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

Cross-platform performance.

[reaper20]

Very nice release so far, mail/news seems to be "catching up" to the browser function.

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 ... does anyone have a reasonable explanation on why the performance is so radically different between linux/win.

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!

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.

[anthony_baxter]

I find that building with mondo optimisation makes quite a difference to how fast mozilla "feels". I also turn off mail/news - I don't care, I don't need it :)

From my .mozconfig:

ac_add_options --disable-mailnews
ac_add_options --enable-optimize="-O4 -finline -fno-omit-frame-pointer -march=pentiumpro -mcpu=pentiumpro"

I don't know what build options are used for the milestone builds...

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[rmathew]

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

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[Simm0]

Unfortunately this high optimization (>= -O3) will not work while compiling with GCC 3.0 which currently has a strange bug which will cause mozilla to crash on startup. A patch was checked in early today that fixes this problem on the mozilla trunk.

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

Re:Mozilla is a great browser if...

[ihatelisp]

From the release note,

System requirement
* Intel Pentium-class 233 MHz (or faster) processor

So your hardware isn't even covered by the requirement. However, Mozilla runs fine if you have a lightly loaded system, e.g. a clean install of Windows 95. I was able to run Netscape 6.2 on a Pentium 100 with 32MB RAM in Win95, and it outperforms Netscape 4.79 (try fancier pages like www.msn.com; simple pages doesn't justify what Gecko is capable of).

Your hardware is pretty old. If you're thinking about running Mozilla on top of X in unix, well, you're pushing your computer too hard

Spell Checker

[Malc]

I've found every release better than the last, except for 0.95, which seemed to have gained a few more crashes. I'm excited to see how this one goes. Can anybody give me instructions on how to integrate the Netscape spell checker and change the language settings to en_GB? I tried following instructions for the spell checker before (installed the .xpi), but I couldn't figure out how to actually use it (were the UI bits removed?)

Only comment so far on the latest build: it polls all of the news groups and servers in my Netscape profile when the news/mail client starts. This is bad as I have a load of crap in there, and a load that are only accessible from when I switch internet connections. I have to click cancel on a lot of dialogs before I can get going :(

Re:Mozilla is a great browser if...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure Gecko is a wonderful rendering engine and all that, but the performance gain is totally lost on us Pentium-120mhz users.

Yep - it's pretty slow on my C64 as well.

Re:Mozilla is a great browser if...

[Milican]

Well lets look at the system requirements, which as we all know are very conservative

Windows
* Intel Pentium-class 233 MHz (or faster)
* 64 MB RAM
* 26 MB of free hard disk space

Linux
* Intel Pentium-class 233 MHz (or faster)
* 64 MB of RAM
* 26 MB of free hard disk space

Since you probably can't upgrade your processor on your board maybe you should try and bump your RAM to 128MB or so? That would definitely help out. Otherwise I recommend you give Opera a shot. It's right up your alley and it works on Linux and Windows :)

JOhn

It's nearly on par with IE5.5

[gruntvald]

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!

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:huh?

[great throwdini]

I duel boot between linux ... and Windows...

Freudian slip?

Threads and Processes

[Carnage4Life]

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.

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.

Re:Threads and Processes

[roca]

> Rendering HTML is not rocket science

Oh yes it is.

Go to the W3C Web site and ingest the HTML4 and CSS2 specifications. Throw in all the I18N requirements (Bidi, charsets, etc) (Opera doesn't do them BTW). Throw in all the image formats and plugin support. Now throw in hacks to make a million differently broken pages work reasonably. NOW, in case you think you're done, make sure your engine is fully incremental so everything updates smoothly when stuff takes a while to load, or when you resize the window, or when the document modifies itself in arbitrary ways using the DOM (Opera doesn't handle the latter). Now make it all robust and fast for when some fool writes a page with 100 IFRAMEs, or 1000 combo boxes, or 10000 paragraphs all nested inside each other. And make sure you have ZERO buffer overruns or your users are toast.

Sounds easy, huh?

Re:Threads and Processes

[YU Nicks NE Way]

No, parsing HTML on the Web is not rocket science. It's much close to neurosurgery -- theoretically trivial (cut, cauterize, and close), really incredibly delicate.

You see, HTML has traditionally been interpreted by parsers that will accept lots of errors: missing cell closure, misplaced tags, heaven only knows what else. That means that every real HTML renderer contains a huge error recovery routine which watches what the parser is doing, then backs up and recovers from erroneous source. If parsing HTML meant the same thing that parsing C did, it would be easy. But parsing HTML means much more than that -- and that's why it's so hard.

Re:for speed...

[Cardhore]

I don't know about you but I use mozilla exclusively for the IRC chat program.

Re:Better and Better

[pthisis]

- You can disable Mozilla's JS window.open()
A nice feature, true, but what happens when you go to click on a "help" icon and it can't open a new window?

The mozilla anti-popup feature disables popups on window open, page load, and window close (and timers). So obnoxious auto-pops don't happen, but e.g. The Onion's horoscopes still work.

Sumner

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.

Build Options

[Simm0]

Here are a couple of build options that I frequently use in my .mozconfig when building mozilla to keep it running extreemely well also cutting alot of the cruft out.

These build options are for all the people that are complaining about shoddy mozilla performance under linux and people that would like to have a look at some really new features.

ac_add_options --with-extensions=all
Enables such things as the Chatzilla IRC client and the dom inspector(which I think is extreemely neat for debugging and viewing dynamicly changing html object model) also contains some very experimental things such as xmlterm.

ac_add_options --enable-mathml
Very neat standard for displaying math of all types and sizes in xml.

ac_add_options --enable-crypto
Great option, about a year ago this option wasnt even possible due to netscape not realeasing it's code due to US laws afaik. Now everyone that want to compile the lizard can get ssl support built right into the browser.

ac_add_options --enable-optimize="-O3 -march=i686 -mcpu=i686"
The main optimization part. This option has the biggest leaverage affect on the actual quickness of the browsre itself.

ac_add_options --disable-tests
Get rid of the unneccesary tests.

ac_add_options --disable-debug
We don't need any debuging symbols in th build if where not a developer do we.

ac_add_options --disable-shared
ac_add_options --enable-static
A nice new enhancement of the moz build system which links all of the modules in statically, im experiencing a big speed increase and a decrease of startup times with this option probably because it doesnt need to read each individual shared object from the hard disk.

Better cookie viewing before accept/refuse

[weave]

IE 6 now tops Moz in the cookie/privacy area because you can set IE to prompt before each cookie and remember the accept or refuse action for later (as you can with Moz), but it also allows you to see the cookie contents to help you decide what to do with it as well.

Opera and Konq also have this nice feature.

I'm hoping Moz steps up to that plate soon....

Re:Pornzilla 0.9.1 also released today

[onion2k]

What i want is a secret 'porn' button that i can press

There is one. But its secret.