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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..."
Very nice release so far, mail/news seems to be "catching up" to the browser function.
... does anyone have a reasonable explanation on why the performance is so radically different between linux/win.
The tabbed browsing is almost up to galeon-level, though the speed is still slow, and its missing an (X) to close individual tabs. Use ctrl-w to close tabs in the meantime. This feature is quickly becoming my favorite.
One thing that continually bugs me is the total lack of performance of the linux builds compared to the windows builds. On windows, moz is FAST, and getting faster, and I don't mean just the turbo-load stuff
From my daily usage, mozilla on windows is "done" as far as for what I need to do, on linux, it still has a long way to go.
What is making mozilla slow on linux?
go Mozilla!
Though I haven't checked 6.0 yet. If the Mozilla team can straighten out some of the plug in problems (for example, it takes some voodoo before java actually works), or at least come up with a definitive install procedure, we'll be rockin'. The browser is solid, but I don't want to have to be asked what MIME type an m3u file (winamp playlist) is. Heck, I don't actually know! I'm so used to it being taken care of. This kind of "plays nice with others" is something we take for granted - even if it's fake in Bill Gates' case!
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.
Many OS purists think that using multiple processes is a hack around understanding multithreaded programming especially since traditionally there is a context/address switch cost from process to process versus when using different threads. Linux merely legitimizes this hack by implementing the clone system call and copy on write semantics for pages shared amongst processes which makes the worst problems with using multiple processes instead of multiple threads dissappear.
So, now Linux has both faster processes and threads, but thread performance still sucks.
This statement puzzles me greatly. How can Linux threads be faster yet their performance still sucks? Faster than what then?
mostly to support implementing multithreading in userspace (ick).
Huh? How is userland programs being able to create multiple threads a bad idea? Should creating multiple processes the only way to handle multiple tasks at once in an application?
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.
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. They specifically had issues with the inconsistent way signal handling is suposed to be implemented amongst threads in the same process if memory serves me correctly.