Slashdot Mirror
Minefield Shows the (Really) Fast Future of Firefox
zootropole writes "If you are using Firefox 3 (or even Chrome) you should consider taking a look at Mozilla's Minefield. This browser (alpha version yet, but stable) would give a new meaning to 'fast browsing experience.' Some Firefox extensions aren't supported, but riding the fastest javascript engine on the planet definitely worth a try. Minefield's install won't affect your Firefox, so there's no risk trying it. It's fast. Really. And I'm loving it."
Reviews popping up around the web are overwhelmingly positive, calling the upcoming browser crazy fast, blisteringly fast, etc.
thanks to minefield :)
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Are you crazy? If you want to be a little risky, try the 3.1 beta. Nightlies shouldn't be used by those that want to use extensions or avoid crashes.
These are the nightly builds, once they like how the nightly builds work, they will release them as a "Firefox" update.
They will, it's an early beta and is therefore considered unstable...
Today's nightly for mac crashes on http://www.pentestmonkey.net/jsbm/index.html which is a javascript benchmark, i was trying to see if it really is as fast as the article claims... Currently the webkit nightlies seem to be the fastest on this benchmark, by quite some considerable margin.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
If it is that much better, why arent they just replacing Firefox with it??
They will, though it will be called Firefox when that happens. "Minefield" is just the code name for Firefox 3 nightlies, and it's called that for a reason: as a developer-intended build, it's prone to blowing up.
It will be released when it is ready. That time isn't yet.
Minefield isn't very different from FF at all.... because Minefield *is* Firefox. The main development code is called Minefield. At different points they branch the code off to become the versions of Firefox that we all know.
So they branched Minefield several months ago to become Firefox 3.0 but continued work on Minefield and now a new branch from Minefield will become Firefox 3.1.
It has the potential to be, at least for interpreting javascript. The gui still feels a lot more sluggish though, and general rendering still seems quite a bit slower as well. Just remember to do the about:config thing, then search for jit, and turn the two options on to get the speed boost.
Everything will be taken away from you.
OK, it's time for us to start educating users and the media of when to properly use the monikers Java and JavaScript.
The article linked to from the summary says "Handles Java Well" in the subtitle, but then never mentions it again - only JavaScript.
These are NOT THE SAME.
This is, of course, CBSNews.. but I have seen the same mistake in so-called "tech" media lately, too.
... was it to code name a perfectly fine browser that's both fast and stable "Minefield"?????
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Another browser to test on!!!
"Hey Rockie, watch me put a gun in my mouth!"
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I just wonder how often the speed of javascript matters vs the network connection.
I tried to Chrome but never really noticed much difference.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Which is faster, crazy or blistering??
I dont think crazy sounds all that fast - I mean most crazies I've met have had trouble moving around much without taking timeouts to wipe drool and yell at the birds.
I have spoken'eth.
its fast, its stable, my extensions work ;)
Especially Zotero (SVN) rocks !!!
What the hell kind of codename is that? Maybe an attempt at 'truth in advertising'?
That's exactly what it is. Minefield always refers to the current alpha-release of the upcoming "major" release.
Don't use it unless you know what you're doing. Suggesting end-users use this, without briefing them on why it will crash [frequently], is irresponsible at best and does a disservice to the alternate browser movement.
Of course, you have to enable the TraceMonkey JIT JavaScript compiler before you'll see any reasonable speed increase (in theory). Just go to about:config, search for the 2 items with "JIT" in their name, and enable them.
My stress tests have shown it to be 10-50% faster than Chrome *when* JIT works. However, it's still buggy as hell, it eats its own memory heap and grinds to inexplicable halts kinda randomly whenever my code does anything repetitive and strenuous, bringing the average execution speed down to almost FF2 levels, meaning it's faster for me to leave JIT disabled. It's a no-go for me until they fix that.
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
People are talking as if Chrome's V8 was the fastest JavaScript engine around, but it wasn't - WebKit's SquirrelFish Extreme was faster. Is Minefield's engine even faster? Ars Technica's tests show that TraceMonkey runs the SunSpider benchmark in between 78% and 84% of V8's time. However, according to earlier tests, SquirelFish Extreme completes the benchmark in 74% of V8's time, making it even faster than the newest TraceMonkey. So it looks like Minefield, though fast, is not the fastest browser in JavaScript.
Sorry to nitpick but is anyone else turned-off by the hyperbole in these write-ups?
