Firefox 3.6 is out. Go download it! If you need a reason, here’s a few things you’ll love about Firefox 3.6.
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Firefox 3.6
Year: 2010
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Things You’ll Love About Firefox 3.6
To be honest Firefox 3.6 is a little lighter on Features than Firefox 3.5. It’s more about refining and improving than bells and whistles. Here are the things I feel are really noteworthy.
User Centric Features
UI Speed – Many things in the Firefox 3.6 UI have gotten faster. For example startup time has been improved thanks to various optimizations. My personal favorite is the awesomebar is now asynchronous, if you don’t know what that means, just trust me that it makes things feel faster if you have a slow hard drive like in a laptop.
JS/Video Speed Improvements – TraceMonkey, the fast JS engine has gotten some tweaks to improve performance even further. Seeking in <video/> is now much faster than it was in Firefox 3.5.
Focus – UI geeks will note that Firefox has had a few issues regarding focusing elements. Thanks to some refactoring it’s vastly simplified and improved.
Personas – Firefox has always supported theming, but it’s a complex process to build a theme and it’s prone to breaking as the UI evolves between versions. Personas is a light weight system to customize the look of the browser’s chrome.
Plugin Update Notification – A big cause of Firefox crashes, and security issues actually aren’t related to Firefox directly but plugins. Firefox can now notify you when you need to update a plugin helping you to keep your system as stable and secure as possible.
Full Screen For <video/> – Firefox can play native <video/> but thus far had no method to go full screen. Apple may want you to pay for “Pro” for full screen but with Firefox 3.6 you get it at no extra charge.
DLL Blacklist – To improve security/stability Firefox now has a DLL blacklist and can prevent other DLL’s from interfering with Firefox. This is Windows only at this time.
Opening Links In New Tab Position – When you opened a link in a new tab in previous versions it opened in a new tab on the far right, with lots of tabs open this created confusion as you may have several different tabs open on various things your doing. Now this will result in the new tab being created to the right of the current tab. If you don’t like this behavior you can set tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent to false. It takes a little getting used to, but it’s worth it.
For Developers
-moz-background-size – This is exactly what it sounds like. I’ve wanted to do this a few times in the past.
Poster frame for <video/> – Poster frames are now supported for <video/>. It’s a small bit of polish but will hopefully benefit design and perhaps even SEO down the line.
Web Open Font Format (WOFF) – Imagine an open font format that supported compression and meta data. Now imagine that a lot of font foundries have expressed support for it. WOFF!
async attribute for <script/> – It’s simple enough, the async attribute is now supported. Those who care about performance have wanted this for a long time.
Using Files from Web Applications – This is a huge step towards making web applications first class citizens. Hopefully we’ll see support for this in Google Docs at some point (one of the apps I think could best make use of this).
HTML5 Parser – Firefox 3.6 ships with an HTML5 parser, though it’s disabled for now by default. To enable set html5.enable to true.
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Talk To The Moose Parody
This video requires a little explanation for overseas readers. GAP ran a commercial titled “Talk To The Moose” in the US during the 2009 holiday season that was notable for featuring several young girls dancing and singing what became an Earworm for some people thanks to a fair amount of air time.
I’m not sure if the cute factor or the Earworm was the marketing approach.
The side effect of a commercial being memorable for any reason is that these days we get parodies thanks to the Internet! I’m pretty sure this one was filmed with alcohol nearby, but perhaps that’s what makes it so great. The painful looking flip is what puts it over the top. I’ve got a few side-by-sides because despite being so poor (in a funny way), it’s actually a surprisingly pretty good parody.
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Luxury Markup
Audioholics has a must read review of the $3,500 Lexicon BD-30 Blu-Ray player.
What did they find? It’s actually the $500 OPPO BDP-83 inside a new case. Literally. They put the entire chassis inside, not just the components. Then they did some audio measurements and found they also matched. Not just close but identical.
The Lexicon BD-30 is THX certified while the OPPO BDP-83 is not, however THX certification requires paying licensing which OPPO Digital declined to do. People who bought an OPPO BDP-83 apparently got a THX worthy system for a fraction of the price though Audioholics deputes if the device is totally up to par.
This reminds me of the $500 ethernet cable. Or Gizmodo’s case against Monster Cable.
Lots of people assume a higher price tag equals better quality. That’s often not the case.
[Hat tip: The Consumerist]
I’ve noticed that Microsoft Entourage 2008 sometimes falls out of sync with the Exchange server. This results in missing or outdated events on a calendar. When you use multiple computers and webmail this can become annoying. I’ve traced the problem to the cache in Entourage 2008 becoming either corrupt or stale for some unknown reason. Clearing the cache can be done manually (right click on the calendar and go into “Folder Properties” then press “empty cache”) or can be automated.
Obviously I prefer the automated route. Here’s the AppleScript I wrote:
set accountIterator to 1
tell application "Microsoft Entourage"
repeat
if (exists Exchange account accountIterator) then
empty cache of every calendar of Exchange account accountIterator
set accountIterator to accountIterator + 1
else
exit repeat
end if
end repeat
end tell
Save it as a script, I’ll call mine clearCal.scpt. Now place it somewhere. I’ll use /Users/me/clearCal.scpt.
Now in terminal open crontab via crontab -e and enter the following obviously adjusting the path to point to the script:
0 8 * * * osascript /Users/me/clearCal.scpt
Save (ctrl-o) and exit (ctrl-x).
