Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1 Released

An anonymous reader writes with word of the release of the first alpha of Firefox 3.6, "intended for developers and testers only." "As with Firefox 3.5, there are improvements to the performance; pages render faster, and pages with JavaScript code run much faster with the new Tracemonkey engine. Although this Firefox version carries the code name 'Namoroka' Alpha 1, it is also currently referred to as Firefox.next. And like other Firefox Alphas, it does not bear the Firefox logo. This release uses the Gecko 1.9.2 engine and will likely include several interface improvements in later versions, such as new graphical tab-switching behavior, which was removed from 3.5 with Beta 2." Update: 08/09 03:54 GMT by T : Read more at InaTux.com.

Comments

No link

[Anonymous Coward]

What? Is it me or there is really no link just a teaser?

Re:No link

[Tubal-Cain]

Here.

Re:No link

[lastomega7]

Now with extra clickability: https://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2009/08/07/firefox-3-6-alpha-1-now-available-for-download/

Re:No link

[Briareos]

Actually, it's a teaser for the upcoming dupe two days from now - with a link yet pointing to the mysterious future... ;)

np: Death Cab For Cutie - Styrofoam Plates (The Photo Album)

OK...

[Tubal-Cain]

And like other Firefox Alphas, it does not bear the Firefox logo.

Um... yay?

Re:OK...

[Jurily]

Manbearfox.

Re:OK...

[barzok]

Thundercougarfalconbird.

Gotta Love Slashdot Linking

[basementman]

Getting the code right to link to something on Slashdot is so hard not even the editors can get it. Maybe that's a sign of something.

Re:Gotta Love Slashdot Linking

[DiegoBravo]

> Maybe that's a sign of something.

Please, get the idea! That link needs Firefox >= 3.6 to be functional.

Re:Gotta Love Slashdot Linking

[bcmm]

Getting the code right to link to something on Slashdot is so hard

In comments, it's

<a href="URL">linky</a>

Standard HTML. You DO know HTML, right?

Re:Gotta Love Slashdot Linking

[ClosedSource]

If Slashcode can't handle links without the poster implementing it in "Standard HTML", perhaps we should write the JavaScript to post the message too.

Re:Gotta Love Slashdot Linking

[wickedskaman]

I shall quote a great philosopher here: "Stop whining!"

Re:Gotta Love Slashdot Linking

[ClosedSource]

Actually, I don't care. I just like to poke people who say things like "you DO know how to do X, don't you?"

Re:Gotta Love Slashdot Linking

[mako1138]

I like how your comment was moderated "Informative".

Re:Gotta Love Slashdot Linking

[bcmm]

It says HTML Formatted (by default, if you're logged in) right under the input box.

Missing links

[Shin-LaC]

Downloads

Wiki page on Namoroka

Re:Missing links

[Shin-LaC]

I downloaded and tried out the Mac build. Two things I noticed:

• build alpha 2 is already available, only a day after alpha 1
• the wiki lists the single most important feature missing from Firefox (imho, of course), namely OSX Keychain integration, as one of the requirements for "Firefox.next". Hooray! It's not in this build, though.

Re:Missing links

[gparent]

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/3.6a1-candidates/build1/win32/en-US/

Setup version.

Re:Missing links

[Jugalator]

build alpha 2 is already available, only a day after alpha 1

Hm.. You mean pre-alpha 2? That would at least be started pretty much immediately after alpha 1 release. But it also contains very few changes compared to alpha 1, and are the typical incremental nightly builds until the final alpha 2 is releaed.

Re:Missing links

[Jugalator]

Hooray! It's not in this build, though.

No, and perhaps not even in the final Firefox 3.6 either. Perhaps the release afterwards. "Firefox.next" is the codename for a forthcoming "major" Firefox release (4.0?) and not 3.6.

Re:Missing links

[Runaway1956]

"Keychain integration"

They are offering a Firefox keyfob now? Cool, I want one!! Can we get them with early logos, like FF 0.5a ? That would be REALLY COOL!!

Re:Missing links

[Myen]

Please don't use ftp.mozilla.org! That's the server used for things like nightly builds and other testing machinery.

Instead, please use the mirror network, http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/namoroka/alpha1/

Besides... linking to latest-trunk/ and pretending it's a release is always bad.

Missing Link...

[Anonymous Coward]

https://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2009/08/07/firefox-3-6-alpha-1-now-available-for-download/

Re:Missing Link...

[skeeto]

Uh, no, this is the missing link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitional_fossil

Sheesh!

Too much too fast

[apankrat]

I was reinstalling the laptop the other day and installed FF 3.5. Used it for an hour, uninstalled and replaced with 3.0. A fresh install of 3.5 on a faster hard drive was noticeably slower than a well used 3.0 on an older hardware. Not just the start-up, but a regular use too. To me, personally, no amount of new features can justify that. So unless 3.6 comes with a performance fixes - thanks, but no.

Re:Too much too fast

[AmiMoJo]

I find 3.5 to be significantly faster than 3.0. As well as general optimisations, the history database backend has been improved so it puts less strain on your machine when doing lookups for things like the address bar suggestions. The new Javascript core is also a lot faster.

One major irritation with 3.5 is the new way tabs work. You used to be able to set it so that all links opened in the same tab, regardless of any target="_blank" rubbish. I.e., you have control over the browser, not the web developer. At the same time, there was a separate preference for links opened by external programs (e.g. you click a "go to product's homepage" link in a program, or a link in your email client) which allowed you to have them open in a new tab every time. Unfortunately the latter option has disappeared in 3.5, so now you can either have external links destroy your current tab or suffer endless new tabs being opened by badly behaving webmasters.

I wish the Moz devs would consult users on these sorts of major functionality changes before just doing them.

Re:Too much too fast

[Anonymous Coward]

You can still do this, although it takes a visit to about:config.

1. Go to about:config
2. Ensure browser.link.open_newwindow is set to 3 (should be default in current firefox)
3. Set browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction to 0 (default is 2)

You can follow the links to see all the possible values.
Hope it helps!

Re:Too much too fast

[Anonymous Coward]

You can still do this, although it takes a visit to about:config.

1. Go to about:config
2. Ensure browser.link.open_newwindow is set to 3 (should be default in current firefox)
3. Set browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction to 0 (default is 2)

You can follow the links to see all the possible values.
Hope it helps!

Err. I made a mistake.

Step 2 should be:
2. Set browser.link.open_newwindow to 1 in order to open in the same tab.

Somehow I read it as open in same window. Sorry about that.

Re:Too much too fast

[AmiMoJo]

I am aware of those options, but there is no combination of them that does what I want.

browser.link.open_newwindow = 1 (open all new window links in the same tab)

browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction = 2 (allow Javascript pop-up windows when I click the link)

The settings you suggest would open new window links in a new tab and prevent the annoying Javascript pop-up windows that some sites use from working. They would not do anything different for externally opened tabs.

Re:Too much too fast

[mqduck]

Unless I just missed it, forcing all links to open in the same tab hasn't been an option made easily available for quite a while. Anyway, all you need is Tab Mix Plus.

