Firefox 9 Released, JavaScript Performance Greatly Improved

MrSeb writes "Firefox 9 is now available — but unlike its previous rapid release forebears where not a lot changed, a huge feature has landed with the new version: the JavaScript engine now has type inference enabled. This simple switch has resulted in a 20-30% JS execution speed increase (PDF), putting JaegerMonkey back in line with Chrome's V8 engine, and even pulling ahead in some cases. If you switched away from Firefox to IE or Chrome for improved JS performance, now is probably the time to give Firefox another shot."

Comments

Firefox - Too little, too late

[InsightIn140Bytes]

Mozilla really screwed up both their long-time users and new users. There really haven't been good improvements in a long time. Most of their time has went to making it more Chrome like, and playing with version numbers.

I've seen many old Firefox users change their engine, on top of those that have been using IE. They aren't using Firefox, they're using Chrome or RockMelt now. Especially RockMelt is an interesting browser - it completely abandons geeky stuff like NoScript or Adblock but instead caters to casual, normal people and how they use the internet. RockMelt has online Facebook friends directly on the site, along with recent news and updates from all social networks. It lets you easily add social bookmarks to sites like Reddit and Digg, along with sharing to Facebook and Twitter. Most people have been saying how wonderful it is compared to Firefox. It's an browser that actual people want.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Threni]

Firefox - Too little, too late?
Too little: Doesn't sound like it, given the writeup of this release.
Too late: An install of pretty much any software is one click away. No software is too late - a later version can fix the problems of earlier versions. Most users don't have any problems with memory usage, don't care about how the footprint compares with this or that version of chrome etc.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

RockMelt [techcrunch.com] now. Especially RockMelt is an interesting browser - it completely abandons geeky stuff like NoScript or Adblock but instead caters to casual, normal people and how they use the internet. RockMelt has online Facebook friends directly on the site, along with recent news and updates from all social networks. It lets you easily add social bookmarks to sites like Reddit and Digg, along with sharing to Facebook and Twitter. Most people have been saying how wonderful it is compared to Firefox. It's an browser that actual people want.

I thought that sponsored "Ask Slashdot" was a bit much but now we have sponsored first posts?

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[obarthelemy]

And RockMeIt has much better astroturfing !

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Rik Sweeney]

it completely abandons geeky stuff like NoScript or Adblock

Oh boy, now I can enjoy adverts featuring rotten teeth and modal popups that insist I "like" them on Facebook again!

Seriously, if I wanted to put up with this crap I'd go back to using IE.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[somersault]

Who are these "most people"? I heard about RockMelt a year or two ago. I think it was Windows only which wasn't a good start, especially given that I think it was based on Firefox. It's "interesting", but I thought it was long dead. Most sites where you'd want to share something already have share buttons for social networking sites.

Adblock isn't geeky. Nobody likes ads. Apart from you perhaps, since you work in marketing.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[allo]

rockmelt will be the same scam as iron.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you and fuck Rock Melt. I don't want no shit Indian browser.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[WillHirsch]

Tell that to the entire history of software uptake, ever.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[amRadioHed]

Too late: An install of pretty much any software is one click away. No software is too late - a later version can fix the problems of earlier versions

That's only true if some other software didn't already fix their problems first. A significant number of users have already switched from Firefox, only being as good as Chrome isn't enough to get anyone to switch back.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[deadhammer]

Sadly you're probably not going to get a response from the advertroll. He's quick-posted his ad in response to a keyword in the article ("Firefox" probably) and will disappear afterwards. Honestly, I've learned just to ignore the first post/thread in the comments of Slashdot articles now.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Lennie]

Most people which install Chrome just install it because Google is a known brandname to them. And Google pretty much is the Internet to them, so they might as well install the Google sanctioned browser.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[dotancohen]

Firefox - Too little, too late?
Too little: Doesn't sound like it, given the writeup of this release.
Too late: An install of pretty much any software is one click away. No software is too late - a later version can fix the problems of earlier versions. Most users don't have any problems with memory usage, don't care about how the footprint compares with this or that version of chrome etc.

But it breaks Firefox's major original selling point: extensions. After Firefox 5 the extensions were supposed to be auto-updating in theory.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[hairyfeet]

Well I just installed it on my download box to give it a test run and I can say its an improvement....if you call slamming the CPU to 80% on page load instead of 100% an improvement. Frankly its still a piggie on single cores and it still looks like it don't like AMD.

Frankly I don't get it, I was a die hard FF user all the way up to FF 4 and it wasn't THAT bad on CPU spiking, now I scroll through my bookmarks and watch the CPU meter jump, pick a page and watch the CPU meter jump, new tab? you get the idea. Meanwhile I've been using Comodo Dragon (based on chromium) and frankly the WORST it slams the CPU is 60% when loading SD vids and even then it quickly drops down to less than 50%. Hell not having anything but the FF static search page loaded has me using 10% in FF and I just attempted to watch an SD video and FF jumped to 89% and hovered there. I will give them credit that 89% IS better than 100% and in their favor the video wasn't skipping like it did under version 8, but I tried the same video under Dragon and it maxes at 45% even with 4 other tabs open (FF just had the one).

While I'm glad they are making progress at this rate they'll be back to 100% usable by FF 14 and by then will they have any users left? By FF 6 I had most of my customers switch over to Dragon simply so I wouldn't need to hear their gripes about lack of speed and it was/is safer due to supporting low rights mode in 7. Does FF support low rights mode yet? Its been 5 years already!

C'mon FF devs, you guys used to kick butt, now you seem determined to run off all your users. if I didn't know better I'd swear that the head of Mozilla was a plant from the Chrome or IE teams, but no, I'm sure its just classic "we know better than our users" arrogance we've seen sadly far too often on FOSS projects. Personally as a long time FF user I wish them all the best and will download and install each new version hoping for a return to their original mission statement, which was for FF to be a lean light browser while the suite was the heavy one, but sadly the way their numbers are declining I wouldn't be surprised if FF was a dead project in 5 years. They don't listen to their customers, they blow through too much resources, and they lack security features like low rights mode (not to mention the malware guys seem to have figured out away around FF's XSS protection as evidenced by the porn bug that loads Yahoo Mail from FF and spams a person's address book) while their competition seems to be getting tighter all the time. I wish them all the luck but it may be too little too late.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Tsingi]

I just ran something I'm working on in Nightly. The first thing it does is to determine what it can about the client.

var comp;
for( comp in window.navigator ) { ... }

The code above should give values of comp for the keys in window.navigator, but comp remains undefined and the code raises an exception when window.navigator[comp] is examined in the loop. This would be the loop that should fail to execute if there are no values for comp.

I can't say anything about the release, I don't use windows so it probably isn't available to me, but Nightly is broken.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Except even IE9 has built-in ad blocking.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Tukz]

All the people I know installed Chrome for one entirely different reason: Speed.
Chrome is so much faster than Firefox and doesn't use nearly as many resources.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[MattSausage]

Lol.. how long did the ad firm work to come up with that last line?

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't really get all these extension complaints. Not once since FF4 have I had an extension fail on update, that I'm aware.
More importantly, some of the extensions I use have absolutely no acceptable substitute in chrome (never mind other browsers), leaving me completely baffled as to why people change just because FF changes their version number at a different pace (though I agree that it is a silly and pointless move).

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[mwvdlee]

RockMelt

I thought the sponsored posters would be marked as such on Slashdot?

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Lennie]

I meant normal every day endusers, no geeks.

Geeks only have geeks as friends ;-)

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[somersault]

Actually, he responded to me a few times the other day. I'm still unsure whether this is actually his job, or he's just an idiot. The fact that he said he works in advertising probably does mean that at least some of it is part of his job.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[cbhacking]

Yep. IE9 with the tracking protection / privacy filter lists from AdBlockPlus, and it works nearly as well as on Firefox (a little harder to configure, though still easy to turn on or off for a given site).

The fact that people are willing to put up with severely ad-laden sites always amazes me.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[SageBrian]

I don't agree with this. While Google may be a known brandname, one can say Microsoft is also.
The people I know that are using Chrome are using it for the speed of startup. I am not even talking tech geeks. Family members, having been pushed away from IE by us geeks were using Firefox. But when they saw how fast Chrome started up and loaded pages, they started using it more.

I also started doing that for the quick logon. But for my main surfing, I still want my extensions in Firefox.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[mwvdlee]

I actually resisted moving to Chrome from FireFox and Maxthon (= IE), but it's my primary browser nowadays (I still use FF occasionally and sometimes even IE9). Good performance, few problems, minimal interface. FireFox actually has more branding on the UI than Chrome.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[FooBarWidget]

I agree that Chrome is more responsive that Firefox. (Note that I didn't say "faster"...) But to say that it uses less resources is bollocks. Chrome consumes vastly more memory than Firefox and I have less than 10 tabs open. Go ahead, browse for a day and measure it; the total memory usage of Chrome tops Firefox by quite a bit. The UI responsiveness is the only reason why I use Chrome over Firefox.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Scam? You mean "Recompile Chromium and release"? That's not a scam.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[pandronic]

Chrome might feel snappier, but for some time Firefox uses less memory.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[anax]

Sure, then leave it open overnight. Firefox leaks like a sieve.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[S.O.B.]

If he is in marketing don't discount the "just an idiot" angle.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Lord Lode]

Why do you need to reinstall all these extensions after every firefox update (and there are so many of those these days!). It's annoying. Doesn't Firefox have a proper API for extensions that doesn't break with every single version?

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

> completely baffled as to why people change just because FF changes their version number at a different pace

Perhaps because your experience with not having extensions break is not everyone else's experience.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Skuto]

because FF changes their version number at a different pace (though I agree that it is a silly and pointless move).

The version number changes quicker because the releases happen quicker. That's not hard to understand.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Skuto]

I don't use windows so it probably isn't available to me

I don't get what you mean here. Firefox is most certainly not a "Windows-only" product.

but Nightly is broken

It breaks often. That's why there's an Aurora and Beta in between before you even get to a release.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Likewise, perhaps some people's experience with extensions breaking is not everyone else's. I've never experienced extension hell; mine just go through perfectly sanely. Attacks on anecdotal evidence cut both ways, you know.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[ifiwereasculptor]

Well, know me: I have switched to Chrome because FF still hasn't implemented a minimal tabs-on-title interface on Linux. That wasn't relevant back when I had a 4:3 monitor, but with a little 16:9, every tiny row makes a difference. Plus I switch tabs a lot and everything sitting on the edge of the screen is simply easier to activate, especially since I like my mice fast. It's not a huge issue, but then again FF and Chromium aren't that different right now - they're both fast enough and use similar resources, so a tiny edge is all one of them can win by.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't quite follow. I said I don't understand why people change browsers just because the version number increases. You answered something completely different that I did not even ask about, nor indicated I was confused with. Or if you did indeed somehow answer me, then you're being very vague and confusing.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

First: That's the wrong way to examine window.navigator anyway. It has a set of known key values. Check them. Second: Test for Firefox 9.0 and you've determined what you need to know about the client. Leave your "everything in window.navigator" hack for other browsers.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Tsingi]

I don't use windows so it probably isn't available to me

I don't get what you mean here. Firefox is most certainly not a "Windows-only" product.

New releases usually are though. Other OS's are generally released later on.

The current latest release for both Linux i686 & MAC OS X is 8.01. Curiously, the current latest release for Windows appears to be the same.

As for Nightly breaking often, no it doesn't, and I am aware that it is pre-release.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[pmontra]

I discovered RockMelt today but even if it could run on my two computing platforms (Android and Linux - it doesn't) I'd say "no AdBlock + no NoScript == no thanks." Anyway I agree that it's a compelling browser for most of the people out there (in here being /.)

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Thoguth]

Chrome has at least one deal-killer bug for me: under certain circumstances it works very poorly on google websites.

Knowing what I do about their technology, my guess is the problem happens when overzealous corporate firewalls block SPDY requests, but it could be something else --- I don't know the cause, but the effect is that anything that hits a google page, or anything that loads google ads or google analytics (i.e., most of the internet) hangs indefinitely in Chrome.

That has kept me from making Chrome my "only" browser. But I also like firebug in firefox, and some things, like the Charles plugin work much better in FF... so what happens for me is, I have two or three browsers open at once constantly, and compartmentalize things...

• Firefox - dev browser. Loads my in-progress web apps, plugged into all the debugging tools I use.
• Chrome - documentation browser. I load docs related to dev in chrome, and also gmail if I'm on a network where google apps aren't hanging
• Opera - casual / non-work-related browser. Opera is kind of a sucky browser compared to other options. By using it for non-work-related activity, I can ensure that I don't enjoy screwing around all day.

