Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Released

Shining Celebi writes "Mozilla has released Firefox 3.6 today, which adds support for Personas, lightweight themes that can be installed without restarting the browser, and adds further performance improvements to the new Tracemonkey Javascript engine. One of the major goals of the release was to improve startup time and general UI responsiveness, especially the Awesomebar. You can read the full set of release notes here."

Comments

Switch Proxy Tool

[wbav]

If you have the Switch Proxy Tool, I strongly suggest you disable it. Caused all sort of issues when upgrading. If you've already upgraded, right click on the shortcut and run in safe mode, there you can disable it. YMMV.

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[jesser]

This is why people complain about bloat...what is the point of this junk? Weren't there already addons/themes that let you do this kind of stuff?

It's the first step toward replacing Firefox's old theme system with a better one, where themes are smaller and easier to create. (It's not there yet, since you can't replace buttons, only backgrounds.)

While we have both systems in place, it might seem like "bloat", but in the long term it will allow Firefox to use significantly less memory and have a simpler user interface around installing themes. It's a fight against bloat.

I hope that mouseover to change style stuff only works on mozilla domains

Correct, it only works on sites that are whitelisted for extension installation. By default, the only whitelisted sites are the mozilla sites for extensions and themes.

Pretty neat.

[jayminer]

Tried on Windows, performance improvements are immediately noticeable. Wastes less screen space by default. For those who are used to the old look-and-feel can feel a little awkward at first.

Set extensions.checkCompatibility to false and you're good to go.

Javascript performance

[mallumax]

My javascript performance comparison between Firefox 3.6 and Chrome and Safari http://www.manu-j.com/blog/firefox-3-6-vs-chrome-vs-safari-javascript-performance/432/

As usual, Firefox performance on the v8 benchmark is pathetic where Chrome is more than 10 times faster.It is 24% faster than version 3.5.4 in V8 but it is clearly not enough. In the sunspider test, chrome is 2 times as fast as firefox. In this test, 3.6 is 17% faster than 3.5.4. Safari too comfortably beats Firefox in both these benchmarks

Re:Javascript performance

[Zocalo]

That delay is nothing to do with your browser - that's Slashdot scanning of a bunch of ports on your IP address. I spotted this a few weeks back when I made a post to Slashdot while running a "tail -f" on my firewall logs, although I've been aware of the lag a lot longer than that. It seems that if your firewall just DROPs the packets you get a delay while it retries a couple of times, whereas if you REJECT then it's a good deal quicker. There's some caching going on as well, once you've gone through this the lag disappears for a day or two, then re-starts. As it says in my .sig - WTF?

Re:Javascript performance

[Anonymous Coward]

They are checking to see if you are an open proxy, and will ban you if so.

Re:Javascript performance

[Zocalo]

Not SMTP; HTTP. The ports scanned are all common default ports for web proxy applications like Squid's :3128, various ":8080" type combinations and such like. I'd have to go digging through my logs to get the complete list, but I'd guess there are about a dozen ports checked in total.

What's so irksome about it is that it's a straight SYN scan done very slowly that impacts any users that have a firewall that DROPs packets with an apparently inexplicable delay of several seconds. If you really feel the need to do this, which the Slashdot team obviously does, it would be much quicker and less annoying for users do the scan at a faster rate without the two or three retries currently used. Better yet, kick the scan off in the background while the data is being entered data into the form and reject the post if necessary when the "Preview" or "Submit" button is clicked. Even if a post is submitted through an open proxy before the scan completes, Slashdot's delay between posts from the same IP will ensure that only one post can get through before the ban hammer comes down.

Re:Javascript performance

[Simetrical]

Chrome is open source in the same way that OS X is open source.

Sure they're both based on a open source project (Chromium/Webkit and Darwin/BSD) does not mean they are truly open source. Try to modify and redistribute either and see how long before either of their "parents" get all lawyer-ey.

The analogy Chrome : Chromium :: OS X : Darwin/BSD is nonsense. You can't build an almost identical replica of OS X from open-source code, or anywhere close. Chromium is fully open-source, and it's essentially identical to Chrome. It's what the Chrome developers themselves use for development and testing.

Re:Speed Kills (play it safe - buy a Chevy)

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox 3.6 does beat the newest Chrome on some Javascript benchmarks (and Chrome beats Firefox on others). I think it's safe to say they're in the same ballpark. http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/17199/1/

It's extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6

[wiredog]

Seethis for details.

Re:How can I upgrade on Ubuntu?

[Hatta]

Wait until the maintainers put a package in the repository, then update like usual. It's generally not worth installing unofficial packages if an official one is forthcoming.

Re:Scrolling

[ddegirmenci]

about:config
set mousewheel.withnokey.sysnumlines to false
set mousewheel.withnokey.numlines to 3

As good as new... Wait a second.

Open Link in New Tab changed

[bughunter]

The new tab now appears to the right of the current tab when you right click on a link and select "Open Link in New Tab."

I just discovered that after about 5 seconds of "Hey, where'd my new tab go??"

Re:Open Link in New Tab changed

[Paradigm_Complex]

I prefered Firefox's older way of dealing with this. To revert, go to about:config and change

browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent true

to

browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent false

Re:How can I upgrade on Ubuntu?

[Knuckles]

How can I upgrade on Ubuntu?

It won't appear in the main distribution until the new distro release 10.04 (current Codename Lucid Lynx). Possibly someone will stick it into the backports repository (which you would have to enable) or into a PPA (likewise).

If you can't wait, install into /usr/local from mozilla.com (use checkinstall to create a basic deb package so that the package manager knows about it).

Re:I'm sorry but this is pure bloat.

[Ant P.]

Why do FF developers hate their own extension framework dammit!?

Be careful what you ask for...

Let's imagine for a second that you're writing a HTML web page with some scripting. If this were Chrom(e|ium) you could stop reading here; this is how their extensions work. But as a FF extension writer, you don't get the luxury of preserving your sanity.

Take away all the HTML you know and replace it with XUL, a completely different XML language with a different box model. Actually, you can keep the HTML in addition. You can keep your CSS too - along with getting to learn a metric assload of browser extensions to the syntax and creative ways to hack the existing vocabulary to get results. Want to display an image? XUL doesn't have the <img> tag, or a box model with sufficient control to embed a background image, but hey you can use "list-style-image"! Oh and since it's XUL you get to have fun with overlays, which are like includes except they work in an XML/XSLT way.

At this point, I'd like to mention the average human brain can only hold 7 items in short term memory at once. So far I've only named the bare minimum necessary to make a UI that does nothing. Now to make that clusterfuck do anything, you have to use a dialect of Javascript that makes COBOL look terse. Still not scared? Then you might survive extension-writing long enough to get around to the RDF stuff...

I really don't blame them for hating it.