

Firefox 3.6 vs 8.0 - melling
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/see-what-youre-missing-firefox-36-vs-firefox-801/16809

======
asadotzler
Firefox 8 is light years ahead of 3.6 in performance and memory usage. It's
light-weight and blazing fast. If you've been away for a while, delete your
old Firefox profile and re-import your setting. You'll be surprised at how
much better Firefox is.

~~~
grannyg00se
Is that manual cleanup really necessary?

~~~
gcp
No, but many of the "Firefox crashes a lot" are caused by profiles who have
gotten corrupted over the years, and many of the "it eats 2G of RAM" are
caused by that and extensions.

Old Firefoxen also tended to fragment their SQLite databases heavily on disk
(and in some cases, internally as well), which can show as sluggish response
and "hanging" whenever disk I/O is involved. There were changes to ensure that
some critical database files don't get fragmented any more, but if you already
have those files from an old install you're SOL as it can't defragment them
while its using them.

If you have serious performance or memory issues with Firefox, and you're a
longtime user, at this point cleaning your profile is probably at least as
likely to help as waiting for the next version.

Edit: Just to clarify, the manual cleanup is necessary because uninstalling
(and reinstalling) Firefox never deletes your profile. This means that a
serious problem can never be fixed by a reinstall - a behavior that probably
should be changed.

~~~
nodata
To defrag your databases, first close Firefox then run:

    
    
      for i in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*default/*ite; do sqlite3 $i vacuum; done

~~~
gcp
Note that this does not defragment the storage on disk, just the internal
SQLite pages. So it's not a complete solution.

~~~
nirbheek
Actually, that command will also rewrite the entire .sqlite file, and if you
have enough free space, the filesystem will most likely rewrite it in a
contiguous manner.

I tested this with filefrag.

------
zachwill
In my opinion, Mozilla should have put more effort into seamless background
updates before starting their 6-week release cycles. (Unleash the fanboys...)

~~~
asadotzler
I'm the Director of the Firefox Desktop product (I wasn't at the time of the
move to the new release cadence) and I agree with you 100%. We've been busting
our butts for the last couple of months to get our updates ironed out and
smooth. We've already shipped some of this in Firefox, including not nagging
users to restart, killing the "What's New" tab that would interrupt your
start-up, and reducing the number of incompatible add-ons by helping users get
rid of add-ons they never requested (add-ons that were sneakily installed
without user consent.)

We've got "install add-ons in the background" code finished and in testing.
We've got "bypass the UAC prompts" code finished and in testing. We've got
add-ons defaulting to compatible with a blacklist for broken ones (reversing
from a default to incompatible with a whitelist) coded and it's in testing.
We'll be shipping these in Firefox 10 and 11 so the remaining bits are going
to arrive very early in the new year.

~~~
ericabiz
I'm really hoping you can get the remaining 3.6.x users to force-upgrade. We
still have a couple people using 3.6 on our web app (where some pages won't
render properly--we've labeled this 'wontfix' in our system since Firefox 7.0+
renders these pages properly.)

Any word on whether there is any way to get them to upgrade? Last I saw, it
upgraded them to a newer 3.x version, but then opened a page on your site with
a tiny-font-sized line of text that said "This isn't the latest version"--not
exactly obvious that 3.6.x is pretty much ancient at this point.

