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

[ottothecow]

I used someones firefox with these persona things already installed...it was awful, I couldn't see which tab was what.

It was like giving myspace page designers control over your browser

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[Ethanol-fueled]

I just installed the persona add-on and checked out a few of the themes. You're right, most of the non-solid ones like the Marshall Amp and the DJ one with the turntables on it are annoying because they distract the eye and add visual clutter to the workflow.

Additionally, the graphics from the themes as described above have that pixellated, dithered, low-res look to them. It's like stretching a 400x300 picture to desktop wallpaper.

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[Skratchez]

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.

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[Anonymous Coward]

It was like giving myspace page designers control over your browser

See? This is what happens when the Mozilla people come up with their own ideas instead of just implementing the features from the previous version of Opera.

I keed, I keed!

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[ottothecow]

yup, I am typing this from freshly upgraded firefox. I put my mouse over a few of the persona styles and they had nasty dithering effects (and I am not on a large display).

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? I hope that mouseover to change style stuff only works on mozilla domains...because I see a whole new way to make the internet an awfully annoying place...screw animated gifs and blink tags, I am going to change your damn browser.

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[zullnero]

Awesome. I love having as much freedom to make my browser as irritating to use to my jerk friends who don't ask for permission to use my machine as possible. It's just a thing I like to do.

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[xtracto]

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!)

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.

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[Thinboy00]

That involves letting "friends" know that you don't want them to use the computer, which could get ugly.

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.

Re:Pretty neat.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

There are cases where this is worth it to people, but this isn't a good idea if you value stability. This pref is true by default for a reason, and if you're going to recommend that people change it you should warn them about the fact that this is dangerous.

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

[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.

Re:Javascript performance

[larry bagina]

WebKit is open source. Chrome is open source.

Re:Javascript performance

[causality]

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

They should use Slashdot for testing JS performance. Click "Read More" to load a new discussion, then hit "Reply to This", type a response, hit "Preview", and count how many seconds it takes before you see the preview. May the best browser win!

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.

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

[xtracto]

Maybe it is possible to disable that via a Grasemonkey script?

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: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.

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

[amRadioHed]

That delay is really annoying. If they need to do it they should start it in the background when you preview and then by the time you post it should be done and they wouldn't need to make anyone wait.

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:Javascript performance

[LordLimecat]

Try to modify and redistribute either and see how long before either of their "parents" get all lawyer-ey.

You mean like how these guys do? Theyve been around for close to a year now, and google hasnt said a peep (nor could they). Its not "sort of pretend" open source, you can modify, redistribute, etc as much as you like.

Re:Javascript performance

[Zocalo]

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.

Re:Javascript performance

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

You mean like Iron?

The competition is heating up!!

[igadget78]

Microsoft's patch vs. Mozilla's release. I can't wait. The Excitement is almost too much.

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/

Just used Chrome

[treeves]

to download Firefox 3.6. I regularly use both. Just happened to be using Chrome when I came across this story and decided to upgrade Firefox. I used to use Opera a lot. Not sure why I stopped and why I can't stick with one browser. I guess Chrome took Opera's place as the lighter, faster browser for me while I keep using FF for the extensions.

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?

[Nick Fel]

Didn't Internet Explorer 3 have skinable toolbars in 1996? Transparency please.

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

[Cheburator-2]

Just downloaded it - it's just as fast as Chrome or even faster. Typing this from shiny new browser.

GPU accelerated Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:GPU accelerated Firefox?

[MarcQuadra]

Firefox is based on Gecko, which uses Cairo Graphics, which has an accelerated OpenGL back-end as an output option.

My guess is that performance when using an OpenGL-accelerated renderer is actually -worse- on non-compositing window managers.

The rendering of pages wouldn't be helped by GPGPU stuff, since it's 'procedural' to parse and render HTML, it's not SIMD in nature.

Apple's been sitting on accelerated 2D rendering of the UI, glyphs, text, and primitives for over four years now, it's not a panacea. I don't think Firefox would be improved if it started depending on video drivers, 3D hardware, and was slower.

Re:How about fixing the Memory leaks?

[Chirs]

Not sure what you're doing. My firefox has been up (and used regularly) for two days and is sitting at 550MB.

It's extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6

[wiredog]

Seethis for details.

Scrolling

[Majix]

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.

Re:Scrolling

[ddegirmenci]

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

As good as new... Wait a second.

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:How about fixing the Memory leaks?

[imnotreallynewhere]

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.

Re:How about fixing the Memory leaks?

[Dan667]

get the Ghostery plugin for firefox. That stops some poorly written javascript from running in the first place.

Re:Where can I download this?

[XanC]

http://www.charbonnet.com/Firefox%20Setup%203.6.exe

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

[shutdown -p now]

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

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:Open Link in New Tab changed

[deniable]

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?

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

[headkase]

I ignore all moderation here, especially down moderation as that is always disagreement. There should only be positive mods and they should not be limited to 5. Set your threshold wherever you like with that. There are no consequences to moderation any more either as the only thing it used to affect, order of comments if you used that no longer really exists.

Personas are not themes, but want to replace them

[BenoitRen]

Personas are not light-weight themes. In fact, they're not themes at all. They're more like little gadgets that you hook up to your web browser to customise one part of its UI. It doesn't even compare to a theme.

But what's worse is that Mozilla is looking to depreciate themes in favour of Personas. From the Add-ons Manager, click "Get Themes". You won't see a page listing themes, but a page listing Personas. There isn't even a link there to the actual themes listing.

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:Personas...?

[zullnero]

It's a path towards creating themes that don't require a browser restart, which is and has been an annoyance since they started doing themes several years ago. Unfortunately, a huge number of themes already out there don't work that way. It seems like a preliminary step towards transitioning to how Firefox 4.0 will be dealing with themes. 3.5 and up are pretty much transitional upgrades to wean people onto 4.0 when it's released. Pretty ordinary release strategy, really.

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: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.

how about making FF fun again

[cinnamon colbert]

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

I'm sorry but this is pure bloat.

[Requiem18th]

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!?

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

[visualight]

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.

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.

Re:Perfect

[anaesthetica]

The Firefox team is aware of the problem and they're working on eliminating as many of these as possible.