ARS estimates the browser to be 10 percent faster. I mean, if it was three times faster than my current browser, then I'd say blistering is appropriate.
I mean, if you were driving on the freeway at 60 mph and someone passed you doing 66...would you say they were traveling "at breakneck" speed?
That was their intention.
It keeps idiots like you who look at the name only away from the nightly builds, and anyone with enough of a clue to not judge it by its name is also by extension usually intelligent enough to read the fucking warnings not to use it in the first place.
No it is the name for the unstable trunk, Shiretoko is the code name for Firefox 3.
These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based upon the order I joined. -Homer Simpson
I've been running Bon Echo [Community Edition Release for Win64] for quite some time now, but some weeks ago it changed into the Minefield build. With 8GB RAM installed I did notice it's gobbling up more memory than Bon Echo did, but that's just a minor issue. It looks like the money spent on RAM hasn't paid off, as most applications I've got running on x64 are 32 bit, so no real gain to be expected. [It'll be my last WinOS, before I move to a Kubuntu/FreeBSD ONLY network.]
err 3.1
These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based upon the order I joined. -Homer Simpson
Just asking.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
People. There is A REASON why Mozilla calls these builds "Minefield" rather than "Firefox".
It's because they're not ready for daily use.
They may be faster than the released version of Firefox, but they also may contain major, showstopping bugs, up to and including bugs that can cause data loss.
The only people who should be using them are people who understand this risk and are willing to accept it -- i.e. testers.
Anyone promoting these builds for use by the general public is being irresponsible and exposing anyone who takes their advice to risk.
TFA is bad enough, but it's worse to see major sites like Slashdot parroting this bad advice. You should be telling your friends to avoid Minefield, not to seek it out.
Read my blog.
Seems pretty quick to me, but that's probably cause it's not running my 15+ extensions.
There is a war going on for your mind.
But has the JIT code been implemented for PPC?
No. They seem to be planning to have PPC support eventually, but work is in very early stages.
Well, it's certainly faster than Chrome for OS X or Linux, since neither of these are available yet at all. Chrome fades more into irrelevance the longer they delay releasing versions for non-Windows platforms. This is not because the browser particularly sucks, it is because unlike Firefox, it has missed the boat for endorsement by the geek community.
I've said this before, but it bears saying again: Google is not short of resources, so their ignoring other platforms only suggests deliberate policy. In other words, they might as well take their browser and stick it where the sun doesn't shine.
Please remember that if you messed with minefield "a few months back" then its been through dozens of iterations since then. It's a nightly build.
It's a codename for the Firefox development branch. Nothing will ever be released with that name, it's a moving target that gets branched out to Firefox for release.
Reading FTW!
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
The biggest advantage of firefox is the ability to block out javascript via NoScript. Why would I want to give that up?
Javascript was not created by the opensource community (it was created by Brendan Eich and ended up becoming part of Netscape, which was not open source at the time). Additionally, Javascript has reasonable structures that don't deteriorate when the software expands to large sizes.
Check out Synchronet, it has IRC servers, NNTP servers, Gopher servers etc. all written in javascript. The code is completely readable (generally not the case with VB when the code reaches that complexity) and cross-platform.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the Javascript language, like there is in visual basic.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Its either via donations made by companies who earn their money via the capitalist system you so dislike or its students writing code for free while they earn money through other jobs or , more likely, are supported by their parents.
You need to get real - nothing in life is free apart from the air (and not even that if you work under the sea!)
Remember how they used to say that if IBM marketed Kentucky Fried Chicken, they would have called it "Warm Dead Birds".
Someone cheched the startup time of FF3.1 ? Compared to Chrome FF 3.0 takes ages.
The browser war heated up when Google (and others?) started paying out on ad revenue created by in-browser searches. Apple makes some nice change on Safari. So does the Mozilla Foundation, apparently.
There would be very little competition if there wasn't money to be made.
You've just learned an important lesson:
Capitalism has room for socialist enclaves. It all works well as long as there is a choice. Sometimes, as in this case, the competition is good for everyone.
It's the socialist society that can't survive without eliminating choice.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
One thing I'm most impressed with is the SVG performance. It's starting to almost become an alternative to Flash for interactive applications. I like it and I hope it gets even faster.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Actually, that's a Jerry Pournelle quote about AT&T, and it was "Hot Dead Chicken".