Hehe

[FunPika]

Looks like someone forgot href="url" in that linking code. ;)

For me on the same machine 3.5 is much faster

[ZP-Blight]

For me on the same machine 3.5 is much faster.

It's possible it might be taking more ram and on your old hardware with less ram it's using swapped memory, which is very very slow.

Re:For me on the same machine 3.5 is much faster

[psyclone]

3.5 performs better than 3.0 for me too (x86_64). What I have noticed the most is memory usage. I have the same extensions installed with 3.5, and I open the same number of tabs, and browse for a "normal" amount of time, say 3 days, and resident memory seems to peak at 250-350 MB. Whereas with 3.0, my resident memory is never less than 500-750MB over the same period of time.

My heaviest extensions are TabKit (yay groups of tabs on the side!) and NoScript.

I used to have to restart 3.0 every 5-7 days or so when resident memory would exceed 1GB. I can leave 3.5 running for 2+ weeks.

I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[Jane Q. Public]

Firefox 3.5 was terrible. Every few seconds, no matter what I did, it would pause, and I would have to watch a beachball spin. Really bad.

Further, tabs should be attached to the pages they represent, not floating around at the top, in limbo. That was the worst design decision I have seen in ages.

And finally, at least on the Mac, the "close this tab" button should be on the left of the tab, for consistency with everything else. Not on the right.

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[jez9999]

Further, tabs should be attached to the pages they represent, not floating around at the top, in limbo. That was the worst design decision I have seen in ages.

In my FF3.5, tabs are 'attached to the pages they represent'... unless I'm misunderstanding you. Care to provide us with a screenshot of what you're talking about?

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[caerwyn]

That's rather odd- I use Firefox 3.5 regularly on 10.5.7 with no such issues. The only slowness I've found is when quitting the app- it clearly does a lot of cleanup when you shut it down, and that process takes a ridiculously long time. Nothing with regular browsing, though.

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[Hurricane78]

I agree. That beachball is just as horrible as that apple with the bite. ;P

On a more serious note: I use is on Linux, so I can't comment about the Mac UI integration. But I think UI integration really is very important. I often hear of development teams neglecting the Mac. But every time I had to develop for the Mac, I found testing it to be very frustrating, because the whole system is so not-made-for real power usage like development. (At least for me.)
Maybe that's a part of the issue...

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[Anonymous Coward]

Every OS so MAC users can finally feel they dominate the world!

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[AXNJAXN]

I don't know that they really need to fit the "tab" metaphor any more than word processors need to stick to typewriting conventions. Seems like most web browsers have the same tabbing behavior, after all. I would think the usability of a system where the tabs are forced to attach to their pages would introduce more problems than benefits, and most of the benefits would be purely cosmetic. $0.02.

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[danhuby]

Further, tabs should be attached to the pages they represent

Are you sure you aren't thinking of the Mac dev preview of Google Chrome, which has the tabs above the location / tool bar?

Firefox 3.5 didn't change the tab locations for me (on OS X 10.4). But it wasn't particularly fast, like the previous version, and I've now gone back to Safari which is much faster.

Dan

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[FooBarWidget]

And finally, at least on the Mac, the "close this tab" button should be on the left of the tab, for consistency with everything else. Not on the right.

Uh, what? Everything on OS X has the close button on the right of the right. iTerm, Textmate, etc all have their 'X' on the right of the tab, not left.

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[Dhalka226]

I'm not the OP, but I think I understand what he's saying.

In FF, the tabs are rounded at the bottom. In other words, they're "attached" to the browser on the top end, facing your URL bar, and then they extend into the dead space that is the tab bar.

What I think he's saying is that he feels it should attach the other way, at the bottom. The active tab would therefore blend into the page you're viewing while the other tabs would jut out of the top of that page. It would literally look as though the active tab was part of the page.

Personally I don't care that much. I'm just trying to articulate his point.

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[Bogtha]

Everything on OS X has the close button on the right of the right.

Safari has close buttons on the left of the tab. The software you mention is third-party, not Apple software, so looking to them for examples of UI consistency is a bit of a red herring.

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[Jane Q. Public]

The whole concept of tabs, in the first place, was that of a tabbed folder, like a 3-ring binder with those little plastic tabs so you can find your place. That was the visual "metaphor" that was being followed. By visually detaching the tabs from the pages they control, the metaphor is broken, and the eye does not follow as naturally from the page to the tab, or vice versa.

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[Jane Q. Public]

It is not just a "convention". It is a principle that is based on time and motion studies. If the tab is visually attached to the page, it takes less time and effort for the brain to associate the two. I don't know about other OSes (I could look in Windows, I suppose), but the active tab is not visually highlighted very much either, so it is sometimes not obvious at all which tab on your screen goes with the page you are on. So all the visual cues you can get are helpful.

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[Jane Q. Public]

Not mine. In all the programs you mention, including Textmate, my close buttons are on the left. Maybe it's in the preferences somewhere.

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[pizzach]

The whole concept of tabs, in the first place, was that of a tabbed folder, like a 3-ring binder with those little plastic tabs so you can find your place. That was the visual "metaphor" that was being followed. By visually detaching the tabs from the pages they control, the metaphor is broken, and the eye does not follow as naturally from the page to the tab, or vice versa.

Please remember that there are reasons for both ways and that you are debating which is less wrong. Not which is right. The tabs attaching to the toolbar is supposed to show that the buttons effect that particular tab which is also a very important thing to represent in the gui. Ideally, the tabs should be on the very top of the window like Opera and now Chrome.

Or alternatively you can use abstract PC for the tab connecting to both effect so no one is happy. :)

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[ZosX]

ff 3.5 on windows 7 has tabs that flow into the document. they are quite pleasing to the eye. i know the linux version has some appearance differences. I think I really prefer the default windows ff over the default skin in ubuntu.

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[minvaren]

Regarding pause issue : many reports show it linked to the places.sqlite file - see this thread on page 3 and look for the compactor tool they mention. Seems as though the "Awesomebar" is not without its issues.

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[Achromatic1978]

LMAO. Don't even start me on 'internal Apple UI consistency'. That baby got thrown out years ago, in favor of 'looks purtier this way...'.

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[ion.simon.c]

In FF, the tabs are rounded at the bottom. In other words, they're "attached" to the browser on the top end, facing your URL bar, and then they extend into the dead space that is the tab bar.

Your description of Firefox's tabs is kinda confusing to me. Do your tabs look like mine? (This question applies to the OP, as well.)

http://simoncion.wargameweaver.com/pix/ff3.5tabs.png

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[shutdown -p now]

He's using it on OS X. I guess they copy Safari there, which would explain the tab appearance. Well, blame Apple for that - they set UI standards on Mac, others can either follow, or be flamed by Apple users for not doing so...

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[compro01]

Tab mix plus has an option for the "close button on the left" thing you desire (It's in tab mix plus options, display, tab, "place on left side"), among other tab customization options.

