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Mozilla Releases Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2
daria42 writes with news that Mozilla has released the second alpha build for Firefox 3.1, codenamed "Shiretoko." The new build includes "support for the HTML 5 <video> element" and the ability to "drag and drop tabs between browser windows." ComputerWorld is running a related story about benchmarks shown by Mozilla's Brendan Eich which indicate that Firefox 3.1 will run Javascript faster than Chrome.
I see. Is that why I was yet again presented with a dialog tonight inviting me to "Upgrade to Firefox 3!" even though I've hit the Never button on that same dialog at least twice on this machine over the past few weeks?
If you give me an upgrade option that says "Never," and I choose that option, my expectation is that I will no longer get random dialogs offering the upgrade. Ever. That's sort of the reason I keep clicking "Never" instead of "Later," but Firefox doesn't seem to care.
This is really starting to get annoying.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
"the ability to 'drag and drop tabs between browser windows.'"
You can do that now last time I checked...
In theory, theory always works in practice. In practice, theory rarely works. <><
To get a version with Tracemonkey, download a nightly build and follow these instructions:
open a new tab
type about:config and hit enter
read the warning and heed its wisdom
enter jit in the filter field
double click on javascript.options.jit.chrome and javascript.options.jit.content to change their values to true
The first thing I did after installing Chrome was run Sunspider. It averaged completion on my work machine in ~1.4 seconds. I went and got two different 3.1 builds with Tracemonkey (9/3 and 9/2) and it averaged ~2.3 seconds. I was kind of surprised as I did expect Tracemonkey to be faster than V8. The only test that Tracemonkey outperformed V8 was the regex test, all the others it got completely spanked.
Sorry, don't have the actual numbers. Like I said, this was on my work computer.
So here we have the Moz FF team saying: "We ain't dead yet!".
With IE as the undisputed champion, nothing happened. FF brought the "browser war" back, and suddenly IE starts getting new features.
Google's Chrome brings the browser war to a white heat - suddenly FF is being given a run for its money as the undisputed browser feature champion!
Here's what I'd like to see:
1) Process-per-tab. It sucks when some JS in some tab gets hung up, bringing everything else in the browser to its knees! Chrome is the only game in town here.
2) Fast (native-speed) JS execution. (Chrome? FF?)
3) Excellent plugin compatibility. Both FF and IE have this down.
4) Cross Platform support. I'm a Win/Mac/Linux guy, I expect my software to work equally on all three. FF is the clear winner here.
4) Ubiquity. For me, this is FF, because it's the first thing I download after a fresh OS install, regardless of the OS. But for most people, this is still IE.
What am I going to use? Firefox has my money, still. I type this in Chrome, but I usually am not using Windows, so Chrome, Safari, and IE are non-starters for me.
But Chrome makes it obvious: the browser is the next O/S.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I installed it and the first thing that happens as always is the extensions stop working.
Why don't the extension developers keep ready an upgraded version of their add-ons so that with every Firefox upgrade you don't have to sit and wait for days for the add-ons to be upgraded?
Oh, never mind the extensions. Firefox 3.1 alpha 2 just crashed on me. :-/
slashdot rocks
While I appreciate the new features in Firefox's latest release, I am still disappointed in it because I cannot watch CNN live streams.
Before you jump to conclusions, let me inform you that I have all the latest plugins installed; from Flash, Shockwave, Java and all the rest.
I even have CNN's own plugin for Firefox installed...but live streams will not play! Incidentally, the commercial before the the actual content (which is in Flash), plays fine. When it's over, what one sees is a black screen!
Whose fault it is, I do not know...all i know is that I cannot watch those live streams on CNN. What's going on?
ComputerWorld is running a related story about benchmarks shown by Mozilla's Brendan Eich which indicate that Firefox 3.1 will run Javascript faster than Chrome.
Take that Google!
--I'm not talking about dance lessons. I'm talking about putting a brick through the other guy's windshield.-
Have they fixed the GoDaddy issue yet?
too bad they didn't say which kanji. shiretoko could be shireitoko, the place of a ghost. or it could be command place. shiretto-ko would be the little one who doesn't care. shiiretoko could also mean the buying up place ... japanese has so many homonyms
You have no idea how the Internet works.
