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``Also a real pity, i wonder if the so called improved javascript VM will actually ever make it in the real world... cause we REALLY REALLY need optimized javascript;''

Well, it seems several people are already working on that. From Mozilla, there is Tamarin. From Apple, there is SquirrelFish.

And here's a comparison of the performance of various JavaScript engines, including Tamarin, SquirrelFish, and Chrome's V8.

I couldn't care less about the "Incognito"/porn mode. What I care about is proper window/tab isolation. That is, threading or forking. IE8 will have it. Chrome has it, I'm really tired of waiting for FF to catch up.

In fact, the only reason I still use FF at all is that it supports must-have extensions like adblock and flashblock. And a less necessary, but still - for me vital - extension: Foxmarks with its "Use own server" option.

I couldn't care less about the "Incognito"/porn mode. What I care about is proper window/tab isolation. That is, threading or forking. IE8 will have it. Chrome has it, I'm really tired of waiting for FF to catch up.

In fact, the only reason I still use FF at all is that it supports must-have extensions like adblock and flashblock. And a less necessary, but still - for me vital - extension: Foxmarks with its "Use own server" option.

I couldn't care less about the "Incognito"/porn mode. What I care about is proper window/tab isolation. That is, threading or forking. IE8 will have it. Chrome has it, I'm really tired of waiting for FF to catch up.

In fact, the only reason I still use FF at all is that it supports must-have extensions like adblock and flashblock. And a less necessary, but still - for me vital - extension: Foxmarks with its "Use own server" option.

The Distrust extension for Firefox DOES remove flash cookies, and it sits as a convenient toggle-button in the status-bar.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1559

At least in my opinion, it's a lot nicer to just click a button and browse privately, and then click it again after you're finished than to have to open up a whole new window like in Chrome. I really think the "open new Incognito window" would be more usable if it was an "open new Incognito tab", instead. Although maybe that's just my opinion.

That's pretty funny; the nightlies of Firefox display a giant warning when you try to go to that site, because it has a self-signed certificate!

Here's a different link that won't force you to add an exception to your browser.

(that is if there weren't already so many out there)

Yeah, well, and firefox has had a extension for it since a few months later

https://update-dev.mozilla.org:8080/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&id=1306&vid=6511

direct link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1306

It has 820.000 downloads, so it's not like people have been missing this functionality from firefox...

Uh, I know CWmike wants to promote Computerworld and all, but really a link to at least one of the "notes posted on its website" would have also been helpful..

Uh, I know CWmike wants to promote Computerworld and all, but really a link to at least one of the "notes posted on its website" would have also been helpful..

A lot of us watch YouTube and other flash video. Heck, some of us even play the odd flash game until a download is finished. If Adobe open sourced Flash, you could make decent cross-platform web applications in a matter of minutes all the while blocking Flash ads.

As with most other browser-based problems, Firefox has a plugin for that, so you can leave out the bits you like, but not be assed out by required Flash functionality in certain sites.

Corollary: Revamp the plugin architecture so that plugins have to run in a separate process.

I'm beginning to wonder if that fellow had any inside knowledge...

Are you kidding? This idea is the subject of a popular, but ignored request for enhancement filed back in Mozilla's Bugzilla in 2002!

It has 81 votes and 103 users on CC list. The idea is ages old, the successful implementation is new.

Now if only Mozilla guys got to finally implement it in their browser... Otherwise you'll always get folks blaming the browser for crashes which are in fact caused by proprietary plugins.

They [processes] 're slow to start up

It's hilarious anyone would think that. We're talking about a web browser, not a web server. Even on platforms where process creation is "slow", it's still going to be instantaneous from a single human's point of view. It's not like the user is opening 100 tabs per second.

Check out Linky.

Agreed - crashes in the browser itself are rare - Firefox seems very reliable in that way.
However crashes in plugins can be common, and indeed trusting a big binary blob to invasively use your process safely just seems like a bad idea. So I would say that firefox should definitely go for that part and not worry about the process-per-tab part.
Well like most good ideas it has been in Bugzilla for years!
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=156493

It is also quite easy to customize,both with extensions and full bore rebuilds. Firefox by itself is okay, but with Noscript,Adblock Plus,Forecastfox,and FEBE to ensure backups it makes Firefox a must have in my book,even so far as keeping a copy of Firefox Portable(another nice customization) on my flash for out in the field.