Not sure what you mean by "tabs should be attached to the pages they represent" though.

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[jez9999]

Just to confirm, I had to search pretty hard for a screenshot, but it looks like this only applies to FF on MacOSX. On Windows + Linux, it doesn't. So, as another poster said, flame Apple not Mozilla. Though, I think Mozilla should still keep the look & feel closer between different OS ports... the MacOSX version looks so differently skinned it feels rather different. Leave that to Camino.

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[visualight]

I think there's a firefox ui dev who just won't be satisfied. Seems like every release I have to spend a week looking for about:config fixes and extenstions to undo his work.

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[apoc.famine]

I dunno if it will be what you're looking for, but check out the Tree Style Tabs extension. It puts the tabs to the left, in expandable/collapsible trees, with the trunk forming based on the page the links spawned from. It's great on wide/short monitors, as your vertical space is generally the limiting factor for webpages. Plus, it makes waaaaay more sense to me to organize tabs this way.

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[skeeto]

I've never actually seen the whole Fx 3.5 UI since I use Vimperator, so I'm not sure what exactly you all are talking about. With Vimperator, all the GUI mess at the top is gone: it's just a row tabs, then the page. I think this is perfect, and it sounds a bit like what you are describing.

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[mqduck]

Further, tabs should be attached to the pages they represent, not floating around at the top, in limbo. That was the worst design decision I have seen in ages.

I'm trying, but I can't think of what you might be talking about here.

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[ion.simon.c]

Heh. That looks strange. *shrug* Thanks for digging that up.

Re:I am on OS X 10.5.7.

[Jane Q. Public]

There is no VISUAL reason, in FF 3.5, for the tabs to be upside-down. There were space reasons, which had to do with how to lay out the UI, but that is not the same thing. The clear (and claerly working) visual attachment was broken, and replaced with... nothing. There may be reasons for both, but by inverting them from the standard, they violate the visual metaphor that has long been shown to achieve the minimal eye-scan time for identification.

That is to say: there may be a reason for it, but there are stronger reasons against it. And the hell of it is, those reasons have been known since they did important UI studies some 20 years ago.

RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh wait... I guess editors don't even do that!

Random number bug

[manweekdayz]

when will they fix that random number generation issue that makes the program take 3 mins to launch? Firefox has been a POS lately because of it.

Re:Random number bug

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Random number generation issue?

Re:Random number bug

[Anonymous Coward]

http://weblogs.asp.net/fbouma/archive/2009/07/09/the-firefox-3-5-fiasco.aspx

Re:Random number bug

[Threni]

In 3.5.1.

Re:Random number bug

[manweekdayz]

er...dont think so. I have ver 3.52 and it takes forever to startup. If only opera had the same sort of plugins (adblock, noscript) etc, i would dump ff. The firefox devs have gotten cocky of late, shame really since the only reason the browser has such a loyal following is because of the quality plugins and not due to anything innovative in the browser per se (usually ff just rips off opera, IE, safari etc).

Re:Random number bug

[Threni]

Fixed it for me. Shame for you, but I really don't care about load time cos I only do it once.

Tried Opera but didn't like it. FF has the following because unlike Opera/IE etc it's always been open, always been free, always been non-shit. There's a lot of catching up to do which probably isn't going to happen. If I switch browser it'll be to something like Chrome, and only if it continued to be loads faster than the others, continued to be free/open, and only when it has a bunch of plugins. Chrome's not out on Ubuntu yet - that's the main reason I don't bother with it (even though I use both Ubuntu and XP). That and the lack of ad-block. If you can't block ads then I'm not using the browser.

Re:Random number bug

[kbrosnan]

Was fixed in 3.5.1 Mozilla Firefox 3.5.1 release notes See the section What's new in 3.5.1, you will find. "An issue that was making Firefox take a long time to load on some Windows systems."

Re:Random number bug

[manweekdayz]

yea, like i mentioned, if opera had adblock + something like noscript to toggle javascript, i d dump FF. You dont seem to care about load times, but why suffer through terrible load times esp when other browsers dont seem to have the same problem? Would you be as tolerant of this if it were an IE bug?

Re:Random number bug

[BZ]

> I have ver 3.52 and it takes forever to startup.

In that case, the random number thing is not your problem.

Is startup still slow in safe mode? If not, can you pin down which extension or combination of extensions is contributing? If it's still slow in safe mode, please file a bug with whatever details you can come up with.... Might also be testing with a new profile; if _that_ is fast while the old profile is slow then it could be an issue in the Places code or something; useful information for that bug that you'll file.

Please feel free to cc me (":bz" in Mozilla's Bugzilla) on any bugs you file. I'll make sure they land in the right place.

Re:Random number bug

[Threni]

I was tolerant of it before the fix (I just tried to remember not to quit - I seem to quit and reload the browser all the time; years of using Windows has taught me to quit stuff all the time, to save prefs and preserve memory), so the question is really "do you treat IE differently". I don't - I spurn it for purely rational reasons. If IE wasn't plagued with poor performance, security problems, crap rendering, poor plug-in support etc then I wouldn't rule it out purely because of a one-off slow load time, no.

Re:Random number bug

[manweekdayz]

so you are saying "its not a bug if you never close the browser program" - why does opera / chrome load up just fine no matter how many times its opened and closed? btw my desktop at work is rebooted only once a week, quitting/reopening programs of vastly greater complexity/memory footprint doesn't cause the same issue as with FF. Unfortunately, i d rather not have a browser window open all the time just cause i dont want to have to restart the process. Can you clarify if you are a FF dev, coz you sure are pretty defensive about what is obviously a massive bug

Can we have tracemonkey on 64bits...

[koolfy]

... yet ?

Cause we deserve it, man, seriously, we were told 64bits is the future, that's just mean :(
Instead we have laggy JS, and /. takes a shitload of time to load comments :(

(more seriously: it's fun to notice that even if I'm pretty sure to have red somewhere that tracemonkey is disabled for 64bits, and that even /. is laggy in those conditions, Beta version of Google Wave (aka "3 tons of JS and some wave protocol somewhere under all that JS") works pretty fast, dunno why...)

Re:Can we have tracemonkey on 64bits...

[BZ]

You _can_, but since there's no JIT shipped for x64 the pref does absolutely nothing on that architecture.

You can also download 3.6a2 pre

[techmuse]

3.6 alpha 2 pre (found here) has additional performance improvements (ie. is wicked fast), and seems quite reliable in the latest nightly build. Note that these are nightly builds, so you run the risk of being the first to experience a shiny, new bug!

Re:You can also download 3.6a2 pre

[techmuse]

Ok. Let me try to get that link right. You can download Minefield here.

"pages render faster"

[Hadlock]

How much faster can you get than "instant"? I'm still using 3.0 on a dual core windoze machine and everytime I hear someone say "its faster than the previous version" I think, "hunh?". Browser speed is not something that has come to mind since 2005 at least. Maybe they're talking about render speed on old 1ghz celerons burdened with norton antivirus and tons of spyware on 512mb of ram.

