Pt 3, Awesome bar, Security in a box is Here
Pt 4, Passwords and Download manager is Here
Pt 5, Hers and there is Here
Ok, Ok, I know I had a lengthy post https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/429680/ which was tracking the changes happened on firefox trunk nightly. But that one is too techi to be helpful for normal firefox 2 users.
Now since firefox 3 beta 5 codes has been frozen, the final version should looks pretty much like today's nightly. Its about time to re-introduce firefox 3 to 2.0 users!.
There are a lot of new stuff in firefox 3, it would be sad to see them got overlooked!
I will start with several under the hood changes, they are not so "apparent", but nevertheless are very significant changes.
I will add more post to this topic when I have time, firefox beta 5 should be out on 1-2 weeks, and final should be out in 1-2 months.
1. Turbo speed
When we talk about speed, there are several types involved:
app starts up speed,
app response speed (snapiness, beachball-ness)
page loading speed (download),
page rendering speed,
speed of reading from history (cache, when you click back/forward button of the browsers).
Javscript speed (dynamic content of the webpages).
Firefox improves in these area:
By rewriting most codes in cocoa, starts up speed is improved up to 2x, beachball has been almost 100% removed.
By increasing the default number of request sent to server by firefox, the page loading speed are up to 3x faster
Mozilla developers put alot of concentration on javascript, altho a minor fraction of most webpages, javascript becomes more important when surfing websites such as gmail, etc, which uses mass amount of client side javascripts. Firefox 3's javascript speed (according to sunspider test suite) will be 4.2x faster than firefox 2, and will be leading among all stable released browsers.
An added benefit is that firefox's UI is written in javascript, so this improvement also improve firefox's snapiness.
Firefox 3 is using a new backend 2D rendering lib called "cairo", which improves the page rendering of firefox 3 on mac greatly. I will talk more practical benefit of cairo in next post.
2. Less memory
a story here about memory stress test, firefox 3 beats all other browsers
Firefox 3 will be using a new memory allocator called jemalloc, which is the new memory management method in FreeBSD 7 (just released last month).
By using jemalloc, and all other memory improvement techniques (Picture decoding method, for example). Firefox 3 will start up using slightly higher memory, but the memory usage will cap around ~100MB (on my MB with 2G memory), and firefox 3 will release memory more frequently, in the end, firefox 3 uses up to 60% less of memory compare to firefox 2.
Next to come: cairo (fullpage zoom, cross tab draggable elements, etc)
Pt 4, Passwords and Download manager is Here
Pt 5, Hers and there is Here
Ok, Ok, I know I had a lengthy post https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/429680/ which was tracking the changes happened on firefox trunk nightly. But that one is too techi to be helpful for normal firefox 2 users.
Now since firefox 3 beta 5 codes has been frozen, the final version should looks pretty much like today's nightly. Its about time to re-introduce firefox 3 to 2.0 users!.
There are a lot of new stuff in firefox 3, it would be sad to see them got overlooked!
I will start with several under the hood changes, they are not so "apparent", but nevertheless are very significant changes.
I will add more post to this topic when I have time, firefox beta 5 should be out on 1-2 weeks, and final should be out in 1-2 months.
1. Turbo speed
When we talk about speed, there are several types involved:
app starts up speed,
app response speed (snapiness, beachball-ness)
page loading speed (download),
page rendering speed,
speed of reading from history (cache, when you click back/forward button of the browsers).
Javscript speed (dynamic content of the webpages).
Firefox improves in these area:
By rewriting most codes in cocoa, starts up speed is improved up to 2x, beachball has been almost 100% removed.
By increasing the default number of request sent to server by firefox, the page loading speed are up to 3x faster
Mozilla developers put alot of concentration on javascript, altho a minor fraction of most webpages, javascript becomes more important when surfing websites such as gmail, etc, which uses mass amount of client side javascripts. Firefox 3's javascript speed (according to sunspider test suite) will be 4.2x faster than firefox 2, and will be leading among all stable released browsers.
An added benefit is that firefox's UI is written in javascript, so this improvement also improve firefox's snapiness.
Firefox 3 is using a new backend 2D rendering lib called "cairo", which improves the page rendering of firefox 3 on mac greatly. I will talk more practical benefit of cairo in next post.
2. Less memory
a story here about memory stress test, firefox 3 beats all other browsers
Firefox 3 will be using a new memory allocator called jemalloc, which is the new memory management method in FreeBSD 7 (just released last month).
By using jemalloc, and all other memory improvement techniques (Picture decoding method, for example). Firefox 3 will start up using slightly higher memory, but the memory usage will cap around ~100MB (on my MB with 2G memory), and firefox 3 will release memory more frequently, in the end, firefox 3 uses up to 60% less of memory compare to firefox 2.
Next to come: cairo (fullpage zoom, cross tab draggable elements, etc)
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