There is theoretically other room for Safari or IE, for testing or debugging browser specific problems, but since I have tons of tabs and windows open of each browser, using different browsers simplifies the alt-tab switching between modes of working.

And... because I have multiple browsers installed and switch between them, this is a flexible plan. New browser comes along? I'll give it a shot. Get tired of some bug in a browser? pop up another one.

That said, for a while now Chrome has been the "browser upgrade" I put on my friends and family's computers for a while now. If Firefox is better though, that will change.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? I've never had to reinstall anything when I update. There's a brief "checking compatibility" dialogue and possibly a quick download of a new addon version and that's it. At least in my experience.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[TrekkieGod]

Sure, then leave it open overnight. Firefox leaks like a sieve.

I never close firefox on my living room computer. It's been up for two weeks since I last did a reboot, and it's currently using up 256.6 mb of RAM. Doesn't seem like it's leaking.

I am seeing that it spawned 26 threads, which looks excessive. I assume it's a thread pool for when they actually need it, and that they're not really active right now.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Loosifur]

Most people *who*. Sorry; copy editor.

I disagree. I think where you're going with this is that most people just sort of install what's easiest or whatever has the ad campaign that speaks loudest to them, but in my admittedly anecdotal, personal experience I have found that even "casual" users are pretty savvy when it comes to web browsers. In my experience, people tend to gravitate towards browsers that emphasize aspects of web use that are most relevant to them, and not always functional aspects.

I know several highly non-technical users who love Firefox because it feels like the least commercial browser. I know many people who use IE *because* of the anti-Microsoft sentiment, as a sort of statement of rebellion. On the other hand, I know a lot of web devs who grudgingly use IE because they have to develop to it, and since it plays fast and loose with standards they have to use it to test.

I personally use Chrome because I don't really bother with Facebook, don't really use extensions for anything, and like the launch speed. Same reason I use IE fairly often. I don't know if it loads pages faster than Firefox (I think it does, but that might be what they call "butt-dyno"), but I know it launches faster. Since I almost never leave a browser open when I'm not using it, that's a major selling point to me. Firefox is neat, and I have it installed, but the lengthy startup time is a killer. And the app tabs (which I found useful, but clunky) don't outweigh the startup speed.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[necromaedian]

yes

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Tukz]

So did I.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the number changes quicker because they jump from x.1 to (x+1).0 for every other security fix (e.g. 8.0 was labelled a security fix).

If they had used a sensible numbering system, they could have release 4.25 by now, and still be releasing quicker.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Skuto]

Type Inference in 9.0 wasn't a security fix. Reducing memory usage by 30-50% in 7.0 wasn't either. (I'm sure the other releases had improvements other than security fixes, just nothing that interested me personally).

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[allo]

http://chromium.hybridsource.org/the-iron-scam

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd put my money on "just an idiot". He posts so much that I couldn't help to notice him. He's currently Slashdot's "Most Active Commenters"

Anybody who thinks Kim Jong-il was a great man (but greater than Hitler?), I wouldn't necessarily count as a public relations genius. But who knows, I've seen some pretty weird spam.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Chryana]

Wow, looking at the screenshots from that browser, it seems the developers of that browser think that "normal people" like to have some of their valuable screen estate wasted with Facebook buttons and small pictures of their friends... No thank you, I'd rather keep that crap in its own tab. Bring you lame astroturfing elsewhere.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't Firefox have a proper API for extensions that doesn't break with every single version?

That API is called "JetPack", addons that use it are also called restartless. The addons that need restarting use the XUL API.

XUL based extensions can change anything in the way the browser works (that's how powerful they are), JetPack extensions are less powerful, but they don't break with upgrades.

Also, extensions are checked automatically and if no errors are reported they are upgraded automatically. What ancient extensions are you using that break with every new version? I've got over 30 extensions installed and none have problems.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[LizardKing]

New releases usually are though.

Bollocks are they, check the FTP server ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/. I've just downloaded the 64 bit version of Firefox 9.0 for Linux from there.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[maroberts]

It used to leak like a sieve; as far as I'm aware its old habitys have been cured in the last few versions

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[bananaquackmoo]

Well lucky you. If I leave Firefox on overnight it eats up over 700MB of memory.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect that you are on Windows, right? I left Firefox when it started crashing multiple times a day (memory leak? don't care, shouldn't crash) on Linux. I can't say that Chrome doesn't crash at all but it does so much less frequently than Firefox *on Linux*.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, then leave it open overnight. Firefox leaks like a sieve.

I never close firefox on my living room computer. It's been up for two weeks since I last did a reboot, and it's currently using up 256.6 mb of RAM. Doesn't seem like it's leaking.

I am seeing that it spawned 26 threads, which looks excessive. I assume it's a thread pool for when they actually need it, and that they're not really active right now.

[rant]Ok, I love how these threads go..."Firefox leaks memory, is bloated, is slow, and Chrome is so much faster." Then you read into the comments a bit more and find out that it's not necessarily Firefox that's the problem it's the bagillion add-ons people have stuck on their Firefox installs that are leaking memory and causing crashes. Reminds me of the early days of Windows 95's tray! Now, I'm not going to take the total blame away from Mozilla on this, as they were the architects of the add-on APIs, but to put the whole blame on Firefox when it's the poorly written add-ons causing all these problems is just asinine. Oh, and so is leaving a desktop system on for two weeks without rebooting, and leaving all your apps open during that time. Why, Lord, why? Anyone who has a technical knowledge of computing knows that the longer you leave any desktop OS running with apps still running the more likely you are to suffer application and OS crashing due to bad memory management or just poorly exiting applications. You have bookmarks, you have "Open recent files" options in your apps, Hell, OS X Lion will reopen everything for you after a shutdown or reboot. Why in God's green Earth would you need to leave a machine running that long with all your apps still running? Ok, torrents, I get that, ONE APP! Maybe some background stuff, but why a browser? Makes no sense, but to each his/her own, I guess.[/rant]

Not looking for replies, just wanted to get that off my chest. Things that defy common sense like that really turn my crank. But, I'm good now. Ok.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[snevig]

Chrome spawns one thread for each tab, extension and plug-in in addition to a "Browser" thread and a "GPU Process" thread. A summary of the processes is provided in Chrome's task manager (Shift + Esc or right-click on Chrome's chrome and select Task Manager).

Chrome uses significantly more resources than Firefox however it does not suffer from the horrid memory leaks that have plagued Firefox for years: Mozilla Gets "Tough" on Firefox Memory Leaks

As the article states, the memory leaks are a well-known problem. It's an issue that the developers do not seem to be able to fix.

Chrome's performance is exceptional and stable. Firefox's performance is also exceptional at first launch but it can degrade in a matter of minutes to a choppy, annoying experience. If you're using Firefox and haven't already done so, try the Memory Restart add-on. Be sure to display the add-on bar to watch the memory inflate. In my experience, performance starts to degrade around 600 MB.

In a world where RAM is dirt cheap, Chrome is welcome to all it wants to use as long as it maintains its performance. I have 8 GB of RAM installed and rarely see total usage beyond 3 GB.

I switched to Chrome yesterday after at least five years of primary Firefox usage. I'm a bit sad to leave Firefox behind, but I had tired of restarting it four or five times a day just to keep the memory in check.

Ironically, it was the Google toolbar that had kept me tied to Firefox for the last year. I'm now using the Context Search extension in Chrome to achieve similar functionality to the Google toolbar "buttons" in Firefox.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Toonol]

Javascript execution is a good and worthy improvement. I just wish I could get the faster javascript in a UI that was similar to... six versions ago? Seven?

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[dryeo]

I'd suggest going back to using the suite. SeaMonkey does most of what Firefox does with less of a footprint.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[amicusNYCL]

Test for Firefox 9.0 and you've determined what you need to know about the client. Leave your "everything in window.navigator" hack for other browsers.

It is commonly accepted that testing for specific features, instead of specific browser versions, is the better practice. I'm not trying to argue that everything you need to know about a browser is in the window.navigator object, but testing for specific browsers and versions went out of style several years ago.

For example, if you're using ajax, instead of trying to figure out if the client is a specific version of IE you should just test for the existence of the XMLHttpRequest object.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[alexo]

I'm still waiting for them to fix bug 490122. Opened over 2.5 years ago, 296 comments.
Not to mention bug 484964, also over 2.5 years old, recently marked as a duplicate of the above.

I believe that pages with lots of images or thumbnails (in particular Google image search et al.) exacerbate the problem.
Add AutoPager to the mix and you got yourself a memory hog that:

1) Pauses every 10 seconds or so for about a second (or even more), affecting videos, typing, everything...
and, more importantly, uses 100% CPU so it impacts other programs as well. I have to close it in order to watch a video.

2) Eventually exhausts memory and hangs forever at 100% CPU usage.

Seriously, it's like a car engine that keeps overheating while the mechanics are concerned with the equalizer controls on the sound system.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[alexo]

bug 490122. Opened over 2.5 years ago, 296 comments.
bug 484964, also over 2.5 years old, recently marked as a duplicate of the above.

Forgot to mention: both bugs "Assigned To: Nobody; OK to take it and work on it"

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[cp.tar]

This is why I love Tree Style Tabs. You get the tab bar on the left (or wherever else you like it), tabs structured hierarchically, collapsible trees and all that fancy stuff, including vertical screen estate.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats great for both of you, but my firefox routinely takes up 2GB of system RAM. It has been this way for at least 5 years over all it's versions. Chrome has never been able to reach that level of RAM usage, not ever. There have been many postings by many users about the Firefox memory problem over the years, and I am glad they are finally trying to do something about it.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[hairyfeet]

Thanks for the advice, just a couple of questions: Does it support ABP? And NoScript? I have ABP in Dragon but I do miss NoScript, frankly NoScript on my XP machine was the reason i tried to keep FF for so long.

And notice how quickly the fangirls squicked and modded me down? Is there a SINGLE thing I posted that hasn't been known since the dawn of time? Is there ANYBODY here that didn't know that FF runs like shit on AMD, that it spikes the CPU on single cores and netbooks and that it goes through memory like crap through a goose? Its not like I just made this stuff up off the top of my head folks, I can sit here and watch my mem and CPU load in AnVir Task Manager and literally typing this text in FF causes the CPU to jump with each keystroke!

Seriously when typing in a fricking text box causes CPUs to bounce like a hooptie on air shocks to quote the old K's Choice song "Something's Wrong". But I didn't try to push Dragon which is my main browser now, I sincerely hope one day FF devs will get their shit together and bring back the FF of yore. Frankly I could deal with memory leaks, its the CPU spikes I simply can't tolerate anymore. When I lose a good 40 minutes on the battery because it keeps slamming my E-350? "Something's Wrong".

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[bobcat7677]

Well, there is that...and the whole stability issue. I am still not interested until it gets stable. I guess some people have had some success with it not crashing, but it crashes all the time for me and my wife on different computers/OSs. And no, we don't run any special extensions or anything. Chrome doesn't crash doing the same thing on the same machine...so we use that now.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[GameMaster]

Also, from what I've heard, much of Chrome's recent "growth" in install base is a function of the malware-esque techniques that Google has been using to have auto-install when people install other, popular, software packages. This just means it's on their system. It doesn't mean that they're actually using it.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Requiem18th]

It's too late because Google is putting a formidable marketing force behind Chrome. We need some Firefox super bowl ads, oh an let's advertise it in a very high traffic page like youtube!

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[GameMaster]

Do you happen to use any plug-ins with it? The problem may be with a third party software and not Firefox.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[gstrickler]

Run the Peacekeeper benchmark and watch during the Canvas and HTML5 video tests. You'll see that Chrome and Firefox are the only MAJOR browsers that don't suck at video and Canvas. Overall, Opera 11.6 performed well, but video was jerky on all supported codecs. Chrome (16.0.x tested) handled all the codecs correctly, handled the Canvas test correctly, and was fastest overall. FF (8.0.1 tested) handled most of the codecs, handled Canvas correctly, but overall performance was about 1/2 that of Chrome. Safari 5.x on Mac OS 10.6 handles video well, but didn't do well on the current Canvas test and failed to complete the benchmark.

Notes: I tested on WinXP and Mac OS 10.6, therefore, I haven't tried IE9. I did not have Adobe Flash installed, except the built-in Flash in Chrome, so Chrome may (or may not) have had an advantage on the video codecs. Tests were run on 1.86GHz and 2.2GHz Core2 Duo systems with plenty of RAM and decent video controllers (plenty fast enough for video and low/mid range games, but not anything a "gamer" would even consider). YMMV.

With so much video on the internet these days, and especially now that Adobe has finally acknowledged that Flash isn't the future, I believe that the above tests a relevant to the average user. Until Opera addresses the poor video playback issue, no amount of JS performance is going to win them market share. IE9 being Win7 only (Vista doesn't count) puts some limits on it's market for now. So, it comes down to Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Safari on Windows sucks.