Re:"pages render faster"

[wizardforce]

you know, not everyone has a new computer and frankly I am glad that at least some developers don't make the same assumption you just did. This is especially important considering the rising popularity of smaller notebooks that even bare Windows XP has trouble booting.

Re:"pages render faster"

[danhuby]

OK, this might not be important for you, but I think it's important that the development team continue to improve the performance of the engine. Not everyone has a dual core machine. It's useful if the engine runs nicely on older hardware or portable low power hardware such as netbooks.

Adding CPU power is no substitute for writing good code and constantly optimising that code.

Re:"pages render faster"

[Killer Orca]

you know, not everyone has a new computer and frankly I am glad that at least some developers don't make the same assumption you just did. This is especially important considering the rising popularity of smaller notebooks that even bare Windows XP has trouble booting.

How old are these machines that some people are running? My families oldest computer is from 1997 and runs Windows 95, should people expect that to be supported? If you slimmed down an XP install to run on older hardware and it can't handle a modern web browser is that the creators' fault? I can understand your grievance about netbooks, some are just plain underpowered for 3 tasks at once and you need to use the applications that it can handle, but how long is hardware supposed to be supported by software? 10, 20, 30 years?

Re:"pages render faster"

[flydude18]

Instant? New Slashdot has been pretty sluggish for me in 3.0 for Linux on a decent dual core machine. While that's hardly the browser's fault, I say bring on faster Javascript.

Re:"pages render faster"

[BenoitRen]

My families oldest computer is from 1997 and runs Windows 95, should people expect that to be supported?

Expect? No. But open-source is not a business, and doesn't have to bother with questions like "what's the ROI for continuing to support an older OS?".

Furthermore, the Windows API hasn't changed all that much in many years, save for the introduction of Unicode-enabled API functions that otherwise do the same thing as their ANSI versions. This makes older versions of Windows easier to support than, say, old Mac OS versions.

The latest SeaMonkey is still supported on Windows 95. I'm using it right now.

Re:"pages render faster"

[johannesg]

I'm not sure what they include in rendering a page, but if I open a bunch of slashdot articles in different tabs it slows down noticably after I open more than four or five. And this is on a machine that has 3GB of RAM and a dual core / 2.6GHz CPU.

Also, the geocaching.com map is still pretty unusable on FireFox; only Chrome has enough oomph to actually make it work in anything approaching realtime.

So speed improvements are definitely appreciated.

Re:"pages render faster"

[Hadlock]

When I bought my dual core machine in jan 2008 it was already year old hardware, the cheapest name brand stuff you could buy. That was for a $500 computer including $120 video card at the time. A standard $350 consumer computer without fancy video card from three years ago is going to be just as fast running firefox as a brand new one - i.e. instant. I think it's respectable to expect poorer performance on a 5 year old computer running it's original install of windows (and whatever spyware it's been choking on since), compared to a 2006 or 2007 vintage computer.

Re:"pages render faster"

[BenoitRen]

I forgot to mention that Opera, which is NOT open-source, also supports its web browser on Windows 95.

Re:"pages render faster"

[SlashV]

but how long is hardware supposed to be supported by software? 10, 20, 30 years?

Current software will do none of those! 10 seems reasonable, but most software really doesn't run on 10 year old hardware. Set yourself up with 1999 machine and you'll be drinking really dangerous amounts of coffee when loading a recent firefox. So I think your parent poster has a good point.

Re:"pages render faster"

[wizardforce]

the mentality of devs is that the hardware can take the bloat just give it some time and as far as I am concerned it's a cancer slowly eroding away at what software should be. quick, clean and efficient. BUt really, why shouldn't software be capable of running on hardware for over a decade- we've got a 12 year old compaq sitting in the basement that has less hard drive space than my ram is and yet it can surf the net just fine... The problem comes when devs start to think that they shouldn't be tasked with improving code efficiency because they aren't coding for older hardware. Well all I can say is maybe they should. If an old geezer compaq can hack it just fine on the internet today why can't newer versions of software that do the same basic things cope as well?

Re:"pages render faster"

[wizardforce]

2008 is not an old. old begins at windows ME [not that you would ever use such a POS OS] the software ran fine at least if you don't upgrade the software that is... the functionality is basically the same [surf the net, check email etc...] so why is it that since that time a new firefox is currently using 137 megs of RAM while I'm reading slashdot. A computer even ten years ago doesn't even have that much ram and yet you can surf the net with it... explain to me why all of this ram use was worth it?

Re:"pages render faster"

[genik76]

Install an old Netscape, compare the results, and I will guarantee you will see that Netscape is really instantanious compared to FF 3.0. The difference is what you are missing, and what you are not realising. With a fresh install of Firefox on my Core i7 machine, I still cannot claim Firefox to be blazing-fast, although it's quite ok.

Re:"pages render faster"

[Mia'cova]

The developer excitement isn't around getting a youtube page to render 10ms faster. It's the application possibilities that these improvements allow. People are excited about building really solid media players with javascript and html 5 instead of flash and silverlight. They're excited about the possibilities of doing 3D in the browser with javascript and OpenGL-like hardware rendering. But the common glue is javascript and DOM. Anything you build will be limited by the browser's core. And from a current-day perspective, this is also very helpful for mobile devices. When you improve rendering performance, that will speed up your iphone and save battery life. Perf is just an all-around good metric. Incredibly important to keep our eye on it. Improve it if we can but also just be careful not to introduce any new perf problems.

Re:"pages render faster"

[mr_lizard13]

It might not be a business, but they still have finite resources, and need to spend them wisely.

In their case, the ROI isn't how much money they would get back from investing in supporting Win95, but whether or not such an investment would help with Mozilla's mission.

With that in mind "what's the ROI for continuing to support an older OS?" probably is a question they need to consider carefully.

But then I know little to nothing about Windows APIs, so I probably don't know what I'm talking about. Perhaps keeping Firefox alive for Win95 is actually quite an easy thing to do, and they chose not do because they can't be arsed.

Re:"pages render faster"

[Alef]

As web pages are progressing to become more and more like applications, where the browser serves as a standardized virtual machine, speed will become an issue (if it isn't already -- slashdot is rather sluggish on my box running Firefox 3.0). This includes both java script performance, which Google have been emphasizing with Chrome, as well as rendering performance.

Re:"pages render faster"

[LateArthurDent]

How old are these machines that some people are running? My families oldest computer is from 1997 and runs Windows 95, should people expect that to be supported?

You shouldn't "expect it," but it's a certainly a plus when it works. The aim should always be to to write code that performs as well as possible for the task at hand and if you could boast that your software runs on a 486 with 16mb of ram, the response shouldn't be, "but who runs 486's these days?" The response should be "awesome, that means it'll be instant on my modern computer while keeping plenty of resources available for other apps to run AND I can recommend it to my grandfather who refuses to upgrade."

