What do you think about this upcoming version?

I have been testing it for some months now and the recent alpha 4 version seems to much faster and light on system resources

You can get it here

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/

You are correct - it is quite fast - as is the Seamonkey 2.1a1pre. Firefox is a little heavier on the memory footprint. It remains to be seen what plug-ins will eventually do to it speed-wise.

In any case, the real story is that it is coming to a point where even XP will no longer handle them - let alone 98. At present both Minefield 3.7.4 and Seamonkey 2.1a1pre are being set up to work with Vista and 7 - most particularly in terms of Direct Draw and DirectX to separate the video from the CPU. Right now this can be set with a toggle in about:config (also the reason IE9 won't run on XP since this feature can't be toggled off).

K-Meleon's charm has always been its finesse in running on machines that are light on memory and speed and still be efficient while running on a Windows system that has become an antique. Dorian has his work cut out for him.

Mozilla Minefield works in XP because I am testing it on XP. Direct2D and DirectWrite will only work on Win Vista or Win 7



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/20/2010 07:41PM by chrismt.

No one said it didn't run on XP - what was being said is that in the future the features that are now advanced will become standard, and they will not run on XP. How long that will be no one knows. Try running IE9 on XP - that is the future already knocking at the door. If you like the advanced features in Firefox now (speed, etc.), it will bring with it some things that may also make it incompatible with older OS's.

Quote
Terry
K-Meleon's charm has always been its finesse in running on machines that are light on memory and speed and still be efficient while running on a Windows system that has become an antique. Dorian has his work cut out for him.

But I don't think K-Meleon should always neglect the new technologies only because there are 98 and XP users. I think there should be an "edge" version that supports outdated systems and all the next versions should come with DirectDraw, JS compiling engine etc to provide high speed and smooth rendering and eye-candies for the current systems. Otherwise K-Meleon will come to a stagnation because the old systems can't offer more than they can, and the world is constantly changing. K-Meleon will lose it's speed advantage (I think K-Mel lost it already - look at Opera 10.50 for example) and it will really become outdated. This will be sad indeed because I love K-Meleon.

You are correct AirSpirit. Dorian plays a real balancing act. He is trying to bring K-Meleon up to the 1.9.x engine and he is facing a tidewater change in operating systems. Clearly, the eye candy is attractive (as in Opera's aero tricks), I do believe, however, that the direction of K-Meleon will be toward efficiency in speed and low resource footprint. Lately, K-Meleon has been a little slow getting out of the paddocks due to the change in the engine and the OS's - and, after all, it is only one guy writing the code.

I'm wondering what dorian is going to do with Gecko Engine for KM. He is currently working on KM with Gecko 1.9.1 as Gecko 1.9.2 is already out and 1.9.3 is under development. Is he going to update the Engine to 1.9.2 soon after the release of KM?

Well, since they are both 1.9.x Engine, it's not so difficult to update anyway.

@ Terry

I already tested IE 9 on my Win 7 and Vista few days back.

The new Javascript engine is called Chakra, a Hindi word

So I think that an Indian is working on it. Just a guess.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/21/2010 06:39AM by chrismt.

Some of the more talented programmers are from India. Though, from what I have read, Microsoft seems to do things in large committees with one guy being the "chief architect".

The word "chakra" is pretty widely used especially among "new agers" and alternative medicine practitioners. A chakra is focal point for the reception and transmission of energies. You have to love Microsoft - whether a chakra is the equivalent of a black hole or a thunderous tornado - Microsoft has to see itself as in the middle of everything. Just when everyone is starting to concentrate on html5, Microsoft wants to run javascript faster than Chrome.

New Age is a big shit :mad:

I cannot understand why in the US people are talking about the separation of church and state when companies and governmental departments are embracing New Age thinking and ideas

Isn't New Age blah blah just another religion?

Hell lot of mad men around nowadays.:O

Anyway,

Microsoft will never catch up with Chrome unless it unplugs IE from the core of Windows

I only understood how much IE is integrated when I tried to uninstall IE 8 from Win 7 :drool:

My system crashed

As far as programmer in India goes. They know how to write codes very well but they don't innovate

Quote
AirSpirit
look at Opera 10.50 for example

Opera took that speed advantage at the cost of compatibility, especially with workarounds for ie.

However, using Opera, I wonder what the speed advantage through hardware accelarating is really worth. I mean, most browser can render pages that quickly, is becoming a few microseconds faster worth dropping support for popular OS's?

@Rocksprecht

You are correct about Opera's incompatibility. Just when you begin to like it, it blows up. As to its speed - Tom's Hardware did a test: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-chrome-opera,2558.html#xtor=RSS-182 and found Chrome still to be champ. Having said that - what these tests don't show is how a browser performs in the long haul, on a daily basis, and with all kinds of other tasks going on in the background. This is where K-Meleon shines. It consistently keeps its admirable speed and efficiency without interference to whatever else is running.