Pale Moon, 24.5, Linux 32 bit, running on Debian squeeze 32 bit, on my system, is dramatically faster than Firefox 29.0.1.

Or rather, the latter is dramatically slower than 28.0, just about unusably slow. And this is true with a very minimum installation and usage, Session Manager and Track Package the only extensions, a version of Shockwave Flash auto installed the only plugin. As little as 3 windows with 7 tabs.

And it might just be my impression, but Pale Moon might have been faster than Firefox 28.0.

Have you tried the two side by side?

See my link. I performance tested Firefox, Pale Moon and CyberFox on the same hardware within Windows and posted the results. Maybe the current Debian build is a bit messed up. Debian does their own builds of Firefox through a special agreement with Mozilla (they aren't Mozilla builds).

Ah, I see.

However the Firefox builds I'm using are the generic ones from Mozilla, Debian doesn't supply Firefox due to IP issues, they do their own "Iceweasel" build (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_r...).

Ah right. I'd confused it with Ubuntu. It's still odd, though. I wonder if other Debian users are seeing similar issues.

Out of curiosity, I ran the tests again on FF30 on Windows and Sunspider is about the same as FF28 was while PeaceKeeper and Dromaeo increased a couple percent.

It hasn't been notably slower for me.

And it's rather notably more lightweight in terms of RAM usage.

Who cares if javascript execution is slower? You can speed that bit up by not allowing it to run in the first place. I would accept any speed of browser to avoid Australis.