~~~
rprospero
Firefox 3.6 user here. I'd love to upgrade, but the new versions don't run on
PowerPC

~~~
gcp
I'm not a PowerPC Mac user, but I understood PowerPC Firefox is now entirely
handled by the community in the form of TenFourFox.

------
azakai
Inaccuracies: SunSpider was not developed by Mozilla (it was Apple), and
kraken is not based on SunSpider.

------
tete
What about HTML5? A LOT of HTML5.

Firefox/Gecko has support for tons of HTML5 features that Chrome/Webkit
doesn't support (or didn't until recently).

I wish some things would be pushed faster from Aurora into the other branches.

The only thing I dislike about Firefox is that there are a number of CSS1
features that still aren't supported. I just know Opera supports them, so I am
not sure about the others. One can't style some form parts. There has been a
bug report for this for ages.

Oh and to all web developers out there: Start checking for features, instead
of browsers, PLEASE! It's so annoying to always read "Your browser doesn't
support XY" when that's not true, because I am using a recent release, beta or
the aurora branch of Firefox.

------
ck2
I made the 3.6 to 7/8 switch only a few months ago.

Here are some extensions I found critical to my sanity to keeping things
somewhat familiar:

    
    
       Status-4-Evar   <<<<<<------------ a must
       Add-ons Manager Dialog Returns
       Back/forward dropmarker
       Restore View Source for Firefox 6+

and

    
    
       Firefox 3 theme for Firefox 4+ (v2.0) 
    

Then once you are in FF8 treat yourself to extensions you can only running in
FF8+ like Font Information which shows you what fonts are being used on the
page in the page info dialog.

Now my FF8 looks a lot like 3.6 but works several times faster.

~~~
tete
This has been fixed in Firefox 10 (or 9?). Until then you could use this
extension:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-
compat...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-
compatibility-reporter/)

~~~
ck2
If you are responding to "only can be used in FF8" the font information
extension only works in FF8+ because of the api hooks needed are not available
in previous version. It's not a min/max versioning issues.

------
omgmog
Just carried out some Kraken 1.1 runs on Firefox on OSX, here on my iMac 8,1
(2.6ghz c2d/4gb ram).

I've got all major versions of Firefox installed side by side using my shell
script (<https://github.com/omgmog/install-all-firefox>), this allowed me to
test Firefox 2.0.0.20, 3.0.19, 3.6.24, 4.0.1, 5.0.1, 6.0.1, 7.0.1, 8.0.1,
10.0a2.

Results: <http://omgmog.net/kraken.html>

For Firefox 2.0.0.20 and 3.0.19 the browser kept crashing, so I was unable to
finish these, but all of the other versions ran well.

------
itsnotlupus
Is it a coincidence that the last version of Firefox that will ever run on
PowerPC macs is being surprisingly resilient to those calls to upgrade?

I'd be curious to see how many of the 3.6 laggards really are on old macs and
are simply unable to upgrade until they budget in some new hardware.

~~~
kemayo
Analytics for me says, for the last month:

    
    
      Firefox 8.0: 2.68% Mac
      Firefox 7.0.1: 9.53% Mac
      Firefox 3.6.24: 13.47% Mac
    

So it's definitely appreciably lower for 8 than for 3, but the closeness
between 7 and 3 makes me wonder whether it's actually an effect.

------
aidenn0
So, what a Firefox 3.6 user is missing out on is running a bunch of artificial
benchmarks faster?

~~~
gkoberger
If you haven't tried updating past 3.6, you should. Benchmarks may not be 100%
accurate, but you can see the difference in JS-heavy apps (like GMail). The UI
has been cleaned up and revamped. There are a ton of new HTML/CSS/JS features.
Better memory management, and Firefox as a whole is faster. Restartless add-
ons. The list goes on and on :)

~~~
aidenn0
Oh I have upgraded, and there are things that I like about it. However the
title "What you are missing" isn't really addressed by showing a bunch of
benchmarks. Having a real-world section talking about subjective performance
on actual sites used by people would have done that.

------
J_Darnley
So the only thing I get from Firefox 8 is faster javascript? Why is that
useful when I would lose so much? I block all javascript with NoScript and go
a few steps further with RequestPolicy and Ghostery.

Whereas I want my browser to look like a standard Windows classic theme
window.

