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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!
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
Probably dragging to anywhere in the window works now.
After reading the rest of the article, and a reply below me, I think Tracemonkey wasn't enabled when I ran the Sunspider test on the 3.1 build. Therefore the numbers in my post are useless. Ignore.
u have to turn tracemonkey on (even in the tracemonkey capable builds).
see this guy's post
As an FYI for Safari users, you can do the same in Safari. IIRC, it came in sometime in the 2.x era, but I might be mistaken in that. I frequently run the betas and the feature vs version issue gets a bit clouded for me.
Anyway, you can rearrange the tabs, drag them to other windows, are drag them out into a new window.
The only down side is that, as far as I can tell, you have to have multiple tabs in the window from which you're dragging. So consolidating two windows into one means you have to Cmd-T in one of them to open another window first, then close it after consolidation. Rather silly - and the preferences don't have an "Always show a tab" option.
Eh cookies? Lets not get too excited here over nothing.
Stopping Content Restriction Annulment and Protection means not calling it DRM.
Because I still feel stupid for having made my original post without knowing that you needed to enable Tracemonkey, here's results from my home Windows machine, which is similar to my work machine (Intel Core2 Quad Q6600; work is XP 32 bit, home is Vista 64 bit):
Chrome Sunspider results (TinyURL to Sunspider results)
Tracemonkey Sunspider results (TinyURL to Sunspider results)
Tracemonkey was faster than Chrome. I think it's odd that Chrome was slower than at work considering my home machine has much better parts. Chalk it up to Vista 64bit or something, I dunno.
The current stable build, 3.0.1, can already do this. (and maybe already in 3.0).
http://developer.mozilla.org/En/DOM_improvements_in_Firefox_3
It seems they have been focusing on extending the DOM support but TraceMonkey will eventually be used to enhance FF's DOM performance
(Excerpt from this page: http://ejohn.org/blog/tracemonkey/)
Right now there isn't any tracing being done into DOM methods (only across pure-JavaScript objects) - but that is something that will be rectified. Being able to trace through a DOM method would successfully speed up, not only, math and object-intensive applications (as it does now) but also regular DOM manipulation and property access.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Because addons.mozilla.org doesn't allow us to call our add-ons compatible with future versions of Firefox. We have to wait till Firefox releases a new version and then update the compatibility.
It kind of forces developers to check whether their add-ons are actually compatible with the new version. But not really.
Each tab does run in its own process. A "persistent login" is usually implemented using a "session" on top of HTTP and usually using cookies. One would think, that a cookie is a cookie across all Chrome processes. That is the behaviour that one would expect and also the behaviour that has correctly been implemented in Chrome.
Before your next troll, perhaps you should go and write a multi-process application, then go and write a web-application that stores login information in a session. Then think about what you just posted.
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.
FTFA:
This reminds me: TraceMonkey is only a few months old, excluding the Tamarin Tracing Nanojit contributed by Adobe (thanks again, Ed and co.!), which we've built on and enhanced with x86-64 support and other fixes. We've developed TraceMonkey in the open the whole way. And we're as fast as V8 on SunSpider!
and
V8 is great work, very well-engineered, with room to speed up too. (And Chrome looks good to great -- the multi-process architecture is righteous, but you expected no less praise from an old Unix hacker like me.)
Yup, lots of credit-stealing and belittling going on there. Meanwhile, I don't like that you can't even spell "salaries" correctly. You see, I'm new here: I RTFA, point out inaccurate comments, and correct spelling. An unholy trinity I suppose.
Three rights make a left. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly.