I have started using Firefox 3.6 and it does feel a little faster than its predecessor, though it's definitely not as snappy as Chrome. I should note that this is how Firefox 3.0 and 3.5 also felt at the time of their release, only to not feel that fast as time wore on and we received successive security and stability updates. I wonder why.
Showing posts with label firefox. Show all posts
Showing posts with label firefox. Show all posts
2010-01-23
2009-11-23
Google Chrome on Slackware
Google Chrome has been out for a while now, but only on Windows. There are pre-release Linux builds of Chrome, but they work out-of-the-box only on Ubuntu or Debian. As a Slackware 12.1 user, I couldn't therefore check out this browser and I was too lazy to build it myself. Fortunately for me, it turns out that the available builds can be made to work on Slackware with a little effort. Chrome turns out to be surprisingly usable and fast on Linux. That said, I'm not shifting from Firefox to Chrome yet, at least not right away.
2008-06-15
Firefox 3
I have been using the release candidates of Firefox 3 on Linux for some time now. The experience has been quite good so far. I would encourage you to try it out for yourself - in fact, download it on the 17th of June and help Mozilla set a world record.
Firefox 3 comes with quite a lot of fixes and improvements. The "Field Guide to Firefox 3" is a nice page summarising the more important improvements. It seems to have improved a lot in terms of memory usage and speed. You just have to use Gmail to see the difference in speed for yourself. Since I never open too many tabs, use too many extensions or keep the browser open for too long, I have never personally run into memory-usage issues with previous releases of Firefox and I can't really say if the improvements in this area are that drastic.
Devanagari Text Rendering on Linux: Firefox 2 (left) v/s Firefox 3 (right)
The composite screen-shot above shows the difference between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 when rendering Devanagari text (from Josh18) under Linux. I have circled some of the words that were rendered incorrectly by Firefox 2 and correctly by Firefox 3. (Click on the image above to see a larger version.)
It has not been all wonderful though. There are still some issues that make my experience with Firefox 3 less than ideal. The most egregious of these is how some web pages using Flash either cause Firefox 3 to freeze up or just crash with a segmentation fault (of course, this could be due to a badly-written Flash Player plug-in). The other issue that has persisted from Firefox 2 but now seems to have become worse for me is how Firefox would just freeze for a second or so every now and then, especially noticeable while scrolling up and down large web pages. This might be related to garbage-collection cycles, but I am not sure about it.
Incidentally while Firefox 3 itself mercifully does not require GNOME (I am a happy KDE-only user), its new crash-reporting tool does need a few of the GNOME libraries. This tool is now based on Google Breakpad. I found that the crash reporting tool itself would crash while trying to send a crash report to Mozilla. That was fixed only after I installed GConf, ORBit, libIDL, D-Bus and dbus-glib. It still failed to send the crash reports and it turned out that I must also install and configure Curl. Of course, ordinary Linux users with a typically-bloated Linux distribution would not run into such issues.
By the way, there is now a new pseudo-URL named "about:crashes" that would let you to lovingly admire the crash reports that your instance of Firefox has generated and submitted to Mozilla.
Firefox 3 comes with quite a lot of fixes and improvements. The "Field Guide to Firefox 3" is a nice page summarising the more important improvements. It seems to have improved a lot in terms of memory usage and speed. You just have to use Gmail to see the difference in speed for yourself. Since I never open too many tabs, use too many extensions or keep the browser open for too long, I have never personally run into memory-usage issues with previous releases of Firefox and I can't really say if the improvements in this area are that drastic.
One of the more important fixes for Indian users of Firefox on Linux is its improved support for complex text layout, which is used in quite a few Indic scripts. I have complained about it before and I am happy to report that it now seems to work fairly well:
Devanagari Text Rendering on Linux: Firefox 2 (left) v/s Firefox 3 (right)
The composite screen-shot above shows the difference between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 when rendering Devanagari text (from Josh18) under Linux. I have circled some of the words that were rendered incorrectly by Firefox 2 and correctly by Firefox 3. (Click on the image above to see a larger version.)
