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Firefox 3 Performance Gets a Boost
jason writes "Mozilla has been working hard at making Firefox 3 faster than its predecessor, and it looks like they might be succeeding. They've recently added some significant JavaScript performance improvements that beat out all of the competition, including Opera 9.5 Beta. And it comes out to be about ten times faster than Internet Explorer 7! Things are really starting to fall into place for Firefox 3 Beta 4 which should be available in the next week or two."
Flash has more and more accessibility support, but PDF is the Page Description Format. It's meant for print output and says nothing about the meaning of the contents of the document, just how they are supposed to look on the screen and on the page.
The good thing about tag-based formats like HTML is that--provided someone's following the standard--they can be fairly easily parsed regardless of the output format. With XHTML, you can read stuff on your screen, the blind can use screen readers, and web developers can easily extract and transform elements from a given document things are good as they are.
Finally, why do you think PDF = lean and mean? Acrobat proves that a PDF reader can get hideously bloated.
The benchmark used in this article is a JavaScript benchmark, but PGO was enabled for most components of Firefox, not just the JavaScript engine. And even if only the JavaScript engine improved in speed, you'd see a speed boost despite having JavaScript disabled in web pages, since parts of Firefox itself are implemented in JavaScript.
The shareholder is always right.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
I have nightmare's about JavaScript being the one language to rule them all... please, let's have no such talk.
I have. Still ass. doesn't go lighter when it's backgrounded, stays the same dark grey as if it were foregrounded.
Open-Source seems good for getting a job 90% finished and completely ignoring the 10% polish required to make it an app of the same quality as closed-source
Sorry, copying the bad eyecandy from Microsoft doesn't classify as an improvement in my opinion.
The learn-as-you-go menu behaviour which they copied from Windows didn't work well in Windows either. The main problem is that it causes inconsistent behaviour. Repeating something doesn't necessarily give you the same menu items. It's good for newbies who read every single line before choosing one of them, but it's very bad for people who memorize what they do so they can repeat it quickly without even looking.
Mark this as off-topic if you like. I'm responding partially to the parent comment, but mostly to its score and reason.
This is a discussion board. How can you mark someone's comment as redundant? Is this an attempt to invalidate their statement? Don't blame them when it's actually a limitation of the forum system. There is no simple way to increment an "I agree" or "I have the same problem" counter, there has to be a new comment for each person who agrees. There is no way of adding weight to a comment except by increasing child nodes, or adding as many individual argument nodes that are similar. Yes, there is already one branch in this thread that talks about the memory issues, but relax not everyone perfectly gets all their statements in exactly the right location in the discussion tree. Judge it simply on what it says, not the comments location.
For what it's worth, I agree. I also have problems with memory bloating with FF. I don't really care if they are memory leaks, or memory fragments, it's still a problem that I would like to see fixed. Unfortunately I cannot fix the problem, so I will patiently wait for the next great release of FF. I have no solution, but this is my informal bug report.
Increase in speed on JavaScript will be great. There are many times when my FF instance gets temporarily grayed out when it loads a page with lots of JavaScript. This is the window manager thinking that FF is locked up and not responding.
Gah! I don't want software that fucking "learns"! I don't want software that tries to think for me. I want software that just fucking works in the first place!
It's the KISS principle. I'd rather have stupid software that works in a clear manner than all this crap that tries to figure out what I maybe might be wanting.
The cake is a pie
>I don't want software that tries to think for me.
In which case you don't want the browser to autocomplete the URL for you at all, and the fact that it finds seemingly irrelevant matches shouldn't matter.
Threads add a whole new dimension of complexity to the engine. The "right" way to do it may not even exist.
Extensions definitely should not have direct access to the threads. It would be an absolutely terrible idea. In fact, extensions shouldn't even know that there's multithreading going on behind the scenes. At best, extensions would be able to indirectly spawn threads and manipulate the spawned threads in a roundabout manner through that context using a thread-safe API.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Just because I have a couple gigs of memory doesn't mean I want Firefox to consume it all. I run more than just a web browser. I don't want a lot of caching anyway, since most pages I hit are dynamic and I don't use back very frequently. I don't want a program to look and see I have a couple gigs of memory and assume it can use it all.
-Aaron
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Or does a single tab still cause the entire browser to freeze up?
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
I agree with you totally. I've been toying around with the Firefox 3 Betas for a couple of weeks and I think the awesomebar is the best new feature. It's not broken -- it's different. Once you get used to it, finding pages you frequently visit becomes much easier.
Say you visited the Wikipedia page on the Tunguska event a couple of weeks. If you want to revisit the page, all you do is start typing the first few letters of "Tunguska" and the page comes to the top of the list. With the old type of address bar, you'll have to type the whole Wikipedia URL or search your browser history separately. This speedup is well worth the relatively shallow learning curve.
I find it pretty stupid to compare this feature with Windows' "adaptive menu" feature. There's only a superficial resemblance. Remember, the traditional address bar still "learns" in the way you hate by ordering URLs by the frequency with which you visit them. What is it with the Slashdot crowd and being insanely conservative about their software?
Would it be fair to say the following actually occured to obtain these javascript performance improvements:
1. instrumented firefox (PGO technology)
2. ran the stinking benchmark with the instrumented code
3. used the feedback from the benchmark to automatically compile an optimized version of firefox optimized specifically for the benchmark.
4. Publish results of said benchmark for all to oooh and awwww over.
Isn't this as pathetic and useless as vendors manually tweaking their 3D drivers to artifically raise performance figures displayed in 3dmark? Did I totally misread TFA?
I know, it really sucks that people don't write books anymore since the printing press came out. The whole industry collapsed, you probably haven't even heard of these jobs:
* Copyists, who dealt with basic production and correspondence
* Calligraphers, who dealt in fine book production
* Correctors, who collated and compared a finished book with the manuscript from which it had been produced
* Rubricators, who painted in the red letters
* Illuminators, who painted illustrations
Ohhhh wait, people still write books and the industry didn't collapse. It just changed. I'm sure in 50years we'll be saying 'wtf was a publisher again?'. And nothing of value will be lost. Artists have the HUGE opportunity of being able to cut out the middle men (there are lots of them) with current technology. With less hands in their pockets they will make big money from live shows and bigger profit from merchandise as well as profits from ad supported downloads and site page views. Artists will NOT starve, i don't see how cutting away the massive corporations which artists are carrying on their back atm will hurt the artists.