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Mozilla Releases Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sat Sep 06, 2008 01:03 AM
from the keeping-up-with-the-googses dept.
from the keeping-up-with-the-googses dept.
daria42 writes with news that Mozilla has released the second alpha build for Firefox 3.1, codenamed "Shiretoko." The new build includes "support for the HTML 5 <video> element" and the ability to "drag and drop tabs between browser windows." ComputerWorld is running a related story about benchmarks shown by Mozilla's Brendan Eich which indicate that Firefox 3.1 will run Javascript faster than Chrome.
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Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means (Score:5, Informative)
I see. Is that why I was yet again presented with a dialog tonight inviting me to "Upgrade to Firefox 3!" even though I've hit the Never button on that same dialog at least twice on this machine over the past few weeks?
If you give me an upgrade option that says "Never," and I choose that option, my expectation is that I will no longer get random dialogs offering the upgrade. Ever. That's sort of the reason I keep clicking "Never" instead of "Later," but Firefox doesn't seem to care.
This is really starting to get annoying.
Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means (Score:5, Funny)
That bug was fixed in version 3.0. I recommend you upgrade your browser to fix the bug.
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Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means (Score:5, Insightful)
"... but what other explanation is there for Firefox, Netscape, Windoze, or other programs to keep INSISTING that I MUST upgrade my software immediately OR ELSE face dire consequences?"
That's because morons like you, with vintage software, are responsible for all the hundreds of thousands of bots flooding the net with spam and other nasty stuff.
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Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means (Score:5, Funny)
Cool, thanks. I'll get on that right awa
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Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means (Score:5, Insightful)
Although Psychotria (953670) was meant to be funny it gave me an idea. add firefox's upgrade address to your host file and point it to yourself thus it will not look for an upgrade.
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Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means (Score:5, Insightful)
This is really starting to get annoying.
I suppose you filed a bug report a few weeks ago and no one has done anything about it?
Don't bother to check, I am quite sure you didn't:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=453452 [mozilla.org]
This was posted on the 3rd. On the highly unlikely event that it was you that posted that bug, maybe you should give them more than 3 days to do something about it before bashing them on /.?
Also, I would categorize this as a low priority bug(OMFG? Pressing a button AN EXTRA COUPLE OF TIMES? You still alive?), so don't hold your breath.
It is also in the 1.8 branch..
You know one thing I find annoying?
Users that find bugs and never tell you about them.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Because no more than one person could possibly be experiencing the same bug
Yep. Quite likely.
And besides being an excuse to not report bugs, it would also be an excuse to bash them on forums? Right?
Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means (Score:5, Insightful)
My Firefox is at 2.0.0.16. This is an official release (and, as far as I know, the most recent revision to the 2.0 tree). When Mozilla issues a public software update that has passed their internal reviews and release management processes, I don't believe that it's my responsibility to report bugs prior to complaining about them.
While I agree that it's not your job to make sure there are no bugs, it's not realistic to assume that a non-alpha/beta release is perfect. It should be stable and bugs should indeed be few and far between, but it's not going to be a flawless product. You shouldn't have to hound the programmers to get things fixed, but as far as I'm concerned, you have no right to complain about something you can do and have done something to fix.
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Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly : you aren't paid to report/fix bugs , but you don't have to pay for the software either.
So , simply put , you can't complain . You can post bug reports to help speed things up
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Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means (Score:5, Insightful)
It takes less time to report a bug to Mozilla than to bitch about it on slashdot then defend your own moaning. If you want bugs fixed then report them, if you don't want them gone, don't complain about them. If you think that Mozilla has enough "internal reviews and release management processes" to find all their bugs before it goes out to users then you are an idiot. Most bugs aren't discovered until the users use it in their own different ways and no amount of testing or anal retentive release management is going to fix that. Mozilla does thousands of things right and you're complaining some trivial dialog box; if they had waited until all the bugs were found before releasing, you would still need to use another browser such as Internet Explorer, Opera, Crome, Safari which are all even buggier.
You're right about Mozilla, they do release free software and you don't have to do anything in return. It also means that they're just writing it because they want to make the best software possible and unless you help them by reporting the bugs, they don't care about you or whether you like their product or not.
