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:

[Fastolfe]

I can't speak for the other poster, but one of my chief complaints about Firefox is when the UI hangs because a web page is doing something (loading or executing some bad javascript). I like to spawn off tabs to load in the background while I'm reading something else, and I regularly find Firefox completely unresponsive until one of those background tabs wraps up whatever the hell it's doing.

Re:my seemingly eternal question:

[kat_skan]

Yeah, that's great. Know what else sucks, Mr. Eich? The whole app becoming completely inoperative because one script on one tab is stuck doing who knows what. Smacks of the old "dialog boxes suck" line that was used to explain why we couldn't have a confirmation box to avoid accidentally shutting down the entire app when we were just trying to close a tab.

Re:my seemingly eternal question:

[starwed]

You do realize the statement that X is not a solution to problem Y is not the same as saying that problem Y won't or shouldn't be solved. Right?

(And make sure to read his comments on the main post for specific responses to the issue of UI.

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 :-)

Re:my seemingly eternal question:

[gbjbaanb]

After reading his blog entry, I think that I know the reason he doesn't like threads. If he codes even a tiny bit like he writes then I wouldn't be surprised if his single-threaded apps had race conditions and deadlocks.

I think he's also a little stuck in the 80s - 'virtual method calls cost'. yup they do, but on a 3GHz machine, the cost is literally negligible. The cost to allocate 1 byte of memory from main ram costs more than the entire time spent fixing up virtual method calls for an entire day! (and if I exaggerate about the comparison, let me remind you firefox allocates a little more than 1 byte of memory...)

He could easily put 1 thread per tab and not have any concurrency issues, no race conditions, no deadlocks. As long as he slapped a single mutex around memory shared between tabs and held it for as short a time as possible, then there will be no problems. Simple, easy, safe and yet so effective! You don't need to add threading within a javascript script - that'd be overengineering worthy of the FF memory leak.

Mozilla needs a new CTO, someone who can talk abotu stuff they know what they're talking about, not someone who likes to speak as eruditely as possibly (probably to make himself sound more intelligent) and leave the incomprehensible, management-style buzzword-speak alone.

Re:my seemingly eternal question:

[suv4x4]

I can't speak for the other poster, but one of my chief complaints about Firefox is when the UI hangs because a web page is doing something (loading or executing some bad javascript). I like to spawn off tabs to load in the background while I'm reading something else, and I regularly find Firefox completely unresponsive until one of those background tabs wraps up whatever the hell it's doing.

I second, triple, quadruple that. I absolutely hate the responsiveness of Firefox.

It's as if it's not waiting for a simple stream to send data, but doing something extremely CPU intensive. It truly seems like it locks up the entire process while it's doing something.

Neither IE7 or Opera do that and the browsing experience with those two is completely different just because of this performance issue in Firefox.

Re:my seemingly eternal question:

[romcabrera]

Opening PDF files in the browser

enough said.

Re:my seemingly eternal question:

[suv4x4]

A requirement for JS3 (along with hygienic macros) is to do something along these more implicit lines of concurrency support.

He said that? Shit.

Let me put things perspective. Tamarin (the Adobe Flash script engine) is currently implementation of JavaScript 2.0 and not 3.0. It'll show up not in Firefox 3, but Firefox 4 earliest.

To get it from JS 2.0 to 3.0 (which doesn't exist even in the form of a draft yet), it'll probably mean few more major versions, Firefox 7, Firefox 8 maybe?

Firefox doesn't just run JavaScript in the pages on JavaScript. Instead, the whole damn thing is a big swat of JavaScript, that talks to the XUL/Gecko components.

So it'll be some 5-10 years before we see multithreaded Firefox? Nice. Perfect.

Now.. when do we expect multicore desktops and laptops to start showing up, and the competition (IE/Opera/Safari) making use of multiple threads to massively improve the responsiveness of their UI? Oh yes... yesterday.

Why is this whole story so familiar? It's Netscape all over again:

"Let's just wait and add bloat and not do much about our biggest problem, since The Solution Has To Be Perfect. Threads suck, instead we'll wait for Something Perfect to manifest in reality for us."

At the same time the competition uses whatever's out there and works, and runs past them.

And they will be like "oh shoot, we can never fix this in time, it's all based on JavaScript/XUL, we need a rewrite". Then they disappear for 5 years while trying to rewrite their newly formed mess, and Microsoft stops development at IE8 and stagnates.

Nice.

Places

[morgan_greywolf]

"We haven't figured out how to make Places lose data."

rm -rf .mozilla

Re:Places

[WhyDoYouWantToKnow]

Come on, that's hardly a cross platform solution.

DId they fix the print bug?

[lhouk281]

Have they fixed the print bug that drops the content of webpages when they are longer than one sheet of paper?

Good idea...

[eddan]

Quote from the blog entry on the new password manager:

The first part, a long slog of untangling and porting the old C++ code to JS, is now complete. Now, THAT sounds like something you want to do. I always mock up something quick in C++ and port it to JS afterwards.

Re:Does it pass ACID2?

[suv4x4]

IMHO, they should first focus on making Firefox 2.x pass ACID2. I'm using Opera 9.21, because it passes ACID2 and had the fewest security bugs. Web standards compliance matters, because non-compliance makes creating rich web sites a royal pain.

Passing ACID2? Is this sort of like passing GAS3, maybe?

While busy explaining how important standard are, you forgot to mention ACID2 isn't anything like an official standards test, and doesn't confirm standards compliance.

It just confirms it supports the features used in ACID2, in the precise context of the ACID2 page. Opera has rendering bugs and many unsupported features just like Firefox.

Re:bloat bloat code your bloat...

[ampathee]

I'm getting pretty sick of this kneejerk comment to any firefox related story. Seriously mods, that was insightful?