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
ffs. This story has been making the rounds about "Firefox Minefield" being an awesome browser. Well the next release of Firefox may be awesome, but this is a nightly build that was given the name Minefield so people might get the idea that, as the parent pointed out, it's unstable.
more of the same on Twitter.
This isn't against capitalism at all. You just have to look at what they are really selling.
Very few people want to pay for a browser. If you see the browser itself as the product, this can be a real problem. So what do you do if you are a browser maker? Opera's browser is their product. They focus pretty heavily on selling it for embedded/small/portable systems.
Mozilla on the other hand launched their campaign to build and promote Firefox. They give the browser away for free because that's how they increase the value of the actual product that they are selling to supporters: marketshare and openness. Investing in Firefox is investing in a new standard that everybody has nearly equal access to. It's building a more open web based market across which to conduct other business.
Some companies may shy away from investing because they don't own the results. But other companies may invest specifically because of how equal the access is to the results.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
And what's amazing, and completely against capitalism, none of these web browser makers are charging any money for their products! All this great software is being developed and given away for free!
Capitalism and OSS are orthogonal concepts. Companies like IBM and Red Hat make money out of Linux and Mozilla with hardware and services (not by selling the Linux kernel or the Firefox browser), and would carry on investing in free software even if Microsoft suddenly went bankrupt. My company develops instrumentation using GNU tools, and we also support OSS.
Capitalism by definition is the free market, which when taken to the extreme is anarcho-capitalism. Thanks to Marx's poor definition of value (which is too dependent on labor) and his class war ideology, the concept of capitalism has been associated with fascism. As Hayek wrote, the easiest way to convince people of something is to redefine the meaning of words. Don't fall into this trap.
Capitalism is a system which allows people to be free to exchange goods and services for mutual benefit and to cooperate on projects such as Mozilla. What we see on Washington, Wall Street and in central banks is a huge money laundering machine, where we can't tell apart where the government ends and where the corporations begin. This is the very definition of fascism.
It saddens me that every time someone on /. states that capitalism is not the end-all, there are always people that seem to think communism is the only other option. And they seem for the most part to be coming from the USA.
Does having only 2 relevant political parties make people limited in their views and reasoning or something?
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
i know its just a pre-beta preview, but still, its a marketing. hard. fail.
But if the entire point of the codename is to dissuade end users from trying pre-beta software, it's a marketing. hard. succeed.
And what's amazing, and completely against capitalism, none of these web browser makers are charging any money for their products! All this great software is being developed and given away for free!
Capitalism and free markets are about the free exchange of goods and ideas, with the people involved in the exchange (and only them) setting the terms of the exchange.
Whether the terms of the exchange involve money or not does not have much to do with the idea of free exchange.
Going back to chrome. Minefield is not faster than chrome. Oh, and yeah it does interfere with Firefox. It gets completely confused if you try to launch it while a firefox.exe process is running. Also, since when should an Alpha version have the default setting of "set minefield to the default browser"???
They will replace the current FFox with what is in Minefield - when it is ready.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReleaseRoadmap
Minefield is just the code-name for the trunk. You see, during development new stuff is submitted to the main branch - the trunk. This is where big changes like a new javascript engine or big changes to the html rendering engine happens.
You can download Minefield today to take a look at what is currently on the main trunk. But this code is often under heavy development and has not gone through all the testing/fixing that an official release gets. That's why they call it Minefield, it can and will blow up now and then.
When the current trunk has all the features one wants for the next version of FFox, they do a branch. They then do stability / security fixes etc on this branch (but no big new features). From his branch you then get the FFox betas/release-candidates and then eventually the shiny new FFox 4 (or 3.5 or whatever they'll call it).
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
To build on that point, in case not everyone understands the implications of this post, those that promote equal market access tend to be either a) the one with an idealist in charge or b) the one that believes that they really are the best on the market.
The fun starts when you actually have both of the above, because they don't shut down the market access for others once they get a majority of the market share. That generally means greater openness and creativity which creates new jobs and more focused disciplines.
This holds true in every market, by the way. Market regulation tries to do this artificially, but rarely works as well as it should. The alternative can be much worse or much better, though usually the former is the case.
"Little is much when little you need."
PowerPC is being added to the Nanojit (backend for Tracemonkey and Tamarin).
