FireFox 7 puts Memory on a Diet!

Looks like the days of Firefox hogging up so much of my computer’s memory, (even if I am equipped with 8GB)

Love to hear they are plugging leaks and I can run Firefox for days before I have to restart it…Some days right now I have to restart 2 times a day.

And with a faster internet connection coming soon, this working online will become a much smoother and effiicent process.

Article

Mozilla forces Firefox 7 on memory diet

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Project MemShrink payback

Free whitepaper – 2011 Lippis Report

Firefox 7 has been released with a promise from Mozilla its browser is less of a memory hog.

The new version of Mozilla’s browser will consume up to 50 per cent less of your system’s memory than past editions with most users clawing back 20 and 30 per cent.

Firefox 7 apparently achieves this thanks to a project started in June called MemShrink.

The project’s goal has been to improve the architecture and code in Firefox by eliminating bugs behind memory leaks and putting in place practices to detect regressions.

With Firefox gobbling up substantially reduced amounts of memory, the idea is for Mozilla’s browser to become dramatically faster and less likely to crash if you have lots of web sites and tabs open or keep Firefox running for long periods of time between restarts.

You can read more here.

Other features in Firefox 7 include the fact WebSockets are now enabled by default on mobile, for two-way communications with a remote host for HTTP, while the Canvas element for graphics has been updated for snappier performance.

You can read more here. ®

Original Source

Firefox 4 debuts: The last kitchen sink release …Everything in. One last time

I upgraded My FireFox today. Sad not all my addon are ready for 4, but ready to ride the speed and 3D this version offers.

Source of Original Here:

Mozilla has officially released Firefox 4, the latest version of its popular open-source browser, after nearly a year of development.

Available for download on Windows, Linux, and Mac, Firefox 4 offers added JavaScript performance through a new extension to Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey engine, hardware acceleration on all platforms, new tools for organizing and navigating browser tabs, a service for syncing browser settings across multiple machines, and a revamped interface. “We focused a lot on speed,” Mozilla vice presidents of products Jay Sullivan tells The Register.

“But beyond raw speed, we’re speeding up the way users flow through the internet. We’re speeding up your real online life, improving startup time, tab switching, and scrolling – stuff beyond the benchmarks.”

Sullivan also emphasizes that unlike Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9, which made its official debut last week, Firefox 4 runs on Windows XP. “This is really important for so many people,” he says, citing studies indicating that between 40 and 50 per cent of the web users are still on this aging Microsoft OS. “We need to provide updates to security, privacy, and innovations to those folks as well.”

Microsoft is (overly) quick to provide a counter argument. On Monday evening, in anticipation of the release of Firefox 4, Redmond sent a canned statement to journalists defending it decision to offer Internet Explorer 9 only on Windows Vista and Windows 7. “The developer community has been vocal that they want to push the web forward,” the statement read.

“The browser is only as good as the operating system it runs on and a browser running on a ten year old operating system tethers the web to the past. The time has come to stop focusing on lowest common denominator, and to really push what’s possible with innovations like full hardware acceleration. Customers can tell the difference when they see it.”

Firefox 4 does offer hardware acceleration on Windows XP, but it’s limited. Compositing is accelerated through Direct3D, but web content is not accelerated. On Windows Vista and Windows 7, Firefox 4 accelerates content through Direct2D. It should also be pointed out that unlike IE, Firefox 4 supports WebGL, which provides hardware accelerated 3D inside the browser, mapping JavaScript to the OpenGL desktop graphics interface.

Mozilla also provides hardware acceleration on Linux and Mac. Content acceleration is handled through XRender on Linux and through Quartz on Mac, while compositing is handled via OpenGL on both platforms. Mozilla acknowledges that Quartz uses the CPU rather than the GPU. QuartzGL, which provides GPU acceleration through Quartz 2D API, is not supported). But Quzrtz GL isn’t supported by any browser, and no, you can’t get IE9 on a Mac. Or Linux.

[ How cool is this! ] On Monday, Mozilla also unfurled a release candidate for an Android incarnation of Firefox 4. And Sullivan says this version is slated to officially arrive “in the next couple of weeks”. Like the desktop incarnations of the browser, Firefox 4 for Android offers the Mozilla’s Firefox Sync service, which lets you synchronize your browser setting across multiple devices.