So, the real choice for most users comes down to Chrome vs Firefox, and both are good choices (each with strengths and weaknesses). Safari (Mac OS), IE (Win) have the advantage of being installed by default, and they can be competitive on their native platforms if you're using the latest versions, but don't have much to recommend them beyond being preinstalled. Chrome is faster, FF has more plugins and configurability. Take your pick.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is often a particular plug-in or extension, and not Firefox itself.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? That comment is 5: Insightful that most people install Chrome, because it's Google and a known brandname?

Let's try
- I don't like to change browsers
- Firefox was unstable, laggy and a memory hog for *several years* so I decided I needed to change browsers
- Last time I looked, Opera UI was clunky and not an enjoyable user experience
- Last time I looked, Internet explorer was/is/has been a security risk for too long that I have little trust in it

So let me get this right. I'm a Google fan boy or Google zombie because I tried Chrome. This obviously had nothing to do with Chrome's ease of use inc plugins, stability, starting quickly, rendering pages quickly, ease of update, and its reputation of being secure?

I suggest the Slashdot moderators need to be moderated.

AC

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Mitchell314]

I leave stuff open all the time on my machine, and I have no problems. It's a somewhat old machine (basic line macbook from 2008), but I've never had any problems with keeping it [Linux or OS X partition] running for weeks or months. Nor do I have a problem with having Firefox open indefinitely, so long as I keep away from Flash apps. I have chrome too (I got it early, before it was cool and mainstream :P), and it's the same situation. Perfectly good until a plugin goes wonky; though the rest of the chrome browser didn't [usually] crash.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[RNelson]

Does it support ABP? And NoScript?

Yes. I have SeaMonkey running with both of them.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[InsightIn140Bytes]

How is it idiotic to say that most people use web for socializing? Because RockMelt is browser made exactly for that. It already has like 2 million users and $40 million from investors, so yes it's a real thing used by many people. It's good to provide alternative views because most of the people get stuck in their own minds.

And just because I work in advertising doesn't mean my job involves advertising on slashdot. There are many geeks that do, but obviously they're bit hesitant to say so because on slashdot it's like admitting that you work for the devil (this probably counts for those slashdotters who work for MS too).

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting - thanks for getting back to me on that. I'd still argue that that's not actually a scam, but if the source code really is so close I'm... impressed. It really is "Recompile Chromium and release"...

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

My point was not that window.navigator doesn't contain the information you need, but rather that iterating through every property is a stupid way to test for specific features.

If you want to know whether the window.navigator object contains certain keys, you check for window.navigator.key1, window.navigator.key2, etc. You don't just iterate through the whole thing to find what you're looking for.

The window.navigator object contains this finite list of properties and methods (on Firefox - similar lists can be created for any other browser) - and not even all of them are of interest to you. There's absolutely no reason to use "for...in".

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[RobbieCrash]

Most users don't have any problems with memory usage, don't care about how the footprint compares with this or that version of chrome etc.

Most users don't care about how the memory footprint compares, but they do care that "when Firefox is like open and stuff, everything else is kinda like I dunno slower and stuff, so I switched to Chrome cause you said it was fast. Now my whole computer is faster!"

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Billly Gates]

Come on moderators this is not flamebait.

Chrome does not follow the RFC standards on TCP/IP so it can have faster loading time. This can wreck havoc on some poorly configured routers, proxies, and SPDY requests with firewalls as well. IE 9 has some of the same issues but not as much as Chrome as they are imitating the same tricks with fast response and loads aka packet storm. Many corporations want to stay with IE 8 for these reasons.

Every browser has its strengths and weaknesses. I will say all IE and Chrome are improving nicely to compete agaisnt Firefox and it looks like we can finally adopt standards and stop sticking with 1 browser for 7 years like we did with IE 6. That is a good thing.

I have a few issues with Chrome myself as I found it crashes often with Flash when I watch movies online or listen to music on youtube. Firefox is HUGE and buggy, and IE lacks the addons and is a little behind with HTML 5 support. So there I bashed all of them

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[theguyfromsaturn]

I also find that Chromium (don't know about Chrome) has more trouble with flash media than Firefox. In Chromium, some videos take forever to download, but if I try it in Firefox (8) it does so instantly and start playing right away. I've repeated the operation on those sites where I observed this and it was quite constant. I don't know why that should be. But it certainly doesn't incite me to switch over.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[RocketRabbit]

I heard Rockmelt spies on you to an even larger degree than Chrome, and that it actually searches your hard drive for credit card numbers and bank account information.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[dryeo]

It runs pretty well all Firefox extensions since SM 2 including noscript and ABP and generally is faster. I haven't benchmarked it in a long time but there was a time when SeaMonkey could load Slashdot close to twice as fast as Firefox, this on a dialup connection where the limiting factor should be how fast it can download the page, not spiking the CPU for twice as long. Memory usage is probably close to the same, right now with about 120 tabs open on an old 1GB machine I have 536 MBs free. This is an old OS/2 box so the operating system itself is much lighter even with 15 years of cruft.
Possibly the problem with AMD and Firefox is the profile guided build they do. If they're using Intel hardware, it's going to be optimized for Intel. Another option for you would be to try the mingw build.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[Dahan]

Chrome does not follow the RFC standards on TCP/IP so it can have faster loading time.

What, does it include its own implementation of TCP that uses raw sockets or something? No? Then it must be using the TCP/IP implementation that comes with the OS it's running on. SPDY isn't some tweaked non-standard version of TCP/IP--it's a tweaked non-standard version of HTTP (or perhaps a layer between HTTP and TCP, depending on how you look at things).

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[hairyfeet]

Wouldn't happen to have a link? all I found under mingW search was links to the compiler. i've tried Pale Moon (which is an SSE optimized FF) but frankly it really didn't seem to help much. You'd think that being a FOSS browser they would use a FOSS toolchain like GCC or Open64 but if they are using the Intel compiler that would explain why FF runs like shit on AMD.

All I know is it seems to do a lot less spiking on this old 1.6GHz P4 I'm working on for a customer than my brand new E-350 or even my 6 core Thuban so I have to wonder if its not something they are doing which makes it favor Intel CPUs. Since I no longer sell Intel CPUs since it came out they were bribing OEMs that makes the current FF a non starter for me, but both Chromium and Dragon seem to be CPU agnostic. If this Mingw build you are talking about allows FF or Seamonkey either one to run well on AMD chips i'll be happy to add it to my freeware CD I give to every customer as well as try it myself, as I do try to spread free software where i can.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[vga_init]

Chrome does consume more memory than Firefox tab for tab, but one important thing to note about Chrome's memory usage is that even though it can take a bit of memory, you are more likely to get it back. Open up 50 tabs and close all but 1, and Chrome will shed the resources almost instantaneously.. Firefox will take longer to free up memory and won't give all of it back. This works great for me because, while I usually go long periods of time between closing the browser completely, I open and close tabs constantly, so each new tab in Chrome is like a fresh start, whereas with Firefox it's all still running in the same process.

Chrome's modular design is the real reason I use Chrome. It not only makes it faster but more reliable and efficient as well.

The only thing I don't like about Chrome is that the Linux port is not as good as the (presumably native) Windows build. I'd stick with Firefox just because it's more free and it runs beautifully on Linux.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[arose]

Try disabling Flash.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[arose]

Doesn't Firefox have a proper API for extensions that doesn't break with every single version?

They do, but didn't originally. It's not widely used yet.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[DMUTPeregrine]

Chrome doesn't work for me, since it does not allow sidebar tabs. Opera, on the other hand, does. Still no tree-style tabs, but I can live without that for a while. This announcement just served as a nice reminder to uninstall Firefox.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[DMUTPeregrine]

I agree, it's the one thing Opera is missing for me. Happily tabs can at least be put in the sidebar and grouped.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[atamido]

This is why I love Tree Style Tabs. You get the tab bar on the left (or wherever else you like it), tabs structured hierarchically, collapsible trees and all that fancy stuff, including vertical screen estate.

I'm also quite pleased with Tree Style Tabs. When I'm researching something, I can have dozens of tabs open and organized by how I got to each one. No other browser can have as many tabs and be even remotely useful for finding them.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[gstrickler]

FF 9 wasn't showing as available earlier, but I just downloaded in and ran Peacekeeper. My testing shows a slight (~3%) decrease in JS performance vs FF8.01. While that's trivial, it's far short of the 20%-30% increase they're claiming.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[cbhacking]

Save you a bit of searching:
EasyList Ad Blocking List - http://easylist-msie.adblockplus.org/easylist.tpl
EasyPrivacy Tracking Protection List - http://easylist-msie.adblockplus.org/easyprivacy.tpl

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late

[allo]

Scam is a big word. But chromium is just okay, thats the message.

Just because of speed?

[Turnerj]

Speed was only half the issue that drove people away, the actual rapid releases and incompatibilities with add-ons with these releases among other things.

Re:Just because of speed?

[ByOhTek]

Agreed.

Actually, I still use an older version of Firefox. The "MeTo ChromeAlike" interface of the newer versions annoys the hell out of me. It's still faster than any version of IE I can use with current rules by my employer. Never cared for the Opera or Chrome interfaces, and I don't trust Chrome for security...

So, maybe it isn't that I stopped using Firefox, so much as that I haven't bothered upgrading. Firefox 4+ versions have been kindof like Windows ME or Vista, IMO.

Re:Just because of speed?

[ThePhilips]

I'm staying with FireFox (3.6) solely for the extensions.

I have accepted the compromise that flexible configurable browser would be always losing in the performance department. And I'm fine with it.

All this rabid JS/etc performance is only needed on the handful of websites I actually do not use. Neither I see the live feed scrolling or sweeping or slide-out or fade-in thingies, a modern replacement of marquee and blink tags, as something I'm sorely missing.

Re:Just because of speed?

[AmIAnAi]

So true. I switched to Chrome at the weekend for exactly this reason. I can't remember when JS or render speed were an issue for me, but useability just keeps going down with FF.

Let's stop with the posts anouncing the latest release and wake me up when the Firefox devs are listening to their users once more.

Re:Just because of speed?

[somersault]

So you don't trust the security of a browser that's actively having its bugs fixed, but you're not upgrading the browser you have - a browser for which there must be known exploits?

Re:Just because of speed?

[Lennie]

Actually 3.6 currently still gets security updates, but don't count on that remaining true for long.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Lennie]

It also helps to improve the performance of the interface.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Warma]

This probably isn't worth a post, but I want to give Firefox props for the option of turning that interface off. I did so, and got back the clean and simple interface from Firefox 3.x.

I actually I tend to exclusively use programs that allow this, as Interfaces differing from the visual standard set by all your other programs is distracting.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're confusing Firefox with Chrome.

Re:Just because of speed?

[AbRASiON]

Yep, I keep getting mocked for using 3.6.
Fact is, they keep patching the security - it's at 3.6.24 - it was like 3.6.11 when they first released 4.0
It's slow, no question - but ALL my addons work AND it's not ugly, it works precisely how I want from a user interface perspective.

I will change, no doubt - but it's unlikely I'll go to another version of FF.

Re:Just because of speed?

[eexaa]

Rapid release isn't the actual problem for extensions - most of them are OK whenever you manually edit them and expand their version-support range. Basically, it is just another example of "why version number checks are totally wrong". I hope they can improve it soon with feature-presence checking or something similar.

Re:Just because of speed?

[ByOhTek]

I didn't know you could do that. I'll have to consider upgrading.

Re:Just because of speed?

[ByOhTek]

Yes. Simply put, I'm more confident in the 3.x Firefox being more secure on average, than Chrome, I'm not confident in the abilities of the Chrome devs.

And the newer versions of Firefox, I just can't stand the UI. With careful browsing habits, 3.x Firefox is secure enough.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Speed was only half the issue

Nope. Speed is a tiny, tiny portion of the issue. Most people just don't give a shit about JS performance simply because it doesn't matter for most people. Most people are simply not going to notice 1ms here and 1ms there when loading a page.

99% of FF's problem is the FF developers. You said it yourself, "the actual rapid releases and incompatibilities with add-ons with these releases among other things." And make things worse, a lot of really dumb people have in turn adopted this same type of release insanity which in turn creates new problems elsewhere with yet more resentment for FF. It used to be people cared a lot about version numbers. These days, no one gives a shit and just about everyone is used to ignoring version numbers. Word of mouth is everything. And word of mouth is what is kill FF because of developer stupidity.

Re:Just because of speed?

[pankkake]

I hope they can improve it soon with feature-presence checking or something similar.

