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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."
It's an improvement. That's what counts, some of us don't want to trade our lovely open-source browser for a product from Google or Apple, or MS for that matter. I can wait on javascript performance, TYVM.
Proof that Firefox is heading for doom. Stop wasting time on making the browser look different than the fucking OS you idiots.
well this can happen on a machine with no plugins and just left sitting at the gmail page.... gets worse with visits to youtube and such. Now I have 3 PCs, two with XP one with Windows 7, it happens on one XP and the Windows 7 box, one XP machine is just fine. And yes I do run add-ons and such, the same on each machine, but ive tested on clean re-installs and it does it. A bit of googling you find other with the same problem.... its not everyone out there.....but its still not enough to drive me away from Firefox, its not much of a pain to restart every few hours.
The problem is there are just not the plugins for other browsers. Even though some folks are obsessing over rendering times, the extensions add to block flash, malware, adblock, etc make Firefox faster and the web more usable for me.
You realize you can switch/disable Personas, don't you?
It's true that many Personas themes aren't really usable, but nobody is forcing you to use them. There are lots of themes you can try.
I'm currently using the relatively nice Einstein theme :)
Mozilla has released Firefox 3.6 today, which adds support for Personas, lightweight themes that can be installed without restarting the browser
I think someone just jumped the shark.
I can't explain to myself how adding a theme engine on top of another theme engine was somehow near the top of their todo list.
Ha, and you got tricked by a Opera or Chrome fanboy into replying. You know that's not going to make them change.
This is true. The new personas features are butt ugly. Use Stylish (I recommend Gradient iCool for the nice dark black and blue) and the custom /. black with green text mod. It looks like an old CRT.
This made me smile a little. It shows the reason why we (geeks) are *different* from the majority of "normal users".
Normal users find myspace like pages OK, the more sparks and blinks and effects the better. Whereas we find green text in black background great.
I love Green on Black (DarkRoom is a godsend for me). But everytime anyone else has seen my color schemes (I tend to work [program] in Linux using Compiz META+M inverted colors) they think I am crazy or antiquated (green and black has not been in vogue in computers for about 50 years!... even my father used VGA!)
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
These tests are mostly pointless anyway. They measure raw JS performance, which would matter if you'd be doing, say, number crunching. In practice, the most heavyweight operation that is likely to be done by scripts in a browser is DOM manipulation, and that's an entirely different thing. What does it matter if your super-efficient JS AOT compiler based on quantum branch prediction can call a method on a DOM object as fast as a plain native JMP, if the implementation of said method causes reflow and redraw of most of the page?
Coincidentally, it's why Opera feels so fast for actual browsing while still using an interpreter for JS (and consequently sucking in any synthetic JS perf tests) - its interpreter is an order of magnitude slower than e.g. Chrome, yes, but it's got an extremely fast layout engine and renderer, so DOM updates are instantaneous.
Good, because that's how everyone else (i.e. IE, Chrome, Opera) have been doing it for a while now.
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.
Remember kids, free doesn't always mean open source, and open source doesn't always mean free.
Man for some years now they've been just doing shit for the sake of doing shit (I've heard all the arguments, they're all BS). They have a bunch of "UI Engineers" that just can't leave anything alone. Every new version sends me on a two week hunt for hacks and about:config settings to undo it all. And that's not working anymore for everything. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm almost resigned to moving to opera or chrome with this one -unless they've finally fixed the address bar so I don't have to type 'www' to make tab completion work, God knows why they thought they needed to break that.
Every 3.x version has been worse than the last, so, they've set my expectations.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
Or, as with my case, the firewall on your router only provides one option for rejecting traffic, which is apparently to DROP. If I allow the IPs used by Slashdot through to the IPTables based firewall on my Linux box - which is on a public IP address and is configured to REJECT - then the delay become unnoticeable.
Anyway, since it only adds up to a few dozen syslog entries from Slashdot every few days amoungst the thousands of others coming in from script kiddies and bots I don't particularly care about the scanning so much as about the implementation. It's needlessly borked for everyone out there sitting behind a home router that either defaults to DROP or doesn't provide an option for REJECT, presumably because of the numerous "test your router" and "probe my ports" sites that were around a few years ago that promoted this approach.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Randomly changing UI behavior without warning is the way MS has been doing it for a while too. Glad to see Mozilla catching up. What's next, a ribbon?