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Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means (Score:4, Insightful)
Last time I checked, Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit company.
Quote wikipedia:
"The Mozilla Corporation reinvests some or all of its profits back into the Mozilla projects.[2] The Mozilla Corporation's stated aim is to work towards the Mozilla Foundation's public benefit to "promote choice and innovation on the Internet."
Just like Microsoft, right?
Except it isn't:
"The Mozilla Corporation was established on August 3, 2005 to handle the revenue-related operations of the Mozilla Foundation. As a non-profit, the Mozilla Foundation is limited in terms of the types and amounts of revenue. The Mozilla Corporation, as a taxable organization (essentially, a commercial operation), does not have to comply with such strict rules. Upon its creation, the Mozilla Corporation took over several areas from the Mozilla Foundation, including coordination and integration of the development of Firefox and Thunderbird (by the global free software community) and the management of relationships with businesses.
With the creation of the Mozilla Corporation, the rest of the Mozilla Foundation narrowed its focus to concentrate on the Mozilla project's governance and policy issues. In November 2005, with the release of Mozilla Firefox 1.5, the Mozilla Corporation's website at mozilla.com was unveiled as the new home of the Firefox and Thunderbird products online.
In 2006 the Mozilla Corporation generated 66.8 million dollars in revenue and 19.8 million in expenses, with 85% of that revenue coming from Google for "assigning [Google] as the browser's default search engine, and for click-throughs on ads placed on the ensuing search results pages."[4]"
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Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means (Score:4, Insightful)
"They have people who are paid to do this shit."
Ridiculous. They are giving you stuff for free, *and* you expect them to do even more stuff for you for free while insulting them at the same time? Talk about being ungrateful, rude and anti-social!
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Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means (Score:5, Insightful)
No, google "users" are a product. The advertisers are the customers of google.
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Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means (Score:5, Informative)
Have you read this [slashdot.org]? Seems like they have really started pushing FF3 hard like they said they would!
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Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means (Score:5, Insightful)
If they want it fixed, yes. It is impossible for a programmers to fix a bug they don't know exist, even if it's in an official public release.
Then she better tell someone about it, if she expects someone to do something about it, just like she would with any other kind of problem.
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Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means (Score:5, Insightful)
What if your grandmother uses Firefox and something doesn't work as she expects?
My grandma would probably just click the 'Never' button every once in a while.
If something really gives her problems, she'd call me up. I'd look at it, and file a bug report.
Wow... the system works.
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Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means (Score:5, Informative)
OK, Once and for all:
From Wikipedia:
"On August 3, 2005, Mozilla Foundation announced the creation of Mozilla Corporation, a wholly owned for-profit taxable subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation, that primarily focuses on delivering Firefox to end users. It will also oversee marketing and sponsorship of the products."
Emphasis mine.
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Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe, If you started to think, instead of demanding from people who give you stuff for free, you'd found out, that "Never" means "Never ask me if I want to update to *this* version.".
Besides: If you don't like it, you can easily fix it. Every noob can change some "if (...)" in some JavaScript C code.
Never forget that all that beautiful open source software only gets created, fixed and updated because we like to do it. And if we listen to you, it's only because we like to make people happy.
If you insult us, call as stupid idiots, tell us that we're shit... do not expect us to even talk to you.
It's common sense: Be nice. Most of the time, people will help you.
But maybe some people do not get out of their basement too often... (Users and Developers alike)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
On the other hand... if you call us *the* shit... we might accept it. :D
This version does not include Tracemonkey (Score:5, Informative)
To get a version with Tracemonkey, download a nightly build [mozilla.org] and follow these instructions:
open a new tab
type about:config and hit enter
read the warning and heed its wisdom
enter jit in the filter field
double click on javascript.options.jit.chrome and javascript.options.jit.content to change their values to true
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Or you're just caught up in the hype and think it's faster? Do you have any benchmarks or data that show Chrome is performing better than FF3.1 alpha2?
We ain't dead yet! (Score:5, Interesting)
So here we have the Moz FF team saying: "We ain't dead yet!".
