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

Re:Javascript performance

[Skratchez]

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.

Personas, lightweight themes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Proof that Firefox is heading for doom. Stop wasting time on making the browser look different than the fucking OS you idiots.

Re:Personas, lightweight themes?

[Stormwatch]

Stop wasting time on making the browser look different than the fucking OS you idiots.

Hear, hear, goddamnit, HEAR! Consistency is an essential quality of a good user interface. That's why I could never really stand Opera: you can make it look like anything, but good luck making it look like it belongs. And that's why I love Safari on the Mac, yet hate it on Windows: it looks alien to the system around it.

Here's a tip -- go to the themes page and look for something that fits your OS. Looks like custom themes are immune to this Persona shit.

Re:Javascript performance

[Dan667]

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.

Personas...?

[Stan Vassilev]

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.

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

[zullnero]

Ha, and you got tricked by a Opera or Chrome fanboy into replying. You know that's not going to make them change.

Re:Javascript performance

[shutdown -p now]

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.

Re:Open Link in New Tab changed

[shutdown -p now]

Good, because that's how everyone else (i.e. IE, Chrome, Opera) have been doing it for a while now.

Re:Javascript performance

[mrdoogee]

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.