Firefox 20 should feel faster

Future versions of Firefox should sensibly be faster, although the page load time will actually be longer. This is because css, html and javascript load faster, at the expense of images. This makes sites appear faster on the screen.

on his blog writes Firefox developer Patrick McManus that a patch now submitted to Mozilla ensures that javascript, html and css code take precedence when loading web pages. Only when those elements are in will images and other media be loaded.

Because images and other media such as videos are loaded later, and no longer in parallel with the css, javascript and html, loading pages as a whole takes more time. According to McManus, however, the emotional speed increases sharply. The time to first paint, in which the first contours of the website become visible, would take thirty percent less time. A website is then more or less usable. According to McManus, the first paint is sometimes slowed down by parallelization.

According to McManus, the deterioration in the page loading time amounts to about 5 percent. On websites with relatively many images, such as Pinterest, the improvement in the emotional speed amounts to more than 30 percent. If all goes well, the patch will become part of Firefox 20; Firefox is currently at version 17.