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Mozilla The Internet Operating Systems Software Windows

Optimized International Firefox Builds From MOOX 34

Posted by timothy from the well-mookie-here dept.
Nigel Wellington writes "Many of us have tried and are using the optimized builds of Mozilla Firefox made by MOOX. For those not aware, these builds perform roughly 20% faster than the official builds from Mozilla, are generally more stable and have extra features patched in. Well, the good news is that MOOX appears to now be making optimized builds that are localized as well to specific languages! This page has several localized builds already (German, Czech, Finnish) and by the looks of it many more are coming. If you have been looking for a solid localized build I strongly suggest these. The German M3 version has been awesome for me for the past 24 hours!" (These builds are Windows-only.)
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Optimized International Firefox Builds From MOOX More

Optimized International Firefox Builds From MOOX

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  • ...why aren't these optimizations contributed back to the Mozilla source? I'm assuming there's a good reason... just curious.

  • Any advantage for Gentoo? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by crow ( 16139 )
    Is there any advantage to these builds over the ones I get in my Gentoo system? I've already set my CFLAGS to optimize for my processor, but 20% sounds like a lot more than what I would normally expect from those changes. Or do the default builds include debugging or things that would be turned off in other distribution builds, as well?

  • Testing criteria (Score:1, Insightful)

    by scumbucket ( 680352 )
    I noticed in the linked PDF file that his test CPU is an Athlon XP1700+ overclocked to 2.15GHz. A stock XP1700+ only runs at 1.4GHz, so that is a pretty hefty overclock. Seems to me it could be the overclock that is causing his 20% speed increase, not some special optimizations.

    • Seems to me it could be the overclock that is causing his 20% speed increase, not some special optimizations.

      Firefox standard build and alternate build are both run on the same hardware, so... No.

  • Optimisations are COMPILER flag optos (Score:5, Informative)

    by tod_miller ( 792541 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @10:41AM (#10383975) Journal
    Which is why they are not put back into source.

    Mozilla release generic stuff, as you would, not good asking people to choose which CPU you have to use the intarweb.

    Grab a CPUID app, find out your flavour of CPU (or just remember what one you bought) and d/l an optimised version!

    I think quake 3 is some monster that runs certain branches of optimised code instructions based on processor... maybe...

    So no source changes, just compiler sex.

    800.469.9269 INDUCE ACT CALL IN DAY. Phone now, and state you are opposed to the INDUCE ACT

  • Red Flag (Score:2, Redundant)

    by noselasd ( 594905 )
    Things like this always makes me raise a red flag.
    If these are chnages not in the original mozilla, might they
    not be unstable/experimental ? Or if they are much better than
    the original, why arn't they in mozilla.org ? Either way, not good imho ;). (good for end users if it delivers what promises though..)
  • Has any looked at the speeds of the these builds vs the Linux installations, say on Suse, Fedora and Gentoo?

    On my own machines the Linux seems lil' faster, but that's anecdotal evidence.

    • My Gentoo build (measured subjectively by using the browser normally) seems to run about as fast as the official Windows build on my girlfriends machine.

      What? Not a scientific benchmark? Well, my computer is 800 Duron and my GF's is 1.4 or 1.6 or something Duron or Athlon (can't remember), so I guess the Gentoo build at least here seems to beat Windows build.

      Except... well.. I think the bottle-neck is the network connection after all.. How many have network connections so fast that browser performance i

  • But I like the Windows installer (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Elwood P Dowd ( 16933 ) <judgmentalist@gmail.com> on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @11:05AM (#10384330) Journal
    If this MOOX dude would give us .msi files or an installer .exe, I'd be down. If I were on a unix machine, I'd be happy with a directory that I could throw in /usr/local/bin/ & add to the path, but on Windows I expect some infrastructure. Because I'm a spoiled brat.

    I tried expanding MOOX's zips over my existing installation, and only succeeded at breaking everything. OK, I admit that was dumb.

    Also, shouldn't it be possible to build a binary with SSE optimizations for all x86 processors?

    • Re:But I like the Windows installer (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I tried expanding MOOX's zips over my existing installation, and only succeeded at breaking everything. OK, I admit that was dumb.

      Mozilla has said with every official release that installing over older releases (even sec. updates like 0.9.x) is a Bad Idea (TM).

      Especially when the only settings in Firefox that aren't profile-centric (that I know of, at least) are the search engine settings. Just c&p those, or spend the two or three minutes at Mycroft it takes to restore your search settings. :p

      I

  • To answer many of the questions here... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    From the .pdf:

    Build Environment: The free Microsoft MSVC++ Toolkit

    Presumably, most people are using gcc to compile Firefox, so this means you can't just set some flags in your makefile and get the speed-up. You'd need to convert the build process to use Microsoft's tools.

  • Other builders (Score:5, Informative)

    by Leffe ( 686621 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @11:51AM (#10384937)
    Moox isn't the only one providing custom builds (although I use them :) ), MozillaZine [mozillazine.org] has a forum dedicated to custom builds (ThunderBird, SunBird, etc...). And if you can't find what you need there are several guides (and official ones) for configuring and building the source. I suppose the processor-specific optimizations are hidden somewhere too, bugzilla maybe?

    Hm, I suppose you could check out this forum [mozillazine.org] too...

  • When do I get to use my "submarine copyright"?
  • I am moox - the Firefox builder making the localized builds of Firefox. Sorry for the odd uer name of Sevencarbon, but moox was already taken. First off, I want to say thank you to the poster who made the original post here about my work. I do appreciate the recognition, but I am not the only 3rd party developer making custom versions of Firefox. There are several 3rd party developers making optimized and customized versions of Firefox and Thunderbird. The include people such as mmoy, JTw, BangBang23,

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