build was scheduled to be released in Q4 2009 but was pushed back to Q1 2010 and could very well show up sometime later this month or during the next few weeks. In the meantime, it is possible that Firefox 3.6 RC1 could be very identical to the final build, most notably in its feature set and in its performance improvements.

We took the opportunity to do some benchmarking between today’s most popular browsers, including Firefox 3.5.7, Google Chrome beta 4.0.249.64, Safari 4.0.4, Internet Explorer 8 and the new Firefox 3.6 RC1. The benchmark of choice was Futuremark’s Peacekeeper, a free online benchmarking tool for measuring and comparing the performance of common internet browsers, which has been available since March 2009. Our hardware setup consisted of a Core i7 Extreme 965 running on an EVGA X58 SLI Classified E759 with 6GB of DDR3 1600MHz and Windows 7 Ultimate x64.