With a SSD, is there really any noticeable difference between Ff and x64 versions?

I tried Waterfox then Cybrf, no issues with either, but really couldn't verify any difference. Admittedly I never benchmarked anything. My last experience I was using Cybrf 17.1 and starting a new session (homepage the slowest renderer out there being, MSN) "seemed" a tick slower than Ff. Once aboard, pages "may" have rendered a tick quicker. I have 8gb of 1600 speed RAM, the fastest without having to over clock a Ivybridge 3570 on a Z77 motherboard. Thank you!

 

I don't think your HDD limits the speed of rendering pages. The SSD can cut down launching application time, but i doubt it will do much to render faster webpages. Using another firewall may do that. Using another anvtivirus with lighter HTTP scanner may do that, better network drivers may do that, but i doubt the SSD will help there, unless you use the HDD heavily at the same time you browse.

 

I have both the latest Firefox (32-bit) and Palemoon (64-bit version) installed on SSD. I don't notice a difference in launch times and I don't think SSD has any effect on browsing speed once they are up and running.

fwiw, I did run PassMark AppTimer to test the two and Firefox took on average 10 seconds to launch while Palemoon took 9 seconds. fwiw, I think they usually launch in 3-5 seconds, but I have multiple instances of Matlab running simulations in the background i.e. CPU is around 25% instead of idle while I was running these test so could just be random variance too.

method: fwiw, I used 5 repeated launches of each browser until my home page, Google - encrypted.google.com (HTTPS), was detected by window name and visible, then closed with WM_CLOSE. I'm not sure the browser had fully finished loading the page since it's hard to detect that, but the comparison should still be fine. Note: I think they can take longer to load if it's the first time they are loaded after booting to windows.

 

Doesn't the cache reside on disk, and wouldn't that have at least some impact on things?

 

Probably more in theory than practice. It will read cached pages faster, but most of that content is going to have pretty small file sizes to begin with. The bigger difference is going to be in the rendering of that content; RAM, CPU, and GPU will probably have a greater effect, I'd think.

 

What Notok said. Rendering is very CPU dependent to start with and RAM bandwidth plays another role and RAM is faster than SSD. And to that you have graphic elements that the GPU must render.

Just a general googling seems to show it's the general consensus:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/257356-14-does-load-pages-faster

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/261117-14-internet-speed


The only things that i noticed a sudden improvement passing to SSD, is browsing through directories, opening the control panel , all seem to pop up snappier. Ah, specially the Event Viewer that before had a characteristic lag.

Also AV scanning and making-restoring disk images. Images take like half the time. Applications also launch faster. But that's it.

But browsing, minimal impact. Imagine that the guy in the 1st link has made a RAMdrive and only got 0.23 advantage. And the RAMdrive is faster than any SSD.

 

Don't get me wrong. An SSD is an upgrade that is very apparent once you do it. I mean, you can buy a new CPU, but if you don't use it to 100% load, it may as well feel the same with your old one. The SSD, as soon as you install it, you can feel the difference. It really boosts the general performance feeling. But it's not panacea. And also, unfortunately, with time, it has a performance degradation. I remember the first day i installed the SSD, i had the feeling that things were happening so fast that i was almost in vertigo. I mean, i could almost not follow how fast folders were responding to a click. Now it has degraded a bit as performance, to the point that feels more normal (or i have adapted).

 

Ok, makes sense...

 

I just got my first SSD last month, and +1 to all of the above; it really does make a huge difference in things like app launching. I've got DDR3 2133, too, which helps. Every component plays a part, though; even a good PSU can help things run smoother when coming from a cheap one.

Some of the performance degredation is also just getting used to it. Samsung has an 'optimize' tool in the utility app that helps a bit. Apparently fragmentation is still an issue (although less of one); Auslogics has an SSD defrag algorithm. Point is that the degredation doesn't have to be especially pronounced.

 

Then what is the advantage of x64 browsing?

Found an outdated article!

 

What's being said here is just that an SSD doesn't really factor in. As the article talks about, the improvements would be in performance and probably security. And who knows, maybe the restructuring would give them opportunity to add in some functionality that would otherwise be too big an undertaking.