And then if Firefox isn't to your liking there is always Flock,and Kmeleon for older Windows machines(also works with Noscript and Adblock with a little tinkering) and of course there is Songbird which is going for an Open Source iTunes kind of thing and is actually a pretty nice media player IMHO. To me that is what is nice about Gecko,it has enough features built in that a good coder can use it as the basis for all sorts of applications and it is trivial to add functionality through extensions to make the browser YOUR way,instead of what some company thinks is best. This is why despite the buzz around Chrome I'll still be installing Gecko based browsers(Firefox,Seamonkey,or Kmeleon depending on the client/machine) on every machine I service or sell. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV

It is also quite easy to customize,both with extensions and full bore rebuilds. Firefox by itself is okay, but with Noscript,Adblock Plus,Forecastfox,and FEBE to ensure backups it makes Firefox a must have in my book,even so far as keeping a copy of Firefox Portable(another nice customization) on my flash for out in the field.

And then if Firefox isn't to your liking there is always Flock,and Kmeleon for older Windows machines(also works with Noscript and Adblock with a little tinkering) and of course there is Songbird which is going for an Open Source iTunes kind of thing and is actually a pretty nice media player IMHO. To me that is what is nice about Gecko,it has enough features built in that a good coder can use it as the basis for all sorts of applications and it is trivial to add functionality through extensions to make the browser YOUR way,instead of what some company thinks is best. This is why despite the buzz around Chrome I'll still be installing Gecko based browsers(Firefox,Seamonkey,or Kmeleon depending on the client/machine) on every machine I service or sell. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV

It is also quite easy to customize,both with extensions and full bore rebuilds. Firefox by itself is okay, but with Noscript,Adblock Plus,Forecastfox,and FEBE to ensure backups it makes Firefox a must have in my book,even so far as keeping a copy of Firefox Portable(another nice customization) on my flash for out in the field.

And then if Firefox isn't to your liking there is always Flock,and Kmeleon for older Windows machines(also works with Noscript and Adblock with a little tinkering) and of course there is Songbird which is going for an Open Source iTunes kind of thing and is actually a pretty nice media player IMHO. To me that is what is nice about Gecko,it has enough features built in that a good coder can use it as the basis for all sorts of applications and it is trivial to add functionality through extensions to make the browser YOUR way,instead of what some company thinks is best. This is why despite the buzz around Chrome I'll still be installing Gecko based browsers(Firefox,Seamonkey,or Kmeleon depending on the client/machine) on every machine I service or sell. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV

It is also quite easy to customize,both with extensions and full bore rebuilds. Firefox by itself is okay, but with Noscript,Adblock Plus,Forecastfox,and FEBE to ensure backups it makes Firefox a must have in my book,even so far as keeping a copy of Firefox Portable(another nice customization) on my flash for out in the field.

And then if Firefox isn't to your liking there is always Flock,and Kmeleon for older Windows machines(also works with Noscript and Adblock with a little tinkering) and of course there is Songbird which is going for an Open Source iTunes kind of thing and is actually a pretty nice media player IMHO. To me that is what is nice about Gecko,it has enough features built in that a good coder can use it as the basis for all sorts of applications and it is trivial to add functionality through extensions to make the browser YOUR way,instead of what some company thinks is best. This is why despite the buzz around Chrome I'll still be installing Gecko based browsers(Firefox,Seamonkey,or Kmeleon depending on the client/machine) on every machine I service or sell. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV

Same reason I won't switch to Opera. I like vim.

Oh, and don't forget about noscript, even if Chrome runs javascript faster, most of the time, I don't care.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gecko:DeCOMtamination

Yes, adding the feature to the core of Firefox would be nice...but if they did that for all the 'nice features' it'd have too much bloat. Hence, extensions.

Check out 'NoScript' - it does what you want. By default, no pages get to run scripts. You approve on a per-domain basis (so say, Slashdot is running some google code on the page - you'll have both domains as choices - allow, temporarily allow (which is handy when you don't recog the domain) or block, and don't tell me again.

http://noscript.net/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722

I run it on all my installs of Firefox...this combined with AdBlock & Flashblock make for a very controlled and friendly surfing experience.

Better idea is to just use the nightly tester tools. That allows you to override compatibility on a per-extension basis, which is a good idea, as sometimes they really are incompatible and sometimes they're really incompatible. Just ask anyone who tried forcing Google toolbar on 3.0 before Google updated it.

I have a feeling that behaviour might be "by design." From this blog entry:

".. select Never if you don't want to accept this upgrade offer; we might send you another offer again in the future, but it won't be for several weeks or months.."

I don't know whether your "few" matches up with Mozilla's "several" :/

http://developer.mozilla.org/En/DOM_improvements_in_Firefox_3

It seems they have been focusing on extending the DOM support but TraceMonkey will eventually be used to enhance FF's DOM performance

(Excerpt from this page: http://ejohn.org/blog/tracemonkey/)

Right now there isn't any tracing being done into DOM methods (only across pure-JavaScript objects) - but that is something that will be rectified. Being able to trace through a DOM method would successfully speed up, not only, math and object-intensive applications (as it does now) but also regular DOM manipulation and property access.

This is really starting to get annoying.

