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Minefield Shows the (Really) Fast Future of Firefox
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Oct 28, 2008 08:20 AM
from the zipping-right-along dept.
from the zipping-right-along dept.
zootropole writes "If you are using Firefox 3 (or even Chrome) you should consider taking a look at Mozilla's Minefield. This browser (alpha version yet, but stable) would give a new meaning to 'fast browsing experience.' Some Firefox extensions aren't supported, but riding the fastest javascript engine on the planet definitely worth a try. Minefield's install won't affect your Firefox, so there's no risk trying it. It's fast. Really. And I'm loving it."
Reviews popping up around the web are overwhelmingly positive, calling the upcoming browser crazy fast, blisteringly fast, etc.
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Firefox 3.5RC2 Performance In Windows Vs. Linux 240 comments
pizzutz writes "Andy Lawrence has posted a Javascript speed comparison for the recently released Firefox 3.5RC2 between Linux (Ubuntu 9.04) and Windows(XP SP3) using the SunSpider benchmark test. Firefox 3.5 will include the new Tracemonkey Javascript engine. The Windows build edges out Linux by just under 15%, though the Linux build is still twice as fast as the current 3.0.11 version which ships with Jaunty."
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First Post! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:First Post! (Score:5, Funny)
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Suggesting nightlies to regular users?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you crazy? If you want to be a little risky, try the 3.1 beta. Nightlies shouldn't be used by those that want to use extensions or avoid crashes.
Re:Suggesting nightlies to regular users?! (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't use any extensions though.
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Re:Suggesting nightlies to regular users?! (Score:5, Funny)
You missed out the 'or' operator. The original statement was that IF (you want to use extensions OR you want to avoid crashes) THEN you shouldn't use nightlies. The followup said that he used the nightlies and avoided crashes just as well as with the stable release, although he didn't use extensions. So: wants to use extensions FALSE, wants to avoid crashes TRUE, and as it turns out nightlies work just fine. Hence OP's theorem is disproved by counterexample.
Really, this is basic Boolean logic. Anyone reading /. ought to understand this stuff...
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Re:Suggesting nightlies to regular users?! (Score:5, Insightful)
What's more, this is the same thing we hear every 2 years. "Browser X is really fast!" Then six months later you hear, "Browser X was lagging behind the pack because it didn't have support for A, B and C, but now it's getting them." After that you get, "Why is Browser X so slow these days?" And inevitably, "Browser Y is really fast!"
When are we going to realize that browser maturity and performance are going to be on opposing curves and jumping ship to an immature browser just sets you up to lose functionality for a short period of time until the performance can be gobbled up by it.
This is exactly why I'm not using Chrome. Chrome is very nice, but it doesn't have most of what I require of a browsing experience. Once it does, THEN I'll evaluate its competitiveness, not before.
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Re:Suggesting nightlies to regular users?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Speed seems to be determined by a lack of bloat... and by bloat, I mean features. Firefox, back in the days it was referred to as phoenix, was exceedingly fast. Since then, fancy bookmarking, spellchecking, rss feeds, etc, etc has been added to it, causing slow startup and loading times. With the addition of a few thousand lines of code, not surprisingly, anything will take a bit longer to start up and go.
Chrome doesn't have many features, so it runs amazingly fast. Minefield doesn't have many features, so it runs amazingly fast. If either of them are weighted down with features (code bloat) then they will slowly grind to a halt much along the lines of IE or current FF.
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Re:Suggesting nightlies to regular users?! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Suggesting nightlies to regular users?! (Score:5, Informative)
I don't even understand the hype about it being fast. It's *really* slow compared to for example the latest WebKit nightly, here's the benchmarks on my machine:
Sunspider:
FF3.0.3: 2697.2ms
Minefield (jit enabled): 1412.4ms
WebKit: 680.6ms
V8 bench:
FF3.0.3 - 199 runs
Minefield (jit enabled): FAIL (brings up printer dialog rather than actually running javascript)
WebKit: 2342 runs
ACID 3:
FF3.0.3 - 71 and significant laggyness
Minefield (jit enabled): 89 with only a little jitteryness
WebKit: 100 totally smooth.
