Sunday, September 07, 2008
|
Loading ...Last night Mozilla started offering a major update for Firefox 2.0.0.16 users to Firefox 3.0.1, the current version.
Firefox 2 users will have the option to postpone the update for 24 hours (clicking on Later), or start the update right away (clicking on Get the new version). Pressing Never however doesn’t really mean never but “much later” (several weeks) which is what the label should read.
If it’s not rare for you to have 20, 30 or 40 tabs opened at a time, you know how much of a burden it can be to get back to the one you need: you have to remember where it was in the tab bar and scroll it accordingly, or scan the List All Tabs menu.
An approach to this problem, and currently in development for Firefox 3.1, is displaying thumbnails of all your tabs so you can visually identify the one. The obvious limitation is that tabs may look alike, specially when you have too many tabs so the thumbnails get really small. To see how this works check the Ctrl-Tab extension review.
Mozilla has just landed a new JavaScript optimization feature to Firefox 3.1 development code base (Shiretoko) that effectively enhances JavaScript-based web applications performance by a 2X - 20X fold compared to the already-severely-pumped-up Firefox 3, according to a variety of JavaScript performance tests ran and published by Mozilla’s Brendan Eich.
TraceMonkey tracks the JavaScript code your page is running, identifies pieces that are repeatedly used, and translates that code (interpreted) to an a machine ready state (compiled) that runs much faster the next time it is needed. As this repetitive executions (loops) are very common, the performance gains are huge.
After a short delay due to overwhelming number of users hammering Mozilla servers, Firefox 3 is here.
Not much to say except congratulations to all the great people who helped make Firefox 3 a reality. It is finally here and there’s a lot to like and learn about it. Check either the full review or a quick 5 minutes review.
Tune in to a special Air Mozilla today at 2:00pm including live broadcasts from Mozilla headquarters, Mozilla Foundation president, Mitchell Baker from South Korea, and Mozilla’s Toronto office.
Get Firefox 3 now, available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux in 45 languages. The clock starts ticking right now and we have 24 hours to set a Guinness World Record for most downloaded software.
Mozilla has joined big mobile market players including Verizon, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung, LG, Motorola, Panasonic, Orange, McAfee, AMD and long list of others, as a member of the LiMo Foundation, a non-profit organization that aims to deliver a mobile Linux distribution as the cornerstone of its members’ mobile applications and devices.
LiMo, which was founded on January last year, has already delivered a first release of its mobile Linux platform which even powers a couple of Motorola headsets: Razr 2 and Rokr E8.
Mozilla VP of Engineering, Mike Schroepfer, has confirmed that the final release of Firefox 3, currently in Beta 4 stage, is expected for June, a full quarter later than the latest estimate and some nine months past the original.
Matthew Gertner, former CTO of now defunct AllPeers, an excellent Firefox extension I miserably failed to properly review several times has an excellent writeup on TechCrunch, on Prism, Mozilla’s proposition for desktop enabled web apps and similar products from Adobe and Microsoft. You may want to give it a look.
One of the main concerns about the JavaScript benchmarks I recently published was that it mixed in-development releases with shipped products that may not be as current as the others.
So, I ran again the tests with the most recent versions I could find: Read the rest of this entry »
Along with the long list of new features and improvements we can find in Firefox 3 betas so far, there is a series of performance improvements coming to Firefox 3 Beta 4.
I’ve finally managed to run a set of tests to see how Firefox 3 performance compares to Firefox 2’s.
Subscribe RSS
Subscribe email