Slashdot Mirror

OpenGL and Direct3D are pretty equivalent APs in terms of capabilities. Firefox uses OpenGL on Mac. It tried to use OpenGL on Linux, but discovered that this causes some drivers to crash. In fact, even detecting the driver type causes it to crash. The problem has since been solved by just using a separate process at startup to detect the driver type so crashy drivers can be blacklisted, so OpenGL should be used in on Linux in the future.

Direct2D (which is what does 2d stuff on Windows) is something that has no equivalent on Mac and Linux. Render can sometimes do an almost-equivalent job if you get lucky with your card and drivers (e.g. a lot of the IE "hardware acceleration" tests are way faster on Linux than on Mac when you get lucky in this way). To deal with this issue Mozilla is basically going to implement a cross-platform accelerated 2d graphics layer (on top of OpenGL in the Linux case) and use that. See http://blog.mozilla.com/joe/2011/04/26/introducing-the-azure-project/

But yes, this would all work better on Linux if the drivers worked without crashing, if there were a decent system 2d API for accelerated graphics, etc...

Have you tried FireFox 4 for mobile, which runs on both Android and Maemo? It was actually released Friday.

http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/03/29/mozilla-launches-firefox-4-for-android-allowing-users-to-take-the-power-and-customization-of-firefox-everywhere-2/

I can turn off AdBlock but not Firebug, I'm in it all day and need it for development. It would be ironic to see a tool like Firebug be the cause of this problem. Firebug is also only running in a single tab, the app that I'm working on and that's it. So I'll play around with the addons but isn't there a way to see how much memory each addon is using instead going through a trial and error routine?

I just closed my browser and restarted it with the same 34 tabs and memory usage went down to 384 MB from 1.3 GB. By the time I finished writing this first part, which is the only thing that I've done other than visit http://support.mozilla.com/nl/questions/799397#answer-159664, and memory usage now sits at around 812MB. I did no development, did not use Firebug and didn't visit a page that has any ads except for this one. Now it's at 932MB and then all of a sudden drops back down to 731MB. The only thing that I'm doing is typing in this comment box on Slashdot. It's slowly climbing again and it's now at 981MB. It's climbing at a rate of about 2MB per second and then will drop about 200MB and then start climbing again. Like I said, I'm not browsing at all - just typing in this box while these memory fluctuations are happening.

See, after getting 4gb of ram, and having like 6 more in swap, I don't worry about memory usage

The problem is, that's the equivalent of saying "There's no problem with the software. The user should just throw money at the issue and upgrade his/her system."

Even Mozilla's recommended system requirements indicate 1/8th the amount of RAM you have.

We can't daydream and imagine we can acceptably run modern websites, let alone 50 tabs of them, on decades-old machines. But if the developers themselves are recommending 512MB, then the user should have an acceptable experience at 512MB, not 4GB.

It appears you haven't heard about the new Firefox release schedule.
https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel/

Firefox 4 is the stable channel
There is no beta build currently
Firefox 5 is in the Aurora channel
Firefox 6 is in the Nightly channel

Have a look at this and use your blood pressure as a benchmark score.

> Now it's much easier to keep two copies of Firefox
> next to eachother.

This was always just as easy as now. Nothing has changed in this regard.

> There is only one problem that I see, you cannot run
> them next to eachother

Sure you can; just have them use different profiles. See http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing%20profiles

Funny, because this "legacy garbage" is the only reason why Windows is still so popular. In addition, the "legacy garbage" (aka ActiveX, ask the people in South Korea why they can't use anything but IE. http://blog.mozilla.com/gen/2007/09/21/update-on-the-cost-of-monoculture-in-korea/ ).

How about they build a new Windows, without the 'legacy garbage' and every mom and pop need to buy all the software they all love and use again for no reason other than the older version doesn't run on the new Windows?

Would be nice if Windows would start to compete with other systems on fair grounds and not how well Windows application can be run on the different systems (which no matter how well your system is, Windows will always run Windows applications better).

After decades we finally have somewhat of a fair ground where Microsoft Office needs to compete on fair grounds and not how well the office suites can open and save Microsoft Office documents. But of course that move was undermined by Microsoft with their OOXML format.