They do it already, and automatically bump the version numbers (sure, it could be done better). I've never had issues with incompatible extensions and the rapid releases, with 30+ extensions. I guess the complaints are coming from people who don't actually use Firefox.

Re:Just because of speed?

[rmstar]

I'm staying with FireFox (3.6) solely for the extensions.

I'm hearing that a lot, but the fact is that all the extensions I use (firebug, abp, it's all text, and some others) just run fine with the latest firefox too. What addon is it that does not work?

Re:Just because of speed?

[mwvdlee]

Not even the rapid releases, but rather the insistance on incrementing the otherwise completely meaningless and arbitrary major version every release.
It seems more and more marketing people are getting involved with FOSS nowadays. I appreciate they want to help, but I wish they wouldn't, or atleast not get involved with the actual product.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Sepodati]

People getting all bent over UIs is always funny to me. I could care less where the address bar or tabs are. Nearly all of my time is spent reading whatever is in the browser window, so why should I care about tab/address locations?

I find the same hilarity in people bitching and moaning about Unity. Again, nearly ALL of my time is spent in an application. I only interface with Unity to start the damn thing...

I realize that there are many other use cases and specific UI elements can cause issues for people even though I don't experience them... but vague wining about UI or Unity make me chuckle... Plus all you normally hear is bitching, so I like to throw out a "I don't care if it changed" voice every now and then.

Re:Just because of speed?

[geminidomino]

HOW? Please, for the love of all that is good and right, tell me. When did this option appear and where the hell are they hiding it?

Re:Just because of speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Right-click on the tab bar / title bar, uncheck 'tabs on top'

You might want to check 'menu bar', too.

This option has always been there.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Slyfox696]

I went back to Firefox 4 because YSlow in Firebug doesn't work after 4.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Merk42]

You didn't like the rapid release model of Firefox so you switched to Chrome which has had 16 versions in 3 years?

Re:Just because of speed?

[Slyfox696]

They do it already, and automatically bump the version numbers (sure, it could be done better).

I've never had issues with incompatible extensions and the rapid releases, with 30+ extensions. I guess the complaints are coming from people who don't actually use Firefox.

I use Firefox and YSlow doesn't work past version 4. Perhaps the extensions you use are working, and that's great for you, but I have to stay on version 4 until the add-on gets updated. I guess the point I'm making is your comments about people who don't like the rapid release must not be using Firefox is incredibly narrow, since you're basically using a survey of one.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your bitching that they are releasing too much? Seriously? Before we were getting something every 2.5 years. I like this better thank you. New features as they are done. Instead of waaaaaaaaaaaaaaiting.

Too fast thats a new one. *especially* in open source.

Especially considering the cadence the browser everyone is moving to has a similar (if not faster cadence)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#Release_history

Whatever retardo gave you the idea that release slowly is a good idea is just that a retardo.

Re:Just because of speed?

[somersault]

Nearly all of my time is spent reading whatever is in the browser window, so why should I care about tab/address locations?

Because Chrome wastes way less space with all that shit. It has a really similar layout to how I used to always rearrange Firefox to try to make more space, except it has the bonus of getting rid of the menu too.

The only way they could improve on it would be to have an option to auto-hide the menu at the top. I just Googled and it looks like that is an "experimental" option in the about:flags page, but it's only in Chromium and the Windows version of Chrome.

Re:Just because of speed?

[pmontra]

At https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/yslow/versions/ I read "Version 3.0.4 Released August 8, 2011 212.0 KB Works with Firefox 3.0 - 10.* "

Re:Just because of speed?

[ThePhilips]

I'm staying with FireFox (3.6) solely for the extensions.

I'm hearing that a lot, but the fact is that all the extensions I use (firebug, abp, it's all text, and some others) just run fine with the latest firefox too. What addon is it that does not work?

Poor choice of words on my part. It is not that I stay with 3.6 for extensions - it is that I'm staying with FireFox (the browser) for extensions. Last time I was checking, most my extensions should work on the new versions. The last one missing was the "rein, das Monochrome" theme and even it was updated few months ago.

Re 3.6. I have some subtle customizations applied in the about:config which one can never be sure that new versions still provide. Neither I can't recall now all the customizations applied. (E.g. remove the new tab button from tab bar, double click selects line, location of tab close button, etc.) Literally every major upgrade starting with the Fx 2.0 was pain in the butt because developers were continuously trimming the GUI-less options from the about:config. One had to resort to the extensions or whatnot to replace/augment the browser features/behavior to bring it in accord with my workflow and habits.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I use Firefox and YSlow doesn't work past version 4. Perhaps the extensions you use are working, and that's great for you, but I have to stay on version 4 until the add-on gets updated.

Have you tried going into about:config and creating a false valued boolean for "extensions.checkCompatibility.9.0" (replace 9.0 with relevant major version number or the word "nightly") in order to turn off checking for yslow?

I have a handful of extensions that haven't been updated for over a year, but work just fine if I turn off compatibility checking.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

I find the same hilarity in people bitching and moaning about Unity. Again, nearly ALL of my time is spent in an application. I only interface with Unity to start the damn thing...

Well, that's your usage pattern. My usage pattern is completely different. I constantly switch between lots of different applications. I handle a multitude of files of different types, for different purposes, with different applications. How easy I can do that is essential to my work flow. Note that the most essential part of that isn't even features (although they are important, too), it's stability of features. It's not having to relearn everything every other day just because someone has decided that the new way is the "right" way, and therefore everyone has to do it that way. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against new ways of doing things. But I'm against new ways being forced on me. Give me the option, and eventually, when I've got time for it, I'll try it out, and if I like it I'll use it. And if nobody likes your shit, it doesn't mean everybody is just stupid; maybe you made an error. Which is not really a problem as long as you don't force your error on everybody. When an old feature happens to not be used any more by many people through their own choice, then you may think about removing that feature (but please, don't make that decision lightly).

In short: Options, even unusual ones, are good. Mandatory changes are bad. Removal of effectively unused options can be well-justified. Removal of options in wide use is almost always inexcusable.

Re:Just because of speed?

[RDW]

Actually 3.6 currently still gets security updates, but don't count on that remaining true for long.

Possibly until April, then they're talking about a new LTS-style 'extended support release' supported in parallel with the crazy dev cycle of the main product as a sop to 'enterprise' users:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:Proposal

'Extended' seems to mean a year at best, though, and they won't exactly be encouraging widespread use ('The ESR will not be marketed through mozilla.com properties other than the Enterprise wiki page, staging servers, and/or blogs.').

Re:Just because of speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

By View>Toolbar>Menu Bar, also unclick Tabs on top. Hope this is what you meant by FF 3.X UI.

Re:Just because of speed?

[NickFortune]

I find the same hilarity in people bitching and moaning about Unity. Again, nearly ALL of my time is spent in an application. I only interface with Unity to start the damn thing...

Personally, I derive vast amusement from those all too common cases where people whinge and whine about other people expressing their opinions in a public forum.

Sometimes they even try and disguise their bitching and moaning as amusement. I find that even more hillarious!

Re:Just because of speed?

[Certhas]

It's 4 clicks or so to get the non chrome UI in the newer firefox releases and now that people have had time to adjust to the rapid release schedule add on compatibility is not really an issue anymore. I'm on the Beta chanel and haven't had an add on break in a long time.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

It always was there. Right-click on menu (or an empty zone on the tab strip, or whatever), then check or uncheck what you want to make appear: menus, bars, tabs on top, customization...

Re:Just because of speed?

[kcitren]

Vimperator. It's a great plugin for Firefox that adds Vim keybindings. But more that that, it greatly cleans up the UI. No Navigation bar [though that can be reenabled], Bookmarks bar, etc.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Inda]

I installed an add-on/theme/toolbar changer about 2 years ago. I couldn't tell you the name (from this work PC) but it was something like "minimalist".

It has survived all updates.

I couldn't even tell you what the "MeTo ChromeAlike" interface looks like, as I've never seen it.

Peeps, if you don't like how FF looks, change it. It was one of the thing that drew us all to FF in the first place - the ability to change stuff we didn't like.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Sepodati]

I see two extra lines of text on the Slashdot homepage when comparing Firefox to Chrome. Assuming FF3.x gives you the same "benefit" at the risk of eventually losing security updates and features, I just don't see it.

I'm not trying to get anyone to switch to anything... use what you want.

Re:Just because of speed?

[archen]

If you're that worried about space, just use the fullscreen function. Firefox even has an option that allows tabs to stay in fullscreen.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Rolgar]

Is Mozilla necessarily the best browser now? Considering the number of people switching, I guess not. But there are reasons I prefer Mozilla despite the issues others have raised. I like that Mozilla is independent of the pure profit motive. I don't trust Chrome for privacy as much as I do Mozilla. I also like to use Google for GMail, Search, Documents and maps. By using Mozilla, I hope that I can give Google good incentive to play fair to keep me as a user.

I like Sync. By supporting the third browser, I hope to help the maintain the market of multiple "good enough" browsers. If Mozilla falls into disuse, then we are back down to 2 browsers, with it being very difficult for a third option to get back in the game. Being on Debian at home, I like having two options (I don't consider the Linux-only browsers as a real option because of Sync) even though I have check Sid to get the latest update quicker.

I like the current update situation better than waiting 1.5-2 years for the latest improvements, but I've read about concerns with the API changes with the rapid release, and I hope the Mozilla team can do something to stabilize that. I've been very happy with the improvements with the browser this year. I'm still hopeful that the multi-process feature will be implemented which will squelch my biggest grip with the current browser, since the browser should stop locking when it is loading 20 tabs.

Maybe I'm just a creature of habit in my own way. I've used Firefox since it was called Phoenix at around version 0.6. I can still recall before version 1.0 came out, when several of my co-workers who were more experienced than myself came to me for advice on switching browsers because of a rash of IE exploits came out. After I showed them the power of tabs, being able to open dozens of tabs with a single click to check dozens of sites with minimal effort, and the ability to power up your browser with add-ons, they all became converts to the point of celebrating the 1.0 release.

That said, I think the biggest problem is that when the browser updates, many of the extensions break. I think they need to do a better job of encouraging add-on programmers to be ready for a new release before the new version releases, then most users won't be concerned with updates when they happen.

Re:Just because of speed?

[0123456]

Because Chrome wastes way less space with all that shit.

Yeah, and? I have a 1920x1080 monitor, so I'm totally worried about programs using a few pixels to display useful information at all times.

Re:Just because of speed?

[geminidomino]

Oh... as much as I loathe tabs on top, I was hoping there was more to it. Damn...

Re:Just because of speed?

[somersault]

I was considering that too.

I just checked and in fact Firefox does things the way I'd want them to be done when in full screen mode.

The killer of me switching now would be that it doesn't have synch built in, and with the number of Chrome installs I have (5), that is a bit of a PITA. Presumably there are extensions to do that, but right now I'm not fussed.

I also just noticed that on Windows 7 even Chrome wastes space at the top of the menu, same as IE.. however in Linux it is nice and compact.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

How does the same crap that gets posted in every Firefox article gets modded as Insightful is beyond me.

incompatibilities with add-ons

Which ones? Haven't seen it once since Firefox 4.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome has the best security record of any browser. You're an idiot.

Re:Just because of speed?

[somersault]

I have one too (and I use my laptop display for secondary stuff like media controls) but that doesn't mean that I like looking at crap that doesn't need to be there any more than I want an unmovable clock top and center on my display (hi, Gnome Shell).

How is a blank 1890x50 px area along the top of your browser window "useful information", exactly?

Re:Just because of speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/common-questions-after-upgrading-firefox-36

Re:Just because of speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome's version system doesn't break plugins, in my experience. I have a Firefox plugin that needs to be updated every time Firefox gets updated, for no other reason than a number change in the plugin.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you refer to Firefox as "Mozilla", something it hasn't been called for surely at least half a decade?

Re:Just because of speed?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Chrome's version system doesn't break plugins, in my experience. I have a Firefox plugin that needs to be updated every time Firefox gets updated, for no other reason than a number change in the plugin.

That's a reportable bug now.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

You've never had to support IE Tabs in enterprise. Lucky you.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially on my windows machine. The transparency effect getting applied to just about everything and generally making it unreadable to me without switching the system colors (black on dark blue with hazy grey around it instead of contrasting the font with white, are you kidding me?). And the addon bar with the huge x that I have clicked on more than one occasion. I don't have the skills or knowledge necessary to change those things through making a custom theme with CSS. But you think that they would add an option to switch to the old interface. After all, over a fifth of people still use FF 3.6 or earlier. More choices, not less!

Re:Just because of speed?

