Once this is merged into the main dev branch of Firefox, I'll build that and switch off of Chrome. The main advantage of WebKit at this point is that their JavaScript implementation is an order of magnitude faster.
Considering Chrome's GTK integration is god awful (on my box anyways), I can't wait.
Wow, what do you do with your browser that you absolutely need to have a JS performance which is an order of magnitude better than FF 3.6? Just curious...
High performance isn't just about getting stuff done faster, it can also be thought of as getting the same amount done in less CPU time. When I'm running on batteries, my laptop's CPUs are running at 800MHz, and I get about 8-10 hours of battery life. If something's making my computer work, my CPUs go up to 2.4GHz, and my battery life plummets. More efficient javascript engines should be able to do the same work with less battery use, which makes me happy.
"Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"
Firefox 4 still has a little ways to go (of course). I've been running the beta since it came out.
I accidentally discovered a neat DoS in Firefox 4 while working on some JS: the alert loop from hell is persistent even after you close the tab. IIRC, in 3 it was possible to close the tab in between alert()s and they would go away; in 4, you'll have to kill and restart Firefox to get rid of them. Chrome still has an advantage there.
Not sure if there's any graphs on the web, but my own benchmarks have shown it (with hardware acceleration enabled) slightly better than ie9 preview 3, which is many orders of magnitude ahead of everything else (opera's actually not bad though). Keep in mind I have a pretty good graphics card, so that helps with the acceleration.
Have you tried Firefox 4 betas? (Legitimate question.) It feels significantly faster than 3 on my machines. Much further on the track of a Chrome-like browsing experience, though there's still many areas it can improve before release.
I'm personally waiting on Electrolysis to speed up the browsing experience. Having a monolithic browser, slower or not than separate processes, just makes it feel more sluggish than it is.
Anyone know what the other lines are?