I see you've already backpedaled on this, but my $0.02: I think it was always quite clear that they were comparing to Firefox 3.0, not 3.1. Whether that's fair or not is something of a grey area—I think it's arguably reasonable to limit comparisons to shipping browsers. How many people are using Firefox 3.1? Probably very few, making it a somewhat useless comparison for most people if they're trying to decide what browser to use right now. You can feel free to put up a page comparing Firefox 3.1 to Safari 3 if you like.

This post seems more telling of your penchant for kneejerk Apple-bashing than anything else.

I agree that it's a bit shady.

Just a note though: Firefox 3, and Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 'real world' performance on the mac is not that great in my opinion. It makes no difference to me what time you post in some javascript benchmark if your browser is not going to perform properly in day to day tasks. I have been a die hard firefox fan since about 0.7, and it runs beautiful on windows, but on OS X it's poor, even with all the extensions turned off. Typically this shows up as the spinning beachball when you have too many tabs open, or the spinning beach ball on startup (I get this one all the time) and just by freezes that last for a few seconds at a time. Am I the only mac user experiencing this? I have the latest model iMac with 4GB of RAM, so I don't see it as a hardware problem.

I have now switched to Safari 4 with the terminal trick that puts the tabs back where they used to be as my main browser, and Firefox I only open when I need Firebug (best extension ever in my opinion).

Aaron, Safari 4 is not a "shipping browser" any more than Firefox 3.1 beta 2 is a shipping browser. If Apple wants to be honest, they should compare the shipping browsers, or compare the beta browsers but it's definitely misleading for them to compare their new beta product to other older shipping products when there are betas on the market for them to compare against.

Apples to apples, oranges to oranges, but not apples to oranges. It's really not that difficult a concept.

- A

@Aaron I think it is ok to point this out, especially since this performance test seems to be the only "fact" that enables their marketing to claim that Safari 4 is "The worlds best browser" http://tbx.tumblr.com/post/81142332/blah-blah-blah It's defnetly a fact that Apple is exaggerating alot in their marketing, especially in Europe they have problems with advertising regulators. E.g. http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/11/uk-bans-apples.html This is not Apple-bashing, it's a critiqual point of view.
Why are many people in the Apple community so over sensitive about "their brand"? I like Mozilla alot, but if they fail on something, I'm able to critizice it. E.g. I think Songbird is just an open source clone of Itunes. (Sorry, Songbird people)

So that is it? They Keep spreading a lie over and over until people accept it as true fact? Enough is enough!

I think that graph is fraudy: The bottom of the bar doesn't visually "meet" the 0 line!

Spurious 3D: Recipe for disaster, IMAO.

C|Net article didn't compare it to Firefox 3.1 beta 2 either, they compared it to Firefox 3.2 pre-alpha.

Not only were they clear about what browser they were comparing to, their performance charts include both Firefox 3 and Firefox 3.1 beta (clearly marked), as well as IE 7 and IE 8 beta (again, clearly marked). Yes, it would be nice of them if they said "faster than any shipping browser and as fast as Firefox's competing beta," but I think you're _way_ over the top with a "performance fraud" headline. Again, what they say is accurate, and the chart with details including clearly marked beta results is one click away.

Aaron says..

How many people are using Firefox 3.1? Probably very few, making it a somewhat useless comparison for most people if they're trying to decide what browser to use right now.

I'm notorious for bashing Apple, but I somewhat understand their logic here. I guess the key difference here is that the beta of Safari 4 is the default you get when you try to download Safari from Apple.com, whereas the Firefox web site still gives you 3.0. That being said, I'd never offer a beta by default--unless the product never leaves that state, obviously. As long as Mozilla doesn't start fighting fire with fire by shifting focus to the 3.1 betas, I'm not bothered.

Following the apple link and clicking on the chart, we can see that some bench ran by apple give Firefox 3 better than firefox 3.1beta2 (the ibench stuff on windows).
I don't how real is this bench but it seems strange.

matp75, iBench is a joke. No one but Apple gives it any credence. It's very easy to manipulate that test and so the results are almost meaningless.

- A

the Safari 4 beta vs. Firefox 3 stable comparison is indeed just marketing, but then that's what marketing is (Firefox marketings included).

Anyway as far as I know, in terms of Sunspider scores at least, latest Safari webkit nightly is about 10% faster than latest Chromium nightly, and latest Chromium nightly is about 10% faster than latest Minefield nightly. In the end the latest Safari nightly is about 15-20% faster than latest Minefield nightly. Of course that's just in an Apple benchmark.

Asa wrote: "Wasn't that clever of Apple. They compared their beta of Safari 4 to the shipping Firefox 3 rather than to Mozilla's beta of Firefox 3.1. See what I mean about Apple marketing? It's really bordering on fraud."

Note also BTW that Microsoft is comparing pre-release (January) IE8 speeds to FF3 ones:

arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/03/microsofts-own-speed-tests-show-ie-beating-chrome-firefox.ars

[insert obligatory joke about MS copying Apple (again) here ;]