How are you testing the ping time through Firefox?

I'm using Speedtest.net. I'm sure it's not perfect but I wouldn't expect the ping to change for the worse by upgrading to a newer version of Firefox. I was surprised when I reverted back to Firefox 3 that it went back up. Suggestions?

Seems to have something to do with the java-script engine FF12 uses. New versions of firefox are using sophisticated coding to avoid lags caused by miscoded and crappy javascript on the webpage. Speedtest.net makes heavy use of javascript to measure the round-trip-time, your ping, by sending a TCP "ping" on port 80 to the testing server.

I just tried it with FF 3.6 and FF Nightly 14.0a1 and I can reproduce your result. With FF 3.6 the ping times are always at least 10ms lower, but the connection speed is also a bit lower, esp. with the upstream.

I put the pics of the scans to this post.

Summarized I would say it not a bug but a feature of new FF versions to control the CPU time a script can consume to avoid page hangs and laggy responses.

Well thank you so much. I know I need to upgrade for many reasons...especially security but these tests results made me go back to the older version. This makes sense and gives me enough knowledge to be able to go back to 12 and probably stop worrying about 10ms give or take.

I tested two systems that had recently been restarted (Windows updates...) and got very, very close results on the sister site PingTest.net. Fx3.6.27 is on XP, Fx12 is on Win7.

Now, my collection of extensions is a bit different on the different browsers, so this isn't a perfect test by any means, but it's another data point. (Obviously we have a nice fast connection here at work...)

If you are concerned about performance, John, you may want to try the Aurora builds of Firefox. They are called "Firefox nightly" (actually FF version 15). These are development builds, and they usually provide cutting edge tech and the best performance. If you are using a 64 Bit OS you can also download the native 64 bit version of Firefox nightly.

You can officially get both of them here:

http://nightly.mozilla.org/

The ping time as measured by the speedtest.net script, by the way, is not relevant for anything while browsing the web, its just a feature to tell the aprox. time between you and the server. You can get much more precise times if you measure them on a deeper network level (firefox/javascript is operating at "application level" (7) of the OSI network model and the built in windows "ping" tool operates at level 3 giving you more precise results.

You can call it by pressing the Windows Start button and entering the command: cmd in the blank field. You can then ping a host to check the ping-time.

e.g: ping google.com

Thanks so much Noctha and jscher2000. This really helped. I guess sometimes it's just the little things we focus on and i'm the kind of person who perfers to understand something like this. Thanks again.