From Brendan's JS benchmarks:
We win by 1.28x and 1.19x, respectively. Maybe we should rename TraceMonkey "V10" ;-).
Apart from getting the "asshat" award for this comment, Brendan seems to ignore Firefox currently has the slowest DOM manipulation of any of the major browsers.
And it's that DOM which is the bottleneck in most web applications (as I can testify as a web developer), as JS is mostly used to modify the document in some way, not to compute cryptographic hashes of huge datasets or the like.
I am noticing a consistent trend in Mozilla trying to one-up the competition in their benchmarks, while ignoring the real-world problems of their products. Bad for their users, but in the long run, bad for Mozilla as a company and initiative as well.
Using FF, I right click on the HTML5 video link in the summary and opened it in a new tab. A rather large page, it maxed out my CPU for about 15 seconds parsing and rendering it. During that time scrolling down the slashdot page became very jerky.
Tried it out on Chrome on my Windows box, and no such problem. Do the FF people plan on going down that path?
From Eich's interview:
Eich disagreed. Although he called V8 "great work, very well engineered," Eich said TraceMonkey has more potential than Google's interpreter for additional, and dramatic, speed improvements. "We've only been working on TraceMonkey for, what, three months now," he said in an interview today. Google has said its Danish engineers had been working on V8 for approximately two years.
TraceMonkey was possible in three months only thanks to the efforts of Adobe on developing the AVM2 engine (aka Tamarin), which took over 2 years to complete and release. Tamarin's Micro JIT engine is what powers the heart of TraceMonkey and is a significant part of the update we'll see in Firefox 3.1.
I don't like that Eich seems to not give any credit to Adobe at all for their contribution, and on top of that tries to belittle the effort of Google, who are technically paying their sallaries at Mozilla Corp.
Or you're just caught up in the hype and think it's faster? Do you have any benchmarks or data that show Chrome is performing better than FF3.1 alpha2?
Its not what it is, its something else.
Chrome isn't perfect and doesn't run all that well on a hyperthreaded P4 single core.
I'm not about to throw away my computers just to run a beta Chrome which really isn't as functional as my Firefox. I doubt if it would ever be.
A lot of us appreciate the work that FF dev. does and it can only improve.
Thanks.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
The current stable build, 3.0.1, can already do this. (and maybe already in 3.0).
n/t
have they fixed the damn "Awesome Bar" so it works? I'm getting a little tired of the way it currently works, where if I start typing "news" (to go to news.google.com, for example), slashdot is listed in the links because the sub-heading is "news for nerds".
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
I wonder if FF are planning to fix the poor memory handling and speed in Linux any time soon. I'm getting quite tired of just how Windows focussed they are. I know that needs to be their primary target, but it would be nice if the Linux version didn't lag behind *quite* so much, especially seeing as they forget to mention that all these fancy improvements listed for a new version don't actually apply to the Mac and Linux versions.
is that whenever a window for some reason crawls to an end, everything is lost.
For instance, I'm a big fan of Comedy Central (daily show), but watching it at my job is a pain in the ass during noon. I don't know if the site is really busy or if its the traffic inside, but the Flash player just goes "boing" and all my open windows are lost forever.
Please, could you teach these guys about a multi-threaded environment? thanks!
That was a very nice puff piece. Congratz. :-)
Send your spendthrift head of state this
Personally, I'd prefer that they worry less about making JavaScript faster and focus on the security policy. Isn't there at least some buried option not to run JavaScript from a 3rd party source, or only to run in-line JavaScript and not imports? How about disabling certain functions? As a person who hates to install 3rd party anti-spam extensions, I think some more low-level control would be a better option than just turning off JavaScript entirely (so, for example, I can actually reply to comments on some AJAX-laden blogs).
Let the advertisers worry about how to get around this. They always do, one way or another.
I haven't tried the latest Firefox but so far the day I've had with Chrome has been amazing. Even with the latest versions after less than a day's usage switching between tabs would start to slow down and even closing every single tab would leave Firefox with a huge amount of leftover memory. Responsiveness and shedding the leftover memory would only be fixed by quiting out of the browser two or three times a day.
Even if there are a few benchmarks where Firefox can match Chrome it isn't going fix the performance and resource rot that plagues Firefox.