Yes, Microsoft should have been split up and the new companies should have been under control by the feds. Further, the APIs and the document formats should be opened up, for Wine, Samba, and OpenOffice. The judgment did in fact nothing at all and you can see how well the governmentcooperation relationship is doing.

Current releases of 3.6, 4.0 and 3.5 have the fix for this problem
http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2011/mfsa2011-11.html
http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2011/03/22/firefox-blocking-fraudulent-certificates/

Ah, I see what you mean now. Sorry, I'm a bit dense today.

Yup, you're right. Clearing browsing history should have nothing whatsoever to do with opened tabs.

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/794373#answer-150774

Click on "I have this problem too!" to vote to fix it (I just did). Enough votes and they might throw it into the bugtracker.

No, there's good reason for having the tabs above.

http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2010/06/24/why-tabs-are-on-top-in-firefox-4/

I don't understand why people don't like their tabs on top. I like it, and there's quite a few good reasons for them to be on top (such as how the buttons like back and forward only modify what's on the current tab, making the buttons appear to be directly connected to the tab). The only reason I can think of off the top of my head for keeping the tabs on the bottom is just a resistance to change or not being used to the new behavior, which I completely understand. Insisting that it's "where they belong", though, is just nonsense.

I've been using the beta for awhile, and from the moment I installed it it seemed significantly faster to me, and to most people:
http://input.mozilla.com/en-US/release/

And there is plenty of data to support it:
http://arewefastyet.com/?a=b&view=breakdown

Some details on how the download visualization works: http://blog.mozilla.com/data/2011/03/22/how-glow-mozilla-org-gets-its-data/

as seen in Chrome and Firefox 4.

And it's even worse in Safari.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/4.0/whatsnew/

Try explaining to AT&T why your "mobile browser" is suddenly Firefox (which isn't available on smartphones)

Are you sure about that? My Samsung Galaxy S seems to think differently...

(To be fair, I find that FF's a bit of a pig on that platform; most of the time, I use Opera instead.)

I posted this already just below this but here it is again: http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2010/11/17/dead-code-elimination-for-beginners/
I admit that I do not know whether IE9 fixed all the flaws in their dead code elimination but it used to be incredibly flawed and dead code elimination only works for poorly written code that you would typically only find in badly written benchmarks anyways. However, the real problem is the test itself and so Sunspider should be updated so that IE9 actually does the math that Sunspider is trying to test the performance of.

I said to ignore Peacekeeper because my original post was about JAVASCRIPT and HARDWARE ACCELERATION but Peacekeeper tries to test overall browser performance. I can't find any links for you but the major problem with Peacekeeper's Javascript benchmarks is that they call getTime() from within loops instead of outside of the loop which makes the tests mostly about how fast they can call getTime() instead of running the actual code that they're trying to test.

Since you can't be bothered to google:

http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2010/11/17/dead-code-elimination-for-beginners/

Get the Addon Compatibility Reporter. Mozilla recommends it to get around this very problem... I found out about it via their FAQ page. This disables checking for compatibility so you can test the extensions and report to their devs that they are still working (or not).

https://services.mozilla.com/privacy-policy/

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/Crypto

It does confirm to standards, just not very many of them: http://people.mozilla.com/~prouget/ie9/

Of course this is a mozilla blog, but facts are checkable

Found this page explaining how to update

Has to be one of the stranger ways to update something that I've seen.

Yeah, there should be a big button, right on the release announcement page, labeled "Download" for the OS/Architecture of the browser you're currently running. But the download's not that far off. For those to tired or lazy to look, the link to the download page is right under the link for "Release Notes". (This might be a case of deliberate obfuscation, since this is a beta that you don't want to mistake for a supported official release.)

I kind of like BTW the sci-fi theme of the page background, where you got this team of people fixing or unloading things off their hovercars.

That's the landing page you get after installing it.
Try https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/beta/

Modern JS jits (tracemonkey, crankshaft) seem to be able to get to within about a factor of 10 of well-optimized (gcc -O3) C code on simple numeric stuff. That's about equivalent to C code compiled with -O0 with gcc, and actually for similar reasons if you look at the generated assembly. There's certainly headroom for them to improve more.