[Urza9814]

I have six extensions currently installed -- three disabled because I gave up on keeping them updated. It's getting a bit better now, but it used to be every Firefox update I'd have to manually update any extension I wanted to keep. Now most are automatic and not all need updated, but I still, for example, have had to manually update Firebug pretty much every single time I want to use it. Extensions that I have that now seem to update automatically are Flashblock and MAFIAAFire Redirector. Extensions I gave up on because of the update hell are Modify Headers, Page Speed, and Resurrect Pages. I literally dumped half of my extensions because it was such a pain in the ass to keep them updated. That isn't good.

Re:Just because of speed?

[jez9999]

Try installing Firefox 3 theme for Firefox 4+ to solve all the nasty transparency effect issues of the default theme and returning the look (largely) to that of Firefox 3.

Re:Just because of speed?

[jez9999]

Unfortunately, they also decided to go ahead with an update to Firefox 8 which disabled the user's custom theme for the large majority of users upgrading, even if the custom theme was compatible with Firefox 8. Of course, most users thought that it had been disabled because it was incompatible. As far as I know there are no plans to undo this damage, and so now every major theme has experiences a massive drop in the number of users who have it enabled.

Re:Just because of speed?

[stickyboot]

I found that funny too. People complain about the rapid release cycle of firefox, then tell you to use chrome. To be fair, the second part of the argument, is that their archaic, poorly maintained mash of firefox plugins stopped working and its because of the new release schedule (which is partly true, but hardly the part of the bigger issues that firefox is facing and dealing with rather well). Google's chrome is slick now, just as firefox was back a few years ago was, but I guess I am not truly convinced that chrome wont face the same issues that firefox is facing today. Plus, It seems to me that giving into chrome and abandoning firefox hands the browser market back to the big guys to push their will onto the web, just as IE had done prior to firefox. I think chrome is a good browser, and I sometimes use it, but I find mozilla's policies fall more in line with my own regarding many aspects, and mainly stick to firefox.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Idbar]

You mean you just made the menu permanently available, like the same thing that happens when you hit "Alt"?

I don't get all the whining about Firefox of some people. As you said, it has to be probably the one of the most (if not THE most) flexible customizable browsers. But people feel threatened because their trying to make it more appealing to the masses.

Re:Just because of speed?

[DutchUncle]

People getting all bent over UIs is always funny to me. I could care less where the address bar or tabs are.

I'll put that in reverse: I've gotten used to where things are, so I'm ticked off when the developers feel the need to screw around with them and confuse me. They want to make it rearrange-able, fine; just leave it the **** alone as the default.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Shining Celebi]

The killer of me switching now would be that it doesn't have synch built in, and with the number of Chrome installs I have (5), that is a bit of a PITA. Presumably there are extensions to do that, but right now I'm not fussed.

Firefox does have Sync built in - it has since version 4, I think. It can sync history, bookmarks, etc. It's right there on whatever they call the orange menu.

I wasn't big on it at first, but "Open Tabs From A Different Computer" is probably the best browser UI idea in a while.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's meaningless and arbitrary why be bothered about it?

Re:Just because of speed?

[somersault]

Thanks, that sounds pretty cool.. I'm going to go take FF for a spin on Android - the built in browser apps' synch is buggy for me.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess the complaints are coming from people who don't actually use Firefox.

Or people who have extensions that don't do that. For example my banks uses a security addon which takes a while to update to the new cycle. So I have to postpone updating FF for, usually, 1 month because of it.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox actually lets you customize the UI. I'm using Firefox 8 and it looks exactly the same as when I was using Firefox 3.0. Granted, I'm using it on Linux so I'm not sure if it is as easy on Windows and Mac, but I've barely had to do anything to keep it looking the same other than turning off "tabs on top" when they enabled that by default. Otherwise, it has just kept my settings.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

PimpZilla doesn't yet work in Firefox 8, and that's a show-stopper for me. I see no point in Firefox without the leopard skin print and bling.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Slyfox696]

I have not tried that, but I will.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Slyfox696]

Didn't work for me, on three different machines.

Re:Just because of speed?

[djdanlib]

16:9 aspect monitors really suck when you have all these programs and documents (such as websites) that are designed to be used/viewed in a portrait orientation. Anything they can do to reduce the vertical size of a program's GUI clutter is good by me. I'd rather have things that are available only as needed via a popup menu than an always-there titlebar, menu bar, URL bar, two toolbars, a bookmarks bar, a tab tray, a status bar, the OS dock/taskbar... you know what I mean? Condensing the GUI is good.

Re:Just because of speed?

[AmIAnAi]

It's not the rapid release cycle by itself that bothers me - if everything continued working I wouldn't care if there was a weekly update. As I said in my post it's the loss of usability that concerns me most - plugins not working, memory problems and the ever changing layout for no obvious benefit. Although I've only used Chrome intermittently since its first public betas it's UI feels far more stable and consistent than FF. And yes FF is becoming more Chrome-like, but not in a good way.

Re:Just because of speed?

[pankkake]

Uh, what? At least Firebug & Resurrect Pages work... I'm using them every day. I never had to do anything special, they auto-update.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Emetophobe]

It takes some tweaking to get it to look like Firefox 3.x:

1. Right click one of the toolbars to bring up the context menu and enable "Menu Bar" and disable "Tabs on Top"
2. Right click the navigation toolbar and select customize. Drag the home button to the left of the address bar and add the stop and reload buttons*
3. Download the Status-4-Ever extension to get a proper status bar
4. Set browser.urlbar.formatting.enabled to false in about:config (this disable url highlighting in the address bar)
5. Set browser.urlbar.trimURLs to false in about:config (this will show the protocol name in the address bar, i.e http:/// )
6. Download a classic theme (Optional)

*Note: The behaviour of the stop and reload buttons depends on the order in which you place them next to each other. If you place the stop button to the left of the reload button they will appear as two seperate buttons, but if you place the stop button to the right of the reload button it will appear as a single reload/stop button with combined functionality.

Re:Just because of speed?

[geminidomino]

Much nicer. Thank you. Still not great (And I'm still getting hard locks when Windows Update or steam is downloading?! WTF?) but better.

I don't suppose in your bag of tricks you have one more thing? A way to get the old Back/Forward buttons back? Pretty please?

Re:Just because of speed?

[RocketRabbit]

I think he means he doesn't trust a "free" browser made by ad salesmen.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

My complaint about Unity has specifically to do with the fact that "I only interface with Unity to start the damn thing".

It's a pain in the ass getting it to start damn things.

Re:Just because of speed?

[b4dc0d3r]

You're right it wasn't worth a post.

Actually, wait. A lot of poeple have been trying to figure that out. It's just a checkbox somewhere, I assume, otherwise you would have detailed exactly what you did to achieve that, some link or other reference.

Re:Just because of speed?

[gstrickler]

It's not the rapid release of fixes that's a problem. It's the constantly changing version numbers. Even if the new version would otherwise be compatible, the fact that it's identified as a new version breaks most plug-ins.

And then there is the issue of getting it validated for corporate use, where the testing and approval of a new "version" is far more difficult than getting approval for a minor version (.x) or security update. Chrome suffers from this as well.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Phoghat]

I'm on the Beta too, and I have 1 problem with FF that I can't seem to solve. I use Instructables.com site a lot and it doesn't render correctly. The page is squeezed in to the middle and appears about half size. The only reason I'm using Chrome is because I don't have that problem with that site. Hints to solve problem would be appreciated

Re:Just because of speed?

[caspy7]

Though 3.6 is still receiving security updates, the current version of Firefox possesses security features which 3.6 does not, making it more secure.
There may also be security fixes which have been architecturally prohibited in 3.6.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Certhas]

Peculiar, it renders correctly for me, and I assume for most others (as its a high profile page that, if it broke across the board would be fixed quickly). Does it work with a clean install/profile?

Re:Just because of speed?

[Emetophobe]

Whats wrong with the current back/forward buttons? Are you talking about the oversized back button with the smaller forward button?

The only thing I can think of is right click the navigation bar and select customize, then check "Use Small Icons".

Re:Just because of speed?

[geminidomino]

Annoying, but not a huge issue.

No, I mean the goddamn "click and hold" to get the history dropdown. I'm not on a tablet, and "click and hold" sucks.

Re:Just because of speed?

[AmiMoJo]

You seem to think that the browser is like the OS - just a means of getting to the actual content. It isn't, the browser is an app that processes information for me. I use it to find and narrow down a list of products until I can make a decision, and if someone decides to randomly break my work flow because Chrome does it differently or it's the new trendy buzzword feature then I get annoyed.

A lot of web developers make the same mistake you did. Most of their content has little inherent value, that only comes from my ability to process it. That is why a bad UI can make content utterly worthless.

Re:Just because of speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try right-clicking.

Re:Just because of speed?

[KillerLoop]

maybe this will be of help:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/backforward-dropmarker/

Re:Just because of speed?

[geminidomino]

That does, thank you.

I love how whenever someone talks about Fx's performance problems, the first thing they blame is the user for loading up on extensions (which isn't the only cause anyway), but they continue to shit all over usability so that you HAVE to top load extensions to make the damn thing remotely usable...

Fucking "designers"

Every time...

[xushi]

Every time I hear of a small or big release, they mention huge speed improvements in JS. Every time they put amazing speed increase percentages, such as this 20 - 30%...

I just don't get it..

Is JS really that bad?
Is Firefox's JS handling really so awful that one sees such `improvements` with every release?

And tbh, since the ol' days of FF 3.x, as a front end normal user, I can't really see such drastic improvement - if any - with webpages that have JS, especially the ones that have JS poorly coded into them (the vast majority...). It's still excruciatingly slow to load, refresh, and even drag the page up and down, with teeth-grinding latency and jerkiness...

But I stand corrected... but just an opinion form an ex user...

What are your comments? I'm interested to know..

Re:Every time...

[Lennie]

Have you tried disabling 'smooth scrolling' (Options/Preferences -> Advanced -> General-tab -> Browsing: use smooth scrolling), I personally don't like it.

It is on by default, someone thinks it is a feature.

Re:Every time...

[DrXym]

Is JS really that bad?

No JS is not that bad, it's just that sites are making more and more demands from it. Where once upon a time a site might have some simple functions and a few onclick handlers, now it's executing humoungous blocks of JS often tied to DOM calls. Look at apps like Emscripten for example or GWT which spew out a mass of JS code. The JS engine suddenly finds that the time it takes to parse, compile, garbage collect, execute and interact with the DOM suddenly makes a big deal of difference in performance when previously it might not have mattered so much.

The situation is bound to get even worse when tools appear which convert flash into HTML and HTML based animations with bloated JS runtimes of their own become increasingly common features on websites.

Re:Every time...

[erroneus]

Turns out that Javascript is expected to run faster than compiled assembly language and many people find the slowness to be an unbearable burden. So now Javascript is executed before it is downloaded to improve speed even more.

Re:Every time...

[foniksonik]

Client side presentation / GUI is the future. The trend is to build out data services and transaction handlers on the server but put the rest on the client. JavaScript templating merges the data with DOM markup. This should actually speed things up. Behaviors can be bound inline with the DOM rather than waiting for the browser to build the DOM tree from on page markup. I'm not talking Ajax, it can all be served up static, cached, synchronous with a REST URL that can be bookmarked.

The direction is because maintaining separate server code for desktop/mobile/tablet web plus apps and feeds (Apis) is becoming too burdensome.

Re:Every time...

[FriendlyPrimate]

In general, anytime code has to be generated by a machine, I'm skeptical. That stuff is going to be absolutely unmaintainable in 10 years. And the tools that generated that code will likely be long gone.

I agree that JS is being used for purposes for which it was never intended. For robust, maintainable applications, you need a strongly-typed language. It seems to me that Java Applets would have eventually filled this space perfectly (a strongly-typed language capable of interacting with the DOM). Unfortunately, Applets were introduced about 15 years too soon (and pretty much killed off by Microsoft), and thus suffered from perceptions of poor performance. And now that Java is owned by Oracle, that opportunity is gone forever.

Re:Every time...

[perryizgr8]

maybe its just me but i simply can't stand non-smooth scrolling on a touch pad. when i use the wheel of a mouse to scoll, its okay, but when sliding my finger along the touchpad edge, i have to have smooth scrolling. and usually i'm on my laptop using the touchpad. and firefox's smooth scolling is not actually smooth. it jerks and freezes up randomly for fractions of seconds. this is the main reason i left firefox :(

Re:Every time...

[DrXym]

Same could be said of C++ though. It generates machine code and few people would contemplate modifying the machine code. Instead they'd modify the source and recompile. I wonder what fun would await me if I tried to move binaries built for a 10 year old Slackware and tried to make them run on Fedora 17. Chances are I wouldn't even bother - I'd take the pain of porting the code and build it from scratch against the new platform.