Parent
Java v. Javascript (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, it's time for us to start educating users and the media of when to properly use the monikers Java and JavaScript.
The article linked to from the summary says "Handles Java Well" in the subtitle, but then never mentions it again - only JavaScript.
These are NOT THE SAME.
This is, of course, CBSNews.. but I have seen the same mistake in so-called "tech" media lately, too.
Who's bright idea... (Score:4, Funny)
... was it to code name a perfectly fine browser that's both fast and stable "Minefield"?????
Oh goodie!!! (Score:5, Funny)
"Hey Rockie, watch me put a gun in my mouth!"
Is it faster than wget? (Score:4, Funny)
Just asking.
This is irresponsible (Score:5, Informative)
People. There is A REASON why Mozilla calls these builds "Minefield" rather than "Firefox".
It's because they're not ready for daily use.
They may be faster than the released version of Firefox, but they also may contain major, showstopping bugs, up to and including bugs that can cause data loss.
The only people who should be using them are people who understand this risk and are willing to accept it -- i.e. testers.
Anyone promoting these builds for use by the general public is being irresponsible and exposing anyone who takes their advice to risk.
TFA is bad enough, but it's worse to see major sites like Slashdot parroting this bad advice. You should be telling your friends to avoid Minefield, not to seek it out.
Re:This is irresponsible (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:This is irresponsible (Score:5, Informative)
You got lucky.
A nightly build is exactly what it says it is -- a snapshot of the codebase as of a given day.
Some nightly builds may be completely bug free. Others may be chock full of major dataloss bugs. It's a crapshoot.
Your friends may be fine today, but if they decide to "update Minefield" on the wrong day in the future, they're gonna get screwed.
That's why I call it irresponsible.
Parent
No thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No thanks (Score:4, Funny)
No idea, especially now that no browser executes javascript faster than firefox with NoScript!
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Re:No thanks (Score:4, Interesting)
Plus, it was really annoying when they recently started releasing a new minor version every other day or so. Amongst all the computers I use at work, school, home, whatever, it seemed like I was upgrading NoScript constantly. AdBlock Plus is all I really need nowadays, and BugMeNot is useful sometimes.
Parent
SVG too (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing I'm most impressed with is the SVG performance. It's starting to almost become an alternative to Flash for interactive applications. I like it and I hope it gets even faster.
Re:Firefox Replacement (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Firefox Replacement (Score:5, Informative)
They will, it's an early beta and is therefore considered unstable...
Today's nightly for mac crashes on http://www.pentestmonkey.net/jsbm/index.html [pentestmonkey.net] which is a javascript benchmark, i was trying to see if it really is as fast as the article claims... Currently the webkit nightlies seem to be the fastest on this benchmark, by quite some considerable margin.
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Re:Firefox Replacement (Score:5, Informative)
PowerPC is being added to the Nanojit (backend for Tracemonkey and Tamarin).
Help is welcomed. Hop onto #tamarin for pointers.
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Re:Firefox Replacement (Score:5, Informative)
If it is that much better, why arent they just replacing Firefox with it??
They will, though it will be called Firefox when that happens. "Minefield" is just the code name for Firefox 3 nightlies, and it's called that for a reason: as a developer-intended build, it's prone to blowing up.
It will be released when it is ready. That time isn't yet.
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Re:Firefox Replacement (Score:4, Informative)
So they branched Minefield several months ago to become Firefox 3.0 but continued work on Minefield and now a new branch from Minefield will become Firefox 3.1.
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Re:Firefox Replacement (Score:5, Informative)
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mod parent up (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:faster than Chrome (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:faster than Chrome (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, you have to enable the TraceMonkey JIT JavaScript compiler before you'll see any reasonable speed increase (in theory). Just go to about:config, search for the 2 items with "JIT" in their name, and enable them.