I suppose you filed a bug report a few weeks ago and no one has done anything about it?
Don't bother to check, I am quite sure you didn't:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=453452

This was posted on the 3rd. On the highly unlikely event that it was you that posted that bug, maybe you should give them more than 3 days to do something about it before bashing them on /.?
Also, I would categorize this as a low priority bug(OMFG? Pressing a button AN EXTRA COUPLE OF TIMES? You still alive?), so don't hold your breath.
It is also in the 1.8 branch..

You know one thing I find annoying?
Users that find bugs and never tell you about them.

To get a version with Tracemonkey, download a nightly build and follow these instructions:

open a new tab
type about:config and hit enter
read the warning and heed its wisdom
enter jit in the filter field
double click on javascript.options.jit.chrome and javascript.options.jit.content to change their values to true

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6349

Just for reference for those who may also be blocked or otherwise can't get to it...

You know all those sites where you have to register for a free account in order to access the content, sites where there's no real logical reason why you should have to register for an account except for the purpose of them harvesting your e-mail and personal information?

What Bug Me Not does is provide usernames and passwords for registrations that people have created and uploaded to their site that you can use to access content without giving up your personal information.

Perhaps a simple example would make it more clear. Let's say you go to some news site, and they insist that in order to access the site, you register for a free account. Of course, they want your name, address, and e-mail address. Even after you fill out your information, they drop you a registration e-mail that you have to validate. Then, and only then, you can access the site.

If you don't want to go through these hoops or give up your information to them, what you can do instead is go to Bug Me Not. Punch in the site name, and voila, you get a username and password you can use to access the site that someone else has already registered. If one doesn't exist and you're motivated enough, you can register one (probably using a service like Mailinator) and provide the username and password so that the next schmoe that comes along that needs one will have it.

There's also a nice Bug Me Not Firefox extension that will automagically fill in the information for you so that you don't even have to bother going to the web site.

The only problem, as someone else mentioned, is that if you're behind a content filter, some companies tag Bug Me Not as a "hacking" site. (As is Mailinator, usually.) Obviously, some people have trouble with the concept of people who don't like giving out their personal e-mail addresses or other personal information just to read a frickin' article.

See also: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

The CustomizeGoogle extension also has an anonymization feature. I hope we will see a fully anonymized Chromium plugin/fork soon!

I'm searching Google now for a way to disable this distracting device

You can't. It doesn't even respect image.animation_mode. The bug for it is nearly seven years old.

This is also the same in the windows world. Also, when using center click with Tree Style Tab you can get a VERY useful little breadcrumb trail of exactly where you've been. It tends to encourage me to have WAY too many tabs open though.

Why use IE at all? Try the Firefox plugin, IE Tab. Works great. (There is one site that I have run across that doesn't play nice with it, and I have to use Internet Explorer in that case. Other than that, it works wonderfully.)

The current Firefox 3 Javascript engine is Spidermonkey. There is already work happening apace to use the Adobe donated Tamarin Actionscript VM within the next Firefox Javascript engine which will bring features like JIT compilation to the table.

I'm afraid this proliferation of Javascript engines is going to continue unless one becomes available with no strings attached that bests all others in all areas on all platforms. Perhaps that is Google's ultimate goal (if they force such an engine into existence everything else will have to think hard about not adopting it)?

The current Firefox 3 Javascript engine is Spidermonkey. There is already work happening apace to use the Adobe donated Tamarin Actionscript VM within the next Firefox Javascript engine which will bring features like JIT compilation to the table.

I'm afraid this proliferation of Javascript engines is going to continue unless one becomes available with no strings attached that bests all others in all areas on all platforms. Perhaps that is Google's ultimate goal (if they force such an engine into existence everything else will have to think hard about not adopting it)?

So, it should refuse to support that at all?

Are you using Firefox? It has some support as well.

Tabs at the side would take up even more space than tabs at the top or bottom.

But the space they're taking up is less useful. Increasingly people these days have wide-aspect displays...

And let's not forget that even the "old" aspect ratio displays still had more horizontal pixels than vertical. So even at 640x480, vertical space (top and bottom edges) is at a premium over horizontal space (left and right edges). I've always put my FVMW buttons module along the left size of the screen for that very reason.

With Firefox on my 20" 16:9 display, if I were to resize the window to take up the entire screen, I'd loose out. Most web pages are crafted with a 800x600 resolution in mind, and leave blank vertical strips along the left/right edges if the browser canvas is larger. (Sure, that is bad web design, but if you think that's a viable objection, perhaps you haven't seen the Internet before.) Even pages which resize (like Slashdot) tend to make the lines of text so wide as to make them harder to read. (Text is easier to read in narrower columns; there's a reason newspapers lay things out the way they do.)

