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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."
Go Go Mozilla!
You know where you are? You're in the $PATH, baby. You're gonna get executed!
Wow, I got here first using 1.6. Looks like some people will need 1.7 to get here faster next time
This is why I stopped using Netscape: each version was much larger, much slower, and much less reliable.
How can something with the same kernel, and the same ancestry go the other way: Mozilla actually improves as it evolves.
On the one hand, the dodo. On the other hand, the road-runner.
When was the last time Mozilla had a 90%+ market share.
I use Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird too - they're my favorites. But I can't build for Mozilla. I have to build for IE. My clients use IE, the visitors use IE and that makes it the standard (even though it doesn't follow the "standards").
It's an uphill battle, I'm afraid. That said, I'll be downloading this new version ASAP.
The next service pack of Internet Explorer plans to have longer load times, more crashes, and open a few more exploits into a Windows system.
Modzilla keeps getting better all the time.
Mozilla has a small marketshare, practically no one uses it, and finally Long Live IE!
True.
Intelligence also has a small marketshare...
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
When compared to Mozilla 1.6, Lynx is 99% faster at startup, 99% faster at window open time, has 50% faster pageloading times, and is 90% smaller in binary size.
In all seriousness, it's easy to improve figures like this just by removing features.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Sad, but true. However, once one tries Mozilla, IE looks old and lame in comparison. I mean, Tabbed browsing is the best. Plus, you don't have VB tied into Mozilla like it is with IE, so, the virus issue is limited somewhat...
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
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The fastest speed up is not even 10%. That's about an extra 0.01 tits/second. Want more speedup than that.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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!
I just love it and tab-browsing but there is still room for improvement:
A resume feature in the download manager would be a nice start...
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.
How much faster in comparision to other releases? What I want to know is if Mozilla is progressively getting faster, or is this just to compensate for performance regressions when they went from 1.4 - 1.5, etc.
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!
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.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
It's a never ending circle - designers who don't know anything about web standards and have only ever used IE make sites that only work in IE - people try a new browser like Mozilla, and see that their favourite sites are "broken" in the new browser (when really it's because the sites were built to work around the non-compliant IE) - so they go back to IE... That said I've found Firefox does a pretty good job of rendering most pages well.
I code to the standards first and then verify it looks right with both IE and Mozilla (and Opera, and Lynx, and Konquerer). If something doesn't work with both I either remove it, tweak it until it's right, or use something like XSLT to generate the proper HTML for the given browser. It's more effort but it generally results in better code all around. If it's just CSS that is the problem I just have the site choose the desired stylesheet based on the browser used or let the user choose their own stylesheet from a list.
IE's CSS support has gotten better in recent releases but it's still not on par with Mozilla's support. For most things though it seems good enough to just use standard HTML/CSS without any IEisms. IE still isn't very PNG friendly though which is an ongoing annoyance for me.
Overall though it's not really a problem to just code to the standard. Coding to IE is problematic because it's a standard that changes with each release.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Wrong, W3C sets the standard and their browser is the standard. You do not have to use superstandard methods like activeX to make a working webpage, so don't.
IE is not a standard, and won't be unless Microsoft buys it's way into being a standards organization.
For detailed information aboutMozilla, read all about it in the wikipedia.
Admittedly, I get most of my site's hits from Slashdot, but I find a rather pleasant mix of Gecko, Mozilla, Opera, Apple Webkit, and occasionally someone using IE. Actually, I think Google surfs my site more than anyone. (I did tell "Slurp" to take a flying leap.) Of course it does flop over to nearly 80% IE from time to time, but I've also noticed that IE users are only interested in some file named cmd.exe or root.exe, and I've never offered either of those files from this box. It must be a Microsoft thing...
Personally I'm hooked on using Firefox, but I design my pages to look good in any light. ;-)
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.
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".
After the news is released on Slashdot, it's now 40% slower to download. :D
My blog
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
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
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.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
But I can't build for Mozilla. I have to build for IE. My clients use IE, the visitors use IE and that makes it the standard (even though it doesn't follow the "standards").
Ya know, I find that a funny statement.
I manage a software development group, and we have to build for IE too. But we also have to make sure our software works with Mozilla. And for Opera, and Mac, and everything else. We support all "modern" browsers (basicly, verions >=5)
You see, we can't really dictate a browser, and we're not interested in getting locked into one vendor product. We want to remain flexible for the future, and we want to remain reliable when a new browser hits the market.
So we support all browsers.
Happily, this is a very minor expense. In fact, as project manager, I can say with confidence that it costs us well under 1/1000th of our development budget. The only difficulty is to get contractors and new employees to use web standards.
In the end, our maintenance costs are lower, and our user satisfaction is sky high. We never ever get complaints about browser compatibility.... not even once in over 4 years of high-volume operation.
Oh yeah, and our apps look and work damned good too.
So what's the deal? What is wrong with organizations that can't support regular browsers without undo expense and difficulty???
I visited kavlon.org and lost my vision for a few minutes.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
Sure. A performace improvement of 10% is probably totally unnoticable to the user. The real point that the article fails to make is that Mozilla has been getting *consistently* smaller and faster since the 1.0 release. Subjectivley, it's pretty obvious if you use an older release that it's slower. But if that isn't good enough, there are graphs on tinderbox which show the measured codesize, pageload time, new window time and various other metrics (no link, because it would be irresponsible of me to launch an accidental ddos attack on tinderbox) - if you're interested the address is pretty easy to guess/find. Looking at the btek pageload time, I see that in June 2002 pageload was around 1210ms, now it's around 860ms and still decreasing. That's an improvment of around 30%, without cutting any features or degrading the standards support. That means that Mozilla is now competative with so called "lightweight" browsers such as Opera (I don't have comparisons avaliable because such things are hard to do).