For more complicated workloads, the difference from C may be more or less, depending. I don't have any actual data for that sort of thing, unfortunately.

There _are_ things "wrong" with javascript that make it hard to optimize (lack of typing, very dynamic, etc). Things like http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2010/11/17/dead-code-elimination-for-beginners/ (see the valueOf example) make it a bit of a pain to generate really fast code. But projects like https://wiki.mozilla.org/TypeInference are aiming to deal with these issues. We'll see what things look like a year from now!

Mozilla has a free plugin check that you can use to see not only if you're up to date on the most common plugins but also if any of yours that are out of date suffer from an known exploit you should fix immediately. It's free, and there's no extra plugin (yeah, BrowserCheck...what the) to install: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/plugincheck/.

You can use Mozilla's Plugin Check. No installation required.

It is certainly possible to check plugin versions through JS alone, though from reading mozilla blogs I understand it's tricky since not all plugins report their version numbers the same way. Mozilla's Plugin Check.

http://www.mozilla.com/plugincheck/

Ok, my arguments stink, but what my first comment was about was this:

http://people.mozilla.com/~prouget/ie9/

Firefox 4.0 is still in beta https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/beta/

Can you name any files that might be more popular than those infringing the copyrights of the MPAA studios, the major porn studios, the big four record labels, or the major video game publishers?

Perhaps I can.

It really doesn't seem to be so hard.

I mean, really: Did you even stop to look around at the world before you wrote that?

Because, frankly, I think the concept that you're attempting to quantify is bullshit.

Really, I do.

Peace.

It also causes Firefox to ask if you want to save tabs every time you close a window (like popups) which is incredibly annoying.

http://support.mozilla.com/ak/questions/669132

If Firefox 4 starts, assuming you are on Windows, would you try disabling hardware acceleration in tools > options > advanced > general > browsing. If that helps your system has video card drivers that are incompatible with Firefox. Updating the drivers should help. If you have any crash report IDs http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Mozilla+Crash+Reporter explains how to retrieve them. They would be very helpful in diagnosing the problem.

The latest epic fail was "copy & paste." After hibernation, the browser literally stopped providing Copy/Cut-paste functionality, and page printing too. If you don't believe me: http://input.mozilla.com/en-US/search/?product=firefox&q=copy+paste

They do have a what happened to the status bar section in the FAQ, it includes a link to Status-4-Evar which will return the status bar to it's formal glory.

Is there a browser around that targets the geek market? One for those of us who want more information and more control?

That's what the add-ons or libgtkmozembed are for.
Incidentally, firefox "fennec" for mobile phones which is in beta is coming along quite well. I can even view animated .gifs now that you can't with google's browser.

Ten cents a browser sounds really cheap, until you do the math and count the number of downloads each browser has. For example, Firefox 3.6 has had nearly 400 million downloads since January 2010 ( http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/stats/ ). That's nearly $40 million a year to include a third party's software to support a single feature in a product they're giving away for free. I'd rather see that money go into stabilization of the codebase, new features, etc.

I'd actually prefer they went the platform codec route. Setup is a little more complicated, but there's no licensing fee for personal use of MPEG-LA formats ( http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=1977899 ), and if I need a license for non-free media I should just get one for my computer rather than depending on each and every one of my web browser companies to provide one to me.

Yes, on a micro scale it seems silly to "cheap out" by not dropping a dime on each of your users to give them a standard video experience. But when there's a free one available, why not push that? WebM is completely free for anyone to implement and use as they see fit.

PS: Your analogy doesn't quite hold. Try "I'm to cheap to recommend SyFy shows to friends, because for each show a friend decides to watch, I have to pay SyFy a ten cent referral fee."

The article ends with, "It will be interesting to see if major browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari will follow the suit and drop support for H.264."