Help is welcomed. Hop onto #tamarin for pointers.
ok, this is going to be a rant, so hold on to your seats. But having dealt with this bug for so long has gotten me near the edge when it comes to mozilla
---rant begin---
It still has the same linux bug people have been complaining about for I have no idea how long and effects quite a number of users...
https://bugs.launchpad.net/firefox/+bug/125970 - and this wasnt the first time it was logged either. Check out the last link in that bug report and feel the pain if the bug affects you...
Then again, I keep making the assumption mozilla give a flying .... about linux, which means im the one in the wrong, right? Its really the only piece of the linux puzzle i've yet to be able to find an adequate answer to and I've tried them all. The sad part is that mozilla is the best answer in most situations (though between IEs4linux and opera theres a possible answer there).
yes i've tried ever fix ever mentioned for it... So far the only real method that "works" is to use something like the adblock plugin to kill off the performance destroying aspects of a website.
----rant end----
ok, im done... apologies in advance and so forth.
"DISCLAIMER: Use of this advanced computing technology does not imply an endorsement of Western industrial civilization."
Actually, yes, it does. You're just too much of a hypocrite to recognize it.
-Styopa
I just now tested it on that site:
MD5 Benchmark took 1.188 seconds for 3000 hashes (2525 hashes/second)
MD4 Benchmark took 0.839 seconds for 2700 hashes (3218 hashes/second)
SHA1 Benchmark took 1.201 seconds for 1900 hashes (1582 hashes/second)
I also tested SRware Iron (A variant of Chrome) on the site, and scored significantly higher:
MD5 Benchmark took 0.343 seconds for 3000 hashes (8746 hashes/second)
MD4 Benchmark took 0.232 seconds for 2700 hashes (11638 hashes/second)
SHA1 Benchmark took 0.299 seconds for 1900 hashes (6355 hashes/second)
This space for rent, inquire within.
It's the socialist society that can't survive without eliminating choice.
You don't need to eliminate choice, you just need to eliminate people who would choose differently. Then socialism works beautifully.
These benchmark results are a bit debatable - I've seen different suites electing different "winners" and, while SunSpider seems to be the best, it's a long way from a robust benchmark like SPEC* or DaCapo.
In any event, even if SFX is leading the pack right now, that's because it's the most mature competitor, and its advantage won't last too long. I predict (and I write this logged with my account, not AC, so I would be forever glorified when this becomes true in 12 months max) that both V8 and TraceMonkey will take the lead, leaving SFX in a safe third place permanently.
The reason is very simple. All these new JS VMs are JIT compilers, producing native code. But SFX is a context threaded JIT. Context threading is just a step beyond traditional direct-threaded interpreters: functions are 'compiled' into streams of CALLs into routines that implement each bytecode operation, but there is limited inlining (simple operations and branches), with a focus on reducing branch misprediction.
OTOH, both V8 and TraceMonkey are "real compilers" that emit real native code (not CALL streams) for entire functions (or even larger chunks of code, with inlining). This is necessary to enable traditional optimizations like register allocation, instruction scheduling, constant folding, loop unrolling etc. Some of these optimizations can be performed on a high-level intermediate code representation (HIR), but that's typically not worth the effort without real compilation. E.g., loop unrolling will just waste memory an i-cache efficiency if performed by a threaded interpreter/JIT... as the real benefit of unrolling is giving the compiler a much larger basic block to perform other opts like extra folding and bounds-check elimination, or real low-level tricks like exploring using SIMD registers and operations / Instruction-Level Parallelism / prefetching / branch predication etc.
The only reason why V8 and TraceMonkey don't completely 0wn the benchmarks today, is that these JITs are still in their infancy. They have implemented the foundations (like V8's hidden classes or TM's tracing), but they still miss to implement dozens of important optimizations (including very easy ones - they just didn't have the time yet). Check some comments about V8's limitations. TM's developers have also commented on many limitations, quote (Andreas Gal: "If it talks to the DOM during the benchmark, we currently donâ(TM)t compile across such calls (we plan to for Beta2 though)". This and several other improvements are planned for future builds of Firefox 3.1. Notice that items like special support for DOM interactions and event handlers should be critical to some benchmarks - and of course to real-world RIA apps. I'm sure the V8 hackers are also working around the clock to fill in their own gaps. When both VMs are reasonably mature, SFX will have a VERY hard time competing (unless of course, they abandon the context threading model and mutate into a real compiler). Other optimizations, like JITted regex, can be implemented in all VMs and will eventually be ubiquitous.