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
No, they don't agree. I enjoy a good looking site. Not only do such sites (as you describe) usually look boring, but they tend to lack rich functionality. I want a site that is usable, rich in content, functionality and looks good. You can do that and still support other browsers, but if it's a choice between supporting some random browser or having a great site - then screw the random browser.
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?
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
I use Firefox and Thunderbird for all my stuff, but I definitely agree that TB has a way to go. The biggest problem that I've noticed is that occasionally it will just start acting slow, and I have to close it and start it up again.
That said, I love Firefox, and if I'm forced to use IE (say, on someone else's computer), I feel like killing people (its designers, mainly). Is that what they mean by "killer app"?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
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.
It would seem that the definition of "dramatic" just got marginalized. Personally I'd think of a 2x performance increase as dramatic. 1.1x is what I'd term "laudable".
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
I made the mistake of installing the ActiveX plugin with mozilla at a friends place once. What a great plugin, you can make Mozilla just as susceptible to popups and adware as IE. Sheesh.
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.
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!
I guess that makes it.....
29% Better!
-L
Don't Panic.
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.
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.
If a bank site doesn't work properly in anything other than IE, I usually send them an email linking to articles about serious security holes in IE, usually including the SSL certificate one, and tell them they should tune their site to run in all browsers, as some of us are too knowledgeable to want to use something as crappy as IE for online banking.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
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!
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.
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One issue where the browsers are different is capturing key events:
MSIE6 requires:Mozilla1.3 works with:[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
To be on-topic:
Does Mozilla1.7 allow for the awful event model of MSIE? Will this code still work?
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
I disagree. I've yet to find one person who raves about how "stylish" and "good-looking" a web site is an then points to a website that isn't a pain in the ass to use.
Let's take a look at your mezzoblue.com example:
* Uses inconsistent highlighting -- background rollovers (ugh) on part of the text like the "also available" websites, underline rollovers on other parts like the "Designing with Web Standards" link.
* It uses images for text in its heading. At the moment, I am sitting back fram my computer and leaning on a recliner. My face is about 1.5 to 2 times my normal viewing distance, and I use 1152x864 on a 17" monitor, which is already a high resolution. Normally, I just bump up the text size and have no problem reading a website (as do disabled people). This website's topic entries are unreadable to me, and I had to lean forward plop my face right next to the screen to read the "also available" heading. Heck, that's damned small text even for a lot of glasses-wearing older folks that I know of, with no way to work around it.
* The site uses rollover menus. I don't think I know *anyone* that likes using rollover menus -- I *really* hate it. It doesn't even use your typical old annoying rollover menu -- this has an image background or something. It took ten seconds or so for the image to load, so I had floating white text on a light blue background for a bit. It was pretty unusable.
* Widget functionality is unclear to a viewer. Once again, the analysis I've heard of rollovers holds true -- they're used by designers that have such an unintuitive design that they require the user to wave the mouse around over the interface to figure out how it works. There are rollover menus in the upper top corner. There's no visual indication that these little dinky images are, in fact, rollover menus. It wasn't until I started scanning the page with my mouse cursor that I figured it out.
* Confusingly chosen and similar visual indicators. The mezzoblue.com site uses a diagonally-upward-aiming triangle to indicate a menu (*most* of the time). For starters, this indicator is inconsistent with the common desktop use of a downward-aiming triangle to indicate a popup menu. It is also almost identical to the diagonally-downward-aiming triangle that is used to indicate a section header *on the same site*. Not only that, diagonal triangles most common use in current HCI is for a half-open expandable section of data, a convention from Mac OS. The sections look like they *might* roll up when clicked, but do not in fact do so.
* Dissimilar widgets are visually identical. If this designer *had* to make rollover menus and grokked HCI (a dubious pair of bedfellows to begin with), he'd know that one does not make widgets that operate differently but appear identical to the user. Up at the top, we have three blocks of text that appear the same (upward-diagonal triangle, text). The first two ("about", "weblog") are rollover menus. The third, "contact", is a link. When I started rolling my cursor over them, I sat and waited on this link, assuming that my browser was just slow to pop up the associated menu.
* Text colors poorly chosen for readability. Much of the text/background combinations involve two very similar shades of blue. Most of this is readable to me at my current viewing distance if I increase the size, but I know many people that would *not* be able to comfortably read such text.
Honestly, mezzoblue.com seems an excellent example of why sites should *not* be "stylish" -- when designers use "stylish" as an excuse, they're frequently making websites that are simply poorly built from an interface point of view.
Finally, as I've argued before, a lot of people making "stylish" websites with "extra zazz" are people that are familiar with the conventional way products are sold. Most products need to appear flashy, interesting, and novel just long enough for a person to impulsively choose to buy them. For conventional products, "flash" h
May we never see th
The problem is that the "in theory Flash could be useful" argument is used to justify a huge range of websites that, frankly, are a pain in the ass to use, load slowly, are uncomfortable for users of older computers, and exclude the disabled and users of alternate browsers or people that disable plugins for security reasons.
In my entire life, I have seen *one* website that used Flash in what I could consider a significantly beneficial manner, and I have seen many, many websites in my life. The website was for an MP3 player, and one could try out the interface in an embedded Flash object. The rest of the site did not use Flash. There was no equally effective way to reproduce this functionality without Flash, the functionality was clearly important to the product (the product was partly being sold based on having a good interface), and a user without Flash still had the ability to work with the rest of the website.
On the whole, I have seen so little effective use of Flash, and taking into consideration the significant drawbacks of it, that if someone asked me whether to use Flash on their site, I would feel comfortable simply saying "no". The odds of it being a good idea are so phenomenally low that it's just not worth trying.
May we never see th