My stress tests have shown it to be 10-50% faster than Chrome *when* JIT works. However, it's still buggy as hell, it eats its own memory heap and grinds to inexplicable halts kinda randomly whenever my code does anything repetitive and strenuous, bringing the average execution speed down to almost FF2 levels, meaning it's faster for me to leave JIT disabled. It's a no-go for me until they fix that.
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But Chrome wasn't the fastest! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:But Chrome wasn't the fastest! (Score:5, Funny)
My ManBearPig smashes your SquirrelFish and your silly TraceMonkey.
Since I am not going to RTFA, I am going to speculate that Minefield is Mozilla's answer to Microsoft by way of having a faster, more modern version of Minesweeper.
Take that Evil Empire!
Parent
Re:But Chrome wasn't the fastest! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm interested in using Javascript as an embedded language, it's too bad most of the current JS engines assume they will be running in a browser. Yes, you can build standalone TraceMonkey and SquirrelFish shells but it isn't very easy on all platforms (no Visual Studio project, etc) and they aren't very easy to embed.
For general application development outside of a browser I have found V8 to be faster than the others. It's also a lot easier to build standalone or embedded in other applications. It's also very easy to add extensions to (written in C++), especially compared to the other choice.
I'm keeping my eye out but right now V8 fits my needs the best. If the other projects would do a little work towards focusing on general application development in their respective JS engine then I might switch. Switching will be a pain in the butt though because my C/C++ extensions will have to be ported to each engine. I kind of wish there was less diversity because right now it's hard to tell which engine is going to take off (eg. Google could abandon V8 for one of the other engines like SquirrelFish since they are using WebKit anyway).
Unfortunately all of them, including V8, are pretty large compared to cleaner scripting languages like Lua which makes embedding them in mobile applications kind of annoying (although we're getting more and more space on these things).
Parent
Re:Minefield? (Score:5, Informative)
What the hell kind of codename is that? Maybe an attempt at 'truth in advertising'?
That's exactly what it is. Minefield always refers to the current alpha-release of the upcoming "major" release.
Don't use it unless you know what you're doing. Suggesting end-users use this, without briefing them on why it will crash [frequently], is irresponsible at best and does a disservice to the alternate browser movement.
Parent
Re:mozilla minefield? (Score:4, Insightful)
That was their intention.
It keeps idiots like you who look at the name only away from the nightly builds, and anyone with enough of a clue to not judge it by its name is also by extension usually intelligent enough to read the fucking warnings not to use it in the first place.
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Re:mozilla minefield? (Score:4, Funny)
Remember how they used to say that if IBM marketed Kentucky Fried Chicken, they would have called it "Warm Dead Birds".
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Re:mozilla minefield? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:This is a step up (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems pretty quick to me, but that's probably cause it's not running my 15+ extensions.
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Re:This is a step up (Score:5, Informative)
Please remember that if you messed with minefield "a few months back" then its been through dozens of iterations since then. It's a nightly build.
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Re:This is a step up (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Hyperbole (Score:5, Funny)
Well... it's 10% faster than Chrome, not than Firefox 3. So, to use your analogy, it's like you're going down the road at 35MPH when Chrome blows by doing 80, and then Minefield blows past doing 88MPH.
(Just better watch that flux capacitor...)
Parent
Re:You can never call MS Evil again.. (Score:5, Informative)
Javascript was not created by the opensource community (it was created by Brendan Eich and ended up becoming part of Netscape, which was not open source at the time). Additionally, Javascript has reasonable structures that don't deteriorate when the software expands to large sizes.
Check out Synchronet [synchro.net], it has IRC servers, NNTP servers, Gopher servers etc. all written in javascript. The code is completely readable (generally not the case with VB when the code reaches that complexity) and cross-platform.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the Javascript language, like there is in visual basic.
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Re:Competition and economics (Score:5, Informative)
The browser war heated up when Google (and others?) started paying out on ad revenue created by in-browser searches. Apple makes some nice change on Safari. So does the Mozilla Foundation, apparently [clickz.com].
