Firefox 3.6 Released | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 3.6 Released

blog.mozilla.com

47 pointsjohns51 comments

I remember when I used to get excited when a new version of firefox came out, but now I just don't care. The performance is abysmal and frustrating. I am on mac and even though chrome doesn't have an official release yet and no plugins, I have already switched 100% to it. I do hope that we will eventually see competition between the browsers again, but at this state, I don't see that much coming out from mozilla.

So far, I'm impressed with the performance of 3.6 -- it's noticeably faster.

The one thing that has me hooked on Firefox on mac is their multitouch gesture support.

   3 finger swipe up/down - go to top/bottom of page
   3 finger swipe left/right - go forward/back
   rotate - switch between open tabs

Even safari doesn't support all of those..

rotate? That doesn't seem to work for me. An special extension?

hmm, this might be the answer: http://gizmodo.com/5305394/activate-multitouch-gestures-in-f...

Maybe I needed to re-enable it a while ago and forgot.

My main browser on the Mac is now Chromium 35449 (very stable, and extensions work on it).

Firefox has become what is was created to fight (at least on the Mac). Sad..

Oh it's just as bad on Windows too. I use Chrome everywhere now.

"Firefox has become what is was created to fight"

I don't believe Mozilla has become a monopoly abuser ;-)

Ff was created as the lightweight alternative to the mozilla browser (i.e. The thing that was also branded as Netscape)

Thankfully not! But I meant slow and bloated :)

You younguns have no idea what the world was like before Firefox and the apreciation that you owe them. Firefox was created to break the stranglehold that Microsoft had on the web. Mozilla saved the web and averted a great human tragedy with Firefox. Before Firefox web developers regularly wrote non-standard HTML that worked only on IE, huge chunks of the web were visible only on IE, and Microsoft was trying to choke off innovation in order to save their desktop platform. Many thought the fight was hopeless and Microsoft had won. No one, including Google and Apple, was willing to take on the fight except for Mozilla, Opera and a few Linux crazies such as KHTML. But it was ultimately Firefox that forced institutions such as banks to write standards compliant pages and saved the world from Microsoft domination. The existence of Firefox is what allows you to use your KHTML browser and bitch about how Firefox is sad.

One of the highlights of 3.6 is TraceMonkey, which should result in a performance boost.

Chrome does have plugins on the mac. I'm surprised, Firefox is mostly irrelevant to me now.

It does, but only on the dev channel builds. It hasn't filtered into the beta channel builds afaik.

Perhaps you should try this release before talking, since it's meant to adress the very points you're 'desperate' about..

Perhaps you should give it one more chance; I've been using chromium for months now, and so have gotten used to the better performance, compared to firefox-3.5.

With 3.6, I don't see the difference anymore.

On Linux.

After using Chrome for 6-8 weeks, I can't go back. Firefox has so many things going for it (history, extensions, compatibility, etc, etc).. but I can't handle the slowness. The JavaScript performance deficit is bad enough, but the outrageous startup time puts it over the top. I'll keep it around for occasional compatibility testing, but it's no longer the go-to browser.

Startup time is MUCH improved in Firefox 3.6. Chrome still feels slightly quicker, but we're talking on the order of 100s of milliseconds. For something that I do once a day, at most, the difference is negligible.

It does seem to be improved, but on my system (new-ish MBP running OS X), Chrome and Safari startup is nearly instantaneous, and Firefox still lags. I don't know how it compares on Windows.

Still.. bravo to the Firefox team for making a big improvement in this department. My ire is now refocused on the (lack of) JavaScript performance. :-)

Do you have a lot of plugins installed? I tested on a 6-month-old MacBook Pro 13", on both OS X and Win7, and Firefox starts up pretty much instantly (less than 500msecs). Agreed, Chrome and Safari seem marginally faster, but I don't close my browser very often, so it really doesn't matter.

"Startup time is MUCH improved in Firefox 3.6. Chrome still feels slightly quicker, but we're talking on the order of 100s of milliseconds. For something that I do once a day, at most, the difference is negligible."

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/psychology-we...

Read the "The Effects of Slow Download Times" section. Those miniscule effects add up big over time, and lead to better overall satisfaction of the service. The link specifically refers to various web services, but I would be extremely surprised if there was not a similar effect in relation between satisfaction and general speediness (UI snappiness, JS/HTML/etc rendering speed) of various browsers.

Thats not to say that speed is the only reason to choose a browser, but it likely has more of an effect on how you use your browser (and therefore how you use the internet) than you would be able to consciously discern.

Linux 64-bit Sunspider benchmarks

FF 3.6 x86_64: 2940 ms Chromium x86_64 : 656 ms

enuff said

Startup time is usually a matter of vacuuming your sqlite. I actually ended up running firefox entirely from ram, which makes it significantly faster.

How? Just clearing the cache?

ram: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1120475 (I think I've seen windows guides somewhere)

defragmenting: http://lifehacker.com/5344418/make-firefox-faster-by-vacuumi...

I start up my browsers once or twice a month, so start time is pretty irrelevant. I must not use javascript-heavy sites because I have never noticed a performance difference in Chrome.

I wish Firefox would adopt the single location/search field.

