Mozilla Releases Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2

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.

Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means

Mozilla has released the second alpha build for Firefox 3.1, codenamed "Shiretoko."

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

That bug was fixed in version 3.0. I recommend you upgrade your browser to fix the bug.

Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means

Wow... that's got to be one of the quickest and most amazingly silly Godwins I've ever seen.

Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means

There is a fix/workaround for this behaviour--make sure that you do not connect to the internet. This way firefox never sees the update and the nag dialog to update never appears.

Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means

Cool, thanks. I'll get on that right awa

Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means

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.

Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means

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.

Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means

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.

Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means

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.

Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means

My Firefox is at 2.0.0.16.

Have you read this [slashdot.org]? Seems like they have really started pushing FF3 hard like they said they would!

Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means

DAs I pointed out in a prior post, I'm using an official public release version of Firefox. Not a beta, not a nightly, not an RC. In this capacity, I'm an end user, not a QA tester. Do you actually presume that everyone who uses Firefox should report each bug that they encounter?

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.

What if your grandmother uses Firefox and something doesn't work as she expects?

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.

Re:Hey, Mozilla: Learn what "Never" means

I refuse to provide any help to the Mozilla Foundation until it stops trying to disguise itself as a non-profit.

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.

This version does not include Tracemonkey

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

We ain't dead yet!

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!

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:We ain't dead yet!

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:We ain't dead yet!

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:We ain't dead yet!

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.

Linux

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

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?

Re:Hrm, I dunno about Tracemonkey being faster

Because I still feel stupid for having made my original post without knowing that you needed to enable Tracemonkey, here's results from my home Windows machine, which is similar to my work machine (Intel Core2 Quad Q6600; work is XP 32 bit, home is Vista 64 bit):

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.

Re:Still somewhat disappointed in Firefox!

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.

Re:Firefox's bottleneck isn't JS

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.

Re:Eich twists the facts a little

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.

Um, no

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].