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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."
Just downloaded it - it's just as fast as Chrome or even faster. Typing this from shiny new browser.
One of the goals mentioned in the article was to improve garbage collection performance to make pauses shorter and animations smoother. Why not just use the video card to accelerate the graphical operations (plus any other GPGPU operations)? Flash and PDF readers have already done it. For that matter, Windows Vista or later UIs have already do the same. This will give performance edges over contemporary browsers.
It seems the mouse wheel scrolling has been changed in 3.6. It's moving a much larger distance with each "click" of the wheel than before and if you scroll continuously it seems to accelerate even faster. My first impression is that I don't like it at all. It feels a lot more like Chrome, which isn't a good thing in my opinion, the annoying jumpy scrolling is one of the primary reasons I prefer not to use Chrome.
The GUI that pops up when you want to bookmark something - case study in bad design
How about a real editor for bookmarks, with some minimal feature like export this folder (when you need to send someone a bunch of stuff)
How about mozilla not being a jerk about extensions, and getting rid of the spam that makes it hard to see anything but the top 5 extensions big brother mozilla thinks you should have
How about a stable platform for extension developers
How about letting the world know how awesome FF+noscript+adblock is when you go to a site like YAHOO
I hadn't been to YAHOO wihtout my little protectors, noscript/adblock/flashblock for some time and was astonished at how much ads have taken over the front page - how can people stand it
how about giving the users some control over privacy, so we have the wipe things clean on exit menu again
how about giving some users an idea of how much info the SOBs of the web, like google, are collecting
Personas could work AND WAS ALREADY WORKING as a lightweight theming replacement without being tied to the browser code as an addon.
REPEAT: It already works as an addon.
This is essentially an unremovable addon like that MS .NET addon that MS shoved down our throats.
Look, I have for the most time defended Firefox ever increasing features as progress. I already don't think they managed their "awesomebar" well at all, I like it but many loyal users didn't and instead of making it an option or an extension they gave it a hip name to add insult to injury.
But now they are taking an already working addon into the browser.
The thing I liked about FF was it's modularity, it's what caused the browser to split form the mozilla suit in the first place. This is a step into the wrong direction, into a more monolithic application.
Why do FF developers hate their own extension framework dammit!?
But... the future refused to change.