Firefox lets you customize that. Here's what I do:

1) First, get rid of the search box. Go to View, then Toolbars, then Customize. That will pop up a box with all of the possible wigits you can select. Click on the search box in the upper right portion of your Firefox window and drag it into that box.

2) Now with the search box gone, the next step is to make the location bar act as one. To do this, type “about: config” into the location bar. Then select “keyword.url” and enter “http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&q=”. Now whatever you type into the location bar that’s not a URL will do a Google search. You have to exit and re-start Firefox for this to take effect.

thanks!

furthermore, with the search box gone, apple-k (or ctrl-k or wahtever) will automatically load google search. (whereas before it would focus on the search box)

I have been having a lot of problems with that recently, firefox or my dns have suddenly decided to try and go to keyword.com, without forwarding me, and sending http://keyword/ as the header, which breaks most sites around

That's pretty cool. How about using the keyboard to organize a tab, does anyone know if there's some config setting to re-enable this?

Also, 3.6 seems to open new tabs exactly to the right of the current tab. Argh. I liked them at the end!

You should try Firefox's Smart Keywords for searching directly from the location bar: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Smart+keywords

Using these, I type "gs <search terms>" for Google. I also have this set up for Wikipedia, Google Maps, Bing Image search, Amazon, etc. It's better than Chrome because you can bypass Google web search when you know there's a domain specific search that's better.

yeah---i use this tons for wikipedia searches. i guess this could also be useful for imdb and ocw.

In Chrome, you can also use domain specific searches when they're better: start typing the domain name, and when autocomplete matches the domain, press tab, and the location bar becomes a site-specific search.

e.g. when I'm searching for guitar tabs:

"ul <tab> <search terms>" expands to ultimate-guitar.com to search for guitar tabs

"en <tab> <search terms>" expands to en.wikipedia.org to search wikipedia

It's great that it automatically picks up search boxes in websites. So this works on any website that you have searched in the past - you don't have to manually set it up.

Wow, thanks for this. That's a great implementation of the same feature. You even get suggestions for your search terms - something Firefox doesn't do unless you use the dedicated search field.

The slowness eventually drove me to chrome. And so far, not looking back...

If it wasn't for the checkbox bug, I'd be pretty happy with Chrome. However for now, Firefox it is.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=0551...

The startup time of FireFox 3.0 through 3.5 on my MacBook Pro was horrendous... measured in tens of seconds. I just installed 3.6 and it is much better. It doesn't feel like I'm opening up Photoshop anymore, geez.

An ongoing project was started after Fx3.5 to improve startup time: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects/Startup_Time_Impro...

You can also read the blog of the lead engineer working on startup time improvement: http://autonome.wordpress.com/

Why do chrome users have the need to keep telling us how they switched on every firefox story... please, we get it... good luck with chrome already.

It strikes me as a bit disingenuous to criticize the performance of a browser while openly admitting that you haven't tried it.

I've been an avid Safari user for years, but switched back to Firefox at 3.6b5. The performance improvements they've made are incredible, and with the GrApple theme applied, it looks just like Safari. Plus, I get back some sorely-missed keyboard shortcuts, Firebug's awesome profiling support, and the "snappiness" that I'm used to in Safari.

But until you've actually tried the latest release (genuinely - not 10 minutes working from a disk image), please consider refraining from commenting. An aspect of the software you used to hate might have been improved.

You are right, I should have tried it before. Now I did. It's still so slow as to make me wonder how I ever put up with it.

No Idea what's up with the "hate" terminology. The only browser that can even invoke strong feelings in me would be IE. My comment was simply my spontaneous reaction to the headline, no reason to get all hot & bothered.

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-j...

You really should use a test that focuses both on pure JavaScript and also DOM/JavaScript interaction. The fact that Chrome processes JavaScript faster doesn't necessarily mean that Firefox is slower in a real application that interacts with the DOM (although it may be, I'm not sure).

Edit: See http://dromaeo.com/

Sunspider and V8 are standard javascript benchmarks. I have found that the test results compare favourably to real world usage. For example Google wave is sluggish on firefox while chrome has no problems with it.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Dromaeo

It looks like it is not ready for wide usage.

I was suffering horrible hangs will some sites updated, notably Facebook.

On upgrading Firefox to 3.6 I had to edit the install.rdf of the "It's all text" extension to allow it to work. I noticed a comment on the Mozilla add-ons site saying that this extension could be the cause of the slowdowns.

Anyway (with the hacked install.rdf) "It's all text" still works in Firefox 3.6 and my slow-downs have gone.

Happy! I didn't want to swap to Chrome without "It's all text", noscript and adblock plus.

Hi! I'm working on making It's All Text! work with Firefox 3.6. If you have troubles (such as right clicking on gumdrops) then turning on "Remove all bugs" actually does what it says, for a change. o_O

I looked at doing a chrome version of "It's all text!" but chrome doesn't have a way to launch an external application short of creating an NSPlugin. Which I'm not sure I want to have to support across all the chrome platforms.

Would it be possible for sites to impose a persona onto visitors, like http://www.getpersonas.com/ does when you mouseover certain areas?

It's disappointing that Firefox 3.6 only supports Ogg for their <video> tag, especially since Youtube and Vimeo have started beta testing their html5 players.

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