This will run the script at 8:00 AM every morning and clear the cache. I’m pretty sure this will only worked if your logged in, which is fine for me.
Warning: Clearing the cache means that if an event wasn’t sync’d to the exchange server it will be lost. In my case I find this to be the lesser evil. Obviously if you use this, it’s at your own risk.
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The Future Of SSL
Google announced the other day that it will now enable HTTPS by default on Gmail. Previously a user had to either manually type in HTTPS or change a setting to default to it, something most people likely never bothered to do. Google says it’s not related but it seems oddly coincidental that this chance coincides with its China announcement.
However Gmail using HTTPS is not the big story here.
The big story is that HTTPS is now being used in places where it before was considered excessive. Once upon only financial information was generally sent over HTTPS. As time went on, so did most website login pages, though the rest of the sites often were unencrypted. The reason for being so selective is that it’s more costly to scale HTTPS due to it’s CPU usage on the server-side, and it’s performance on the client side. These days CPU is becoming very cheap.
In the next few years I think we’ll see more and more of the web switch to using HTTPS. If things like network neutrality don’t work this trend could accelerate at an even quicker rate just like it did for P2P using MSE/PE to mask traffic.
Like I said, these days the CPU impact is pretty affordable, however the performance impact due to HTTP handshaking can be pretty substantial. Minimizing HTTP requests obviously helps. HTTP Keepalive is a good solution however that generally results in more child processes on the server as they aren’t freed as quickly (read: more memory needed).
Mobile is a whole different ballgame since CPU is still more limited. I’m not aware of any mobile devices that have hardware to specifically handle SSL, which does exist for servers. Add in the extra latency and mobile really suffers. Perhaps it’s time to re-examine how various Crypto libraries are optimized for running on ARM hardware? I think the day will come where performance over SSL will matter as it becomes more ubiquitous.
This patch Tuesday I have 3 updates for this XP box. Two of them seem rather similar yet one is given a title that’s much more obvious than the other. Why is one a “security update” and the other merely an “update”. I’m guessing severity, but I don’t think this is very clear. For the “update” it should still be clear that it’s security related regardless of severity.
Security Update for Windows XP (KB972270)
Size: 555 KB
A security issue has been identified that could allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to compromise your system and gain control over it. You can help protect your system by installing this update from Microsoft. After you install this update, you may have to restart your system.
More information for this update can be found at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=169348
Update For Windows XP (KB955759)
Size: 1.1 MB
An issue has been identified that could allow an authenticated remote attacker to compromise your system and gain control over it. You can help protect your system by installing this update from Microsoft. After you install this update, you may have to restart your system.
More information for this update can be found at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=123411
Google’s announcement about China is rather stunning in many respects from its candidness to the rather bold decision to potentially leave China over “[t]hese attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web…”.
Some may remember a few years ago that Yahoo! controversially provided information to the Chinese government that resulted in the arrest of Shi Tao and Li Zhi. There’s no evidence this impacted the decision but I would be shocked if it didn’t play any role.
It sounds like within the next few weeks we’ll know if Google and the Chinese government have come to an agreement regarding the censorship of search results. I suspect this is only a tiny part of the full story regarding google.cn.
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The Jetpack Debate
I’ve generally found Jetpack to be pretty cool. It’s easier to develop and I’m fairly familiar with both “traditional” extension development and jQuery so it seems natural to me. However I generally agree with Daniel Glazman’s blog post on Jetpack. I’ll even agree that closures can make code more difficult to read, though I think I’ve mostly adapted to it at this point.
Jetpack reminds me more of building JS “widgets” than extensions. I’m not sure I see the advantage of moving away from XUL which really isn’t “hard” for 98% of things (though XUL <wizard/> has admittedly made me say WTF a few times) to HTML unless some sort of portability were gained, but that doesn’t seem very likely at least right now. I haven’t seen any indication of intent either. XUL has the advantage of making good UI seemingly easy while HTML really doesn’t, though I’ll admit HTML5 is changing that.
The biggest problem I see with Jetpack is that too much of it is designed around existing needs. The problem with this process is that it’s always playing catch-up. The best extensions are disruptive and do things nobody ever thought of, or even thought possible. Looking at the Jetpack JEP list I see pagemods and toolbar. The kicker is these are “implementing” and “planning” respectively right now.
Things like jetpack.slideBar, jetpack.music and especially jetpack.lib.twitter make me feel a bit concerned. Why? Because they encourage too much conformity, and too many twitter client Jetpacks.
When developers are given such a sterile environment that’s intended to promote experience and stability it ends up inadvertently creating monotony and stalling innovation. If you want proof look at the iPhone. There are indeed some great apps and I say that as an iPhone user myself, but for each great application there are 1,000 that aren’t worth the price (which is often free). Many are just cookie cutter apps with a companies logo on them. Google used one undocumented API for a feature Apple didn’t think of providing a documented API for, and it was news worthy. While Jetpack distribution isn’t limited in the same way that iPhone apps are with the App Store the design questions still remain.
To quote Adblock Plus author Wladimir Palant:
…Jetpack has to support Adblock Plus, not the other way around. As it is now, Jetpack isn’t suitable for complicated extensions.
That’s the wrong order.
Here’s an impressive video showing the view from the Burj Khalifa (aka Khalifa Tower aka Burj Dubai) in Dubai. Amazing.