Faster javascript is nice but what I really want it a multi-process sort of firefox like Chrome has. I want to see which tab is slowing me down and kill it. I want all of my tabs to run independently on multiple cpu's. I want the memory leakage of any one process to go away when I kill it instead of restarting the whole browser. I spend very little time waiting on the results of javascript execution.
My results confirm yours
Minefield
MD5 Benchmark took 0.71 seconds for 3000 hashes (4225 hashes/second)
MD4 Benchmark took 0.446 seconds for 2700 hashes (6054 hashes/second)
SHA1 Benchmark took 0.721 seconds for 1900 hashes (2635 hashes/second)
Chrome
MD5 Benchmark took 0.411 seconds for 3000 hashes (7299 hashes/second)
MD4 Benchmark took 0.162 seconds for 2700 hashes (16667 hashes/second)
SHA1 Benchmark took 0.18 seconds for 1900 hashes (10556 hashes/second)
and just to laugh IE 7
MD5 Benchmark took 3.885 seconds for 3000 hashes (772 hashes/second)
MD4 Benchmark took 12.473 seconds for 2700 hashes (216 hashes/second)
SHA1 Benchmark took 3.838 seconds for 1900 hashes (495 hashes/second)
All running on Vista with a Intel Core 2 Duo E4600 @ 2.4 GHz
It saddens me that every time someone on /. states that capitalism is not the end-all, there are always people that seem to think communism is the only other option. And they seem for the most part to be coming from the USA.
Does having only 2 relevant political parties make people limited in their views and reasoning or something?
I guess the simple answer is yes. Yes it does.
-An American
check out the best blog ever:
http://oehlberg.com
When it installs it must piggyback off the main firefox profile
That's exactly what happens. When the brilliant zootropole says:
Minefield's install won't affect your Firefox, so there's no risk trying it
...he's means only that unpacking the nightly build archive won't replace your existing Firefox binaries. Running it, however, will immediately step all over your default Firefox profile. I guess zootropole doesn't give a damn when he misleads people.
The safe procedure:
1. Shut down FF. (yeah I know it can be done without shutting down, stfukthx)
2. Run your existing FF from the command line like so
firefox -profilemanager
3. Create a new profile (MyFF31profile, whatever) in the profile manager.
4. Run FF31 like so
The above will isolate FF31 to a distinct profile, on *nix. Windows? My sympathies, no help here.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
How/why do you hate capitalism? That is about as specific as saying you hate socialism, when in reality most people hate poorly implemented socialist governments.
As far as I can tell, the fact that you enjoy competition and therefore the fruits of competition is a direct endorsement for capitalism, at least at a basic level. Add another layer, that you agree to the negotiable exchange of value, and you have capitalism right there.
How can you hate that? IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera all happen to give you a free web browser in exchange for different goods OTHER than money, which means they all play in the capitalist system.
IE for control of the internet
Safari to prevent Microsoft controlling the internet
FireFox in exchange for investments from Google
Chrome in exchange for more data mining
Opera in exchange for license fees
GPL Deconstructed
Those extensions are written with Javascript and XUL. If Javascript is sped up, the extensions should also benefit.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I don't know what's wrong with the internet recently, but Minefield IS Firefox, it's the development trunk. As such, it WILL NOT run when Firefox is already running, and it WILL mess with your Firefox profile. I'm not sure which useless blog started the Minefield circle-jerk but it's ridiculous. People who have been testing nightlies for a while know to make a new profile for the nightlies because it can interfere with Firefox's profile, but random people who just see it on a website aren't going to know that, and it's going to be a headache for the people over at Mozillazine. If you really want to test nightlies, then great, but do it the right way and don't complain when it eats your profile or dies on your favorite site.
All your base are belong to Wii.
My point is that they will work eventually, and will see the speed benefit from the improved javascript performance, rather than your extensions making Firefox run like a Pinto towing a ton and a half of scrap iron.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
The crux of this BTW is your statement:
"So we can be fairly certain that the average real cost of delivery of excellent health care runs to less than $1,500 per man, woman and child"
Which is just some bullshit figure you MADE UP without any cites whatsoever based on one INDIVIDUAL case i.e. an anecdote. Hint the plural of anecdotes is not data., and the costs of health care varies VASTLY across different demographics, I have already given the DATA that the U.S. spends a greater percentage of it's GDP which is data, get i?. Not only do you lose but you are a stupid and cruelly self centered ASSHOLE who obviously doesn't give a rats ass if other people lay sick in the gutter as long as YOU are waited on hand and foot.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?