It has not been all wonderful though. There are still some issues that make my experience with Firefox 3 less than ideal. The most egregious of these is how some web pages using Flash either cause Firefox 3 to freeze up or just crash with a segmentation fault (of course, this could be due to a badly-written Flash Player plug-in). The other issue that has persisted from Firefox 2 but now seems to have become worse for me is how Firefox would just freeze for a second or so every now and then, especially noticeable while scrolling up and down large web pages. This might be related to garbage-collection cycles, but I am not sure about it.
Incidentally while Firefox 3 itself mercifully does not require GNOME (I am a happy KDE-only user), its new crash-reporting tool does need a few of the GNOME libraries. This tool is now based on Google Breakpad. I found that the crash reporting tool itself would crash while trying to send a crash report to Mozilla. That was fixed only after I installed GConf, ORBit, libIDL, D-Bus and dbus-glib. It still failed to send the crash reports and it turned out that I must also install and configure Curl. Of course, ordinary Linux users with a typically-bloated Linux distribution would not run into such issues.
By the way, there is now a new pseudo-URL named "about:crashes" that would let you to lovingly admire the crash reports that your instance of Firefox has generated and submitted to Mozilla.
2007-05-26
Indic Scripts and Linux
If you have the fonts for Indic scripts (for example, the Lohit fonts), Firefox on Linux is able to display the Devanagari text on sites like BBC Hindi and Google News in Hindi. (Devanagari is the primary writing system for languages like Hindi, Sanskrit, etc.) However, if you are using the builds released by mozilla.com, you would notice that the matras (diacritics) are not applied properly to form the correct ligatures. For example, the word "हिन्दी" ("Hindi") itself is not rendered properly. Konqueror does not suffer from such problems.
It turns out that Firefox does not support complex text layout because it doesn't use Pango in the officially-released builds (Firefox 3 will support it by default). You have to either compile it yourself from the source and enable the support for Pango by using --enable-pango, or use a build that has Pango enabled - for example, the builds provided by the Fedora Project. (Setting the environment variable MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO to "1" had no effect for me with Firefox 2.0.0.3.)
On Fedora Core 6 (FC6), it is very simple to get this working:
By the way, I recently came across Omniglot, a site about the writing systems of almost all known human languages, existing or extinct, naturally-evolved or artificially-created. I found it extremely fascinating and insightful. For example, I did not know that Devanagari was not considered to be an "alphabet" but an "abiguda". Check out the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) that can represent almost all spoken languages. How about Loglan (and its freer derivative, Lojban) that claims to be a "logical" language? (I first came across the IPA on Wikipedia, where it is used to provide the pronunciation for some terms. xkcd is where I first read about Lojban.)
It turns out that Firefox does not support complex text layout because it doesn't use Pango in the officially-released builds (Firefox 3 will support it by default). You have to either compile it yourself from the source and enable the support for Pango by using --enable-pango, or use a build that has Pango enabled - for example, the builds provided by the Fedora Project. (Setting the environment variable MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO to "1" had no effect for me with Firefox 2.0.0.3.)
On Fedora Core 6 (FC6), it is very simple to get this working:
- Install the fonts for the Indic scripts you are interested in. For example, "sudo yum install fonts-hindi" , "sudo yum install fonts-malayalam", "sudo yum install fonts-kannada", etc.
- Install a Firefox build for Fedora using "sudo yum install firefox". Note that FC6 installs Firefox 1.5 by default - if you prefer Firefox 2.0 instead, you can install it using "sudo yum --enablerepo=development install firefox".
By the way, I recently came across Omniglot, a site about the writing systems of almost all known human languages, existing or extinct, naturally-evolved or artificially-created. I found it extremely fascinating and insightful. For example, I did not know that Devanagari was not considered to be an "alphabet" but an "abiguda". Check out the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) that can represent almost all spoken languages. How about Loglan (and its freer derivative, Lojban) that claims to be a "logical" language? (I first came across the IPA on Wikipedia, where it is used to provide the pronunciation for some terms. xkcd is where I first read about Lojban.)