There would be very little competition if there wasn't money to be made.
Parent
Re:Competition and economics (Score:4, Insightful)
You've just learned an important lesson:
Capitalism has room for socialist enclaves. It all works well as long as there is a choice. Sometimes, as in this case, the competition is good for everyone.
It's the socialist society that can't survive without eliminating choice.
Parent
Re:Competition and economics (Score:4, Insightful)
Very few people want to pay for a browser. If you see the browser itself as the product, this can be a real problem. So what do you do if you are a browser maker? Opera's browser is their product. They focus pretty heavily on selling it for embedded/small/portable systems.
Mozilla on the other hand launched their campaign to build and promote Firefox. They give the browser away for free because that's how they increase the value of the actual product that they are selling to supporters: marketshare and openness. Investing in Firefox is investing in a new standard that everybody has nearly equal access to. It's building a more open web based market across which to conduct other business.
Some companies may shy away from investing because they don't own the results. But other companies may invest specifically because of how equal the access is to the results.
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Re:Competition and economics (Score:4, Interesting)
To build on that point, in case not everyone understands the implications of this post, those that promote equal market access tend to be either a) the one with an idealist in charge or b) the one that believes that they really are the best on the market.
The fun starts when you actually have both of the above, because they don't shut down the market access for others once they get a majority of the market share. That generally means greater openness and creativity which creates new jobs and more focused disciplines.
This holds true in every market, by the way. Market regulation tries to do this artificially, but rarely works as well as it should. The alternative can be much worse or much better, though usually the former is the case.
Parent
Re:Competition and economics (Score:4, Insightful)
And what's amazing, and completely against capitalism, none of these web browser makers are charging any money for their products! All this great software is being developed and given away for free!
Capitalism and OSS are orthogonal concepts. Companies like IBM and Red Hat make money out of Linux and Mozilla with hardware and services (not by selling the Linux kernel or the Firefox browser), and would carry on investing in free software even if Microsoft suddenly went bankrupt. My company develops instrumentation using GNU tools, and we also support OSS.
Capitalism by definition is the free market, which when taken to the extreme is anarcho-capitalism. Thanks to Marx's poor definition of value (which is too dependent on labor) and his class war ideology, the concept of capitalism has been associated with fascism. As Hayek wrote, the easiest way to convince people of something is to redefine the meaning of words. Don't fall into this trap.
Capitalism is a system which allows people to be free to exchange goods and services for mutual benefit and to cooperate on projects such as Mozilla. What we see on Washington, Wall Street and in central banks is a huge money laundering machine, where we can't tell apart where the government ends and where the corporations begin. This is the very definition of fascism.
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Re:Competition and economics (Score:4, Informative)
Capitalism and free markets are about the free exchange of goods and ideas, with the people involved in the exchange (and only them) setting the terms of the exchange.
Whether the terms of the exchange involve money or not does not have much to do with the idea of free exchange.
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Re:Competition and economics (Score:5, Insightful)
"DISCLAIMER: Use of this advanced computing technology does not imply an endorsement of Western industrial civilization."
Actually, yes, it does. You're just too much of a hypocrite to recognize it.
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Re:Competition and economics (Score:5, Insightful)
How/why do you hate capitalism? That is about as specific as saying you hate socialism, when in reality most people hate poorly implemented socialist governments.
As far as I can tell, the fact that you enjoy competition and therefore the fruits of competition is a direct endorsement for capitalism, at least at a basic level. Add another layer, that you agree to the negotiable exchange of value, and you have capitalism right there.
How can you hate that? IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera all happen to give you a free web browser in exchange for different goods OTHER than money, which means they all play in the capitalist system.
IE for control of the internet
Safari to prevent Microsoft controlling the internet
FireFox in exchange for investments from Google
Chrome in exchange for more data mining
Opera in exchange for license fees
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Re:Competition and economics (Score:4, Insightful)
Does having only 2 relevant political parties make people limited in their views and reasoning or something?
Parent