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Optimized International Firefox Builds From MOOX
Nigel Wellington writes "Many of us have tried and are using the optimized builds of Mozilla Firefox made by MOOX. For those not aware, these builds perform roughly 20% faster than the official builds from Mozilla, are generally more stable and have extra features patched in. Well, the good news is that MOOX appears to now be making optimized builds that are localized as well to specific languages! This page has several localized builds already (German, Czech, Finnish) and by the looks of it many more are coming. If you have been looking for a solid localized build I strongly suggest these. The German M3 version has been awesome for me for the past 24 hours!" (These builds are Windows-only.)
...why aren't these optimizations contributed back to the Mozilla source? I'm assuming there's a good reason... just curious.
No. These are Windows (binaries only, which makes me think they guy didn't hack the code at all). I guess they're just compiled differently.
If this MOOX dude would give us .msi files or an installer .exe, I'd be down. If I were on a unix machine, I'd be happy with a directory that I could throw in /usr/local/bin/ & add to the path, but on Windows I expect some infrastructure. Because I'm a spoiled brat.
I tried expanding MOOX's zips over my existing installation, and only succeeded at breaking everything. OK, I admit that was dumb.
Also, shouldn't it be possible to build a binary with SSE optimizations for all x86 processors?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
From the .pdf:
Build Environment: The free Microsoft MSVC++ Toolkit
Presumably, most people are using gcc to compile Firefox, so this means you can't just set some flags in your makefile and get the speed-up. You'd need to convert the build process to use Microsoft's tools.