Mozilla Releases Firefox 3.5 Officially

[curaga]

Phew, I was worried they would use gstreamer.

[jeffro-tull]

Word is, it's working much better on netbooks. It's certainly loading faster and working smoother on my regular PC - I guess the difference will be more pronounced on slower machines.

Wrt the SQL database, it's the faster alternative. Any other implementation the nkew address bar would almost certainly be slower than SQLite.

It's not the type of database they use that I have a problem with, it's that a web browser needs one at all. I guess their new-for-3.x address bar features are kind of nice, but I hardly ever use them.

[smitty3268]

It's not the type of database they use that I have a problem with, it's that a web browser needs one at all. I guess their new-for-3.x address bar features are kind of nice, but I hardly ever use them.

You've got to store the history information somewhere. I think an embedded DB makes a lot more sense than a plain text file or some kind of binary serialization when you are storing it for more than just a few days. We aren't talking about a full-blown server or anything, it's just an embedded DB which shouldn't add that much overhead.

[jeffro-tull]

You've got to store the history information somewhere. I think an embedded DB makes a lot more sense than a plain text file or some kind of binary serialization when you are storing it for more than just a few days. We aren't talking about a full-blown server or anything, it's just an embedded DB which shouldn't add that much overhead.

On most of my rigs, I agree. My old AthlonXP and my Thinkpad T60 handled it just fine. My K10 rig is completely unphased by it. On those rigs, no complaints.

On my Aspire One, though... that SSD is ridiculously slow. Most of the time, Firefox runs just fine. But when I open up a new page or start typing away in the location bar, it goes unusable (as in "hangs with no apparent response to user input") for several seconds.

[smitty3268]

On most of my rigs, I agree. My old AthlonXP and my Thinkpad T60 handled it just fine. My K10 rig is completely unphased by it. On those rigs, no complaints.

On my Aspire One, though... that SSD is ridiculously slow. Most of the time, Firefox runs just fine. But when I open up a new page or start typing away in the location bar, it goes unusable (as in "hangs with no apparent response to user input") for several seconds.

IMO that's not an issue with the DB, but with Firefox. If it's running a query that could take time, it shouldn't be blocking the UI like it does. I think FF has some limitations that make it difficult for a background thread to update the UI, which is why they need to do a better job ensuring that all the queries they run are instantaneous.

[curaga]

On my Aspire One, though... that SSD is ridiculously slow. Most of the time, Firefox runs just fine. But when I open up a new page or start typing away in the location bar, it goes unusable (as in "hangs with no apparent response to user input") for several seconds.

That's also due to the cheap, crappy SSD.

[BlackStar]

It's not the type of database they use that I have a problem with, it's that a web browser needs one at all. I guess their new-for-3.x address bar features are kind of nice, but I hardly ever use them.

Obviously (or not so obviously ), I was not talking about the kind of the database, but about the existence of a database. Not using a DB would result in worse performance here.

For the record, I've been using Ubuntu & Firefox 3.0 on a 8GB USB stick (which is slower than the slowest SSD) and it's been running just fine. Not a speed demon obviously, but far from unusable.

Upgrading to EXT4 will help your netbook a lot (you *are* using Linux, right? Windows XP & NTFS are awful on slow SSDs).

[jeffro-tull]

running UNR with ext4 partitions on the Aspire One.

Yes, I know the SSD is a cheap piece of (durable) crap. I know that hurts the performance. The database itself may or may not have issues on that drive, or it could be the way Firefox taps into said database. Doesn't matter. Performance sucks.

It just bugs the hell out of me because Opera and Arora run circles around Firefox but aren't really viable on the little guy (Opera doesn't play nice with the window manager, and Arora has zero features outside of the rendering engine and bookmarks).

[BlackStar]

running UNR with ext4 partitions on the Aspire One.

Yes, I know the SSD is a cheap piece of (durable) crap. I know that hurts the performance. The database itself may or may not have issues on that drive, or it could be the way Firefox taps into said database. Doesn't matter. Performance sucks.

It just bugs the hell out of me because Opera and Arora run circles around Firefox but aren't really viable on the little guy (Opera doesn't play nice with the window manager, and Arora has zero features outside of the rendering engine and bookmarks).

I think you can tune the awesome bar history for performance. If that's still not enough (and it might well not be, querying 2000 history entries is enough to give the SSD a heart attack), you can turn it off outright with the oldbar extension. Not ideal, but better than hanging for n seconds whenever you type a letter.

Edit: Also, try Opera 10 (QT4 version). In my experience, it has much better WM integration.

[personman]

Long OGGs lose sync

I believe I've found a bug in firefox 3.5's OGG support.

Long videos seem to lose sync with the audio after about 20-30 minutes or so.

I've posted a bug report on Mozilla's site along with a link to a test video.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501973

I've also been working to add video tag support to my content management system of choice, and have some test videos up:

http://anarchismtoday.org/DF_Multimedia/typeby=22.html

-Andy