With IE as the undisputed champion, nothing happened. FF brought the "browser war" back, and suddenly IE starts getting new features.
Google's Chrome brings the browser war to a white heat - suddenly FF is being given a run for its money as the undisputed browser feature champion!
Here's what I'd like to see:
1) Process-per-tab. It sucks when some JS in some tab gets hung up, bringing everything else in the browser to its knees! Chrome is the only game in town here.
2) Fast (native-speed) JS execution. (Chrome? FF?)
3) Excellent plugin compatibility. Both FF and IE have this down.
4) Cross Platform support. I'm a Win/Mac/Linux guy, I expect my software to work equally on all three. FF is the clear winner here.
4) Ubiquity. For me, this is FF, because it's the first thing I download after a fresh OS install, regardless of the OS. But for most people, this is still IE.
What am I going to use? Firefox has my money, still. I type this in Chrome, but I usually am not using Windows, so Chrome, Safari, and IE are non-starters for me.
But Chrome makes it obvious: the browser is the next O/S.
Re:We ain't dead yet! (Score:5, Interesting)
Google's Chrome brings the browser war to a white heat - suddenly FF is being given a run for its money as the undisputed browser feature champion!
I really don't think that Google wants to enter the browser wars. They will make no money from Chrome; it is just a means to an end. What they are trying to do is just make sure that the rapid pace of browser development over the past few years continues unabated, so Microsoft doesn't pull another IE6 on us.
I see Chrome as more of a "reference implementation" than a true competitor. Really, are they gonna put the effort into this thing to keep it current for the next decade? To foster the type of developer and add-on community that Firefox has? I just don't see it happening. I think they really just hope that Firefox, Safari, and Opera et. al. incorporate all the new ideas in Chrome into their own products.
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Re:We ain't dead yet! (Score:5, Interesting)
Really, are they gonna put the effort into this thing to keep it current for the next decade? To foster the type of developer and add-on community that Firefox has? I just don't see it happening. I think they really just hope that Firefox, Safari, and Opera et. al. incorporate all the new ideas in Chrome into their own products.
If they have structure their code properly (and initial feedback indicates that they have) it will take perhaps a dozen reasonably qualified software engineers to keep Chrome relevant. Compared to the size and resources of Google, this is a fairly small investment.
But the result is likely to be rather dramatic for Google: if they provide a simple, rapid, quality browser for a reasonable price that takes browsers to a whole new level, where the browser is very literally more like an operating system, this can have tremendous benefits for Google with its significant and growing number of online applications like google maps, gmail, calendar, and more by the day.
Unlike IE, Chrome developers only have to build a browser that works. They don't have to integrate with some ActiveX or Cocoa API, they don't have to maintain retro-compatibility with a bazillion intranet applications. They just have to make a browser that's cross-platform and implements O/S features in the 80 MB or so of its download size that were common in early Unix Operating Systems that were 10 MB or so.
While I have my doubts as to whether Chrome is everything claimed in their introductory comic, Chrome represents a good step forward, and the fact that it's open source and open license means that it's likely to spread far, wide, and deep within a few years.
It's a double-plus sign to the KDE team; Chrome is based on webkit which is based on Konqueror which was written for KDE. Open-source cross-polinization at work!
Go Google!
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Re:We ain't dead yet! (Score:5, Interesting)
But Chrome makes it obvious: the browser is the next O/S.
I wish this meme would die... tell me... will your browser have a posix API? Will your browser have it's own video and printer drivers? Will your browser allow me to run Linux as a hosted process?
Honestly, kids these days...
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Re:We ain't dead yet! (Score:5, Insightful)
With reference to my babble; I know, but I used a paragraph of his to introduce an observation.
My observation was that people have slated Firefox 2 and IE 7 and 8 for using 200M of memory, and when Chrome uses the same it's all shiney and new.
I see you're quoting from that comic. Firefox does not have one giant address space, it can allocate memory and release it as and when required using various different methods depending on data requirements (just as any other process can).