Firefox does not natively support the H.264 codec without plugins (i.e., Flash or WMP Firefox Plugin)

http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2010/12/27/addons-mozilla-org-disclosure/
Active accounts have their password SHA-512 hashed with per-user salt, so they're safe (for a while). However those 44,000 holders of older (and now disabled) MD5 hashed accounts should rush changing their passwords elsewhere, if they have the bad habit of using the same password everywhere...

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/4.0b8/releasenotes/buglist.html

Are we fast yet.com shows the measurements used by the Mozilla Javascript development team, comparing performance of ff4 to chrome/v8 and safari/nitro using both the sunspider (Mozilla) and v8bench (Google) test suites. LOTS of movement in Firefox over the past few months, including the apparent surpassing of Safari's Nitro engine in both tests and even beating Chrome's V8 in the Mozilla test suite.

This boost is likely due in part to the recently added hardware acceleration. This is listed as supported on all major operating systems (see the Firefox 4 Beta Technology page).

You may wish to re-try this on FF 4. There has been significant work put in to reducing disk access in Firefox:

• Use sqlite's WAL to reduce fsyncs and disk writes
• Write cookie data to disk less frequently
• Fewer files opened on startup
• Fixed the SQLite page size to increase performance on Windows

There is also a tracking bug for bad I/O patterns available, so you can see what they're up to.

Syncing bookmarks is exactly what Firefox Sync aims to do. Windows Live Mesh does the same for the IE crowd.

first to do so? What can this do that a Firefox add-in cannot?

I don't think an add-in is needed. Firefox help teaches you how to set up a whitelist for cookies:

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Blocking%20cookies#w_block-cookies-for-all-sites

Maybe the IE feature blocks other history tracking devices, such as flash cookies also, but there is nothing in the article that indicates this.

You shouldn't even need to go that far, Mozilla plugged most of the leak. I'm not sure if this made it into 3.6 though... might want to wait for 4.0?

Disabling thirdparty cookies in Firefox seemed to fix the problem for me. Now non-facebook sites can't tell who I am on facebook. I'm not sure why this is not the default setting for Firefox and other browsers.

I only recently discovered facebook's instant personalization "feature". I went to rottentomatoes and it showed movies that my facebook friends liked. This seems very inappropriate to me because how did rottentomatoes know who I am in facebook, without logging in or doing any kind of verification. Apparently rottentomatoes uses thirdparty cookies to fetch your facebook info and display it. This seems to mean that potentially any website can check who you are in facebook (if you are currently logged in). I was able to turn off this feature by disabling thirdparty cookies in Firefox.

More than anything this seems like a big privacy leak and is the fault of the browsers. This should be off by default in firefox and other browsers. If I go to rottentomatoes.com, I would expect that by Firefox would only send cookies back to rottentomatoes and should not even allow read access to other cookies while I'm on that page. The same goes for flash plugins and other scripts, etc. that read cookies, they should only have read access to the cookies for the current page.

http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2010/11/17/dead-code-elimination-for-beginners/

Summary: The Chakra DCE "optimization" handles ++ but not --, > but not >. In short, it handles exactly the set of operators found in math-cordic, and not others. This makes no sense if it's intended to be a general-purpose optimization.

Furthermore, Sayre also points out that the optimization makes assumptions that aren't true for JS, leading to bugs where it incorrectly eliminates code that is not, in fact, dead.

Actually, when you ignore the anomalous 1.0 ms, it runs around 2x longer than Chrome and between 2x-3x longer than Opera.

I didn't run the test myself to check it out - I simply looked at the numbers as published on the blog of the person who discovered this issue. Specifically, this graph. Now that I look at it again, I've realized that this is the total SunSpider score, rather than the one for this particular test. My mistake.

It's way too convenient that the test ends up taking the same amount of time, to a certain resolution ... The "roundness" of 1.0ms is convenient, too

I wonder if it's simply the resolution of the timer (possibly artificially rounded up)? So it takes less than 1ms in practice, probably fluctuating there just as much in relative measurements, but the fluctuations are below timer resolution.

By the way, have a look at my post in response to another reply in this thread. I've tried to get the same effect observed on a different (and much simplified) code, but results are rather weird - something is going on, but it's not consistent with full DCE.