Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Released

Shining Celebi writes "Mozilla has released Firefox 3.6 today, which adds support for Personas, lightweight themes that can be installed without restarting the browser, and adds further performance improvements to the new Tracemonkey Javascript engine. One of the major goals of the release was to improve startup time and general UI responsiveness, especially the Awesomebar. You can read the full set of release notes here."

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[Ethanol-fueled]

I just installed the persona add-on and checked out a few of the themes. You're right, most of the non-solid ones like the Marshall Amp and the DJ one with the turntables on it are annoying because they distract the eye and add visual clutter to the workflow.

Additionally, the graphics from the themes as described above have that pixellated, dithered, low-res look to them. It's like stretching a 400x300 picture to desktop wallpaper.

Just used Chrome

[treeves]

to download Firefox 3.6. I regularly use both. Just happened to be using Chrome when I came across this story and decided to upgrade Firefox. I used to use Opera a lot. Not sure why I stopped and why I can't stick with one browser. I guess Chrome took Opera's place as the lighter, faster browser for me while I keep using FF for the extensions.

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[Skratchez]

This is true. The new personas features are butt ugly. Use Stylish (I recommend Gradient iCool for the nice dark black and blue) and the custom /. black with green text mod. It looks like an old CRT.

Re:Speed Kills (play it safe - buy a Chevy)

[Cheburator-2]

Just downloaded it - it's just as fast as Chrome or even faster. Typing this from shiny new browser.

GPU accelerated Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the goals mentioned in the article was to improve garbage collection performance to make pauses shorter and animations smoother. Why not just use the video card to accelerate the graphical operations (plus any other GPGPU operations)? Flash and PDF readers have already done it. For that matter, Windows Vista or later UIs have already do the same. This will give performance edges over contemporary browsers.

Re:Javascript performance

[causality]

My javascript performance comparison between Firefox 3.6 and Chrome and Safari http://www.manu-j.com/blog/firefox-3-6-vs-chrome-vs-safari-javascript-performance/432/ [manu-j.com]

As usual, Firefox performance on the v8 benchmark is pathetic where Chrome is more than 10 times faster.It is 24% faster than version 3.5.4 in V8 but it is clearly not enough. In the sunspider test, chrome is 2 times as fast as firefox. In this test, 3.6 is 17% faster than 3.5.4. Safari too comfortably beats Firefox in both these benchmarks

They should use Slashdot for testing JS performance. Click "Read More" to load a new discussion, then hit "Reply to This", type a response, hit "Preview", and count how many seconds it takes before you see the preview. May the best browser win!

Scrolling

[Majix]

It seems the mouse wheel scrolling has been changed in 3.6. It's moving a much larger distance with each "click" of the wheel than before and if you scroll continuously it seems to accelerate even faster. My first impression is that I don't like it at all. It feels a lot more like Chrome, which isn't a good thing in my opinion, the annoying jumpy scrolling is one of the primary reasons I prefer not to use Chrome.

Personas are not themes, but want to replace them

[BenoitRen]

Personas are not light-weight themes. In fact, they're not themes at all. They're more like little gadgets that you hook up to your web browser to customise one part of its UI. It doesn't even compare to a theme.

But what's worse is that Mozilla is looking to depreciate themes in favour of Personas. From the Add-ons Manager, click "Get Themes". You won't see a page listing themes, but a page listing Personas. There isn't even a link there to the actual themes listing.

Re:GPU accelerated Firefox?

[MarcQuadra]

Firefox is based on Gecko, which uses Cairo Graphics, which has an accelerated OpenGL back-end as an output option.

My guess is that performance when using an OpenGL-accelerated renderer is actually -worse- on non-compositing window managers.

The rendering of pages wouldn't be helped by GPGPU stuff, since it's 'procedural' to parse and render HTML, it's not SIMD in nature.

Apple's been sitting on accelerated 2D rendering of the UI, glyphs, text, and primitives for over four years now, it's not a panacea. I don't think Firefox would be improved if it started depending on video drivers, 3D hardware, and was slower.

Re:Javascript performance

[xtracto]

Maybe it is possible to disable that via a Grasemonkey script?

Re:Personas...?

[zullnero]

It's a path towards creating themes that don't require a browser restart, which is and has been an annoyance since they started doing themes several years ago. Unfortunately, a huge number of themes already out there don't work that way. It seems like a preliminary step towards transitioning to how Firefox 4.0 will be dealing with themes. 3.5 and up are pretty much transitional upgrades to wean people onto 4.0 when it's released. Pretty ordinary release strategy, really.

how about making FF fun again

[cinnamon colbert]

The GUI that pops up when you want to bookmark something - case study in bad design
How about a real editor for bookmarks, with some minimal feature like export this folder (when you need to send someone a bunch of stuff)
How about mozilla not being a jerk about extensions, and getting rid of the spam that makes it hard to see anything but the top 5 extensions big brother mozilla thinks you should have

How about a stable platform for extension developers

How about letting the world know how awesome FF+noscript+adblock is when you go to a site like YAHOO
I hadn't been to YAHOO wihtout my little protectors, noscript/adblock/flashblock for some time and was astonished at how much ads have taken over the front page - how can people stand it

how about giving the users some control over privacy, so we have the wipe things clean on exit menu again

how about giving some users an idea of how much info the SOBs of the web, like google, are collecting

I'm sorry but this is pure bloat.

[Requiem18th]

Personas could work AND WAS ALREADY WORKING as a lightweight theming replacement without being tied to the browser code as an addon.

REPEAT: It already works as an addon.

This is essentially an unremovable addon like that MS .NET addon that MS shoved down our throats.

Look, I have for the most time defended Firefox ever increasing features as progress. I already don't think they managed their "awesomebar" well at all, I like it but many loyal users didn't and instead of making it an option or an extension they gave it a hip name to add insult to injury.

But now they are taking an already working addon into the browser.

The thing I liked about FF was it's modularity, it's what caused the browser to split form the mozilla suit in the first place. This is a step into the wrong direction, into a more monolithic application.

Why do FF developers hate their own extension framework dammit!?

And yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

"One of the major goals of the release was to improve startup time and general UI responsiveness, especially the Awesomebar. You can read the full set of release notes here."

Ironic, then, that the "awesomebar" and the UI both became exponentially more-unusable, really-laggy on my PC, forcing me to revert to 3.5.7.

Re:Javascript performance

[amRadioHed]

That delay is really annoying. If they need to do it they should start it in the background when you preview and then by the time you post it should be done and they wouldn't need to make anyone wait.