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Mozilla 1.7 Beta Is Faster And Smaller
ccady writes "Mozilla 1.7 beta is out. Not too many new features, but "Mozilla 1.7 size and performance have improved dramatically with this release. When compared to Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla 1.7 Beta is 7% faster at startup, is 8% faster at window open time, has 9% faster pageloading times, and is 5% smaller in binary size." I'll be downloading it."
Firefox will get the speed improvements, but since Firefox is already smaller and uses less, it won't be as significant (I think it is 3%?).
They basically rewrote the string implementation and it is "better faster stronger" than before.
So yeah, Firefox 0.9 will get a speed improvement too. (You can also grab a nightly. They have the improvements -- and more bugs.)
P.S. Also new in Mozilla 1.6 is the ability to block websites from hijacking your context menu (right click menu) in the browser. Yay!
Get Firefox!
It now support's SSO HTTP Authentication using GSSAPI Kerberos. Similiar MS's implementation of SPNEGO in IE. See bug 17578 in bugzilla for more information.
This is compatible with both IIS, and mod_authkerb for apache.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/modauthkerb/
Next the plan is to make kerberos support more general so it can be used for other protocol's like IMAP.
Seeing as Firefox is getting most of the press these days it's important to realise that the full suite is still moving along nicely. They are addressing criticisms well - a redesign of the cookie manager and speed increases are reflective of the fight against bloat and complexity.
And don't forget, changes to the suite are picked up by Firefox since FF is based off the same source tree. So a lot of work here will affect the mini-moz too....
Free iPods - now in the UK!
How can something with the same kernel, and the same ancestry go the other way: Mozilla actually improves as it evolves.
Because it doesn't have the same kernel.
Back in 1998, when Netscape released their code, the open-source community soon realized that they would have to throw much of it away and start from scratch. By throwing out the cruft that had been building up since Netscape 1.0, the Mozilla team was able to build a better browser...eventually. (Check out this BBC article for a nice pre-history of Mozilla.)
For detailed information aboutMozilla, read all about it in the wikipedia.
Each firefox release is based on Mozilla. Firefox 0.9 and 1.0 will be based on Mozilla 1.7.
Mozilla will then make Firefox it's primary browser after 1.0, and Thunderbird it's primary mail reader after 1.0. The Mozilla browser you know will still exist as "Mozilla Suite".
Back when I designed graphics accelerators for a living we did a whole bunch of work trying to figure out what 'faster' ment - at least from a subjective point of view - turns out if you graph actual performance to subjective performance there's sort of an S curve, on the left it's dog slow and people are just annoyed, on the right it's so fast people don't notice performance is an issue at all and in the middle there's a vaguely exponential region where if every time you make things ten times faster they think it got better, maybe by a subjective factor of 2 .... 10% is in the noise .... unless your UI is in that far left dog-slow region
You realize that many alternate-browsers spoof IE headers so that they don't get rejected by MS-powered websites? Konqueror and Opera may even do it by default.
Basically, the Any Browser campaign says to write everything to HTML 4.01 "Strict". Use CSS for all layout. Mozilla development fits this very nicely. Check out Eric Meyer's CSS/EDGE. Everything at CSS/Edge fits with the "AnyBrowser" way of doing things, but yet not everything at CSS/Edge will load with Internet Explorer.
In my own less complex pages, I've found that I can make a page load /similarly/ in both, but I can't use HTML "Strict", unless Internet Explorer starts to choke (throwing everything to the left edge when I wanted it centered, etc.).
So, as the above post mentioned, you end up writing to Internet Explorer, but you loose compatability with some "text readers for the blind", lynx, etc.
Ah, but who cares if a blind person can read your web page. Well, maybe your web page isn't just a collection of photos, maybe you have something of interest. Then, you should care.
Bottom line, the user will think that you're web page is broken if it doesn't load in I.E., and you loose readers this way. So, you end up with a web page that is a little more sparse, and less feature rich than you wanted.
Actually, that's a bit of myth. It was really Netscape's management who dictated the rewrite, in order to accomodate the Gecko rendering engine (which was still called NGLayout or Raptor back then). Most of the Netscape/Mozilla developers (less than six months into the project, there were not many non-Netscape contributors) at the time were against the change, not because they didn't like the idea of a smaller, faster and more standards-complaint rendering engine, but because they were given a ludicrous six-month timeframe to achieve parity with Netscape Communicator 4.5.
And the muscular cyborg German dudes dance with sexy French Canadians
Does anybody know why they stopped putting Talkback into the OS X pre-release versions since 1.6 alpha? I thought that was supposed to help them find crashing bugs. Kind of hard to do when you forget to put it in there in the first place.
..."
:-)
I can't speak for OS X, but as for Windows, I inquired about the removal of the talkback feature in the nightly builds they had this to say about it:
No, it's not possible to enable it. It's either built into the official builds or its not. Currently the official builds are not being built with talkback because of some talkback server issues, so there is no way to disable it. Hopefully by Firebird 0.9 all of the talkback issues will be sorted, but it's probably not going to happen for the Firebird 0.8 release.
Though if you page down it appears that we shall see it in this release of Mozilla
"The installer releases of Mozilla 1.7 Beta now include Quality Feedback Agent again, allowing users to report crashes,
Hopefully all those new bug reports will help speed up development
Candle burns its brightest in the dark
Mozilla for windows has a very good keep-in-memory option.
It will then start about as fast as IE every next time you open it.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
The Mozilla suite and the Firefox, K-meleon, and Camino browsers all use the Gecko engine. The Konqueror and Safari browsers use the KHTML engine. Apparently, the KHTML developers have a more pragmatic policy with respect to implementing MSHTML extensions *cough*document.all*cough* than the more standards-minded Gecko developers.
You do realise that 15% of 1.2 million hits is still 180,000 hits?
15% non IE is obviously not a majority, but it's not insignificant either. Only dealing with IE would piss off 1 in every 7 visitors to your site.
Advanced users are users too!
It seems to me to only be a problem when I have a lot of data open at once, and leave it alone long enough for windows to swap it out to the drive.
For instance, I have a tab link that, when clicked, loads 63 comics pages at once. It significantly reduces my time spent reading comics (waiting for them to load, actually) but it's a TON of memory.
If I let my laptop hibernate and bring it back up it takes nearly 30-60 seconds to render the tab that was on top when I hibernated. After I read the first few and close a few tabs it speeds back up to its normal speed. I suspect it's more an issue with mozilla using a huge amount of memory (possibly for holding rendered versions of web pages) that is swapped out.
Using it interactively, even after having it open for several days, it's about as fast for me as when I first started it.
-Adam
I've heard rumors of sites rejecting non-IE browsers, but I have yet to find one myself.
I am forced to change my browser header for one site on a regular basis. The site to pay one of my credit card bills barfs without IE, it says my browser (Mozilla) is uncompatible with the site. So I use the prefbar plugin to change the browser ID to IE and everything works well. Their tech support never got back to me when I told them this. Mozilla still will not work unless I change how it reports itself to their server.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
May I suggest netcomics and a dedicated image browser like gqview?
May we never see th