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."

Comments

No diffirent then the last release

[Jexx Dragon]

I've been using Mozilla since 0.4 or 0.5, can't quite remember which. It's always been the best, and keeps getting better (tabs anyone?). Every release gets faster, and most get smaller, though not all.

A point each way.

[irokitt]

IE is not expected to see a major revision until Longhorn ships in 2006-2007. It is rumored that the Longhorn version will have tabbed browsing and some kind of pop-up blocking. This would probably be accomplished via the MSN toolbar, which is similar to the Google toolbar but with that *other* search engine.

But the truth is that IE has so much of the market share that revisions don't matter. People tend to use whatever came with their system, even if it is older and came with IE 5. If Microsoft didn't push the patches, quite a few people would be using these older version even now.
BTW, I'm using Firefox.

All those stats... yet no memory useage counts?

[WoTG]

Anyone know if memory use has gotten any more efficient? I still find Moz to be a bit high in memory useage. It's not a problem if when it's up and browsing, but if I flipped to another application for awhile, and Moz gets paged out to disk, the delay to switch back to Moz is a little annoying. At least on my relatively slow by today's standards, WinXP box.

On a related note, is it just me, or does Moz get paged out a LOT quicker than many other apps? Is it playing "too" nice somehow?

Re:All those stats... yet no memory useage counts?

[MyHair]

I still find Moz to be a bit high in memory useage.

If you're comparing to IE, then it's not a fair comparison since IE hides some of its memory footprint in explorer and other places and still takes up 12-25 MB for iexplore.exe.

If you're comparing to Konqueror or another KHTML or Gecko browser, then nevermind.

On a related note, is it just me, or does Moz get paged out a LOT quicker than many other apps? Is it playing "too" nice somehow?

I probably don't know what I'm talking about, but if you're using Moz under Windows then the disadvantage is that Moz plays fair. IE, MS Office, Sun Java and Adobe Acrobat Reader I've noticed hang around in RAM a long, long time after you quit using them. I suspect they have settings to stay in memory an extra long time, where I suspect Mozilla plays nice and sets itself to normal and therefore gets squeezed out by the others.

If you're talking about an X / POSIX platform, then nevermind.

Re:All those stats... yet no memory useage counts?

[mysticalreaper]

Heh. Sorry to break it to you, but Moz is not at fault here, it's XP. Now, investingating why it gets swapped out is still an interesting question, but XP does the swapping, not Moz. Which is demonstrates yet another reason i use linux. MUCH better memory management. The only time i remember Moz getting swapped out was when i left my computer compiling for 24 hours, and came back to it. Took about 2 seconds to pull it back. On a p3-700 with 512 MB RAM. just my two cents.

Re:All those stats... yet no memory useage counts?

[CTachyon]

It's not a secret API. It's MSHTML.DLL, which EXPLORER.EXE (since Win95+IE4 or Win98) and IEXPLORE.EXE both use. It probably uses (documented, non-secret) APIs to create shared r/w data pages for an interprocess in-memory cache. (And, to be fair, if you were writing an embeddable shared-object web browser control meant to be part of 20 apps at once, all owned by the same user, why wouldn't you?)

Re:Thanks Moz Team.

[petabyte]

I'm liable to switch over to FireFox (or whatever it's called this week), except the Preference Toolbar (on which I'm hooked like a crack addiction) still does not function in this stripped down version of the Moz browser.

Yeah, I have similar issues with epiphany. I like its layout and its Gnomeiness but there are certain options it blocks (even out of regular mozilla) that I would really like to have. Every time I download something and the damn download statusbar comes up I want to put my fist through the screen. You can't dare close it either as that will stop the download. Hopefully tomorrow when 2.6 launches I'll be able to play with Epiphany 1.2.0 and it'll have more options.

Galeon

[AnonymousCowheart]

The latest Galeon is out too. Version 1.3.14. Works with Mozilla 1.4 through 1.7b and trunk. Loads pretty fast too;) For those of you who don't know, galeon is a browser based on mozilla, for gnome-but ofcourse works in other wm's too.

Re:Who fucking cares

[koody]

Mozilla has a small marketshare, practically no one uses it, and finally Long Live IE!

Feeding the troll:
You are right. Mozilla's marketshare isn't large. Most Windows users probably don't even know it exists. This doesn't mean they haven't used Mozilla or that Mozilla would be insignificant.

I've seen Mozilla based browsers used in several public web terminals. You will not be able to go to a fair of almost any kind without seeing mozilla used (I've been to quite a few that had little or nothing to do with computers and seen mozilla or a browser using the gecko engine used).

Mozilla will not gain a 95% marketshare today nor tomorrow, but it will gain marketshare. IE will live long, probably a time counted in decades, but Mozilla isn't going away.

I've been following Mozilla closely since milestone 16 and I started using it as my main browser arund version 0.96. Before that it was basically horrible. It was unstable, ate memory like crazy and was too slow for me to use.