The bitter reaction some people are having to people going crazy with excitement over Chrome sounds like there are people too emotionally attached to just a piece of software. Dumping Firefox for Chrome was no different than dumping Alta Vista for Google or IE for Firefox years ago.
I agree. I've seen plenty of benchmarks purporting to show Chrome isn't the fastest, but in my experience it is so much faster it is almost unbelievable. Like pages which take 6 seconds in firefox completing in 2 seconds - that is a seriously big improvement. I downloaded Chrome just to have a look, didn't expect to do more than have a quick go and then leave it as one of my browsers for testing. But the speed is so much better that I've switched almost entirely to Chrome.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.
wtf? moving tabs between windows worked even in ff 2.0..
If you're using FF 3 and want to try out 3.1, chances are you've got a bunch of extensions that will get disabled. Doesn't look like they made any major changes that should affect extensions, so just go to about:config and add/set "extensions.checkCompatibility" to false
Hopefully they'll fix it by the release version.
Release version... from Google. Right.
Speed, who cares. As I work in websites I of course need to have all browsers installed and running, Opera is my favorite browser, its mouse gestures is simply the most complete and function, in Firefox, it still feels tagged on. Same with tabbed browsing, although firefox is getting better at it, opera does it best. For specific tasks, I use firefox, I especially like its spell checked in textarea's, if I care about my spelling (guess what weeb site I doo nt car abot speeling) then that is the one I use, it also used to be the one with the best tools for a dev to see what the hell is going on with CSS and html. And then chrome landed and WOW. Maybe I am using the wrong add-ons in Firefox/Opera but Chrome gives some very nice tools for inspecting CSS and how it is affecting your layout. I really couldn't care less about executing speed, what I expect in a browser is to do what I want it to do well, a mili-second faster or slower has no effect. Firefox is still the most well-rounded browser out there, but right now, two of its tasks for me are better handled by other browsers.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Great! Now all of Opera, Safari and Firefox support the video element, can we please kill flash already?
I doubt youtube, game trailers, southpark studios and friends will demand this real soon now because people in general suck but I can wish can't I?
still no decent process separation between tabs and plugins though. FF has a lot of work to do to catch up to Chrome (or even IE) in this respect. This problem has been known since years now and nothing has happened.
They could also learn a thing or two about sandboxing from both IE and Chrome.
I donno if you're the same guy as ShawnC
but there was something recently about Mozilla being more persistent about people upgrading from ff2 to ff3, in that they would pop up a dialog asking you to upgrade periodically, even if you selected never.
But then again, a quick google search reveals nothing, so maybe i'm imagining it/typing in the wrong words to search from
No, I am not an English major. My posts are subject to typos and incorrect grammar. Do not expect perfection.
I think there are quite a few people who desperately want to see some 'numbers' to let them continue to hang on to Firefox for whatever reason. There are valid reasons for not dumping Firefox and immediately moving to the vastly more responsive and resource lean over time Chrome like extensions and other features.
Some of the reaction to Chrome remind me of console fans who are faced with a competing console putting out significantly better graphics and they go searching for someone with some sort of plausible technical authority to quote them performance numbers to 'disprove' what they and everyone else are seeing with their own eyes.
Am I the only one finding the fact that they only test javascript performance a bit retarded? Dont get me wrong, there's a lot of javascript on the web, but it seems the "performance race" between browsers only include javascript, when normal rendering performance ifs more important as far as I'm concerned.
Webkit page rendering has always been very fast. On Windows, Chrome feels like Safari. John Resig has some benchmarks for the javascript engines. Disclaimer: He is a guy from Mozilla. http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-performance-rundown/. Summary: Javascript performance should feel about the same. Google is guilty of pr crap with their own "benchmark".
Whatever that test is doing is not reflected in reality.
Chrome absolutely destroys the latest Firefox with the improved JavaScript engine enabled. It's not even close. I wouldn't even bother with Chrome since Firefox was fine compared to IE as long as I quite two or three times a day to clear out all the leaks and other crap Firefox leaves behind and doesn't clean up properly when tabs are closed.
I can't imagine how much faster and more responsive Chrome is than Firefox after an entire day's heavy usage.
People really are looking for someway to cling to Firefox with these 'tests'.
I really don't think that Google wants to enter the browser wars.
