Firefox 3.5 - dreaming about the future of the web. | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 3.5 - dreaming about the future of the web.

hacks.mozilla.org

41 pointschanux20 comments

I have just two requests for Mozilla: please make Firefox faster on Linux, and troubleshoot its memory leak problem.

Even Firefox on my Virtualbox windows machine runs a lot more responsiver than on Linux host machine ...

Firefox on Linux has never really compared to the Windows version. I hear that Chrome on Linux is working pretty well though.

I've been running 3.5b4 for a while. I've seen the future, and it looks a lot like the current version of the web, just a bit faster.

It is pointed that the features of Firefox 3.5 are mainly for developers not users. So we will have to wait a bit longer before websites will make use of them.

Anyone know what their Javascript threading model will look like? I am both excited and scared.

I think they are referring to html5 web workers http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-workers/current-work/

A bit sad how Firefox is now chasing IE and Chrome for features and speed. Oh well, were it not for Firefox we'd all still be running IE6.

The King is dead. Love live the King.

It is definitely not chasing IE for speed. AFAIK firefox is faster than IE in JS and rendering and is also more standards compliant

Glad to see I'm not the only that finds it ironic how Firefox only took 2 versions to abandon the original reasoning (lightweight, fast, better UI) that made them so much better than anything else. It's not like in the last few years people have suddenly wanted heavier, slower, harder.

I never thought they did such a great job of that anyway. For example, the early versions of Firefox were about twice as big as Opera (in download size) and had a fraction of the features.

Yeah, they basically switched off a bunch of stuff in the full Mozilla suite (now Seamonkey) but it was only later (for certain things much later) that they actually removed unused code and focused on speed and memory.

So anyone who thinks that Firefox had "Features", "Speed" or "Lightweight" as original killer features is deluded.

They did on the other hand have a fairly stripped down and therefore non-threatening usable UI (now leapfrogged in that regard by Chrome and Safari), extensions, being both open source and free of cost (without being ad supported), faking native Windows UI reasonably well, and not being IE6 in their favor.

Right, and maybe you're right that I was deluded, but my recollection is that the original motivation for Firefox was "Mozilla (and IE) are bloated and slow, let's fix that"

Exactly. The situation today is exactly what freaked Microsoft out back in the 90s, so much that they went all-out to murder Netscape: Continuously improving standards-based browsers. We've got Firefox to thank for that.

Say what you will about the Mozilla project, over the past decade it's been the single largest force for making our lives as web developers better. It's good to see that they're keeping up the tradition, and pushing forward. The feature list for 3.5 is damned exciting.

I hope they implement WebSockets, that sole feature will change the way we know the web.

The real-time web, the next "wave".

Hear, hear!

The sooner we can ditch elaborate long-polling hacks, the happier I'll be. We've got a lot of features on the drawing board that would be enormously simplified by WebSockets.

Oh absolutely, I've been struggling with java, ajax, comet and flash sockets for a multiplayer game.

But imagine all the possibilities for IM, Email, web alerts, twitter, etc.

Or uh, you could use Java or an easily installed desktop client.

Users are much less likely to use a service that requires a desktop client. There are a few exceptions to that rule of course; IM, twitter, and Skype come to mind. But I think it holds as a general rule. For example, if YouTube required a desktop client instead of working entirely through the browser, would you still use YouTube? I doubt that I would.

Not that you are wrong (convenience always wins) but if a desktop client gave the only or the best experience I would imagine you'd pick it.

I have 4-5 different video players installed. I wish I could use just one of them to view videos instead of using Flash (which hiccups and crashes Firefox sometimes and doesn't even work properly on Linux for me).

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