mozilla links
ShareThisThere’s been a flood of posts on the web about the discovery of Minefield, an enhanced new web browser by Mozilla, that just leaves Chrome and the others biting the dust due to its serious performance superiority.
As most Mozilla Links readers may know, Minefield is the main code repository for Firefox (the trunk) where patches and new features that are meant to be included in the next Firefox release first land.
When a milestone is approaching (alpha, beta or final), the trunk is frozen so nothing but stuff related to the goals set for the next milestone will go in. The frozen code is used to make a build, the build is QA’d, mirrored and released as an alpha or beta (code name Shiretoko for Firefox 3.1, Gran Paradiso for Firefox 3, all names of national parks).
After the release, then the trunk is unfrozen and patches allowed again for the next development release.
When a final release like Firefox 3, happens, a branch is created (the code copied to a separate area) so it can be maintained with stability and security updates (like the latest 3.0.3).
Here’s an attempt to make it understandable for visual types.
In summary, Minefield is not a different product but the next (always the next) Firefox minus all the testing and infrastructure to call it even a development release. It may speed things up just as it may delete all your bookmarks or computer documents.
That, however, doesn’t stop about 10,000 people who live on nightlies most of the time.
Most of the improvements you may find on Minefield can be tried in the latest Firefox 3.1 Beta 1, a more stable release, and a better trade off if you’re not ready to risk your data.
To get the performance improvements you will have to enter about:config in the location bar, look for the javascript.options.jit.content advanced preference and double click it to set it to true.
with javascript.options.jit.content activated, i got a print dialog box while attempting to run the JS v8 benchmark and the first test (Richard) has a score of 1 !
Obviously the name Minefield doesnt tell enough to these idiots.
i don’t have this problem anymore with last nightly
With the last nightlies (since October 28th) Tracemonkey it’s on bt default. You don’t have to make the javascript.options.jit.content trick anymore.
People have just “discovered” Minefield? It’s hardly new. Where are you getting this word that it’s just being “discoverd”? I’ve occassionaly played with it on and off for several years now.
Comparación de distintas versiones de prueba de Firefox y otros navegadores…
Este post surge tras la entrada sobre Mozilla Firefox Shiretoko. En ella estaba usando Mozilla Firefox 3.1b3, sin embargo un lector, Xergio, comentaba que estaba usando ya la versión 3.1b4. Esta en teorÃa ya llevarÃa la nomenclatura nueva: 3.5b4. Al……
This has just shown how much online publications rely on each others rss-feeds. It’s kind of like when you copy on your neighbor at school and then both of you go wrong. It has spread all the way to Norway where the biggest newspaper published a story about this new “rebel” browser. I don’t really like to use this to much, but this clearly qualifies to a big FAIL.