Mozilla Releases Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2 348
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.
Re:"New" features (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.
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.
shiretoko (Score:4, Interesting)
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: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.
Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means (Score:1, Interesting)
Don't expect it to stop.
http://tinyurl.com/68o9hu [tinyurl.com]
"We're pretty committed to user choice, but we're also pretty ardent that Firefox 3.0 is a good product," said Beltzner, explaining why Mozilla won't take 'No' for an answer.
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...
Re:"New" features (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, 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. Especially since pressing alt-tab stops the dragging immediately. Hopefully they'll fix it by the release version.
Re:We ain't dead yet! (Score:3, Interesting)
Did you read the comic announcing Chrome? I did. You should, too!
Sure, standard processes can share memory. Sure, they can share cookies. And I don't mind them doing so in a derivative fashion. EG: If I open Tab B from Tab A, it should get Tab A's cookies. But cookies in Tab B shouldn't "backport" to tab A.... The point is that if different processes can communicate with each other, that significantly increases the likelyhood of cross-tab / cross-process vulnerabilities. The attack footprint just grew, rather sharply, in size.
I have no problem with cookies being shared. I do have a problem with NEW cookies being shared across processes in an obviously shmop-type environment. Suddenly, tab A can theoretically access session cookies running in tab B, and worse, can even set them.
But that's not what the comic described! What I read sounded more like a description of a JVM or a chroot-jail. Each process would run in its own highly protected space. There were pictures of bars on the comic. And that sounds very different than the idea that the tabs all share a memory space that contains (among other things) security sensitive session cookies!
If I'm trolling, I sure don't mean to be. But it's pretty clear that the whole "each tab is a different process running in its own jail" is crap. Sorry. It may be significantly better than the "everything runs in a single process" model that FF uses. I don't want to imply that this isn't a significant improvement. But it's certainly less than claimed, and it's certainly less than their comic announcement led me to expect.
And that leaves me disappointed.
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!
Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means (Score:2, Interesting)
You know one thing I find annoying?
Users that find bugs and never tell you about them.
You know one thing I find annoying? Spending a good half an hour producing a long bug report to a third party, detailing my configuration carefully, testing on other machines, suggesting possible causes and workarounds, explaining why the bug is important... then having someone who clearly knows his users' needs better than his users either
(1) ignoring it as if it was never posted;
(2) marking it the "so low priority you might see a fix within 3 years, if at all" category; or
(3) slamming a "wont fix" or a "by design" on it and closing with 0 to 5 words of explanation, because if a bug's not worth considering a bug today, by golly it needs to be ignored Right Now before others point out that it bothers them too. Never mind that it's useful to collect feedback since, if sufficient users argue in some direction, it might be that there's actually a problem.
Though nothing riles me more than offering some patch and the FIRST thing you get is not a comment on its engineering quality but a rant about spacing and variable naming. Two things, fuckers:
(a) First tell me whether you feel the code works and the algorithm is elegant/efficient, because that's where the thought has gone (or hasn't, if I've made some mistake - which I'd be happy to know about);
(b) Then consider that because it's your project you might just this once be able to stretch your valuable time to re-indenting a few lines of code.
Then, and only then, might you SAY THANK YOU then politely point me to some well written style documentation for the project to help me for next time. And, if you do these things, I'll feel welcomed and there will likely be a next time.
I've pretty much given up on reporting bugs to third party projects, in the same way I gave up reporting HTML issues to webmasters before 1998. I think one particular problem is that major open source contributors feel that users owe them in return for the work they do - hell, the parent poster seems to speak as if they do. It's a side effect of the transition from an academic (where things are done for the sake of improving human knowledge) to a commercial (where things are done for oneself) Internet - even in the OSS context, people participate to boost their own egos/resumes/bragging rights/sense of entitlement. Wrong! Take a leaf out of organised religion and assume that you'll get into some sort of Free Software Heaven or something, if it makes you feel better; you do not owe me when I publish a paper in my field that you happen to benefit from reading, and I do not owe you when I use your software, okay?
Moving from a technical to a political note, I refuse to provide any help to the Mozilla Foundation until it stops trying to disguise itself as a non-profit. I don't like Google's hypocritical "do no evil" image either, so it'll be good to see Chrome and Firefox fight it out - hopefully to the detriment of each other by fragmenting marketshare - and it's nice to see Google giving Mozilla an unexpected kick in the balls.
Meh (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Uh, hello, cadettes, "alpha" is not a release (Score:2, Interesting)
I donno if you're the same guy as ShawnC
but there was something recently about Mozilla being more persistent about people upgrading from ff2 to ff3, in that they would pop up a dialog asking you to upgrade periodically, even if you selected never.
But then again, a quick google search reveals nothing, so maybe i'm imagining it/typing in the wrong words to search from
Always javascript performance (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you understand the difference between using Ubuntu and Firefox? One is made by people who really are doing it just for the love of it, and the other is a for-profit company.
There are some who don't seem to be aware of the difference between Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corp.
Why did Google get slammed here on /. for Chrome, which is given away for free, but then go on to polish Firefox's knob? Can you really not use a product without becoming emotionally attached and using it's fucking logo as a family herald? Am I obliged to change my middle name to "Apple" because I use a MacBook? I was about to use as a hyperbolic example the idea of getting a logo tattooed on my body, but then I realized that it's already common.
I refuse to use a corporate identifier as my avatar (and I don't mean in an MMO).
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].
Re:Always javascript performance (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually JavaScript performance is extremely important to Firefox, as the UI and its countless addons run on JavaScript.
As for rendering performance, I haven't really encountered any websites where I noticed any issues with the speed at which it was being rendered, any slowness has always been with poor performance server side when serving up the requisite HTML, CSS and JavaScript files. That said, if you have any good examples of poor rendering performance I'd be interested to take a look.
Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means (Score:3, Interesting)
Pardon teh second post, but "free" is an interesting concept in today's online economy.
Most users of Google products also don't pay anything, but do you believe you are anything but their customer?
Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means (Score:3, Interesting)
I can assure you, no one is working harder to piss off the Mozilla user base than the Mozilla dev team.
Just look at the AwesomeBar.