
Firefox 3.5 - dreaming about the future of the web. - chanux
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/35-days/
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lamnk
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 ...

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

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mseebach
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.

~~~
jakozaur
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.

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

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

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ryanvm
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.

~~~
edave
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.

~~~
johnnybgoode
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.

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ZeroGravitas
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.

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edave
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"

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

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

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megaduck
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.

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

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theBobMcCormick
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.

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omouse
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).

