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Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 Released

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i-love-daft-punk dept.

ink writes "Mozilla has released the third beta for Firefox 3.1 (which may become Firefox 3.5). This beta includes the new location bar, Mozilla's new JavaScript engine Tracemonkey, new HTML5 features and many other enhancements. It looks the same on the surface, but there are many changes under the hood."

5 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. Javascript performance improvements for *nix by rwa2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm looking forward to them resolving the bit where the *nix Firefox builds performed slower than the win32 builds, supposedly due to Profile Guided Optimizations in javascript:

    http://www.tuxradar.com/content/benchmarked-firefox-javascript-linux-and-windows-and-its-not-pretty

  2. Re:Great by Daimanta · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Yes, many people are actually refusing to upgrade because of it."

    Do you mean many as a lot of people or many as in a very vocal minority?

    --
    Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
  3. Re:It always amazed me by sveinungkv · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That and I really dont want "normal people" trying to find codecs on google--most of the hits for "$AWESOME_CODEC" are usually just spyware installers.

    Firefox 3.5 won't have support for other codecs than those that are built in (various Xiph codecs (Vorbis, Theora) and Wav). Since it won't be possible to install extra codecs for use in Firefox Firefox won't contribute to "normal people" installing random codecs from the net. If/when support for system codecs land (probably after 3.5) you may get the problem you describe.

    --
    Spelling/grammar nazis welcome (English is not my first language and I am trying to improve my spelling/grammar)
  4. Re:New location bar? by DittoBox · · Score: 4, Insightful

    AwesomeBar is not search. AwesomeBar is made so you can make shortcuts that don't require you to enter the URL. It gets smarter over time. Just use it some.

    I can't understand why people are so pissed over it, I love it. It really did change the way I use the browser.

    --
    Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
  5. Re:No Preemptive Javascript In Firefox? by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You could say essentially the same thing about Linux. It's an ancient monolothic design, implementing a still-more-ancient system. Its I/O scheduling is still completely fucked up, making it just painful to use as a desktop. But like Windows, it's popular because it's popular.

    I don't think your comparison is all that apt, but if we go by it, there's still a crucial difference between it and the situation with browsers, and it is that there are mainstream browsers other than Firefox now that offer, or are soon going to offer, multi-process tabbed browsing. Also, the true benefit isn't performance, it's stability. Let Flash or Adobe Reader slow down or even crash or hang, it will only bring down that single tab it runs in...