The fact that this memory is attached to one process or various is beside the point, apart from one: When a process (tab/window) in Chrome is destroyed the OS cleans up the memory. When a tab or a window is destroyed in Firefox the application cleans up the memory.
Very well, but this basically means Google's designers have decided that any memory problems will solve themselves (or rather the OS will solve them) when a tab or window is closed in Chrome and that this advantage outweighs the disadvantage involved in spawning new processes and the IPC between them. There is also less incentive to spend time fixing memory leaks because the workaround will be to close the window/tab and re-open it again.
FF3 has achieved quite a reduction in memory usage and received praise for it until now, and slating it as 'crappy code' and 'half-hearted attempts at fixing [memory leaks] is disingenuous.
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Still somewhat disappointed in Firefox! (Score:3, Insightful)
While I appreciate the new features in Firefox's latest release, I am still disappointed in it because I cannot watch CNN live streams.
Before you jump to conclusions, let me inform you that I have all the latest plugins installed; from Flash, Shockwave, Java and all the rest.
I even have CNN's own plugin for Firefox installed...but live streams will not play! Incidentally, the commercial before the the actual content (which is in Flash), plays fine. When it's over, what one sees is a black screen!
Whose fault it is, I do not know...all i know is that I cannot watch those live streams on CNN. What's going on?
Re:Still somewhat disappointed in Firefox! (Score:5, Funny)
I even have CNN's own plugin for Firefox installed...but live streams will not play! Incidentally, the commercial before the the actual content (which is in Flash), plays fine. When it's over, what one sees is a black screen!
The commercial plays fine, that's all what matters.
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shiretoko (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:shiretoko (Score:4, Funny)
I dunno. They all sound the same to me.
;-)
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Um, no (Score:5, Interesting)
All of the possibilities you mentioned are not the same word as "Shiretoko." Did you even notice as you typed them differently from the actual name?
shireitoko != shirettoko != shiiretoko, and none of those are actual words, much less homonyms.
AFAIK Firefox releases use place names, and Shiretoko is a peninsula in Hokkaido. See: Shiretoko Peninsula [wikipedia.org].
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Firefox's bottleneck isn't JS (Score:3, Interesting)
From Brendan's JS benchmarks:
We win by 1.28x and 1.19x, respectively. Maybe we should rename TraceMonkey "V10" ;-).
Apart from getting the "asshat" award for this comment, Brendan seems to ignore Firefox currently has the slowest DOM manipulation of any of the major browsers.
And it's that DOM which is the bottleneck in most web applications (as I can testify as a web developer), as JS is mostly used to modify the document in some way, not to compute cryptographic hashes of huge datasets or the like.
I am noticing a consistent trend in Mozilla trying to one-up the competition in their benchmarks, while ignoring the real-world problems of their products. Bad for their users, but in the long run, bad for Mozilla as a company and initiative as well.
Re:Firefox's bottleneck isn't JS (Score:5, Informative)
http://developer.mozilla.org/En/DOM_improvements_in_Firefox_3 [mozilla.org]
It seems they have been focusing on extending the DOM support but TraceMonkey will eventually be used to enhance FF's DOM performance
(Excerpt from this page: http://ejohn.org/blog/tracemonkey/ [ejohn.org])
Right now there isn't any tracing being done into DOM methods (only across pure-JavaScript objects) - but that is something that will be rectified. Being able to trace through a DOM method would successfully speed up, not only, math and object-intensive applications (as it does now) but also regular DOM manipulation and property access.
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Firefox Developers (Score:3, Insightful)
Chrome isn't perfect and doesn't run all that well on a hyperthreaded P4 single core.
I'm not about to throw away my computers just to run a beta Chrome which really isn't as functional as my Firefox. I doubt if it would ever be.
A lot of us appreciate the work that FF dev. does and it can only improve.
Thanks.
Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if FF are planning to fix the poor memory handling and speed in Linux any time soon. I'm getting quite tired of just how Windows focussed they are. I know that needs to be their primary target, but it would be nice if the Linux version didn't lag behind *quite* so much, especially seeing as they forget to mention that all these fancy improvements listed for a new version don't actually apply to the Mac and Linux versions.