Re:"pages render faster"

[ZosX]

Hmmm. There must be something wrong with your setup there. I'm running a dual core 2ghz machine with 3gb of ram and the page you mentioned ran in total real time. I was able to scroll around the map as fast as my connection could download the map. Pretty neat site. Never thought of combining google maps with geocaching......kinda takes a lot of the challenge out of it to be honest.

Re:"pages render faster"

[Spewns]

It's simply irresponsible to just throw any pile of shit out the door. This attitude of "it's acceptable for programs to suck and be horribly inefficient because my new desktop hardware is a pretty good crutch" is going to horribly backfire if it catches on too much. Imagine what your system is going to feel like if every program you run has developers with those same poor practices and sentiments. Imagine, especially, if you aren't running a fast desktop, but perhaps a netbook. Computers aren't just getting bigger. It's going both ways.

Re:"pages render faster"

[harmonise]

how long is hardware supposed to be supported by software? 10, 20, 30 years?

10 years at least. I should be able to get as much use out of a computing appliance as I do out of other purchases such as a car, washing machine, microwave, dishwasher, TV, etc.

Re:"pages render faster"

[Keybounce]

Alright, consider Javascript. Consider Google docs, spreadsheets, gmail.

Heck, consider http://280slides.com/

That last one is re-implementing appkit (cocoa) in javascript, complete with Objective-J (an Objective-C inspired extension to Javascript), with all of this compiled down to plain, ordinary javascript that then has to run ... slowly, sadly, without good browser support.

Faster rendering? Don't think "Just put the text up on screen". Think "Load the images; remap the colors by ICC 2 standard color conversions; automatically adjust size and anti-alias the images. Run arbitrary programs, because with Javascript we are now an asynchronous execution engine, not just a text formatter. Deal with tables that don't force precomputed sizes, but are nested arbitrarily deep that we have to resize based on user font size preferences."

Did I miss any other big CPU issues of the modern web?

Frankly, I'd put the "Target speed and power" at 1.42 GHz, G4, or about 1.8 GHz, single core. Yes, newer systems are bigger, badder, faster, but there's an awful lot around that speed out there.

Re:"pages render faster"

[shutdown -p now]

The problem comes when devs start to think that they shouldn't be tasked with improving code efficiency because they aren't coding for older hardware. Well all I can say is maybe they should.

Alright. Are you willing to endure slower development, fewer releases and higher prices for non-free software?

Keep in mind that the approach you're complaining about is not popular because of general laziness. It's mostly a result of using higher-level libraries, frameworks and languages, and sometimes using a more generic but slower solution that can be reused over hand-coding a fast specialized one from scratch.

Re:"pages render faster"

[johannesg]

Hmmm. There must be something wrong with your setup there. I'm running a dual core 2ghz machine with 3gb of ram and the page you mentioned ran in total real time. I was able to scroll around the map as fast as my connection could download the map. Pretty neat site. Never thought of combining google maps with geocaching......kinda takes a lot of the challenge out of it to be honest.

Try this: for the address, type "Rheine". Then zoom out two steps. Processing on Firefox 3.5: about 20 seconds. Processing for the same area on Chrome: about 1 second.

Now, this is almost certainly the fault of GC.com: they retrieve at most 500 caches at a time, so whatever processing they do is probably O(n^2), and could probably easily be done in O(log(n)). But for now we are stuck with it, and a faster Javascript engine really does make a big difference when scouting out an area for a cache trip.

As for the challenge being lost, I'm not sure I understand that remark? Surely you (assuming you are also a geocacher) also select caches based on proximity to where you are (or intend to go) before visiting them?

Re:"pages render faster"

[jsebrech]

the mentality of devs is that the hardware can take the bloat just give it some time and as far as I am concerned it's a cancer slowly eroding away at what software should be. quick, clean and efficient.

It's exactly the wrong move from a cost-effectiveness standpoint to put too much effort in supporting old hardware. The replacement cost for hardware is an order of magnitude less than the engineering cost of supporting that hardware. If we kept everything working on decade-old hardware, it would mean less features got developed, which meant people could do less with their computers. You personally might not mind, but society as a whole would make a loss on that deal.

Which is not to say the firefox devs don't care about performance. A lot of performance work went into FF 3.5, and memory-wise it's gotten much leaner than FF3. It does mean that if you're running hardware more than 5 years old, you won't be catered to, and for good reason.

If you're interested in the economic theory behind why it doesn't make sense to support old computers, I can highly recommend "Free", by Chris Anderson (the audiobook version is actually free itself).

Re:"pages render faster"

[dylan_-]

Try this: for the address, type "Rheine". Then zoom out two steps. Processing on Firefox 3.5: about 20 seconds. Processing for the same area on Chrome: about 1 second.

3 seconds. Actually, as quick as it could download, I think. Yes, just checked, realtime once it's cached.

(That's on a 2.8 GHz iMac, Firefox 3.5.2).

Re:"pages render faster"

[msclrhd]

They probably dropped Win95 support because the later versions of Visual Studio (which Mozilla are using to build FF on Windows) has dropped support for it.

Also, there are APIs that Microsoft add to each version of Windows, which means you either can't use the newer features or have to do some form of detection/fallback. This can complicate the code in some/most cases. Not to mention that although the existing API does not change (much), the underlying implementation does -- just look at the difference in the results on the Wine test page for the Windows API (http://test.winehq.org/data/), some of which is differences in configuration, but there are differences in behaviour between versions of Windows, and service packs.

Re:"pages render faster"

[Hadlock]

Confirming what Dylan said - it's realtime in lowly Firefox 3.0.2 Ok, so the bottom half of the map was white for 5ms while it loaded the image, but that's the only weak link. Zooming in and out 5 steps in either direction continues to show instantanious use. This is on a 2.4ghz core 2 on XP SP3 with 2GB of ram (an "average" computer for the last two years)

Re:"pages render faster"

[bipbop]

Yeah, try using Firefox on one of the systems where it's incredibly, incredibly slow, like a PPC mac. (From which I type this, on Firefox. This is a last gen 1.67GHz G4 powerbook with 2GB of ram, and with noscript and adblock plus and nothing else running, all history booksmarks etc cleared, it's so slow as to be barely usable. Blegh.)

Amusingly, on a similarly specced Intel box, dual booting Windows and Linux, Firefox is slow enough not to seem "instant", but still quite snappy and perfectly usable. By comparison, Firefox 3 is probably the single slowest version they've ever released, when I'm comparing on my Powerbook.

As for why I keep going back for more after such terrible experiences? . . . Uh, I don't know. But there you go ;-)

Re:"pages render faster"

[johannesg]

Confirming what Dylan said - it's realtime in lowly Firefox 3.0.2 Ok, so the bottom half of the map was white for 5ms while it loaded the image, but that's the only weak link. Zooming in and out 5 steps in either direction continues to show instantanious use. This is on a 2.4ghz core 2 on XP SP3 with 2GB of ram (an "average" computer for the last two years)

Fascinating. As a test, I've disabled all extensions I've got installed and tried it again. While it is not nearly instantaneous with 467 caches visible, the waiting time is now down to a more reasonable seven seconds. I'll try to figure out if any specific extension is causing this slowdown next.

