If you have followed the news in the last days about Firefox’s new JavaScript engine and the implementation of gpu hardware acceleration, you can stop reading here.
Everyone else, especially Mozilla Firefox users among them, may find it interesting that Mozilla announced plans to improve the performance of the Firefox web browser.
Firefox is lacking behind especially when it comes to JavaScript execution as browsers such as Google Chrome or Opera are both offering better performance right now. That’s a cause for concern for many Firefox users as JavaScript is probably what is impacting browser performance the most currently.
Firefox Performance Improvements
Mozilla employees made several announcements in the past two days that provide details about upcoming changes to the browser’s performance.
The first big upcoming improvement will be a new JavaScript engine called JaegerMonkey which in its current stage speeds up the JavaScript performance of the web browser by 30% to 45% which lots of room for improvement.
It will take some time before the new engine will be included in an official Firefox release, but the time will come, and it will be interesting to see how that new engine improves JavaScript execution in Firefox.
With JaegerMonkey enabled, Firefox should close the gap at least to a degree to the better JavaScript performance of Google Chrome.
GPU Acceleration
The second big change is the introduction of gpu hardware acceleration in Firefox nightly builds.
Firefox nightly builds are developer builds, and it will take some time before the new feature will land in stable versions of Firefox.
The feature is currently turned off by default in nightly builds as well and the developers state that there are bugs and add-on incompatibilities that need to be resolved first.
Firefox users who want to give it a go can download the latest nightly build and enable the feature by doing the following:
1. Enter ‘about:config’
2. Click through the warning, if necessary
3. Enter gfx.font in the ‘Filter’ box
4. Double-click on ‘gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled’ to set it to true
5. Below this, right click and select New > Integer to add a pref setting
6. Enter ‘mozilla.widget.render-mode’ for the preference name, 6 for the value
7. Restart
Make sure to backup the web browser with a tool like Mozbackup before trying any of those new features as some users have already reported that it can make the browser crash.
Update: GPU Acceleration is part of Firefox now and does not need to be enabled anymore. Firefox users who want to disable it need to do the following:
- Load about:preferences#advanced in the browser’s address bar.
- Under General, remove the checkmark of “Use hardware acceleration when available”.