The latest nightly builds of Mozilla Firefox 3 is now being built with the PGO tool. So what does this mean? Simple, Firefox 3 is getter even faster. A lot of work has been done in making Firefox the fastest browser on the earth. And now with PGO Firefox is measuring around 11% faster in JavaScript tests.
So what is PGO?
Stepwise --Speed is improved magically, well not magically but speed goes up. The changes to the original code, none. The lengthy compile-run-recompile cycle is the only penalty. Basically, in a nutshell, you run the Firefox code to see what functions get used the most and optimizes the final code around that data.
- compile with some hooks built in
- run this copy on some representative input data
- recompiling the program using the profiling data produced
- the profiling data lets GCC's optimizer generate more efficient code
PGO is a relatively new feature in both GCC and Visual C++ that improves the quality of generated code. IE was already doing this, IE7 was built with Profile Guided Optimizations and gained a 8% performance improvement with no additional code change.
Firefox 3 Beta 4 should be out in a few weeks time.
Latest: Not surprisingly, Mozilla has announced that a beta 5 version of Firefox 3 will be necessary after all.
As developers put the final touches on Beta 4, which is now in final build stage, Firefox developers deemed that another beta would be needed before final release of the much anticipated web browser upgrade. The development team expects the the beta 5 code freeze to happen on March 18.
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