Mozilla 0.9.6 Released

bluephone writes: "Yessireebob. mozilla.org has released the 0.9.6 milestone. Here are Release Notes and a link of files on the FTP server. For milestones 0.9.7 and 0.9.8, the focus is on performace enhancingment, and stability of the Mail/News end of the suite. And boy, is it getting good..."

Comments

Re:Mozilla is a great browser if...

[jacoplane]

If the only part of mozilla you like is Gecko, then use only gecko with a simplified interface.

For linux, try Galeon

For windows, try K-Meleon

These are the days

[Sludge]

I'm going to miss these days. My favourite browser gets massive improvements every couple of months.

Idea wishlist:

• Ability to bring up my $EDITOR when typing in a textarea
• Plugin missing popup isn't so annoying (I refuse to install flash)
• A clean looking theme that isn't netscape 4-ish
• More usability based around the tab feature. That thing is wonderful!
• A way to delete the contents of the URL bar without destroying the contents of my clipboard. Right now, I copy a URL from somewhere else, then click in the URL bar and hit delete, just to have the contents of the URL bar copied to my clipboard.

I'm a very busy person who does some good for the community already in his free time, so don't ask me to implement these features. I just don't have the time.

Perhaps this would be a good time to ask... does anyone know of a proxy that allows you to rewrite packets on the fly? I think the web's got to the point where I want to start overriding some HTML arbitrarily. I know regular expressions, so some sort of regex interpreter would be quite handy.

Re:These are the days

[ink]

A way to delete the contents of the URL bar without destroying the contents of my clipboard. Right now, I copy a URL from somewhere else, then click in the URL bar and hit delete, just to have the contents of the URL bar copied to my clipboard.

Already done: Highlight the URL you want in some other application and then middle-click in a blank spot on any Mozilla page. You can even set this up to open a new tab with the tabbed browser by going to the new tab preferences under 'Navigator'.

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[Anonymous Coward]

Er, nice try.

The main reason is that Mozilla makes pretty heavy use of pthreads, and pthreads don't exactly fly on Linux. Windows threading performance is definitely superior to Linux's pthread performance, at least on single processor systems. Why?

Windows is absolutely useless at process creation. Windows threads are about as heavyweight as Linux processes, and Windows processes are hopelessly heavyweight. So, the traditional Unix model of using many processes to complete complicated tasks completely fails on Win32. Microsoft's answer to this failing was to make threading as fast as possible, and to push multithreaded programming as a hack around a fundemental OS problem.

Back in Linux land, the relatively low demand for mutlithreaded apps (because the Unix model really works quite well if you have fast process build up/tear down) finally pushes Linus and friends to implement clone(). The clone() system call was based on Plan9's thread model, and is actually much faster and more advanced than Win32 threads, totally beating out of almost all standard OS kernels at thread performance.

So, now Linux has both faster processes and threads, but thread performance still sucks. Note that I said pthread performance on Linux isn't very fast. Pthreads are POSIX threads, and have very different semantics from clone(), mostly to support implementing multithreading in userspace (ick). So, the standard is a hack to say the least. Unfortunately, it's still a standard, and Linux must map pthread behaviour to clone() in userspace, which is painfully slow. It requires multiple context switches just to created a pthread on Linux. So, pthread-heavy programs like Mozilla just crawl.

So, the moral of the story is that Linux has a much better core, but seeing that the Linux community actually cares about standards, performance isn't quite up to snuff.

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[rmathew]

"JayPee" has made available Navigator-only optimised builds for Linux that you might find useful.

Re:Better and Better

[nathanh]

[Re: Open Source nature of Mozilla] Zealots aside, why is this better? Have you modified any of the source code? Have you contributed? Have you searched through it to make sure there are no back doors that mail out your keystrokes? Or are you karma whoring?

• No single entity (person or company) can control the distribution or ownership of the browser. This neatly avoids the problem of a single vendor trying to control standards.
• No product lock-in: "must have" features can always be lifted and used in another piece of software, if the mozilla monster turns out to be an unwanted burden.
• The software is not rushed to completion (2 years of delays proves this!) so I have faith that the quality is better than most other browsers.
• Development is driven by demand not money. This means the engine implements features that people wanted, not just feature "checklists".
• The GECKO engine is portable and has been ported widely. This means I'm not locked into a single operating system or hardware platform.
• There is no limits on how the engine is used. This means I see the same engine rendering my help files, my email, my webpages, etc.
• Though I might never read the code, I know somebody else can, will, and has.

Re:Threads and Processes

[bgarcia]

This statement puzzles me greatly. How can Linux threads be faster yet their performance still sucks?

I think he meant to say that the linux kernel threads (clone()) are faster, but the *pthread* calls are slower.

This statement implies that Linux has POSIX compliant threads which the last time I checked is not true especially since the primary kernel hackers (Alan Cox, Linus, etc) are against it.

Linux does have POSIX-compliant threads. The kernel does not, but there is a pthread library that implements the pthread functions to work with linux kernel threads.