Originally known as Firefox Weave, Sync has long been available as a Firefox plug-in, and it’s the basis for Firefox Home, the Mozilla iPhone application that lets you access your Firefox data on Apple’s holy handheld (which will run Firefox itself). On Firefox 4, it lets you synchronize bookmarks, history, “Awesome Bar” data, passwords, form-fill data, and open tabs.

On the desktop, Mozilla’s new browser also offers Panorama, a means of better organizing your browser tabs. letting you sort tabs like playing cards on a table. And it includes what Mozilla calls “App Tabs”, letting you create compact icons on the browser toolbar for frequently used web applications, such as Twitter or Gmail.

At the heart of the browser, Mozilla offers a new extension to its JavaScript engine known as JaegerMonkey (aka JagerMonkey). This operates in tandem with the TraceMonkey extension that debuted with Firefox 3.5 in June 2009. TraceMonkey speeds JavaScript performance by detecting code loops and converting them to assembly language. With Firefox 4, TraceMonkey still looks to convert loops, but when it can’t, JaegerMonkey converts entire methods into assembly. This new method JIT (just in time) compiler uses the Nitro assembler from Apple’s open source WebKit project.

Mozilla is claiming better performance than its competitors – including IE9, Chrome, and Safari – on its own Kracken benchmark (naturally) as well as Facebook’s JSGameBench.

Firefox went through 12 betas and two release candidates, and this is the last incarnation of the popular open source browser to receive such as an extended development and test period. In response to Google, which now delivers a new version of its Chrome browser every six to eight weeks, Mozilla is moving Firefox to a quarterly release schedule, planning to offer three more new versions of the browser before the end of the year.

“The motivation here is that as we build stuff, we want to get it to people as fast as possible,” Sullivan says. “If you look at Firefox 4, all of its tools have been done for a while. But we created this relatively large unit to ship with. Now, when we get stuff done, we need to get it in people’s hands.”

It’s yet to be seen whether Mozilla can actually deliver new browsers at this pace. Working on a year to two-year release schedule, it has a history of delays, including a roughly three month delay on Firefox 4. But the move to quarterly release schedule is welcome. And Firefox 4 is here. ®

Microsoft+IE9: Holier than Apple open web convert?

It is a remarkable turnaround. Microsoft, the company that more than any other was responsible for freezing web standards by first killing the browser competition and then failing to update its browser for five years, has come out with a browser that is – at the very least – decent.

It is not unequivocally the best browser on Windows. It does not win
every performance test, nor is its HTML 5 support as extensive as that
in some other browsers. Integration with Windows is strong though, as
you would expect, and its privacy controls are excellent.

Full Article HERE

I am still a FireFox Supporter and will not use IE9  for anything more than testing when developing on the web.
Get FireFox Here

IE CSS :hover needs link reference

I noticed another silly IE CSS quirk when styling links.

In this particular case I was using a CSS Sprite and on mouseover the Sprite-image should slide up to show the hover state to the next link in a jquery coda slider type display.

The Sprite’s CSS attribute :hover worked fine in FireFox, but when testing in IE there was no reaction to the CSS :hover state.

Turns out that you have to add a hyper link reference or IE will not recognize that there needs to be a switch.

I applied the href and now the silder arrow button-images are  is working great in IE7

Example:

This worked in FF but Not IE  :<a class=”prev”></a>
This was the fix <a href=”#” class=”prev”></a>

Don’t you just love messing around with cross-browser compatiblity.

This little nugget of info only took me about an hour and half to figure out….after I had adjusted much of my CSS code to figure out what was going on.
Nope the CSS was fine…geez.

Clicking is a waste of time

FireFox and plugins.

If your not using Firefox I suggest that you switch over, for simply the sake of time.
If you spend a fair amount of time online, and I’m guessing you do because your reading how to save time by clicking less, the extra tools you can plugin to Firefox WILL save you time.

How much time?

Years, ago I didn’t think so much about the time it takes to click, but when your clicking all day long, the less clicks the better.

Our Example of click time:

Let’s just say we can decrees our clicks on the mouse by 5 less clicks a day using Firefox plugins.
We multiply that by 365 days in a year = 1,825 less clicks
And it takes us about half of a seconds per click (.5 x 912.5 seconds)
We divide that number by 60 (seconds in a minute)
and we find out that by saving only 5 clicks a day
you can reclaim 15 mins and 20 of your life back, Woot!

More plugins = more efficiency, once you know their power.

I was inpired to write this post after reading one of the many many many blog postings out there about FireFox and the power of it’s 3rd party developers.

Thank you open source and brain-e-acts, and thank you jeff chandler.