Today Firefox 5.0 was released. Since there are not many visible changes I have decided to test the speed again and compare it to the speed of Chrome. I am using Firefox 5.0 final and Chrome 14.0.797.0 dev-m versions.

Here are the results of the Kraken 1.1 test:

Firefox: 8506.5ms +/- 3.6%

Chrome:  6535.9ms +/- 6.9%

Here are the results of the Sunspider 0.9.1 test:

Firefox: 452.6ms +/- 12.7%,

Chrome:  370.4ms +/- 5.8%

I have run the test twice on the same machine, but with different number of running tabs (7 in Chrome, 100+ in Firefox). The numbers above are showing the best result of both runs.

It seems that Chrome 14 is considerably faster than Firefox 5.0. I have repeated the tests with a Firefox 5.0 opened with only 7 tabs and the results were different this time:

Kraken: 7164.3ms +/- 1.1%

Sunspider: 326.7ms +/- 2.1%

It looks like Firefox gets really slow with a large amount of tabs open. I haven’t tested the speed of Chrome with 100+ tabs open because my system can’t take it.

It’s interesting to see that each browser fails the test that it has created or helped create. Overall, Chrome still feels faster.

 7227.5ms +/- 6.0%