But they are interested in web-based applications, and Chrome seems to have been designed with these specifically in mind (the Application Windows/Application Shortcut feature, the tab sandboxing, the minimal UI, Google Gears built-in). They're in a good position to promote Chrome as the best way to run Google Docs/Maps/etc.
Interestingly, we now have Google (Chrome), Adobe (Air) and Apple (Safari, particularly on iPhone/iPod Touch) pushing WebKit-based web application platforms.
Really, are they gonna put the effort into this thing to keep it current for the next decade?
Except that a big chunk of that work can be shared with the WebKit community - which, with the KDE folks plus Google, Apple and Adobe on board (in descending order of likely commitment to open source :-)) seems to be on the ascendant...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Chrome doesn't seem to allow me to switch to another window by hovering the mouse over that window's taskbar button while dragging a tab - which makes the feature nearly useless if you use maximized windows.
Most web site designs nowadays are tested against window widths of 800 to 1000 pixels. Many of them are "liquid", meaning that the width of the main text area resizes with the width of the window; on these, if you make the window too wide, you have to move your head back and forth to read. Others just put blank bars at the sides if your window is too wide. So unless you use a small screen, such as that of an older PC or a subnotebook PC, why would you use maximized windows with a web browser?
All of the possibilities you mentioned are not the same word as "Shiretoko." Did you even notice as you typed them differently from the actual name?
shireitoko != shirettoko != shiiretoko, and none of those are actual words, much less homonyms.
AFAIK Firefox releases use place names, and Shiretoko is a peninsula in Hokkaido. See: Shiretoko Peninsula.
Chrome stayed on my system for about 15 minutes during the evaluation. Yes it was fast, yes it was shiny but I dont think i can browse without my firefox addons (adblock plus!!, piclens, rikaichan for japanese etc). I got used to the web without ads and I just cant go back.
"We are so, so happy with Google Chrome," mumbled Mozilla CEO John Lilly through gritted teeth. "That most of our income is from Google has no bearing on me making this statement. Their implementation of our JavaScript is SO GOOD it's ... pleasing. Really."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I look forward to trying out Chrome when it's available for a platform that I use, but I do think you're being a bit overly harsh on Firefox. I definitely don't experience the problems you're talking about on Firefox - for me, I generally have around 20 tabs open, am constantly opening new tabs, doing stuff, and closing them again, and while memory will slowly take a hit, I haven't noticed any performance issues. Also, even with the memory hits, I generally only have to restart Firefox once a month or so - certainly nowhere near "two or three times a day".
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
Quote from the parent comment: "Firefox continually degrades in performance and memory usage over time where you can feel the tabs taking longer and longer to switch. And the memory leaks and left overs from long since closed tabs won't go away without quitting out of Firefox."
Those bugs are over 8 years old, and exist in Firefox 3.0.1. See the, CPU hogging bug not fixed: Top 20 excuses.
I wonder why, when Firefox gets $50 million a year from Google, they don't fix the bug that bothers users the most. Is it that they don't have the technical ability, or is there a lack of corporate will?
"I wonder if FF are planning to fix the poor memory handling and speed in Linux any time soon"
There's any number of ways of tweaking Firefox in about:config. browser.cache.disk.capacity etc. Besides, in this age of on average 1GM to 4GM of ram, memory isn't a problem.
When you posted this 'issue', what did the support forum have to say about this?
As my title says, all you do is open another firefox window, drag the tab to the task bar (do not let go) hover over the other firefox window task and it will open up, then drop it on the tab bar :-)
Just because it works, Doesn't make it right. - JTM
The reason Google made Chrome was that 90% of the work to create it had to be done for Android anyway. They simply went ahead and made a desktop browser from that code base. I'm glad they did for competitive reasons, but it wasn't their primary motivation.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
I would be interested to just download it and play around to see if 3.1a2 passes the acid 1/2/3 tests.
I wonder how chrome does on the acid tests as well.
The goal of computer science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it.
I downloaded Chrome, then was confused by the hype because I didn't notice any big speed increase and the browser was basically featureless. Uninstalled and sent my comments to Google.
The one big feature of Chrome (other than the speed I never saw) is the per process tabs. This might be an issue, if Firefox wasn't rock stable for me (but it is) or I had to surf for 8 hours straight and was never allowed to restart the browser and memory fragmentation became a problem, but I don't do this and if I did. The browser is just a browser. I would restart it. But I have never seen this happen.
