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.

Comments

Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means

[ShaunC]

Mozilla has released the second alpha build for Firefox 3.1, codenamed "Shiretoko."

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.

Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means

[sameerds]

My Firefox is at 2.0.0.16.

Have you read this? Seems like they have really started pushing FF3 hard like they said they would!

This version does not include Tracemonkey

[Anik315]

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

Re:Firefox's bottleneck isn't JS

[haruchai]

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.

Re:Eich twists the facts a little

[randomc0de]

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.