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Firefox 15 Coming With Souped-Up, Faster Debugger
StormDriver writes "Firefox 15 has hit the Mozilla pre-beta Aurora channel, and it features a redesigned, built-in debugger."
The original weblog post has more. Thanks to improved debugger internals in SpiderMonkey, supposedly code should run just as fast with debugging enabled as without (ever try loading Slashdot with firebug accidentally enabled?). There are also new tools for testing mobile layouts from the comfort of your workstation, and the debugger can attach to remote processes (Something Emacs users have enjoyed for years now, albeit in a hackish manner and without support for mobile Firefox).
15.0 is like 3.9, right?
Honestly, "Web 2.0" transforms so much otherwise perfectly functional hardware into environmentally-unfriendly junk that you might as well just stick your dick in an endangered species.
The web ten years ago was fine: people programmed for content and efficiency. Why can't we stay that way, with the advancement being in quality and quantity of /content/?
So why not focus on faster browsing rather than debugging ?!?
(ever try loading Slashdot with firebug accidentally enabled?)
Yeah, it takes forever. But what is much faster is using the built in Web Console in the tools menu in newer versions of Firefox. I forget what version it was that started natively supporting debugging but it got a lot better (4 I think?). I'm very excited to see these improvements but my JavaScript has to support versions of Firefox all the way back to 3.6 so I'm still using Firebug and I'm still super grateful that Firebug came around. It literally revolutionized debugging web applications for me. There could have been tools before it but, man, that was the final nail on IE's coffin for support from us. Hell, even Chrome's built in debugging is way better than anything I can find on IE. I know the latest IE versions have gotten better but it's my strong opinion that every single person who uses the internet should be thankful for Chrome, Mozilla, Venkman and these debugging tools. They made the web experience a hell of a lot better and open by empowering developers.
My work here is dung.
Um... Isn't this why Firefox was created to prevent the bloat of Netscape and make a browser that just... browsed? Why not make this a plugin?
Why can't someone make a better browser than Firefox but make it as customizable? I've tried using Chrome and found that even basic options don't exist. And Opera really isn't that much better than Firefox.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
So why not focus on faster browsing rather than debugging ?!?
As a web developing, most browsers (yes, even IE) have gotten to the sub millisecond rendering ranges. I mean, we're getting to the point where the browser is negligible compared to your network. Yes, you have broadband and it should be lightning fast but there are even little unavoidable delays for each GET or POST. So the next best thing is to empower developers who write the JavaScript code to be able to find out where their delays are. As debugging improves, we can even breakdown the experience and display that to the developer in the browser for each resource (images, CSS, JS, etc) on a page and then the developer can think about turning all those images into a spritesheet or improving some code. I mean, this is actually making the browsing experience faster for everybody by putting the right tools in the developer's hands. You can spend forever optimizing the backend but it doesn't mean jack squat when you're querying for 99 separate little images when the user first hits the page.
My work here is dung.
In addition to the messed up version numbering, let me know when you can post an announcement with the terms "debugger", "testing" and "emacs" (yes the comparison of a web browser to Emacs is beyond my n00bish level of comprehension.
Until then, I will stick to Opera or may be move to Chrome when Opera is acquired by facebook...
Quit whining and just use the ESR release
if this is feature is ready why is not pushed to users already. why do we have to sit around waiting for months a new version with new features. If mozilla truely believed in opensource they would learn to release early and often.
(on a serious note, I wish projects like gimp had a release cycle like firefox)
Chrome is at 23 now
Can all these noobish people with their issue with version numbers get over it? Every Slashdot post has these idiots cribbing.
You can disable automatic updates. Why are you whining? You don't like something called 15? Write a Greasemonkey script to display the correct version number however you want.
All version numbers as supposed to say is which distribution came first and which came later. 15 > 14. That is all you need to know from a version number.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Yes they did. There was a benchmark story in slasdot a little while ago. It is as good as or better then chrome
It makes a lot of sense actually. New features are actually getting MORE testing and are getting released to the public SOONER.
because none of us want a website like that jacob nielson, people actually want pretty things and unfortunately it costs time, money and bandwidth....
"Web 2.0" transforms so much otherwise perfectly functional hardware into environmentally-unfriendly junk
Find me a "web 2.0" site that requires anything newer than a decade and get back to me. "web 2.0" is meaningless marketing not a tech spec anyway.
Like many (most?) /.ers I have multiple machines on my desk and the experience on my oldest "secondary" box is basically identical to my newest. So it boots and starts chrome slower, who cares, once chrome starts I can't tell the difference.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Are mere mortals already allowed to use it? Last time I checked, they required some sort of registration.
