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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?
im lost what are they up to now...?
stopped using it around 6, when they started the weekly new browser affair....
and to think i helped the universe ( one of 60 guys that helped ge t the communicator code) to get this screwed up....
only plus is browsers are free....
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.
I was totally expecting Firefox 100000015! True story!
The Muzzies are coming, The Muzzies are coming
Everyone keep calm
They're violent and they're evil
And they mean to do us harm
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.
Did Mozilla fix the ram usage yet? Until then I am sticking with Chrome as it doesn't use 2 gigs of ram like Firefox does
Who uses FireFox anymore anyway?
Seriously though, I was sort of mystified when their versioning started incrementing whole numbers with each release. I liked the old versioning system but I guess if I think about it, it really doesn't matter.
They should've just called it "The New FireFox"!
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...
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)
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.
because none of us want a website like that jacob nielson, people actually want pretty things and unfortunately it costs time, money and bandwidth....
Firefux is the prime example as to why and how communist open-sores doesn't work. Firefux is so fucking bloated it takes 1/2 GB memory for just one fucking tab showing a text file. The firefux team refuses to fix it because it is a "Feature" and if someone wants it removed then they must code themselves. NOT EVERYONE CAN CODE YOU COMMUNIST, NIGGER LOVERS!!! No thanks I'll stick with Internet Explorer, at least Microsoft is listening to their customers moreso than the communists such as RMS Titanic AKA Stallman, the firefux team, etc.
"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
What about the outrageous memory leaks?
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.
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
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...
So when will that be? In Firefox it'll be version 16 so the 28th of August, in 7 weeks (and another 6 weeks if I really care about ESR users)
For fun, here's a site that forgot to unprefix their javascript from .MozOpacity to .opacity when it was unprefixed 8 years ago in Firefox before version 1.0, then the author filed a bug asking "why was this SUDDENLY DONE in June 2012?" and plans to invoice Mozilla for the work he does updating his site.
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.
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.
As a web developing, most browsers (yes, even IE) have gotten to the sub millisecond rendering ranges.
We're talking about firefox though, not a browser thats fast like IE, Safari or Chrome. Its cute how you're trying to blame Firefox's shitty performance on something else.
--BitZtream
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.
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. . . .
as it should. mozilla does not make flash - adobe does
FF13 is constantly using 60% or more CPU on all my machines, even with just an about:blank open.
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/
And yet, still no 64-bit browser. Why.
Which species do you prefer?