However, I must stress that the problem occurs only with a large number of caches in the display; with a smaller number it works in realtime for me too. The fact that you claim to be able to zoom out five steps suggests that you are looking at a less-densely populated area.

Re:"pages render faster"

[johannesg]

Well, that turned out to be easier than expected: the slowdown is caused by AdBlock! Disabling it in the FireFox preferences brings up a heavily populated map in about 7 seconds.

Leaving it enabled, but disabling it using its own menu raises that time to about 11-14 seconds (seems a bit variable). Disabling it for all of geocaching.com has no effect on timing.

Re:"pages render faster"

[ZosX]

I just loaded Rheine. No slowdowns. Running x86 FF 3.5 on x64 windows 7.

I don't geocache. But it would be a lot harder with no reference map and basically just a direction to go by. I was under the impression it was supposed to be challenging. I found caches all over my neighborhood that I'm pretty sure I could find without even a gps, though, if I went somewhere I've never been before, I'm sure it would be a lot harder.

Re:"pages render faster"

[ZosX]

Sure....adblock is checking all of those images to see if they are ads or not. Anymore I haven't even bothered installing adblock again. it doesn't really seem to make pages load any faster and it breaks a lot of things. Also its a free lunch, and I sort of feel like web content providers deserve some sort of revenue stream. The ads on slashdot aren't all that intrusive. They keep giving me the option of turning them off for my contributions, but I just leave them on. Maybe one day I'll subscribe.

Sorry for the ramble.

Re:"pages render faster"

[Trogre]

I'm not going to delve into the horrible unsustainability of everybody throwing away a computer every few years, but will instead argue from a performance point of view.

Your argument would have merit, if it weren't for the observation that newer software coming out barely works on up to date hardware. Developers seem to have this mentality that if their own application works on a target platform, with nothing else running, then it's good enough.

I really don't like this mindset at all, and think it entirely inappropriate in this age of multi-tasking operating systems.

If the devs were made to test their software on 10 year old hardware, then perhaps their products would work acceptably on 5 year old hardware.

I guess I'm just frustrated that a word processor takes about 5 times as long to load in 2009 as one did in 1992.

Nightlies

[masmullin]

Just get the Nightly builds @ http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/

Re:awfulbar

[z121212mlmiac]

They've added options to return everything but the appearance to the Fx 2 behaviour. For that missing part, there's oldbar.

Re:awfulbar

[z121212mlmiac]

OMG, I made a mistake. The link for "options" that I posted is outdated. This one describes the current situation.

Firefox ages with JavaScript code

[dealmaster00]

Much like a fine wine.

Awesomebar really is awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, I could never go back to using any browser that doesn't have something similar.

Let's say that I've visited a wikipedia article about Houston recently (as I have) and want to go back. With awesomebar I can just write "Hous" and it suggests me the right page. "wiki/ho" if I would have visited a lot of sites about Houston. In the Pre-Awesomebar times I would have had to write "en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ho" or something like that before it would have suggested the right page.

And more often than not I remember that I have visited something about which I remember only part of the name. It might have been a political comic strip with huxley in it's name but I don't remember where did I see it. So I only write "hux" to the bar and it takes me where I want to be. Or I might have watched some hot clip about gothic femdom but not remember which of the numerous porn sites I visit hosted it. If I remember even part of the url, title (usually both of them mention a clip's name) or anything like that, I can just type it to the bar and I am back at watching gothic femdom.

Pre-Awesomebar? Searching through the history, etc... It was slow and sucked.

A lot of people prefer the old approach. For some it is just resisting change, some might even have some good reasons... So I agree that they should perhaps have left a radio button somewhere to let you choose to revert back... But honestly, it is pretty awesome feature and extremely useful.

Re:Awesomebar really is awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Searching through the history has never been slow for me, I think you're just making excuses for Firefox mashing the functionality of something (history) with something else (ACTUAL TYPED URLs) that never should have been placed together in the first place. The URLbar has the letters "URL" in it for a reason -- it is for actual URLs, NOT history, NOT page titles, NONE OF THAT. If you want all that, there is a great, fast, easy search in the History dialog, instantly summoned using Ctrl+H.

Fortunately I can summon up some about:config preferences from Seamonkey which DOES allow you to customize it however you want, plus install Oldbar. Not only do you get the old look from oldbar plugin, but also the old BEHAVIOR.

Personally, I'd rather stick with Seamonkey 2.0b1. It's stayed much closer to what a browser should be than what Firefox has become.

Anonymous Coward because I know all the Firefox fanboys will disagree with me.

Re:Awesomebar really is awesome

[jsebrech]

Searching through the history has never been slow for me, I think you're just making excuses for Firefox mashing the functionality of something (history) with something else (ACTUAL TYPED URLs) that never should have been placed together in the first place.

UX testing disagrees with you. You're the exception. People that prefer everything in one bar are the rule. It doesn't make sense to cater the default behavior to the exception.

Even thinking about it logically, this makes sense. A url is a search query with one result. Why should you type search queries with one result in one box, and with more than one result in another box? It's arbitrary, and inefficient from a user perspective.

Re:Awesomebar really is awesome

[jo42]

Then why do so many of us turn the 'awesomebar' crap off?

As in "When using the location bar, suggest: Nothing".

Re:Holy shit

[leenoble_uk]

I'm getting update fatigue.

I seem to recall it seeming to take years to get from the various 0.x versions thorugh the 0.9.x versions before several 1.0a versions, and since then it's gone almost exponential.

I haven't bothered with 3.5 yet.

Graphical tab switching?

[Hatta]

As opposed to the text mode tab switching we have now?

Re:Graphical tab switching?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope it's not about showing thumbnails while switching...
Honestly, I don't get how all the recent window thumbnails craze is supposed to improve usability. That method is pretty much optimized for people having a total of 3 windows open, each a different color. But try distinguishing between 30 text documents with that...

Re:Graphical tab switching?

[kbrosnan]

about:config

browser.allTabs.previews
replaces the drop down arrow in the tab bar with a button that does tab preview switching

browser.ctrlTab.previews
replaces ctrl + tab with a desktop like tab switcher that shows a preview of the windows

Thats what I love about Firefox

[kilodelta]

Frequently updated. However a slam if I may, 3.5.2 has HORRIBLE javascript rendering. Hopefully this is fixed in the new version.

Re:Thats what I love about Firefox

[bunratty]

What is JavaScript rendering?

Re:Thats what I love about Firefox

[BZ]

What problem did you encounter, exactly? Did you report it?

I'd love to fix whatever the issue was, but the above is really not enough information to start on that...

Re:Thats what I love about Firefox

[kilodelta]

I don't really blame this so much on Firefox than I do on sites like Digg and on Apple for their resource heavy iTunes.

Re:Thats what I love about Firefox

[BZ]

Well, hold on. You said 3.5.2 has "horrible JavaScript rendering". Presumably some other browsers don't. If so, that needs to be investigated; there's a good chance that this is a bug in Gecko or at least something Gecko can work around.

