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Mozilla Rolls Out Firefox 3.6 RC, Nears Final
CWmike writes "Mozilla has shipped a release candidate build of Firefox 3.6 that, barring problems, will become the final, finished version of the upgrade. Firefox 3.6 RC1, which followed a run of betas that started in early November, features nearly 100 bug fixes from the fifth beta that Mozilla issued Dec. 17. The fixes resolved numerous crash bugs, including one that brought down the browser when it was steered to Yahoo's front page. Another fix removed a small amount of code owned by Microsoft from Firefox. The code was pointed out by a Mozilla contributor, and after digging, another developer found the original Microsoft license agreement. 'Amusingly enough, it's actually really permissive. Really the only part that's problematic is the agreement to "include the copyright notice ... on your product label and as a part of the sign-on message for your software product,"' wrote Kyle Huey on Mozilla's Bugzilla. Even so, others working on the bug said the code needed to be replaced with Mozilla's own."
The summary rambled on about bug fixes and other things that tend not to matter to the end product of FF3.6. Most of the people that read slashdot understand the release process for software. You releases a beta/RC, fix some bugs, release the pre-release. If all is good, you release the final product.
It would have been more useful to cover new features and things that would interest the end-user. At least that's my point of view on the topic...
Useful info from the article:
Among the new features in Firefox 3.6 are built-in support for the scaled-down browser skins dubbed "Personas;" warnings of out-of-date plug-ins; support for new CSS, DOM and HTML 5 technologies; support for full-screen video embedded with the video HTML tag; and support for the Web Open Font Format (WOFF).
TraceMonkey has also been refreshed to boost JavaScript performance, something Mike Shaver, Mozilla's chief engineer, bragged about last week on Twitter. "I am excited about upcoming JS [JavaScript] engine work, and I don't care who knows it," Shaver tweeted.
Its not what it is, its something else.
Firefox at this point is really quite reasonable with its memory use - I can't get my head around the continual complaints. The only area where it's appreciably worse performing than Chrome is in UI responsiveness and this has significantly improved in 3.5. It also has far faster back/forward navigation through the cache and (although I don't have figures for this) it feels faster at displaying pages without extremely heavy javascript. There's also less flicker - most pages load in one paint rather than loading in sections. Besides that, web browsers have a lot of useful RAM caching they can do (your history, uncompressed images etc) - it hardly makes sense to keep browser usage below 174MB when even netbooks come with 1-2GB and that RAM can be used effectively to speed up the browser. Frankly, if you're too stingy to splash out on a stick of RAM use xterm with lynx or another browser from the era when that amount of RAM was normal.
There are two main differences between this and the old way IE did its IE-specific features:
1) This implementation is based on a public draft of a W3C REC-track document, which is worked on in public in collaboration with other browser vendors, web developers, and anyone else who cares to join the public www-style@w3.org mailing list. In fact, the gradient syntax was changed radically between beta 1 and beta 2 of Gecko 1.9.2 based on feedback and discussion on said mailing list.
2) The feature is clearly marked as Gecko-specific, so it doesn't pollute the namespace for future standardization (e.g. the properties are not called "linear-gradient" and "radial-gradient") and makes it clear to anyone using it that it will only work in Gecko and break in other browsers. This last property makes it less likely that someone will just use it, test only in Gecko, and accidentally break other browsers by just failing to think about testing in them.
But yes, using it as an _author_ for things outside progressive enhancement is of course bad. But even the progressive enhancement uses are a start: they can give valuable feedback on that www-style mailing list I mention if there are serious problems with the current spec draft.