Mozilla today is a different beast from the early days:

The most stable (modern) browser I've used (links is the most stable ever)

Best standards support

Getting faster by every release

Getting less resource hungry by every release

The most extendable browser around.

IE will live long but so will Mozilla. Mozilla's marketshare will grow, IE's will probably not. Mozilla is evolving fast, IE is not. Mozilla will always be free, IE might not be. Mozilla will be developed as long as anyone wants to do it or has the money to fund it, IE will not.

All I can say that I hope that the current version of IE lives long and that Microsoft keeps iproving it at the current pace. That will ensure that Mozilla will gain marketshare as it races past IE.
Long Live (the current version of) IE

OS X Talkback?

[Megane]

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.

Re:Mozilla Vs Firefox

[ezzzD55J]

slightly offtopic perhaps, but perhaps someone here knows, speaking of improvements.. what i'd really really like greatly is roaming profiles, allowing me to share bookmarks, cookies, history etc. with mozilla's on each of the systems i use.. It would be such a huge improvement to my browsing usage, at least; currently I don't bother with bookmarks, for instance.. I know this feature has been talked about endlessly, i haven't read the full bugzilla bugs about it because they were so large :) Anyone know what the status is of this?

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[GregWebb]

For the most part, the web applications I work on don't have complex enough user interface requirements that the differences are that significant, but most of the time I've taken the exact opposite approach.

Essentially, because MSIE butchers the standards, I know from experience that if I develop and test my code using MSIE it often barfs on anything else. If I code on Moz, because it's pretty well standards compliant, 99% of the time it works straight out of the box in IE too.

I'd still develop under Moz if that wasn't true, though. To get a context menu item that'll tell me
* What form fields are around and what values they have
* What images the page contains
* What links the page contains

saves a _lot_ of hassle. Can they please fix the bug, though, that causes a new HTTP request if I want to view the source? Why can't it just use cached HTML?

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[hixie]

> IE's CSS support has gotten better in recent releases

What recent releases? WinIE hasn't changed for something like 3 years, and as I understand it Microsoft have said they won't do any more changes to their HTML/DOM/CSS support, ever (even in the IE release that will be in Longhorn). One hopes they are bluffing or will change their mind, but the fact remains that basically, as far as WinIE's rendering engine goes, nothing has changed in years and nothing will have for years to come (no non-security-related changes to be shipped in IE before Longhorn, have said Microsoft officials).

Re:This is why I dropped Netscape

[jovlinger]

Does anyone else see the same behavior I do; that while it starts out snappy, Mozilla gets slower and slower. This is most noticable when rendering tabs in the background; this goes from instantaneous to taking the better part of a minute.

The slowdown from snappy to slow takes a day or two of use, and requires a restart of the browser to fix.

This happens both in mozilla and fire-fox, so it must be some internal resource leak, I guessing.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[coats]

The only problems I have with them come from boneheaded websites that check the browser and then refuse to allow any none IE browser to access the site. How clueless is that.

Not as clueless as the ones that claim to do such a check, and then reject you for not having the very browser that in fact you are using. (They claimed to support IE and Mozilla, then rejected Mozilla 1.6 (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113)

I ran into one of those yesterday on a sporting goods sales site... wrote them a nastygram quoting their rejection-page back to them, together with my browser identity, then asking whether I should expect the same kind of bullshit from their merchandise that I find in their web site design.

idiot bastards!

JS difference between Mozilla and MSIE

[solprovider]

Javascript with timers. The way things are right now [in Mozilla], using even one, unless it's VERY tightly coded, will drive CPU utilization up to 100% and just keep it there. Even when tightly coded, it still eats a massive amount of CPU time.

Be careful when using setInterval() and setTimeout(). Mozilla 1.3 cannot use setTimeout() recursively to create the effect of setInterval() without maxing CPU usage. setInterval() works fine. If you want something to happen at regular intervals, use setInterval() to make all browsers happy.

---
One issue where the browsers are different is capturing key events:

MSIE6 requires:

function inputIE(){
addchar(window.event.keyCode);
}
document.captur eEvents(Event.KEYPRESS);
<BODY ONKEYPRESS="inputIE()">

Mozilla1.3 works with:

function input(e){
addchar(e.which);
}
document.onkeypress = input;

[addchar() is a generic function to handle the processing of each key regardless of the browser.]
[Why did Slashcode add a space within the ECODE tags?]

Luckily both sets of code can be on the same page with the KeyPress event being set correctly without testing for the browser names. I prefer the second method because it allows the code to be contained in a .JS file without modifying the BODY tag. This may have been due to misunderstanding MSDN. There is something called a "named script" (<SCRIPT FOR = object EVENT = onkeypress>) that looks awful and is specific to MSIE. Maybe I just did not find the correct object in MS's DOM to set the onkeypress function for the entire page (maybe document.all.onkeypress?) I stopped researching it once the page worked correctly with both browsers.

To be on-topic:
Does Mozilla1.7 allow for the awful event model of MSIE? Will this code still work?