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Test Drive Firefox 3.1 Beta 1

In Espresso il 21/10/08 @ 20:24 trackback

Condivisi da felipe

Grazie a TraceMonkey (da abilitare esplicitamente), Firefox 3.1 rende i javascript nella METÀ del tempo rispetto a Firefox 3.0.3... Non male!

Mozilla recently released the first testing version of the next major Firefox release. Not all features planned for Firefox 3.1 are included in Beta 1. You will find: fancy Ctrl-Tab tab switcher, the faster TraceMonkey JavaScript engine (instructions to enable later in this post), location awareness on WiFi networks (demo here), OGG built-in media player (demo here), and tag drag and drop.


With the new JavaScript engine, which rivals or surpasses Google Chrome’s, Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is faster than ever. This is why I wanted to try it out on Ubuntu, here’s how to install it without disturbing your existing Firefox 3.0 installation.

fancy Ctrl-Tab tab switcher

  1. I have not had any issues with Firefox 3 Beta 1 sharing a profile with Firefox 3, but you should backup your Firefox profile just in case something goes wrong. First you may want to clear Firefox’s cache to make this backup smaller. To do this, open Edit->Preferences->Advanced->Network and click Clear Now. Running this command will backup your profile to firefox_profile_backup in your home folder:
    cp -r ~/.mozilla/firefox/ ~/firefox_profile_backup
  2. This command will download and extract Firefox 3 Beta 1 to a folder named firefox in your home directory. Paste it into a terminal (it’s one line) to run it:
    wget -O - http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.1b1/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-3.1b1.tar.bz2 | tar xj -C ~
  3. To run Firefox 3.1 Beta 1, first close any other versions of Firefox. Then run the command below to launch it:
    ~/firefox/firefox

The first time you launch Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 you will be prompted about incompatible extensions and to accept a license agreement. Firefox crashed the first time I ran it before showing the license, but after starting it again Firefox was fine.

You can create a menu item for Firefox using System->Preferences->Main Menu and the previous command.

To get your plugins from Firefox 3 (such as Flash and Java) to work, copy them from /usr/lib/firefox/plugins to ~/firefox/plugins.

Firefox’s fast TraceMonkey JavaScript engine is included, but not turned on by default. Open about:config in Firefox, and click through the “this might void your warranty’ warning. Find the javascript.options.jit.content option using the filter, and change the value to True by double-clicking.

I ran the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark, here are the results:

Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 with TraceMonkey performed almost twice as fast as Firefox 3.0.3! I’ve especially felt the increase in performance in Gmail and a few other JavaScript-intensive sites I’ve tried.

— Pagine forse correlate:


Commenti »

1. ost - 22/10/08 @ 10:50

Il ctrl-tab non lo conoscevo! Peccato che sia ancora poco fluido. Io uso firefox3.1 “Shiretoko” e devo dire che con TraceMonkey va a razzo. Purtroppo se cerco di mettere in fullscreen un video youtube crasha inesorabilmente. Non so se è a causa di Flash10.

Comunque per essere ancora una beta è molto promettente.

2. Nico - 22/10/08 @ 13:27

a me gmail non funziona, come invece loro dicono…

provero con un profilo vergine per vedere se per caso è qualche impostazione mia…

3. Nico - 22/10/08 @ 13:29

a me gmail non funziona, come invece loro dicono…

provero con un profilo vergine per vedere se per caso è qualche impostazione mia…

boh…

4. Thunder - 23/10/08 @ 1:15

#1 ost: invece se io metto un fullscreen su youtube ritorna normale dopo qualche decimo di secondo… si ostina a non farmi vedere i video a schermo intero =|

5. Luigi - 24/10/08 @ 18:52

Le pagine “escono” più velocemente di prima, Gmail è una scheggia, flash non mi dà (tanti) problemi (…ubuntu 64bit).

I risultati del test non sono sbalorditivi però:
ff 3.03 (con ottimizzazioni all’about:config): 3500
ff 3.1b2pre (tracemonkey off): 3200
ff 3.1b2pre (tracemonkey on): 3000