I think the biggest issue for JS is there are multiple implementations of it and the DOM and each is a moving target. If you look at GWT (for example), you must specify what user agents your app must run on and it spits out different JS for each of them. So IE, Opera, Chrome and Firefox all run different JS generated from the same input.

I'd have zero confidence that the code GWT spits out now would still function properly 10 years hence. But I'd have zero confidence that even hand written code in JQuery / Dojo etc would work properly either. It might sort-of work but a lot of the details in implementation could change so subtle and not so subtle behavioural and rendering issues could crop up. I think that as long as you write your apps with open source tools that you are relatively safe though. If Google discontinued GWT tomorrow then someone else would pick it up or at least maintain it and I would anticipate that I would run the tool over the source again to produce JS which did work with more recent browsers.

Memory leaks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are the memory leaks gone? Probably not...Then any performance improvements are useless anyway.

Re:Memory leaks?

[Lennie]

Actually the last 3 releases all had some improvements in the memory department (I think 8 had the most improvements) and it looks to me like, there is more to come.

Re:Memory leaks?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of these 'improvements' is discarding loaded imagery for webpages not currently visible (but still opened in a tab). This means I often have to wait for things to load when I switch between tabs.. very annoying. I understand they probably made these changes because there are so many complaints about FF taking up so much memory, but I think I would actually prefer FF taking up some more (otherwise unused) memory if it means it's faster. I guess this is kind of like the way the OS tends to keep filesystem buffers in memory that's not used for anything else.

Re:Memory leaks?

[A12m0v]

It has a much smaller footprint now than before and does release back memory just not as fast as Chrome does.

Re:Memory leaks?

[Dagger2]

This particular behaviour at least is configurable: set image.mem.discardable to false. (Or, if you decide you prefer a trade-off, lengthen image.mem.min_discard_timeout_ms.)

Re:Memory leaks?

[revealingheart]

That's because of the memshrink project (earlier report on /.). You can read a weekly status report on Nicholas Nethercote's blog.

Another project that's recently started is called 'Snappy', which aims to increase the responsiveness of users' interactions with Firefox. There's a thread on Mozillazine tracking updates on Snappy.

Re:Memory leaks?

[Anonymous Coward]

You probably mean version 7.

"Firefox 7 now uses much less memory than previous versions: often 20% to 30% less, and sometimes as much as 50% less."

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/09/firefox-7-is-lean-and-fast

Re:Memory leaks?

[Anonymous Coward]

For some reason "memory improvements" reminds me of the Vista to Win7 step. And words like polished turd...

Re:Memory leaks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy FUCK someone besides me actually posted about these on slashdot. There is still hope!

"If you switched away from Firefox to IE..."

[biscuitlover]

...then you're probably still dealing with the fallout from that time when you switched your brain for a sponge

Re:"If you switched away from Firefox to IE..."

[b4dc0d3r]

Oh! Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?
FireFox Users!

Oh, that was not the expected answer. IE 9 isn't too terribly bad, and it has a lot of security fixes since IE 6, 7, and 8.

Microsoft hasn't been doing too badly since IE 8. I have to use IE at work, and at home I have updated to 9, and haven't had problems.

Except with Mashable, which seems to be a terriblly written website. I have "Display notificatio for all errors" enabled, becaue I make websites, and it took me forever to even turn it off. Mashable sucks.

With this new release versioning system...

[Viol8]

.... you don't even have a rough idea of how big the changes are , whether there will be compatability issues and so forth. I'm sure the coders have done a good job but whatever marketdroid imbecile thought that every new release must have a major version number markup should frankly be shot. And then forced to use IE 6 for the rest of his days.

Re:With this new release versioning system...

[ElusiveJoe]

whatever marketdroid imbecile thought that every new release must have a major version number markup should frankly be shot. And then forced to use IE 6 for the rest of his days.

Makes sense. Undead browser for the undead.

Two finger swipe navigation

[Anonymous Coward]

after playing with Firefox 9 on Mac for half an hour, we’re not sure what this entails — leave a comment if you find out

LOL. I'm guessing it's back and forwards navigation, anyone know?

and it becoming a memory pig and beach ball queen

[Shivetya]

368m for three tabs, really Firefox what gives. Let alone on both my Mac and W7 machines it has started to freeze on occasion to the point I actually have force quit it instead of waiting for it to wake up.

They are pulling a Netscape 4.xx lately and that isn't a good thing.

Can't we all just get along?

[ciderbrew]

At work I use FireFox(3.6.x) for some websites and Chrome for others. IE when forced to
At home I use FireFox for most websites and Chrome with no desktop or start menu icon for other websites. Sure we can share a login and desktop and you can see the web history dear. :)

Re:Can't we all just get along?

[Robert Zenz]

How about different user accounts?

Re:Can't we all just get along?

[cbhacking]

Chrome (and IE and, I think, Firefox) have "private browsing" modes. Quite handy for those "other websites", unless you need to persist data between sessions.

Re:Can't we all just get along?

[ciderbrew]

and plant the seed of doubt!

Re:Can't we all just get along?

[ciderbrew]

private browsing = on the internet all day and you've looked at nothing.. Hmmm?

It really isn't this bad. It's just a habit I got into.

Re:Can't we all just get along?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about mature and reasonable personal space boundaries between spouses?

Re:Can't we all just get along?

[Robert Zenz]

I'm not going into detail how many other advantages different accounts have (two words:personal preferences), but if your spouse goes all "I can't look at your browser history? YOU MUST HAVE AN AFFAIR!" on you...well, get a better spouse...or train that one better. You know, trust and relationships and such stuff. ^^

Beta?

[Pierre]

Looks like its actually just a Beta for Firefox 9?

Re:Beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/download.html?product=firefox-9.0&os=win&lang=en-US

Re:Beta?

[SageBrian]

so it is being prepared for release, but it is not showing up on the Firefox site, nor when we check for update.

The original source actually says "Firefox 9 unofficially released, "

Re:Beta?

[Skuto]

*nor when we check for update*

Apparently it wont be offered for update until after new year, to avoid having to pull some server admins from behind the Christmas dinner table.

Re:Beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it is a beta and I just wasted my time trying to upgrade the browser because of a misleading headline..

Re:Beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

If that is the actual case, then I have loads of respect for whoever made that decision. Kudos to any organization that a) protects its members from unnecessary emergency support, and b) protects its user base from unnecessary interruptions -- both during times when folks just want things to keep running.

Re:Beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

Get Muslim server admins. problem solved

Re:Beta?

[stickyboot]

I just asked in the firefox irc channel and people seemed to think that "they push updates later today" with respect to firefox 9.

Re:Beta?

[PCM2]

I just got it through the update mechanism.

About time

[Anonymous Coward]

It's about time, the performance of Firefox has suffered greatly the last few version. even the right click on a link to show the drop down menu takes several seconds on a 2 GB mac mini (2009 model). At the moment Chrome is the best choice performance wise, but I prefer Firefox.

Re:About time

[Skuto]

even the right click on a link to show the drop down menu takes several seconds

If that is anything but instantaneous, it's time to do a virus scan, wipe all noncritical add-ons and extensions, maybe even the profile, and start over.

Re:About time

[Hierarch]

I get similar performance after letting FF8 run too long, but my usage pattern is a poster child for the problems with memory and CPU bloat. I open lots of tabs, including Facebook and Gmail, and some heavy Javascript sites required by my job. I leave them open sometimes for days. My only plug-ins are noScript and the JRE. Under my usage pattern, FF often reaches a 400MB footprint.

Now add to that the fact that my home computer is a little MSI Wind U100. 1GB RAM, 1.6GHz Atom processor (2-stage pipeline), and the thrashing is unbearable. Eventually I have to give in and close / restart FF.

I credit most of my troubles to the heavy javascript sites, not FF. I suspect that Facebook in particular is caching massive amounts of data and actually claiming that it uses that memory. At some point I should compare to Chrome to find out, but that's a project from some day when I have the time.

Re:About time

[perryizgr8]

It's about time, the performance of Firefox has suffered greatly the last few version. even the right click on a link to show the drop down menu takes several seconds on a 2 GB mac mini (2009 model). At the moment Chrome is the best choice performance wise, but I prefer Firefox.

dude, there is somehing seriously wrong with your pc.

Re:About time

[steveha]

If [right click] is anything but instantaneous, it's time to do a virus scan, wipe [...] and start over.

Not necessarily. If the web browser sucks up enough RAM to cause the system to start swapping, then the user might have to wait while the right-click code swaps in.

I have historically been a lazy power user. Because I'm a power user I tend to open lots of web pages; because I'm lazy I tend to leave them open. I have had the web browser push my system into swapping many times, to the point where I am now modifying my behavior to accommodate the web browser (in other words, I'm trying to close more tabs more often).

At worst, the swapping gets so bad the system is unusable. I "only" have 4GB of RAM; one would think that should be enough even for a lazy power user.

If you aren't sure whether your system is swapping, look at the hard disk light. If it's on continuously, your system is swapping. One thing you can try to fix it: erase all the browsing history, make sure the browser will remember all your tabs, and quit and restart the browser. If the browser is noticeably snappier (and you see the hard disk light isn't on) then your problem was the swapping.

If your system isn't swapping and it's slow for the right-click menu to pop up, I agree you should worry.

steveha

Re:About time

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy shit thanks dude, no-one on Slashdot could figure out what that funny light on the front of the computer was for! We thought it was being Christmassy but it turns out it's being swappy! Hot damn, I'm glad we have people around like you to tell us non-computer-literate types what to do.

In other news, HURP DURP WELCOME TO SLASHDOT WHERE WE KNOW WTF WE'RE DOING.

Re:About time

[Catnaps]

Yeah, it's a Mac.

Oh joy!

[lucidlyTwisted]

Almost time to play "plug-in roulette". Which ones will work, which ones not? Where the compatibility is, no one knows!
Still this is just a Beta, maybe I'm being overly pessimistic.

Re:Oh joy!

[globalist]

Didn't they say FF9 will finally get rid of the addon compatibility check?

Re:Oh joy!

[Skuto]

Didn't make it, though something like 99% of the stuff on AMO is compatible. The problem will still be third party plugins (better called "malware" IMHO)

Re:Oh joy!

[LordStormes]

You can turn off the compatibility check in any version of Firefox. I did it at FF7, and it's saved me ever since. I forget where in the advanced config it is, but a google search for "turn off firefox compatibility check" will get you where you need to be.

Re:Oh joy!

[MoogMan]

This plugin has been really useful to fix this problem: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/is-it-compatible/

Re:Oh joy!

[hedwards]

I know you're joking, but most of that is because plug in developers haven't been using Jetpack, Jetpack pretty much obviates any need for that sort of concern. Unfortunately, it requires the addons to be adjusted to use it and I'm not sure how much work that entails.

Making version numbers more relevant

[revealingheart]

I don't think it's as bad as you make out. I get the impression that version numbers were to be depreceated and replaced with the terms Beta; Aurora and Nightly. Features would be mentioned as landing on Nightly/Aurora, appearing in users' browsers in so many weeks time. Releases themselves (every 6 weeks) aren't news in themselves. If Firefox developers communicate this clearly to reporters, then perhaps perceptions will change.

If users would still benefit from version numbers (e.g. for tech support), then I have a suggestion to make:

Next year, Firefox will be releasing version 12. On that version, there's the option of transitioning to a date-based system, with major versions following the year, and minor versions being incremented every 6 weeks. After version 11, the 1st release with this format would be 12.1; the 2nd release, 12.2; and so on. Here's how it looks like in practice:

* 10.0 January 31, 2012
* 11.0 March 13, 2012
* 12.1 April 24, 2012
* 12.2 June 5, 2012
* 12.3 July 17, 2012
* 12.4 August 28, 2012
* 12.5 October 9, 2012
* 12.6 November 20, 2012
* 13.1 January 1, 2013

Switching to a date-based system has the advantage that users will know what the current version is without having to report it, as the year corresponds to the version. Firefox in 2012 would be referred to as version 12. Reporters would focus on new and upcoming features in Firefox primarily, so that stories have a talking point and posters' comments are pertinent, primarily focused on features and improvements.

An example of an open source group who uses a similar format is Ubuntu (who base the version on the year, and the minor version on a 6 month schedule). Versions matter with this format; but there's still a sense of progression. We know what the version will be in 3 years time - even if we don't know what the features will be. Now try to imagine what Firefox's version would be with the new system, compared with the old one.

Consider that this is an issue that would involve a minor change; would benefit users and reporters (reducing confusion); and improve the quality of comments (on Firefox itself), then I think that Firefox developers will be pleasantly surprised with the results.

If they do want to focus more on development than on numbers, they would benefit by switching to a date system. I hope that some of the Firefox developers read this, as the value of changing merits the effort involved.

