

What's new in Firefox 3.5 - geuis
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Firefox_3.5_for_developers

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axod
Awesome stuff.

\+ Mibbit as default IRC:// link handler

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nuclear_eclipse
Congrats!

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felixmar
The audio and video element support is good for the open web but still needs
work to be an alternative to Flash and Silverlight because currently it is too
slow. It's not just because of Theora. Ogv videos play noticably better
outside Firefox. Safari's video element support (using H.264) is much better.

~~~
cake
I can't wait the day I won't have to load a Flash video.

It's such a painfull experience. It'll be the beginning of the end of Flash,
which makes me happy.

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rmaccloy
I think the support for web worker threads (OS-level, presumably preemptive
multithreading for JS) is potentially the most interesting part of this
release, although I don't know how lock-free they are.

Moz: <https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Using_web_workers> WHATWG:
<http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-workers/current-work/>

~~~
axod
I really dislike this to be honest. Not having threads ensures the language is
nice and simple and pure. Threads in what is pretty much an event driven
language, make very little sense. What operations 'block' in js? Threads
encourage sloppy inefficient programming.

If you start 20 WebWorkers, and it's faster than having 10, you have to ask
some serious questions of the interpreter/VM. Like whether it's insane.

It should really be up to the interpreter/VM to be able to spread the work
over multiple cores, not the programmer of the js.

~~~
mbrubeck
In terms of the programming model, web workers are processes, not threads.
They have no shared state, and use asynchronous message passing as the only
inter-process communication - very much like Erlang. This makes them very
simple, and fits in perfectly with JavaScript's existing asynchronous event-
based model.

"What operations 'block' in js?"

Web workers are important because _everything_ blocks in JavaScript. JS in the
browser is single-threaded, which means that if you do anything
computationally intensive (reading from a Gears database, sorting a huge
array, image manipulation on a Canvas element) then your page can no longer
respond to UI events until the processing is finished. Without worker
processes, the only way to do long-running computation without blocking the UI
was to implement your own cooperative multi-threading by "yielding" with
setTimeout(fn, 0).

(Note: I'm talking about the model exposed to JS programmers, not the
underlying implementation which might be based on native threads, native
processes, or green threads.)

~~~
axod
>> "the only way to do long-running computation without blocking the UI was to
implement your own cooperative multi-threading by "yielding" with
setTimeout(fn, 0)."

Yeah I much prefer that method personally.

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hsuresh
Quite feature rich for devs. Geolocation, native video support, XmlHttpRequest
across domains and offline/local storage are my favourites. And that is not
even the end of the list. Btw, have you seen this ->
[http://blog.mozbox.org/post/2009/04/12/Firefox-35:-a-new-
exp...](http://blog.mozbox.org/post/2009/04/12/Firefox-35:-a-new-experiment-
with-Canvas-Video)

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Xichekolas
Really excited to try out things with TraceMonkey and the DOM workers. Also:

 _"The String object now has trim(), trimLeft(), and trimRight() methods."_

You know, it's a little thing, and easy to implement yourself, but I'm still
glad this finally got added.

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chaosmachine
Probably my favorite feature is the much-improved scrolling on OSX. It's just
as smooth as Safari now.

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jokermatt999
Although 3.5 has some interesting stuff, I'm really excited for the
Taskfox/Ubiquity integration (<https://wiki.mozilla.org/Taskfox>). I think it
could actually make the Awesome Bar much better. Not to mention, I'm sure
we'll see a lot more work on it once it's integrated into Firefox. Hopefully
users will still be able to submit commands.

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paraschopra
Biggest happiness for me: Improved Synchronous XMLHttpRequest support

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JoeH
Download link to Firefox 3.5 beta 4 (in case you were like me and it wasn't
blindingly obvious): <http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html>

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mynameishere
Did they allow users to disable the "awesome" (ie, "shitty") bar? Serious
question, because at some point I'll have to switch to IE or something...

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catch23
There are firefox extensions that turn it into a normal entry box, although
personally I love the awesome bar. I can't switch to any other browser now
because I hate having to type out the whole url all the time. I can just type
"hac" in my toolbar to go to hacker news.

FYI, in IE8, typing "hac" in the url bar sends you to a google search on
"hac". In Safari, you end up at <http://hac.com>.

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FooBarWidget
Seconded. The awesomebar is one of _the_ best Firefox features.

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quoderat
How does anyone actually tolerate the awesome bar? When it debuted, I thought
it was some kind of prank.

I still kinda do.

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Derferman
The new geolocation feature is creepily accurate. This page found my exact
location.

<http://channy.creation.net/project/firefox/geolocation.html>

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indiejade
45 minutes north, on the other side of the Bay. Phew. Thank goodness for
proxies.

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Raphael
Does this mean it's out of beta?

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gjm11
Nope. Still at beta 4.