------
willvarfar
The title made me imagine it was between Firefox and V8

~~~
dchest
<http://arewefastyet.com/>

~~~
zobzu
[http://arewefastyet.com/?a=b&machine=8](http://arewefastyet.com/?a=b&machine=8)
probably more representative

~~~
nl
<http://arewefastyet.com/old-awfy.php> is the most impressive

~~~
zobzu
true, but i meant that most people reading HN are likely to be running the 64
bit version

------
ceol
Did Mozilla just pad their version number? Last I remember, there was Firefox
4 Beta. Why is it at 8 now?

~~~
jaredsohn
They are now on a six-week release cycle, just like Chrome.

~~~
ceol
Thanks for your reply. Not sure why HN decided to downvote my question.

------
D_Drake
I just tried it. Guess what? The interface is still broken.

You look at the page contents constantly, at tab names often, at the bookmarks
toolbar sometimes, at the URL occasionally, and you almost never look at the
page title. In 3.6 these are arranged in order radiating from the center.

8.0 completely breaks the flow by sticking the address bar below the tabs.
WHY. Also, where's my status bar, with all of my plugin status icons that I
use constantly?

4.0+ is still broken, so I'm still going to use 3.6. Simple as that.

~~~
gkoberger
There's a difference between "broken" and "not the way I use it / am used to".
Mozilla released a video explaining the transition of tabs [1]. Still don't
like it? Right click somewhere on the title bar and deselect "Tabs on Top"

As for the status bar, just hit "ctrl+/".

The best thing about Firefox is that if there's something you don't like,
there's probably an add-on for it. Try searching for add-ons that do what you
need. [2]

1) [http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2010/06/24/why-tabs-are-
on-t...](http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2010/06/24/why-tabs-are-on-top-in-
firefox-4/)

2) [http://blog.fligtar.com/2011/01/16/how-to-customize-
firefox-...](http://blog.fligtar.com/2011/01/16/how-to-customize-
firefox-4s-ui/)

~~~
D_Drake
Why would I use 8.0 and spend time and effort turning it back into 3.6, when
3.6 already does everything I want or need it to?

~~~
robin_reala
Because it’s multiple times faster and being actively updated.

------
VonLipwig
I would love to use Firefox but I can't bring myself to do it. Firefox got
really terrible and bloated and whenever I use it I am just waiting for a hint
of terribleness to appear. Then I switch to another browser.

The main thing Firefox need to do is drop the version numbers all together.
These numbers should be for developer's only. I could even argue developers do
not need the version numbers and could work just fine with feature detection.

The fact is that most people do not care what version of Firefox they have.
All they want is Firefox Latest. The latest and hopefully best version of
Firefox will allow for the fastest and smoothest browsing experience. When I
hear FF7/8/9 is out I sigh. Firefox automatically updates now, why all the
grand announcements, especially considering for the majority of users the
changes between 7 and 8 are fairly irrelevant background changes that won't be
noticed.

Chrome is on what now? v15? Does Chrome continuously shout about how version
15 is out? No.. it just updates.. the user doesn't really know about it. The
user doesn't really care about it.

Please.. just call the damn product [Firefox - no version number on the end]
and be done with it.

~~~
tete
First of all this is pretty much where Mozilla is heading towards anyways.

Firefox isn't bloated in terms of memory consumption, when compared to Chrome.
It's interface has more nice features though, which I greatly enjoy though.

Did you actually test a recent version?

Oh btw. the Beta version of Firefox is an officially supported one, meaning if
you find something that is bad for security bug you will receive the grant and
stuff.

~~~
VonLipwig
I have used a recent version of Firefox. It has a load of HTML5 goodness but
not many website's run these bleeding edge features.

It still looks incredibly ugly on the Mac. The last time I used Firefox on Mac
it was wobbly. I only now have it installed for testing. The change in
versioning was a mistake which caused a load of confusion. Firefox may be
getting better in performance or memory usage but does it matter? Other
browsers are already there.

I will keep tabs on Firefox but I see no reason to switch from Safari or
anything else for that matter to Firefox at the moment. It is a bit like IE
tbh. It is getting better but for a generation of users the reputation damage
is already done.