2007-05-19
Firefox 3 and Linux
Mike Connor blogs about the proposed requirements for Firefox 3 to run on Linux. A nasty surprise for me was the inclusion of GNOME as a dependency. While the GTK/Pango/Cairo/etc. requirements are quite understandable, I don't understand why it should need GNOME. Many of us are happy with KDE or Xfce and would like to avoid the bloat and the dependency hell of GNOME for the sake of running a browser.
As an aside, Firefox on Linux also seems to behave quite differently from Firefox on Windows. For example, on Linux Firefox seems to consistently consume more CPU time and memory than on Windows. Some pages are rendered differently on Windows and Linux (perhaps due to the availability, or otherwise, of the fonts requested by the page designer and the rendering infrastructure). I have personally also noticed bug-337093 on Windows but not on Linux.
As an aside, Firefox on Linux also seems to behave quite differently from Firefox on Windows. For example, on Linux Firefox seems to consistently consume more CPU time and memory than on Windows. Some pages are rendered differently on Windows and Linux (perhaps due to the availability, or otherwise, of the fonts requested by the page designer and the rendering infrastructure). I have personally also noticed bug-337093 on Windows but not on Linux.
2006-04-21
2006-03-23
Miscellaneous
Firefox leads to a breakup. I don't know whether I should feel sorry for the bloke who was dumped or the lady who had to change her email address possibly after being bombarded with tonnes of silly emails. I do know that I found this bug report rather funny.
As I had feared, I performed miserably in the qualifying round of the Google Code Jam India 2006. Good luck to the people who moved on to the next round.
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
As I had feared, I performed miserably in the qualifying round of the Google Code Jam India 2006. Good luck to the people who moved on to the next round.
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
2005-12-23
StanChart Sees the Light
Among the financial institutions I deal with and whose online facilities I use regularly, Citibank India, HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank have had great support for Firefox. The only exception was Standard Chartered India who did not seem to want to support anything other than IE or Netscape Communicator 4. I had pointed this out to their Customer Service several times and even pointed out where in their JavaScript code they were making the mistake, but I was always presented with a verbose, albeit nicely written, message asking me to just use the supported browsers and stop ranting. Needless to say, I was irritated and frustrated.
To my pleasant surprise, I discovered last week that they had silently started supporting Firefox as well. Perhaps it came about because a lot of their developers themselves use Firefox; perhaps a lot of customers actually complained; perhaps they saw that by most accounts, Firefox has around 8-10% of the "browser marketshare". Whatever be the reason, I am happy. It is also heartening to note that a lot of sites these days increasingly seem to just work with Firefox instead of requiring IE.
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
To my pleasant surprise, I discovered last week that they had silently started supporting Firefox as well. Perhaps it came about because a lot of their developers themselves use Firefox; perhaps a lot of customers actually complained; perhaps they saw that by most accounts, Firefox has around 8-10% of the "browser marketshare". Whatever be the reason, I am happy. It is also heartening to note that a lot of sites these days increasingly seem to just work with Firefox instead of requiring IE.
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
2005-12-21
New Software
SeaMonkey is the new avatar of the Mozilla Application Suite, kept alive by people who prefer the old monolithic application approach to the new approach of having standalone browser (Firefox), mail client (Thunderbird), etc. components. SeaMonkey has just released 1.0 Beta. I personally prefer the old approach as well, but have decided for the moment to not switch back from Firefox/Thunderbird simply because I have now become quite used to these applications and have begun to rely on some of the superb extensions created by the community for them.
QEMU 0.8.0 is out (as is VMWare Player 1.0). By the way, QEMU can be easily used to create virtual machine discs for use with VMWare Player. However, I still prefer to use QEMU.
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
QEMU 0.8.0 is out (as is VMWare Player 1.0). By the way, QEMU can be easily used to create virtual machine discs for use with VMWare Player. However, I still prefer to use QEMU.
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
2005-04-30
Firefox: 50,000,000 Users and Counting
Firefox has been downloaded by at least50 million users worldwide. Awesome! Congratulations to the Firefox hackers for creating such a wonderful browser loved by so many people.
I hope some ostriches get their heads out of the sand and take a look at the world around them. :-/
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
I hope some ostriches get their heads out of the sand and take a look at the world around them. :-/
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
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