nsane.forums Posted August 11, 2009 Share Posted August 11, 2009 On Friday, Mozilla announced the availability of the first Firefox 3.6 alpha release. It introduces several new features and brings a number of performance improvements to the popular open source Web browser.Firefox 3.5 was officially launched in June, roughly one year after the release of Firefox 3.0. Version 3.6, which is codenamed Namoroka, is tentatively expected to arrive in 2010. Performance and customization improvements are a major part of the roadmap for Namoroka. Mozilla is also exploring some new user interface concepts that could be used to augment the tabbed browsing model.Although Namoroka is still at a very early stage of development, the 3.6 alpha includes very noticeable performance enhancements. In Firefox 3.5, Mozilla introduced a new high-performance JavaScript engine called TraceMonkey that uses just-in-time compilation and an optimization technique called tracing to deliver faster JavaScript execution. Improvements to this engine have helped to further accelerate JavaScript performance in the 3.6 alpha release.TraceMonkey developer Andreas Gal, one of the researchers behind tracing optimization, says that JavaScript performance in 3.6 is roughly 15 percent faster than in 3.5. That's already a meaningful improvement, and it's possible that we could see TraceMonkey get even faster as the development cycle progresses. It's still not quite enough to catch up with Google's Chrome Web browser, however, which also got a touch of extra turbo in its latest beta release. Firefox 3.6 offers several new CSS features. Among these, the most intriguing is support for CSS gradients, which allow Web developers to paint the background of an element with a color gradient with multiple color stops. This feature was originally invented last year by Apple and implemented in WebKit. It is based partly on the gradient features described in the HTML 5 Canvas specification. We have seen it appear in several different WebKit variants, including the rendering engine in Chrome. Mozilla's move to add it to Firefox's Gecko rendering engine marks the first time that it has been used in a renderer other than WebKit.View: Original Article Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bizarre™ Posted August 11, 2009 Share Posted August 11, 2009 Firefox 3.5 still has a faster javascript benchmark. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrator DKT27 Posted August 11, 2009 Administrator Share Posted August 11, 2009 I will still stick to the final one. By sis kills me if I try beta or alpha because it is hard for here to use, ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SacredCultivator Posted August 12, 2009 Share Posted August 12, 2009 The only thing I noticed different from this is the "Scrolling speed" as it seems to go hyper fast compared to 3.5, as for the JavaScript, I have absolutely no idea, although many people are saying that it is slower than 3.5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bizarre™ Posted August 12, 2009 Share Posted August 12, 2009 It is "slower" than Firefox 3.5 :bag:In fact 2x slower.I will not be using it until it goes Beta. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mara- Posted August 12, 2009 Share Posted August 12, 2009 Come on people, this is just an alpha. It will probably be faster in the final version. They need to polish it. I doubt that they would announce that it will be faster and then to make it slower. Cheers ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
donizme Posted August 12, 2009 Share Posted August 12, 2009 Come on people, this is just an alpha. It will probably be faster in the final version. They need to polish it. I doubt that they would announce that it will be faster and then to make it slower. Cheers ;)Yes the alpha doesn't tell you anything about performance. Sometimes developers turn off features in alpha to make things less complicated so maybe that's causing the slowdown. Although in the beta everything should be turned on so lets wait till then. I remember Firefox from the 3.5 beta to final the javascript performance increased by about 15%. So even the beta doesn't give you the full story. :rolleyes: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bigjohn Posted August 30, 2009 Share Posted August 30, 2009 I still find Opera faster than FF Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
irefay Posted August 30, 2009 Share Posted August 30, 2009 Been using it for a while... Quite fast, no crashes yet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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