Hard to do that without specific steps to reproduce the issue, though.

CPU Usage issues still?

[EmagGeek]

I'm downloading the test now, but does anyone who has tried it already know if it still has CPU Utilization issues like 3.5 has? I had to upgrade to 3.0 due to 3.5 hanging and/or crashing on flash content, particularly videos.

FYI, for those who replied.

[Jane Q. Public]

I suspect that the problem was the JSSH extension, which I use for automating remote websites. With it disabled, the problem seems to have gone away. Only time will tell.

Thunderbird is not go

[rif42]

Mozilla, thanks for Firefox 3.5x, now could you please put some focus on finishing Thunderbird 3.0? Why does this have to take forever? And perhaps even get Sunbird/Lightning ready for version 1.0.

Re:Thunderbird is not go

[bunratty]

Thunderbird development got handed off to the spinoff company Mozilla Messaging.

Re:Thunderbird is not go

[rif42]

It is more like two departments of the same company. Their internet sites are completely interweaved.

http://www.mozilla.org/
http://www.mozilla.com/

If that separation is the reason why Thunderbird progress at snail speed compared to Firefox, then that separation is poorly constructed and they should find a way to make Thunderbird progress.

Re:Thunderbird is not go

[bunratty]

Their internet sites are completely intertwined because until recently Thunderbird was developed by Mozilla. My point is not that the separation is causing a slowdown of development, but that you're asking the wrong company to speed up development.

Re:Thunderbird is not go

[rif42]

Mozilla is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Messaging

and they have internet sites mozilla.org and mozilla.com and they are presenting themselves as *Mozilla* the home of Firefox and Thunderbird. Mozilla Foundation created the Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Messaging entities, that now works very slowly on Thunderbird project side. Mozilla, i.e. Mozilla Foundation, is in position to change how these two department/subsidaries/whatever work together, but currently they seemed content that very little happening on Thunderbird side. I find this poor.

Before you say something like I should not complain about free software, I would like to mention that I have actually donated money for Firefox and Thunderbird to Mozilla.

Mozilla: Please put more effort into updating Thunderbird.

Now?

[Bryan Bytehead]

I've been running the alpha as a portable app since 3.5 came out. Now it's true that it's a nightly, but it updates every day that I run it.

Weird.

Only one feature is really NEEDED

[Tumbleweed]

A plugin like Flash should not be ABLE to lock up the browser. No, that's not the fault of Flash, it's the fault of the browser that _allows_ it to happen. The browser should be in control of the plugin, not the other way around.

Re:Only one feature is really NEEDED

[kbrosnan]

This is very much in the works but won't make 3.6. Content Processes

Re:Holy shit

[Spewns]

Firefox 3.0 was released in June '08. Firefox 3.5 (the first following major release) was released in June '09. A year later. Update fatigue? What in the world are you on about? Plus, this is an alpha release. The actual release won't be for another (approximately, at this time) 2-3 months. How does one get update fatigue from upgrading your browser twice in about a year and a half? Actually, I don't see how you can't be excited, assuming you use your browser as much as most people, that your browser is developing so fast in important ways. (HTML5, performance, etc.) Have fun "not bothering" with that, I guess.

Will it take another full point-release...

[jddj]

to get the Close [X] gadget back on the last tab? Firefox 3.5 is KILLING ME with this...

Re:Will it take another full point-release...

[k_187]

about:config browser.tabs.closebuttons http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.tabs.closeButtons

Re:Will it take another full point-release...

[jddj]

thanks for trying to help, but apparently the feature I'm missing has been "improved" out of the settings.

No matter which setting you choose, you can't restore the Firefox 3 behavior that worked so well for me.

Worth noting that some posters on the bug thought it worked well the old way - as I do.

Re:Will it take another full point-release...

[k_187]

Ah, I remember when they changed the behavior from FF1 to 2. I stopped using it until I found out about that option in about:config. For a browser that's as open as Firefox, some of their decisions about user choice are pretty infuriating.

Re:awfulbar

[kbrosnan]

Or you can just use the UI in the Options/Preferences in privacy, When using the location bar, suggest history only. More details at Smart Location Bar, Controlling behavior

Requires Firefox 3.5+

does it leave my harddrive alone

[noric]

I remember hearing that Firefox 3.5 takes ages to load, because it reads a whole chunk of your HD. I didn't upgrade. Does 3.6 do that?

Re:does it leave my harddrive alone

[bunratty]

That problem affected only a small percentage of users, and was fixed in Firefox 3.5.1.

Try the CtrlTab extension

[psyclone]

CtrlTab extension switches graphically while using a keyboard, if that's what you mean.

I love being able to ctrl-tab back and forth between two recent tabs. Much easier than opening a new window and dragging tabs in order to use alt-tab.

Re:awfulbar

[z121212mlmiac]

Actually, that doesn't restore the Fx 2 behaviour. With only this setting, the bar still searches titles, unlike Fx 2.

Re:The programmers aren't doing well, either.

[hairyfeet]

I don't know about his problem, but I can say that I had to switch my dialup customers back to the 3.0.x branch because the 3.5.x branch sucked ass on dialup. If I had to hazard a guess i would say it is that new JavaScript engine, as I didn't notice the problem on my portable Firefox but it has Noscript. I hope they have the bugs worked out by January, otherwise when they pull the plug on the 3.0.x branch I'll have to switch my dialup customers to Kmeleon or Opera.

Native deployment systems allow mass deployment.

[jbn-o]

While I can't duplicate your experience with Firefox on MacOS X taking a long time to do stuff, and I don't see tab graphics as an important issue, I do think the preferences would benefit from being native preferences instead of JS preferences.

Firefox has implemented its own preferences system in Javascript which offer some of the functionality of MacOS native preferences (admins can leave a preference alone, set a preference, or lock a preference at a given setting). Firefox preferences, however, can't be pushed down to clients via OpenDirectory (Apple's directory system) like MacOS X native preferences can. As a result, controlling large installations of MacOS X machines (which is typically done via OD) also requires setting up and deploying files which use pref() and lock_pref() to set and lock desired preferences. You need something like radmind to effectively deploy said files in an organized fashion. radmind is good at what it does, but one shouldn't have to take on a whole new distribution scheme to work around a program that doesn't use native features.

I understand that Firefox developers might not have gotten around to integrating the preferences yet. I'm guessing there are other admins who look forward to being able to deploy Firefox and control it in the same way other applications for that operating system can be controlled.

Does Camino use MacOS preferences and allow control via OD like most Mac applications? Will Camino run Firefox plugins?

Re:Fixed Memory Bloat?

[msclrhd]

What websites are you visiting? Are the sites using flash (e.g. youtube), or making heavy use of JavaScript (e.g. gmail)?

If you can, report the bug to the Mozilla team. If they don't know about it, they can't fix it.

Still no 'Cleartype'technology?