Re:Making version numbers more relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate it when they put vague names like Aurora or Celestial Moonbeam Herpity Derp on releases. I can never figure out which release of Eclipse I should download. Stop it!

Re:Making version numbers more relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox versioning will plateau at either 10 or 11, depending on whether they want to go 'one better' than IE.

I surmised at version 5 -> 6 that Mozilla were accelerating their version numbering in order to be at least 10 by the time IE 10 started to appear on retail PC's.

It's dumb marketing, but then there are so many dumb people in the world that dumb marketing is the only marketing worth a damn.

Re:Making version numbers more relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

When version 13 is released, the world will end.

Re:Making version numbers more relevant

[swarsron]

two digits for the year. What could ever go wrong with that scheme?

Re:Making version numbers more relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

Yawn. When we get within a year or so of the year 3000, wake my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandkids, will you? They can worry about it then.

Re:Making version numbers more relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

you'll be dead by then, what does it matter to you?

but it'd be more like YYYY - 2000 = version

2012 = version 12
2100 = version 100
2999 = version 999
3001 = version 1001

Re:Making version numbers more relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't you learn in elementary school that after 099 comes 100 and that you don't have to write leading 0s? More seriously this scheme if even codebase will almost certainly not hit that magical number if they really go with the Ubuntu model.

Re:Making version numbers more relevant

[stickyboot]

It seems like a lot of people are asking for this. Has there been any response from mozilla about this idea? A dated version numbering system seems vastly more relevant to the end user than any other system I have seen. I would love to see this. "Grandma, you see, its 2015, but you are still running firefox 12, back from 2012, which contains many flaws that might get your social security benefits stolen"

Re:Making version numbers more relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

URL to this page: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/12/20/0032250/firefox-9-released-javascript-performance-greatly-improved

Re:Making version numbers more relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

If we are still using Firefox in 2100 we can just call it version 100, there isn't a problem until 3000.

Re:Making version numbers more relevant

[djdanlib]

Well, by the time it's a problem, we'll all be retired with millions of dollars in the bank am I right?!

Yeah, I get your COBOL/Y2K joke...

Re:Making version numbers more relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes because lots of stuff depends on the browser version... Not to mention prospect of Mozilla Foundation surviving for almost hundred years (outlasting few paradigm shifts along the way).

It's as they say a problem that would be nice to have.

Re:Making version numbers more relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

What? You want the century too? What's with the added bloat?

"firefox 9 released" No it isn't

[Ginger Unicorn]

Firefox > help > about> "firefox 8.0 checking for updates... firefox is up to date"

www.getfirefox.com

good news your firefox is up to date

tfa

Firefox Beta Release Notes

Re:"firefox 9 released" No it isn't

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, switch channels or wait 24 hours. Also,quit acting like a spoiled bitch.

Re:"firefox 9 released" No it isn't

[ojintoad]

Parent is almost exactly right.

When you have the headline "Firefox 9 Released" it is implied that the release is official and current. You expect that if you try to update your software through the normal update process, it will work. So they are right to expect the update to work.

The fact is that Firefox is getting released today and yesterday was an unofficial release, and as of me trying at 8:25AM Eastern Time is not available through normal update channels (i.e. help > about). The linked Extremetech article was in fact titled Firefox 9 unofficially released and states:

Ahead of an official release tomorrow, Firefox 9 has winged its way to various mirrors across the web and is now available to download from the official Firefox website — no messing around with a hammered Nightly FTP server this time, oh no!

The fact that the summary writer neglected the word "unofficial" or this very important detail that it is rolling out isn't the fault of anyone reading the article and speaks to the grand tradition of poor summary writing that Slashdot readers have grown to love/hate.

Re:"firefox 9 released" No it isn't

[mdsharpe]

The build tends to be available by FTP a short while before the update all the documentation and front-end sites... ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/9.0/

Re:"firefox 9 released" No it isn't

[Ginger Unicorn]

that clearly wasn't my point, but thanks for the info

Re:"firefox 9 released" No it isn't

[Anonymous Coward]

The build tends to be available by FTP a short while before the update all the documentation and front-end sites...

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/9.0/

post-install:
"Welcome to Firefox Beta"
"You are now running Firefox Beta"

Re:"firefox 9 released" No it isn't

[Nimey]

Not me. You must have done it wrong.

Re:"firefox 9 released" No it isn't

[Anonymous Coward]

oh thank god(s), It would have really sucked if they actually released it this close to the holidays. FF and Chrome have been making my job very difficult with silent updates and breaking their SVG implementations without any clues in their changelogs as to what might have broken. With the new release cycles it makes it more difficult to keep up with changes, and I just don't have the time to keep on top of these two browsers release schedules.

Firefox startup-time

[calculon102]

*knock*, knock*
"Who's there?"
(Very long pause...)
"Firefox."

Re:Firefox startup-time

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you need to look at your plugin's
the i3 here at work starts in in less then 2 seconds.

Re:Firefox startup-time

[perryizgr8]

i find that extremely hard to believe. also, firefox without lots of addons is worse than ie.

Re:Firefox startup-time

[euroq]

The problem is that Firefox uses custom networking libraries instead of using the system libraries. This means it takes longer for the application to load because it has to load the custom libraries, unlike IE and Chrome which just link to the system libraries.

Not out yet

[Anonymous Coward]

http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/9.0/ says it is not available just yet.

WOOt FP

[Anonymous Coward]

its 8eader5 and

Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox devs sure are doing a good job!

I'm sure

[Anonymous Coward]

that both users are glad for this news.

Triple

[Anonymous Coward]

Eventually, I tripled my firefox: 3.6 > 9.0beta. It seems very good...

It's the UI, not the JS

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the Javascript performance that makes people switch to another browser, it's the sluggish user interface. It has always been.

For example, try clicking a menu item (File, Edit, View, etc.), and moving the pointer as fast as you can through the other menu items. CPU usage jumps to well over 50%. It pretty much illustrates how awfully SLOW the user interface is. Chrome and Safari aren't that much faster, they just *feel* a hell lot faster.

Re:It's the UI, not the JS

[Skuto]

It's not the Javascript performance that makes people switch to another browser, it's the sluggish user interface.

The user interface is written in JavaScript.

Re:It's the UI, not the JS

[GNious]

might explain something ... Have FF9 installed, went to their add-ons page and FF9 just froze up completely. 45 seconds later, a dialog shows up, saying that a script is unresponsive.

Make the UI based on JavaScript, and have a setup where a single script can stall all scripts is a recipe for trouble.

Re:It's the UI, not the JS

[Sepodati]

Damn programs wanting to use CPU time! Unforgivable!!

Re:It's the UI, not the JS

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahahaha what? Really? Hory shet...

Oh great.

[Anonymous Coward]

Even more reason for clueless webmonkeys (but I repeat myself) to throw more gratuitous and outright senseless js at their produce. That this slows down everyone who doesn't have the latest hardware or software or, yanno, actually have to fetch the thing over a shitty network, they'll never notice.

We really do need more people with clue and far more slow machines and shitty network( emulator)s to check just how many cycles a website is throwing away for no gain. Hiding behind a faster js implementation is _not_ acceptable, no matter how impressive the technology.

Thank you

[MarlonTucker]

After reading most of the comments, and not finding many giving praise to a new release of an awesome browser, I thought I would give my thanks.

I personally don't give much worry what version they are, most of my addons work, and the ones that don't I'm geeky enough to be able to edit the RDF file in the zip to fool Firefox into installing it. (If you put a * in the version, your sorted forever until it breaks, which it probably wont).

Increased javascript perf is always welcome, memory management fixes are also good (but ram is cheap so its not a huge issue).

So, thank you to all the Mozilla devs who work hard on their products, it is much appreciated.

I'm looking forward to the new graphics subsystem in the next few releases, and a bit of threading would be good but I realise its very hard to retrospectively design that into such a big application.

Re:Thank you

[The Living Fractal]

I'm thankful for Firefox as well. I used to use it all the time. Then it started to break. The newer releases were slower than the previous releases. Websites simply wouldn't work, like Facebook, which used to work the best on Firefox.

I think the world is ready again for a browser that you actually have to pay for. That is, as long as it is worth paying for. The old saying applies to Firefox, sadly. Firefox is free, and you get what you pay for.

Firefox is coded by a few amateurs

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox is coded by a few rank amateurs. I tried to give the main coder advice on memory leaks in 2006 but to no avail.

There are, what? 5 firefox devs now? 3? Back in the day, all the Mozilla devs were supposed to jump on ship when the Mozilla browser (remember that?!) development ended. What they saw was a horrible code base and code monkeys on the top unwilling to listen to their seasoned advice.

The result? 5 years later, Firefox is still being coded by the same handful of monkeys; their browser is worse than ever; and all the real development is happening in Gecko. Firefox is just a shell around Gecko, and a bad one, too, considering how much better the *real* Mozilla developers' browser -- SeaMonkey -- is.

Stupid!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're just stupid, then.

The score of Chrome devs are leagues beyond the handful of Firefox monkeys.

Disabling plugins

[jones_supa]

How is it possible that the default installation of Firefox does not include a setting to disable plugins? Opera and Chrome have this nifty feature where you can start plugins individually by request.

Re:Disabling plugins

[LordLimecat]

Because Firefox has always left that task up to plugins. Every time a new feature is added people complain about bloat.

Honestly I wouldnt mind that feature being built in.

Re:Disabling plugins

[jones_supa]

It's something that could definitely be built-in. The fancier stuff can be left for the plugins.

Re:Disabling plugins

[roju]

You can disable plugins by going to the plugin panel of about:addons. As far as I can remember you've always been able to disable plugins through some means or another. Unless you're talking about something else?

Re:Disabling plugins

[jones_supa]

Uhh, that's of course add-ons, not plugins, which LordLimecat was probably talking about too.

Re:Disabling plugins

[Anonymous Coward]

That will be in Firefox 12

Re:Disabling plugins

[jones_supa]

I was talking about more fine-grained control, where I can easily fire up individual Flash applets if needed, or allow some plugin for some specific website(s) only.

Re:Disabling plugins

[roju]

Ah, gotcha. I suppose their philosophy is to outsource that sort of thing to addons to keep the mainline trim, which is why they haven't integrated flashblock into the core.

Re:Disabling plugins

[tokul]

How is it possible

User's failure to check for safe startup mode and available configuration options makes lots of things possible.

Re:and it becoming a memory pig and beach ball que

[LordSnooty]

23 tabs over two windows and FF3.6 is using a working set of 358MB. I swear I've never seen the rabid memory problems that every other FF user apparently gets.

Yawn.

[Anonymous Coward]

When do we get the process separation promised in 2009?

Oh, that's right, Mozilla doesn't care about security or stability. So they put that "on hold" for eternity.

Let's hear about it when they do something serious.

tab key cycling history and tab management

[coopstah13]

I don't use chrome, simply because I can't press tab to cycle through my history in the omnibox, this is a 100% show-stopping feature that I need. And I refuse to use the arrow pad, because its simply not natural. Also I tend to have 30+ tabs open in a single window, in chrome they just shrink and shrink until I can't see what any of them are, but in firefox I can use tab mix plus extension and voila now I have tabs wrapping onto multiple lines.

Beta eh?

[Muramas95]

Since when is beta is now "available"? We had access to FF9 via nightly for a long while...

ECMA not a dynamically typed language or something

[sgt scrub]

I thought inference was mandatory in a dynamically typed language.

chrome and FF

[mapkinase]

Once I found NotScripts, I recently switched to Chrome and found perceived speed decrease in loading. It might be due to a different order of loading visual elements (different from what I used to), so I pay attention to this.

Re:chrome and FF

[sempir]

As a 70 year old tecnoidiot let me tell you the IMPORTANT difference between FF and Chrome. I know what I'm talking about cos I'v used them both and even IE when I was much younger. Chrome is better because the Maám says I swear a lot less nowadays since I changed from FF. What more can I say!

Firefox

[C_Kode]

I've always ran Firefox and still do, but I have to say. My plugins stop working almost every time they update these days. It makes me use Firefox less and less.

The best thing about Firefox was that it viewed sites that other browsers didn't (not talking about IE here) and it's plugins. Firefox could do every thing. Now, each release it breaks everything. :/

The JS is fine....

[Anonymous Coward]

Fix the startup speed. Remember when Firefox was a more responsive Netscape Navigator? Now ff is the new sluggard and chrome is the new Firefox.

I don't care about JS speed
I don't care about rendering speed

I care about the number of seconds that elapse between clicking the icon and interacting with the window. By this metric, IE 9 blows, ff is almost as bad, and chrome is acceptable (but getting worse).

