A First Look At Firefox 3 Alpha 5

abhinav_pc writes "PC World is reporting that Mozilla today made an early testing release available from its Firefox 3 browser. This alpha version (code-named Gran Paradiso) for the first time adds the anticipated Places feature for bookmarks. Firefox 3 alpha 5 also features a new password manager. A new crash reporting system called Breakpad is also now available in some Mac OS X and Windows builds but is not yet supported on Linux. 'Places will also be less likely to lose data in the event of program or Windows crashes. In fact, according to Connor, "We haven't figured out how to make Places lose data." For backwards compatibility and manual backups, Firefox 3 will save bookmarks in the traditional bookmarks.htm file when it closes. For other bookmark upgrades, Mozilla is planning to enable bookmark tagging, and is considering building its own synchronization client into the browser capable of backing up and sharing bookmarks. '"

Comments

my seemingly eternal question:

[Tumbleweed]

Multithreaded UI yet?

Re:my seemingly eternal question:

[starwed]

Well, here's what Brendan Eich, Mozilla's chief technology officer, has to say about multithreading: Threads suck

I'm not very clueful on such matters, but it seems like maybe the most important statement is:

A requirement for JS3 (along with hygienic macros) is to do something along these more implicit lines of concurrency support. In all the fast yet maintainable MT systems I've built or worked on, the key idea (which Will Clinger stated clearly to me over lunch last fall) is to separate the mutable unshared data from the immutable shared data. Do that well, with language and VM support, and threads become what they should be: not an abstraction violator from hell, but a scaling device that can be composed with existing abstractions.

Re:my seemingly eternal question:

[zig007]

That they don't fix that raises a different question that is quite interesting. Well at least i think so.. :-)

A friend of mine recently talked about someone..who's name i don't remember right now(a couple of beers were involved), that worked with systems security on fighter airplanes, claimed that fixing almost only high-priority bugs made the system worse.

This was very well documented, about 20 or 30 years of development had been analyzed.
He said that if the users seemingly low-priority complaints was given more weight(adressed more often), it made problems of all severities go down. Significantly.

His conclusion was that the smaller problems contributed to a more messy system where more serious problems might go unnoticed.

Not to mention that a happy customer is better than a dead one for other reasons :-)