Firefox 2 is Getting Worse by the Day
January 9th, 2008I cannot wait for Firefox 3. The performance and memory usage improvements are becoming increasingly important. Lately I write more JavaScript than C# and over the last few "minor" updates to FireFox 2 I have been noticing some annoyances. The main annoyance for me is a flickering that now occurs when I replace a section of content. Before I could replace a section, often with identical content, and you would not see the change. At first I thought I just needed to reboot my computer, like something was killing the processor and causing Firefox to perform badly. Then I saw it on a few other computers, and now I just saw Google Mail flicker when updating for new messages.
Last week John Resig reviewed the timer performance in various browsers. You may notice that occasionally an animation looks choppy. He explained that in Firefox that is caused by the garbage collector. It seems this issue has been a focus of recent work on Firefox. Smoother animations will improve the state of AJAX development and stall competing solutions that are still proprietary, no matter how open they appear to be. (Flash, AIR, Silverlight, etc) I still prefer a slick HTML, JavaScript and CSS application because there really is almost nothing it cannot do.
I expect Firefox 3 will be out within the next few weeks. And shortly after that I hope to see the early beta of IE8. Now that it has passed the Acid2 test I am anxious to see that overtake the IE6 and IE7 market share so that we can start producing web applications that work seamlessly across browsers.
January 10th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
From what I understand, they've admitted to some serious memory leaks in FireFox 2, which are supposed to be fixed in v3. I've installed the v3 beta, but haven't used it enough to benefit from any difference. (The problems take a while to show.)
IE8 sounds great, too, but you're nuts if you think we'll ever be free of browser-specific bugs. That's magic-bullet thinking. Baby steps, dude.
January 10th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
Yeah, I expect that IE8 will have some problems, but I think there is much more happening in terms of automated testing. Even though John Resig works for Firefox he has reached out to the IE to get them on board with running a broad suite of tests on the widely used JavaScript libraries with nightly builds. Having the CSS interpreted properly, as the Acid2 Test supposedly ensures, as well as having a well-tested JavaScript engine will be a nice fit alongside Firefox 3. The biggest problem is convincing those IE6 and IE7 users to move forward. It is so easy to stay current with Firefox.
More on the JS testing in Firefox here...
http://ejohn.org/blog/first-js-test-suite-bug-caught/
Knowing this automated testing is in place makes me fee more confident in building on top of these libraries.