Though from what I was reading up on it, the ESR doesn't make much sense: a random FireFox release is given the "ESR" moniker with purpose of providing only security fixes for it. If the random FireFox version happens to be totally borked and unusable, security fixes alone wouldn't help much.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Right. Plus, you could try the Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release) version, which is supported for the not quite long-term period of one year. It won't shut up the high-version numbers but it would allow you to skip from, say, version 10 to 15+ or whatever version comes a year after the initial release of the current ESR.
The web 10 years ago was not fine. People were still supporting Netscape 4, which in practical terms meant that everybody was stuck with inaccessible, inefficient, inflexible table layouts that had to transmit style information for every page load. Mobile websites were practically nonexistent; where they did exist, it was a severely cut-back version. Using a single responsive design to cater to desktop and mobile uses would have been impractical even assuming today's mobile hardware. Lots of JavaScript was essentially written twice - once for Netscape and once for Internet Explorer, because the various DHTML and layout methods were different and incompatible. Netscape transcoded from CSS to JSSS internally, and lots of websites only supported Internet Explorer on Windows - a single browser on a single platform, both by the same corporation.
From a content point of view, it was still difficult to produce and manage content. Anything beyond basic stuff usually involved a very limited CMS and writing code. The "WYSIWYG" editors generated terrible, inefficient code that often only worked in one browser. Security was far worse than it is now, developers were largely clueless about even the most basic vulnerabilities, and things like the PCI standard weren't put in place yet.
These days, people are paying more and more attention to content because the technology is largely at a point where they can. Consider YouTube, Wordpress or Facebook - people generating content at phenomenal rates. Efficiency is still a prime concern due to mobile browsing, and techniques such as CSS, caching and CDNs have improved efficiency immensely. User-empowering features such as user stylesheets, user JavaScript and add-ons have grown into a thriving ecosystem, and accessibility support continues to grow.
Ten years ago was a really low point for the web. It lacked the client diversity that came before it, it was rife with incompatibilities and the inefficient designs necessary to compensate for them, and it lacked the compatibility and accessibility that mostly came afterwards. In all of the history of the web, that is probably the one point I'd least like to be stuck in.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/10.0.5esr
Firebug just works but I have always had the feeling that it is hard on my browser.
If chrome would get a better debugger then bye bye firefox though.
With a version exactly every 6 weeks, then 8 versions take 48 weeks, so it's 4 weeks shy of a year and would be version 18.
Except it's not.
For some inexplicable reason they chose version 17 as the next ESR, so long-term is now considered less than 10 months.
Really, if developers are the audience why not just farm out this feature to the Seamonkey communication suite, the direct descendant of the Mozilla kitchensink browser + email client + HTML editor, etc. Wasn't the goal of Firefox to become the original speed browser by throwing out all the non-web features of the Mozilla dinosaur?
From my (totally unscientific) observation, most of the page load time is due to every page requesting crap from 10 different ad networks and trackers, which are inevitably overloaded. You can optimize the pages you serve all you want, but this may be a case where developers need to adjust the attitude of the commercial people involved instead.
I look forward to debugging an F-15.
Firefox RAM usage is a lot lower than Chromes actually, theyve done a good job making the browser more efficient. Firefox is faster as well, except for some hiccups here and there. Soon they will go ahead of Chrome, I dont know what changed, maybe its the new release cycle everyone is whining about on this page, but theyve done a good job with it.
Forget debuggers. I don't even load /. with javascript enabled.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Great, now FF will tell me that the Flash plug-in has crashed in a fraction of the time it does now...
That's half the story. The other is that most pages are dynamically generated, slowly. There was a comment thread a couple of weeks about the blindingly fast D forums. Note that they are fast because the server is generating the pages very quickly.
Sorry if it wasn't clear that I was speaking to versioning in general, and how some companies have given it up altogether(Think Apple with "The New Ipad"). Not at all trolling =\
I personally like minor/major release schedules, but that is my preference. When we get to firefox 40, or 50, they'll probably stop and re-think this choice again.
I wish that were the case. As web pages make use of more complex layout and dynamic data, the browsers have become key to not just rendering speed but debugging. Firebug was, for a long time now, key reason to use firefox.
Take a look at http://sinz.org/Maze/ for what turned into an interesting benchmark of layout and js/dom manipulation. (It was not the intent but it sure shows significant differences). Since I did that page, Firefox actually got much slower than it was but it still beats IE but loses badly to Chrome.
except in the real world, that isn't true, just in somebodies "benchmark"
Except in the real world, Firefox has been running for three weeks on this machine with about 20 tabs open and it's using a whole 320MB of RAM. That still seems a lot, but it's a tiny fraction of the available RAM.
My firefox process grows to 1.5GB in 24 to 48 hours. Closing all but one of the windows and attempting to free memory via about:memory does nothing.