If Chrome catches up on everything else I might give it another shot for the per process tabs as a would be nice feature.
I consider this a "would be nice" feature. FF is rock stable for me and guess what. It is just a browser. If it did have a problem, I would restart it.
Chrome OTOH is missing several "must have" features.
I tally it as Chrome up by one "would be nice" and behind by several "must haves" and the all important killer feature: Extensions. Not only the ability to use extensions, but massive library of them here now.
Chrome is not really a browser. It is a tech demo.
Also you could just sit a reasonable distance from the monitor so you can see it all at once - I have no problems doing this on a 21" widescreen.
But then the average person would need to increase the line spacing so that his eyes don't skip a line or re-read a line when they go back to the left side[1] of the extra-wide text column. And if you're going to cut the readable area that much, you might as well resize your window to half the 1920-pixel width of your screen so that you can fit two web pages side by side. Newspapers have four to six columns for a reason.
[1] Right side if Hebrew or Arabic.
Yes, adding the feature to the core of Firefox would be nice...but if they did that for all the 'nice features' it'd have too much bloat. Hence, extensions.
Check out 'NoScript' - it does what you want. By default, no pages get to run scripts. You approve on a per-domain basis (so say, Slashdot is running some google code on the page - you'll have both domains as choices - allow, temporarily allow (which is handy when you don't recog the domain) or block, and don't tell me again.
http://noscript.net/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722
I run it on all my installs of Firefox...this combined with AdBlock & Flashblock make for a very controlled and friendly surfing experience.
Here it is http://ostatic.com/171131-blog/mozilla-plans-to-nudge-firefox-2-0-users-to-upgrade
matar a un hombre no es defender una idea es matar a un hombre
Apple is also not sitting still - and using webkit as well. Checkout squirrelfish, somebody will one day do a benchmark of the above three. One interesting feature the ff3 monkey camp is working on is ironpython and ironruby support, which goes in the direction of microsoft's silverlight's idea
The louse multi-threading multi-processing has quite often made me mad: I often have dozens of tabs often, often with several windows. And it happens now and then that simply clicking a link will freeze all of them, simply because a plugin starts up slowly or some network activity blocks all activity in all tabs.
Thats really lousy and it is sad that after all these years the situation is that bad (I can only talk about the Linux version of FF here as I nearly never use Windows).
Any plugin or any crashing tab can crash the whole browser. But even more badly: any hanging plugin or hanging tab can cause all windows and all tabs to freeze.
Its a known problem for years now.
And yes, IE does this much better since version 7.
I see terrible behavior from FF at work (some old RHEL) It freezes up constantly, but at home on windows it is rock solid. I also run Kubuntu at home and it is much better than at work, but perhaps not as good as windows version. If I rate them. Windows version 9.5, Kubuntu 9, RHEL 2. Just to give you some extent of the problem. I don't really consider it a FF problem, but the crappy Linux installation foisted on us, but our IT department.
I love firefox but I really do tire of the performance sometimes, especially when one tab misbehaves and the others lock up with it. :/
There should be a seperate process per tab, I had a quad core CPU sitting 3 cores idle while FF is locked up on a single tab
Also there's some bugs with flash embedded video and being able to change tabs with control tab, the 'focus' becomes lost from up the top.
I've tried to demonstrate it in this video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLk0MBSxb-A but it's fairly poorly done and difficult to explain.
(I'm sure the majority of the readers here will get it though, ultimately the long story short is control tab and control shift tab, for hardcore keyboard users can not always be consistently relied on, due to some kind of focusing problem specifically on sites with embedded content)
>>>"mozilla-plans-to-nudge-firefox-2-0-users-to-upgrade"
Too bad the "auto-update" window doesn't include a small comment box, so I could send Mozilla my totally honest and true feedback about their program to "nudge" users every day, twice a day, without end:
"New software available. Would you like to upgrade?"
"No. And fuck off for the thousandth time. No means no, just like in the bedroom. Go away."
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Revert a bad mod
I know plenty of people with 19" monitors at 1280x1024 resolution, which works reasonably well maximized. That's what I personally use, although I do have two such monitors side-by-side, and the browser obviously only maximized on one of them.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10