HTML 5 video (Score:5, Insightful)
Great! Now all of Opera, Safari and Firefox support the video element, can we please kill flash already?
I doubt youtube, game trailers, southpark studios and friends will demand this real soon now because people in general suck but I can wish can't I?
Still no .. (Score:4, Insightful)
still no decent process separation between tabs and plugins though. FF has a lot of work to do to catch up to Chrome (or even IE) in this respect. This problem has been known since years now and nothing has happened.
They could also learn a thing or two about sandboxing from both IE and Chrome.
Chrome? what Chrome? (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh dear, and FF 3.1 was going to *win* at JS (Score:5, Funny)
"We are so, so happy with Google Chrome [today.com]," mumbled Mozilla CEO John Lilly through gritted teeth. "That most of our income is from Google has no bearing on me making this statement. Their implementation of our JavaScript is SO GOOD it's ... pleasing. Really."
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow, I didn't know that. Tried just now on 3.0.1 and yes, you can.
It's one of the things I really like with Chrome; I think Chrome does it slightly better (FF replaced the content of the the open tab in the destination window with the page from the source window and left the source tab open - Chrome creates a new tab in the destination window and closes the source tab). I'm still firmly in the Firefox camp so it'd be great if 3.1 more closely mirrors Chrome's tab moves.
But why maximize? (Score:4, Insightful)
Chrome doesn't seem to allow me to switch to another window by hovering the mouse over that window's taskbar button while dragging a tab - which makes the feature nearly useless if you use maximized windows.
Most web site designs nowadays are tested against window widths of 800 to 1000 pixels. Many of them are "liquid", meaning that the width of the main text area resizes with the width of the window; on these, if you make the window too wide, you have to move your head back and forth to read [webstyleguide.com]. Others just put blank bars at the sides if your window is too wide. So unless you use a small screen, such as that of an older PC or a subnotebook PC, why would you use maximized windows with a web browser?
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Probably dragging to anywhere in the window works now.
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Re:Hrm, I dunno about Tracemonkey being faster (Score:5, Informative)
Chrome Sunspider results [tinyurl.com] (TinyURL to Sunspider results)
Tracemonkey Sunspider results [tinyurl.com] (TinyURL to Sunspider results)
Tracemonkey was faster than Chrome. I think it's odd that Chrome was slower than at work considering my home machine has much better parts. Chalk it up to Vista 64bit or something, I dunno.
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Re:Hrm, I dunno about Tracemonkey being faster (Score:4)
Tracemonkey was faster than Chrome. I think it's odd that Chrome was slower than at work considering my home machine has much better parts. Chalk it up to Vista 64bit or something, I dunno.
Which one is the Vista 64 bit machine? What OS is the other?
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Re:Hrm, I dunno about Tracemonkey being faster (Score:4, Informative)
u have to turn tracemonkey on (even in the tracemonkey capable builds).
see this guy's post [slashdot.org]
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Because addons.mozilla.org doesn't allow us to call our add-ons compatible with future versions of Firefox. We have to wait till Firefox releases a new version and then update the compatibility.
It kind of forces developers to check whether their add-ons are actually compatible with the new version. But not really.
Re:Eich twists the facts a little (Score:5, Informative)
I don't like that Eich seems to not give any credit to Adobe at all for their contribution, and on top of that tries to belittle the effort of Google, who are technically paying their sallaries at Mozilla Corp.
FTFA:
This reminds me: TraceMonkey is only a few months old, excluding the Tamarin Tracing Nanojit contributed by Adobe (thanks again, Ed and co.!), which we've built on and enhanced with x86-64 support and other fixes. We've developed TraceMonkey in the open the whole way. And we're as fast as V8 on SunSpider!
and
V8 is great work, very well-engineered, with room to speed up too. (And Chrome looks good to great -- the multi-process architecture is righteous, but you expected no less praise from an old Unix hacker like me.)
Yup, lots of credit-stealing and belittling going on there. Meanwhile, I don't like that you can't even spell "salaries" correctly. You see, I'm new here: I RTFA, point out inaccurate comments, and correct spelling. An unholy trinity I suppose.
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