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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!
Wow, I didn't know that. Tried just now on 3.0.1 and yes, you can.
It's one of the things I really like with Chrome; I think Chrome does it slightly better (FF replaced the content of the the open tab in the destination window with the page from the source window and left the source tab open - Chrome creates a new tab in the destination window and closes the source tab). I'm still firmly in the Firefox camp so it'd be great if 3.1 more closely mirrors Chrome's tab moves.
This is where the serious fun begins.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
n/t
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.
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.
On the other hand, 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. Especially since pressing alt-tab stops the dragging immediately. Hopefully they'll fix it by the release version.
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.
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.
Which one is the Vista 64 bit machine? What OS is the other?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
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.
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.
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