Re:ECMA not a dynamically typed language or someth

[rjh]

No: in fact, very few runtime-typed languages support type inference. What happens instead is that the value gets tagged with a type. E.g., in Python, when I type "x = 3", the variable x has no type attached to it, but the value 3 has the type 'int' attached to it. When the system needs to know type information, it queries the value.

Type inference is a little bit of a hard thing to do in runtime-typed languages. Not impossible, but ... interestingly wacky. Basically, the runtime environment has to be able to make a formal mathematical proof that "there is no code path in which this variable can point to any type of value except an 'int'", or what-have-you. If it's able to do that, then it might be able to optimize access to that value in ways that normal runtime typing can't. E.g., if you know something is always going to be a 32-bit integer, why not store it as a native primitive, rather than wrap it up in an object and have all the associated object overhead? That sort of thing.

Hope this helps!

I'm waiting.

[Anonymous Coward]

What are the chances this version of Firefox could be a lump of coal in the Christmas stocking?

Re:and it becoming a memory pig and beach ball que

[0123456]

It's not just you, I don't get them either.

"If you switched away from Firefox to IE"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why on Htrae would me not stayed on IE in future?

JavaScript isn't the real problem ...

[Rambo Tribble]

... code bloat is.

Firefox is really copying the google release cycle

[ilsaloving]

Apparently a product that is still in beta is considered a 'release'.

The reason for the rapid release cycle is clear

[cjjjer]

They need to get as many bug fixes / new features in as they can while Google is still funding them. Once it has stopped Firefox will become the Netscape 4.7 of web browsers. That is unless Microsoft steps in and picks up the funding.

Re:and it becoming a memory pig and beach ball que

[LordLimecat]

Its because you dont have retarded memory leaking addons.

I could have sworn Asa or one of the other devs released a blog post when 3.0 came out titled something like "Turn off your damn broken addons before complaining about memory".

Troubleshooting Firefox RAM use

[tepples]

368m for three tabs, really Firefox what gives.

How many links have you followed? Firefox saves those in case you want to go Back. How many tabs and windows have you closed recently? Firefox saves those in case you want to reopen tabs (Ctrl+Shift+T) or windows (Ctrl+Shift+N). Which extensions are you using? Can you try disabling one, reopening those three tabs, and checking the memory usage? If so, an extension may have a defect that should be reported to the extension's developer. And how much RAM are other programs using? Is it causing your computer to dip into swap, and if not, why worry about it?

Plausible deniability

[tepples]

One is "on the Internet" when interacting with an application that connects to another computer through sockets. This is true even when reading e-mail in a native MUA (that is, not webmail) or playing World of Warcraft. Do home PC operating systems provide a way to combine "history" from Chrome, IE, Firefox, Opera, Thunderbird, WOW, and every other program that opens sockets?

Add-on Compatibility Reporter and other goodies

[Artemis3]

Install the add-on called "Add-on Compatibility Reporter" and you won't have to manually edit things anymore. Things just work; i installed it around version 5 and every time Firefox updated, 99% of the add-ons that used to say "incompatible" actually worked just fine. (Btw, despite its name, you don't have to report a thing).

In fact, i remember only 1 add-on not working (simply had no effect), which is the one to force youtube videos use a certain quality/resolution, nothing critical.

As someone else said here, all the Firefox bashing must come from people using other browsers. Fine with me, I stay with Firefox, i hate the way Chrome takes over the processor and memory; it may start fast, but later makes the system slow down to a crawl, unless you stick to use a single tab or something...

Firefox might not release memory aggressively while in use, but with the session saved (remember to use Options -> General -> Startup -> Check "Don't load tabs until selected" ) restarting the browser takes no time, and with the Lazarus add-on, you don't even lose anything you have typed in text boxes... I just close the browser when i don't need it knowing everything comes back quickly where i left when its opened again. I also disabled hard disk cache (browser.cache.disk.enable false) memory cache is good enough.

The only thing i would wish Mozilla team to do, is to switch to date based versioning, Ubuntu style (year.month) instead of nonsensical number increases, only a human perception thing. Their LTS plan should address the enterprise concern.

tl;dr

[Eunuchswear]

With an enormous effort a crappy language can be made to run very slowly instead of incredibly slowly.

Interesting.

Mod summary "+5 Funny"

[robi5]

For this joke: "If you switched away from Firefox to IE [...] for improved JS performance"

Re:Mod summary "+5 Funny"

[Billly Gates]

Why?

IE 9 has one of the fastest JS compilers around. Infact according to benchmarks it creams the sunspider.

Now if they went back to IE 6 or IE 7 or something that would be quite retarded

Re:Mod summary "+5 Funny"

[robi5]

When there are about 3 mainstream browsers, even the third place is one of the fastest :-) Google brought the browser speed wars to the market, so in some sense they are leader even if they were to lose some of the current benchmarks _at this instance_ to Mozilla or IE, and IE is the laggard, being utterly defeated by Chrome for a long time, even if by now they managed to pour enough money on the problem to catch up with the thought leaders. MS would have been the loser of the browser speed wars even if they had had a somewhat faster JS engine (which I don't know about) - Google's intention was to make the Web a viable application and interaction platform, and they managed to kick MS in the @ss to serve their goals. Also, while Chrome was for a long time about an order of magnitude faster than IE, it is unlikely that IE will ever command more than an incidental minor lead in some of the semi-realistic benchmarks. It would never occur to me to move from Firefox to IE for JS performance, because I've been a Chrome user since it came out, and because I wouldn't want to support a Johnny-come-late convicted monopolist, which has the history of "choking Netscape's air supply", curiously the former browser market leader that got crushed mostly by criminal activity.

If you look at MS behavior now, even with the mandatory selection ("ballot") in their operating system, they do their best to disgustingly hinder competition: they list a huge number of alternatives just in order to make e.g. the Google alternative appear off the screen. Many are not interested in their JS engine even if they can finally compete on technical ground.

Re:and it becoming a memory pig and beach ball que

[TheLink]

It's often due to buggy plugins. The problem with Firefox's single process model is if a plugin or Firefox leaks, you often can't free up memory by closing windows or tabs. You have to close everything.

In contrast even though Google Chrome might actually leak more, you can usually just close the offending tab, and the memory is freed up. You can even reopen the tab without having to log in again. So if a page gradually leaks memory, you can close it once it gets to big and reopen it again. All without losing sessions in your other tabs/windows.

One might say "Don't use those plugins then". But without those plugins there might be no other reason to use Firefox instead of some other browser.

Opera Mini anyone?

[tepples]

So now Javascript is executed before it is downloaded to improve speed even more.

Opera's way ahead on that:

Before the page is sent to the mobile device, its onLoad events are fired and all scripts are allowed a maximum of two seconds to execute. [...] After the scripts have finished or the timeout is reached, all scripts are stopped and the page is compressed and sent to the mobile device.

Re:ECMA not a dynamically typed language or someth

[thermostat42]

Technically, what has to be proved is "for all code paths we can identify if the value is not an int." And then it can provide a backoff/error handler case when the value isn't an int. The issue is that typically the the error handler is significantly slower than doing it the naive way. So there is a cut-off point where the optimization because a net win, and generally you need some amount of profiling/feedback to correctly identify that cut-off.

So...

[J'raxis]

...can I just expect all the sites already bloated with slow, broken JavaScript to just increase said cruft by 20-30% to take advantage of this?

Re:So...

[Chelloveck]

Yes. They'll busywait your CPU even faster now.

huge installer

[perryizgr8]

WTF?!? after a long time i thought lets try firefox again and the windows exe for the beta is fricking 15mb?!?! i remember and long for simpler times when it was justa 4-5mb download *sigh* no wonder its so fucked up nowadays.

Re:huge installer

[Luthair]

Firefox is 37mb installed, Chrome is 162mb (though there is a file labelled installer which is roughly half that)

Re:huge installer

[perryizgr8]

ok i'm actually using firefox again after a loooooong time and its actually quite usable! not as smooth as chrome but very close! i'm switching back!

A story about Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

...and again dozens of people proclaiming their chrome use.
This really just comes off as hardcore astroturfing. Why would anyone use a web browser made by an advertising company? _At least_ use chromium and disable the questionable options.
Most of the complaints against Firefox are bogus anyway. People mentioning rendering speed, add-on breakage, start-up time (wtf!), memory usage, slow UI performance. Rendering speed and performance are negligible between browsers nowadays. It just looks like all the complaints are either not true at all or most likely user error related.

What's going on?

Re:A story about Firefox

[bussdriver]

As a mozilla user from way back, I've been heavily using it from the beginning. Many popular complaints are partially if not completely true. Since 3.6 the memory use has gone nuts and while I don't mind a doubling of RAM use or how it ignores the cap I put into the about:config I DO MIND how it has since version 4 used so much RAM and then gets slow and locks up for seconds while it manages all that cached data.

Download link for en-US

[emddudley]

Download link for Firefox 9.0 (en-US): http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-9.0&os=win&lang=en-US

just wait longer for releases

[Anonymous Coward]

Just accumulate more changes and let a stable release sink in for a longer time.

Tabs on title

[FatLittleMonkey]

Firefox made that the default somewhere back in version 4. Eliminating the menu bar was version 3.something. (Much to the horror of people too dumb to right-click on empty space and tick/untick those changes.) Somewhere around then they eliminated the add-on bar at the bottom of the screen. You can even turn off the Navigation bar, which leaves you with the tabs-on-title bar and the render-window and that's it. How much more space can you get?

(However, I don't use Linux, so you may be talking about something OS specific.)

Re:I use Java

[Billly Gates]

So I really really do not want to use Firefox at all due to security risks of Java 6.

In IE I have it disabled in the internet zone so it never executes. To my pleasant surprise Chrome does not enable it by default even if it is installed as of Chrome 16. Until that is fixed Firefox is going to stay off. I see the loading Java applet A LOT in porn sites trying to exploit my system.

Flash has many vulnerabilities too and is almost as bad. At least you can block flash a little bit or Chrome will automatically update it for you for security purposed. Unfortunately it makes it more crash prone in youtube.

Re:and it becoming a memory pig and beach ball que

[Hentes]

I haven't used Firefox for long, but my experience was that in order to keep the browser lightweight many basic features (like mouse gestures or being able to disable scripts) were stripped from it, available only in addons. So, while the browser alone doesn't use much memory, you are effectively being forced to use 3-5 addons to achieve a normal functionality. And that means it will consume a lot of memory.

Firefox10

[Frankie70]

I think I will wait for Firefox10 - I heard it's going to be out early next week.

Re:I use Java

[arekq]

You can disable the java plugin in the Add-ons Manager. Just go to the "Plugins" and disable the java plugin.

300th post

[Anonymous Coward]

Why wait for Firefox to be good again when you can join the IE6 master race.

The Opera, the Opera....

[KiloUtrechtTango]

The only reason for me to stay with FF over the last years was Opera not working correctly with /. Last week I updated my Opera to 11.6 and wow, / working as it was meant to be :-) FF has become way to slugish as an application and a few milliseconds more or less faster with javascript while browsing doesn't really give me the 'Zwitserleven' feeling....

Try using the Vertical Tabs

[Anonymous Coward]

Also try using the Vertical Tabs extension. Makes much better use of horizontal screen space: You can read tab titles even when you have ooodles of them open and doesn't waste precious vertical space.

Re:Firefox - Too little, too late, Angry Birds

[b4dc0d3r]

I installed it on the desktop connected to the (1080p) TV because of Angry Birds. They released an HTML 5 version to promote the browser.

I tried it out at work, brought it home.

Chrome doesn't annoy me with updates and incompatibilities. It's easy, it's simple. FireFox is a language (XUL) written in another language (C/++), and a memory or disk hog.

I don't care how it does stuff, I want my browser to show stuff quickly. IE doesn't, FF doesn't, Chrome does. Click, boom, book it, done.

tesdt

[Anonymous Coward]

test

Multithreading

[wye43]

Let me know when Firefox make tabs independent. Having one tab freeze the entire Firefox made me move to Chrome. It happened WAY too often. Oh, and the crashes.

Miss modded someone

[Bengie]

clearing my mod

And just one day later...

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox 9.0.1 is already released. LMFAO. No joke, go check their site.

Nice additional side effect of the rapid-release bullshit... have a bug apparently so critical that you have to release a minor point/bug fix version just one fucking day later. ONE god damn day. Maybe if they would spend some extra time between "major" version releases, you know, for testing and shit, things like this wouldn't happen.

and broken

[atisss]

Profile manager is broken.. No real way to have multiple profiles running, while allowing URL to be opened in any of them

Even FASTER in new "WaterFox 9.x"

[Anonymous Coward]

Per my subject-line above: http://waterfoxproj.sourceforge.net/ & enjoy!

APK