[SuperDre]

Will the new FF finaly have a 'always use cleartype for HTML' option just like IE has? it's the only reason why I'm still not using FF as reading text is just a pain in the butt with FF compared to IE.. in version 1 and 2 you could do this via a 'hack', but since version 3 you have to put your whole windows into cleartypemode, and that's something I don't want to do as cleartype sux for menu's etc...

Re:The programmers aren't doing well, either.

[hairyfeet]

How would I report the "bug"? What, say "Firefox 3.5.x is slow as mud on dialup"? Because that is all I can tell you for sure. I have seen the results myself on at least 3 different desktops and a laptop. If you put Firefox 3.5.x on a standard dialup connection, and compare it to 3.0.x, then the 3.0 branch will run rings around the 3.5 branch. The pages load faster, the browser is more responsive. And this is with a HOSTS file and ABP getting rid of most ads. It is the same without the HOSTS or ABP either.

So I don't see how I could report this "bug" nor do I see many Firefox developers actually having dialup to test for themselves. Most likely I will end up having to switch my customers on dialup over to Kmeleon or Opera, because the 3.5.x branch is simply unusable for them. But if you can figure out a way to report it, please do.

Re:The programmers aren't doing well, either.

[jesser]

You're entirely correct that this is a difficult bug to report. I suggest working with Firefox Support people, who may be able to help you narrow down the problem enough to file a bug report.

Alternatively, you could try this very alpha. Firefox 3.6 is shaping up to be a performance-focused release. Attention is focused on mobile devices that have both extremely low CPU power and fairly low bandwidth, but many of the improvements will help everywhere.

(You don't happen to be using proxy autoconfig, do you?)

Google Pulls Sibel Edmonds' Access to Her Blog

[Philip K Dickhead]

Info/Disinfo. What pill did you take, this morning?

Google Pulls Sibel Edmonds' Access to Her Blog
August 9th, 2009

I don't know what it's going to take to make people understand that Google (and its associated brands, Blogger, YouTube, Google Video, Gmail) are NOT to be trusted for communicating controversial information. The fact that dissidents don't understand this basic information is just more evidence of how screwed we are.

Via: Justacitizen:

My Blog Site http://123realchange.blogspot.com/ is now blocked by Google's Blogger. They will not let me post during this most sensitive period, when I am about to provide deposition on Foreign US government illegal operations in the United States!

http://www.justacitizen.com/Press_Releases/URGENTGoogle's%20Blogger-Aug6.htm

Re:The programmers aren't doing well, either.

[Ant P.]

Firefox 3.5 has jumped head first into the idiotic "perceived speed" browser arms race, and it now does DNS lookups for every link on a page when it's loading just to save 100ms on the off-chance you do click on one. So if your only DNS access is over a 56kbps line, it's going to suck hard.

There's no option to turn this off in the Privacy section like there is on Chrome, it's buried in about:config.

Re:Guys/FireFox fans: A QUESTION (thanks 4 answer)

[Tubal-Cain]

Last I checked, ABP & NoScript worked in Minefield (the nightly builds). Most others don't, though.

Re:On "Info/Disinfo. What pill did you take"...

[Philip K Dickhead]

Multiple tabs. Error. Pasted from editor into wrong pane. :-)

Re:The programmers aren't doing well, either.

[dryeo]

I've always found Firefox to be slow with dialup. In the past I've compared Firefox to Seamonkey and found Seamonkey close to twice as fast loading slashdot with both having slashdot in the cache. The newest trunk dailies (3.6.x) do seem better.
Anyways I'd suggest checking out Seamonkey for your dialup customers, especially v2 (now at 2.0b2pre and quite stable) which uses the same rendering engine as Firefox 3.5.

Re:awfulbar

[Toonol]

Troll. My Karma's excellent, I'm not worried about the hit. I'm worried about the future of Firefox, if anything other than praise for every feature is deemed a troll.

The "awesomebar" is terrible design, and the option to retain the sensible behavior from 2.0 should never have been removed. It existed in beta; it was removed for the final. No good reason for that. Things like the "awesomebar" should have always been add-ons.

Re:The programmers aren't doing well, either.

[hairyfeet]

I tried going to your link, only to get "service is down" when I actually tried to look anything up. Figures. And I'm not using any proxies on my customers PCs. I have tried using ABP and a custom HOSTS file to try to speed up Firefox, hoping that it was the ads. No Joy. No matter what I do FF3.5.x is just awful compared to 3.0.x when it comes to dialup customers.

As much as I hate to do it, it looks like I will be switching my customers away from FF when the 3.0.x branch is killed in Jan. I hate to do it, as I personally love the extensions, and find it easy to manage, but right now the speed difference is just incredible. You can literally go make yourself a sandwich and the page will still be loading when you get back. The same page loads in under a minute on FF3.0.x, which for dialup isn't bad.

So if any Moz developers read this, please email me and I'll be happy to tell you what I know. Or try it on a dialup connection and see for yourself. But while FF2 and 3 were just fine on dialup FF3.5.x is just unusable.

Re:The programmers aren't doing well, either.

[hairyfeet]

WHERE in about:config? Because I would be happy to just tweak it for my customers. I already spend an extra 4 hours or so making sure everything is automated an smooth for them, so the extra 3 minutes to do an about:config tweak is nothing.

As for the other poster, thanks for the SeaMonkey idea. I already pass out SeaMonkey to my older folks, who prefer the Netscape style layout and built in email, but I never thought about just using it as a browser to replace FF. But next time I am out at my mom's house I will test it on her dialup to see how it compares. Thanks for the idea!

Re:The programmers aren't doing well, either.

[jesser]

support.mozilla.com should be up again now. There was a massive air-conditioner failure today in the colo Mozilla uses for project servers; even our bug-tracking system was down.

When do we get a thread per tab?

[AbRASiON]

I want less stupid plugins locking up my browser and I want to be snappier.
As a basically internet addicted geek, I can run up to 50 tabs at a time, memory footprint doesn't concern me, overall sluggishness on a quad core machine does.
Needs to be snappier, I want faster browsing, I want faster back buttons, faster tabbing between tabs and less tabs locking the whole damn thing up.
FF is amazing now but it could be better.

Re:The programmers aren't doing well, either.

[Ant P.]

You need to add a network.dns.disablePrefetch boolean, it's apparently not in the list by default. Details here

Re:Holy shit

[jo42]

The "fatigue" part comes in when you use a technology more or less all the time and are constantly bombarded by "updates" and "upgrades" almost every other day for all of the products that you use. It becomes an exercise in "Ok, what the frak did they change this time and why [for no apparent reason other than whatever]? And what the frak did they break or change [what I'm used to] this time?". After awhile you just want to kick "them" in the nuts -- multiple times.

finally

[fulldecent]

Do you remember when firefox was fast... in the pre-1.0 days?

Version number bloat detailed here:

http://fulldecent.blogspot.com/2008/03/what-firefox-really-needs.html

Re:awfulbar

[z121212mlmiac]

Only the old appearance was kept (and removed) as an option. The behaviour was changed long before the appearance was, and the options to modify it were added only immediately after the 3.0 release.