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

We ain't dead yet!

[mcrbids]

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.

Re:We ain't dead yet!

[tobiasly]

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!

I really don't think that Google wants to enter the browser wars. They will make no money from Chrome; it is just a means to an end. What they are trying to do is just make sure that the rapid pace of browser development over the past few years continues unabated, so Microsoft doesn't pull another IE6 on us.

I see Chrome as more of a "reference implementation" than a true competitor. Really, are they gonna put the effort into this thing to keep it current for the next decade? To foster the type of developer and add-on community that Firefox has? I just don't see it happening. I think they really just hope that Firefox, Safari, and Opera et. al. incorporate all the new ideas in Chrome into their own products.

Re:We ain't dead yet!

[H0p313ss]

But Chrome makes it obvious: the browser is the next O/S.

I wish this meme would die... tell me... will your browser have a posix API? Will your browser have it's own video and printer drivers? Will your browser allow me to run Linux as a hosted process?

Honestly, kids these days...

Re:We ain't dead yet!

[mcrbids]

Really, are they gonna put the effort into this thing to keep it current for the next decade? To foster the type of developer and add-on community that Firefox has? I just don't see it happening. I think they really just hope that Firefox, Safari, and Opera et. al. incorporate all the new ideas in Chrome into their own products.

If they have structure their code properly (and initial feedback indicates that they have) it will take perhaps a dozen reasonably qualified software engineers to keep Chrome relevant. Compared to the size and resources of Google, this is a fairly small investment.

But the result is likely to be rather dramatic for Google: if they provide a simple, rapid, quality browser for a reasonable price that takes browsers to a whole new level, where the browser is very literally more like an operating system, this can have tremendous benefits for Google with its significant and growing number of online applications like google maps, gmail, calendar, and more by the day.

Unlike IE, Chrome developers only have to build a browser that works. They don't have to integrate with some ActiveX or Cocoa API, they don't have to maintain retro-compatibility with a bazillion intranet applications. They just have to make a browser that's cross-platform and implements O/S features in the 80 MB or so of its download size that were common in early Unix Operating Systems that were 10 MB or so.

While I have my doubts as to whether Chrome is everything claimed in their introductory comic, Chrome represents a good step forward, and the fact that it's open source and open license means that it's likely to spread far, wide, and deep within a few years.

It's a double-plus sign to the KDE team; Chrome is based on webkit which is based on Konqueror which was written for KDE. Open-source cross-polinization at work!

Go Google!

shiretoko

[Dr. Tom]

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

Firefox's bottleneck isn't JS

[Stan Vassilev]

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.

Um, no

[amake]

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.