But thanks to Tree Style Tabs, I have the option of putting all my tabs in a box on the left. It also puts the tabs in a hierarchy, with collapsible sub-trees, which fits my browsing and thinking habits perfectly. I middle-click (new tab) for practically everything. I can drag-and-drop to restructure. This lets me structure and compartmentalize my thinking. I frequently find I have 50+ tabs open, with several collapsed, reflecting what I'm working on and what I've backgrounded.

Long titles are rarely a problem (I've got 25+ characters visible in my tabs), and tooltips work for the few times I need more.

I find myself wishing for a window/desktop manager that could organize windows this way. It's like the power of virtual desktops on steroids. There's an arbitrary number of groupings and levels of groupings, while virtual desktops are typically limited (in practical terms) to one or two levels, and two to six groupings at each level.

I find firefox's plugin download statusbar better than opera's seperate tab.
And I was baffled at the opera mouse gestures since you can't customise them. Add-ons aren't that bad or troublesome, really.

I'd guess 0 lines of code.

And you'd be wrong. They use NSS and some other bits and pieces for import.

There's actually an open bug concerning an update of the guidelines. But frankly, they have too many of those.

You don't have to miss IE's screwed up box model - the useful parts of it are likely to go into CSS3. You can still use them right now if you want to, at least they're properly labelled as nonstandard this time.

For all that the Mozilla team isn't worried, they've got a long history of developers rejecting Gecko for other engines: first AOL rejected it in preference for IE (and then again on the Mac in preference for WebKit), then Apple (again for WebKit), and now Google (once again for WebKit). In the mobile space it isn't doing all that much better, with developers rejecting it in favor of Opera. In quite a few cases, including AOL and Google, we've even seen this rejection when the company previously had a history of active support for, and even paying developers to work on, the Gecko engine.

AOL is an interesting case. On the Windows side, I doubt AOL was ever really interested in using Gecko other than a bargaining chip against Microsoft to get preferential desktop placement in XP. I suppose if they were ever really interested in doing Gecko in AOL Win, they could have as it was pretty well known that they had internal builds running that way.

As for AOL Mac, I'd say the issue there is that development stagnated in general on their Mac client side. Seriously, the version of Gecko they had shipping for the longest while was something like 0.9.8, meaning pre-Mozilla 1.0 and pre-Firefox 1.0 by a long shot! Somewhere in between that version and their newer version, they fired all of their Netscape employees and shut that division down. At that point, it only makes sense to use Webkit because you don't have any resources capable of leveraging Gecko any more.

As for Google, that'll be an interesting question for the time being. It's worth noting that Android uses WebKit, so it could simply be a case of leveraging the work already done there to understand the platform. It's well known that Gecko needs to lose a lot of fat around the edges to make it from Desktop to Mobile platforms, so that's a good reasoning for that choice there.

It could simply be a case that Firefox is too much of a beast for third-parties to jump in and start hacking on the code. Remember that it was borne out of 1998-era Netscape code, and while they had to restart at least once in there, you're probably going to get some crud that makes it complicated.

As for clients that embed Gecko, here you go: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/mozilla-based.html

Perhaps a team that isn't forced to respect ass-backwards coding guidelines can attempt to produce something fast and reasonably safe, instead of spending all their time optimizing code for Visual C++ 1.5.

Seriously, Mozilla has their heads so far up the ass that is an ancient codebase, and is extremely slow at fixing the numerous bugs that have shown up over the ages, that I see little chance for them to be a significant competitor in the future, unless they manage to clean up their act in a major way instead of shoving out incremental updates as major versions.

NoScript? I would have assumed that most of the FF users have it installed but apparently thats not the case.

That's because Flash 9 received a brand new Virtual Machine. FireFox was given the code for it (it's called Tamarin), but it has not yet made it into a release. Once it does, FireFox and Flash 9 should show similar performance profiles.

Previous versions of Flash were absolutely terrible from a performance perspective. So the entire JS-language community is slowly moving forward. :-)

And, of course, the awesomebar is painful to look at. Someday I'm going to get banned from slashdot because people will get tired of me bitching about that "feature" on every Firefox story.

Oldbar: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227

Try All in one sidebar. It's not tabbed, but you can manage bookmarks, downloads etc. from it.

Actually, for most people, tabs at the side take up less space than tabs at the top or bottom, because you only need one or two windows for all your tabs, no matter how many you open. Also note that with the vertical tab bar in Tree Style Tab, indentation is used to show hierarchical tab relationships; this isn't possible with a horizontal tab bar. And you can always hide the tab bar while you browse your... Internet. ;^)

Try it for a day. Then comment.

and put the tabs above the address bar (not below)

That's a clear sign something's broken at Google. Tabs belong on the left or right edge so that once you have a number of them you can still allocate reasonable space to their title bars. Tree Style Tab and Vertigo are your friends. I have 40+ tabs open in the window I'm writing this in, and I can navigate through all of them easily. I wouldn't be able to if my tab bar were on the top of the window.