This year’s Velocity EU conference had a special presentation round where browser makers talked about the performance of their specific products. I was invited last minute to represent Firefox and originally was asked to show benchmarks, impressive demos and how we compare to others. As browsers get released in very short intervals these days, this doesn’t quite make sense any longer – at least to me.

Funnily enough the other browser representatives took the same approach so I was happy to see that we agreed that we are beyond number-comparisons and head to head browser war on performance.

My talk “Accelerating the overall web experience” covered other things, like that the choice of which browser to use lies with the users and there is not much we can do to change that. I also pointed out that users will find a way to make our browsers slow, no matter how hard we try and that in a lot of cases third party add-ons and debugging tools are to blame for an impression of slowness.

I ended by showing how the new developer tools in Firefox empower developers to perform much better in finding bugs and fixing them – a part of performance that is not easily measurable but very important.

You can see the slides here (left+right to go back and forward, down for next bullet point and N to toggle notes) or read them as an HTML page:

There is also an audio recording of the talk on archive.org:

All in all it was good to see that all browsers are getting faster and faster and we all see this as a given rather than a goal.