Firefox 3.6 Performance: Startup and Snappiness Improvements

Firefox 3.6 was released today! For me, the most important changes in this release are the performance and stability improvements. On Mac especially, there are some big improvements in startup time, yielding up to 30% faster startup generally. And on both Mac and Windows, we fixed some pathologically bad startup scenarios.

The list of bugs fixed that specifically affect startup time is here, however a few should be called out individually:

The full list of bugs fixed in Firefox 3.6 with the “perf” keyword is here. These range from improvements to web page loading times, general UI responsiveness, and improvements to specific UI actions such as searching History and Bookmarks:

And all of this is just a taste of what’s to come: Over 60% of the bugs fixed as part of our focus on startup performance have landed on trunk, but didn’t make it in time for the 3.6 release. You can follow along on the wiki page for the startup project, and here on my blog, where I post status updates every Friday.