Maybe you should remove the addons that are leaking RAM. As I mentioned above, my Firefox has grown to 320MB after three weeks.
The crap from different domains can often be loaded in parallel to the rest. More relevant to load time are the cases where resource C only gets requested after the browser processes resource B, which is included by resource A.
You can always use IE6. It's still getting securty fixes and it's as usable as ever.
This is when the bulk of the MemShrink work will land, which should make a lot of people very happy. To see what they've been working on, check this site out: http://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/
Hi
I have not seen any Websocket support? It would be nice to see Websocket messages like normal http request in the debugger.
Please
Why? Because it's the only browser that doesn't use Microsoft's screwy font rendering. I know I could run gdi++ to get that system wide, but I prefer hooking OS calls as little as necessary. DirectWrite rendering is better due to subpixel glyph positioning, but it's still too aggressive in hammering the glyphs to the pixel grid for my taste.
Yes, I put up with the other Safari annoyances because the me, the most important function of a web browser is displaying comfortably-readable text, and for me Apple's algorithm wins out big over Microsoft's. Even on a 109dpi screen, Safari is easier on my eyes. Looking forward to high-DPI screens, when I hope that hinted rendering will eventually die out as screen resolution approaches that of the printed page.
Firefox has gotten a lot better over the years, however. Been running Nightly since right around the time when they changed their development schedule, and I'm happy with how the performance and memory usage has improved over that time. If they'd offer options to disable hinted fonts (even if it caused a slight performance hit due to not using accelerated font rendering), I'd switch back completely.
FC Closer
:/
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
and you are proud of this because ....
... run just as fast with debugging enabled as without ... and the debugger can attach to remote processes ...
Yay Firefox 15! With two new better things that I and most people will never use. And that attaching to a remote process thing - wow. Always never wanted to do *that*. No security worries there.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Yep
Until I posted this story last week with real RAM usage in a browser showdown, the lie will keep being repeated and modded up by moderators.
I just got tired of seeing the same comments over and over again which were valid with FF 3.0 and certainly 4.0 and 5.0, but not true anymore. I am glad to see moderators now mod down these comments. I would suggest the grandparent upgrade beyond 3.6 to ESR 10 which has memory improvements or use IE if he is at work and has only 1 gig of ram on his work machine.
I have never seen these memory leaks. At least not recently but I admit I only just started warming up to FF again after 4 came out. It had a lot of issues all last year.
http://saveie6.com/
as it should. mozilla does not make flash - adobe does
I'm at just over 59 hours, and it's at about 400MB* on a 64 bit Arch Linux desktop. That goes out the window when Firebug is on. It seems to leaks memory like crazy. It can easily climb over 1.5GB* in only a few hours of debugging/development.
*Rough estimates based on top
FF13 is constantly using 60% or more CPU on all my machines, even with just an about:blank open.
If you're up to 2GB you're likely seeing a leaky plugin. Firebug, for me, seems to leak. In short, if you're seeing consistent ram usage > 500MB, you should try with all plugins disabled or in safe mode.
That would be a more compelling argument if the first ESR wasn't already nearing end-of-life.
I think Mozilla and most large organisations have very different ideas of what constitutes extended support.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I resisted the move to Chrome for years, but a few weeks ago I finally game up on Firefox. I just got tired of dealing with all the system lockups caused by immense resource leaks. There are features I'll miss, and UI changes I hate having to deal with, but not nearly enough to make it worth sticking around. Especially after Firefox's upgrades started getting driven by Chrome envy.
Try: https://www.requestpolicy.com/
Just because *you* don't see leaks does not mean others don't.
The leak is on 10.0.2 with Debian Squeeze. It is not plugin or extension related. I don't use tabs, I open new windows.
I've done searches on the problem and see a lot of bugs but no solutions. I'll try 13.0.1..
And yet, still no 64-bit browser. Why.
Which species do you prefer?
Firebug is an addon, you have to be pretty damn stupid to call out Firefox on memory leaks when you tested with addons.
The website even states that the addon currently leaks, and suggests using a newer Firefox version.
In short, memory leaks really affect idiots more than anyone else.
I tried 13.0.1. SAME LEAK.
But you don't see it, so obviously it doesn't exist. Try doing a search for firefox memory leak to see how many other poeple are having this and similar memory leak problems.
Also, the memory leak debug tools in firefox are poor. Some folks have tried to improve the tools but typically their efforts get delayed or put off.
what a ridiculous thing to say, I'm an idiot because I have memory leaks?
surely the programmer is the idiot for causing the memory leaks but I suppose you could say that I'm the idiot for trusting the programmer to write his code correctly so it doesn't leak?
the user is not an idiot because the programmer made a mistake. only an freetard developer could blame the user for his own failings....