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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday July 08 2015, @03:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-release-nightly-builds-oh-wait dept.

Mozilla is planning to speed up Firefox's current 18-week release cycle, code in multiprocess support, and phase out the XUL and XBL languages currently used to build the Firefox UI (a change that may eventually break extensions):

Mozilla is planning big changes in how it builds its Firefox web browser, including speeding up its release schedule and – in the long term – getting rid of some of the Mozilla-specific technologies that have traditionally been used to build the browser's UI and add-ons. The decisions were discussed at Moz's "Coincidental Work Week" meetup in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada during the last week of June and were made public in a pair of forum posts by Mozilla engineering director Dave Camp on Monday. For starters, Mozilla plans to ditch its current 18-week release cycle in favor of something more agile. "We think there are big wins to be had in shortening the time that new features reaches users," Camp wrote. "Critical fixes should ship to users in minutes, not days. Individual features rolling out to small audiences for focused and multi-variate testing."

Firefox 39 was released on Monday. Changes include vsync (smooth scrolling) on Mac OS X, the addition of Unicode 8.0 skin tone emoji, removal of SSLv3, improving IPv6 fallback to IPv4, and support for the ECMAScript 2015 Proxy object. Mozilla has also unveiled a "Games Technology Roadmap," which sets out goals of further improving HTML5 + JavaScript performance relative to native applications, shipping the unfinished WebGL 2.0, and minimizing common issues like audio/graphics latency and "jitter".

Google says TurboFan, a new optimizing JavaScript compiler that will replace Crankshaft, will speed up various aspects of JavaScript performance (it currently shows a "29% increase on the zlib score of the Octane benchmark"). It has been shipping since Chrome 41, but will be improved and switched on in more code scenarios over time until it completely replaces the Crankshaft compiler.

Microsoft's new Edge browser will not include ActiveX and Silverlight support, and will instead use HTML5's Media Source and Encrypted Media Extensions for "premium media", as well as MPEG-DASH and Common Encryption (CENC). Internet Explorer 11 will retain Silverlight support.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by JNCF on Wednesday July 08 2015, @06:19PM

    by JNCF (4317) on Wednesday July 08 2015, @06:19PM (#206554) Journal

    When Chrome eventually gets around to adding ahead-of-time compilation for asm.js are you going to say they're copying Firefox?

    From where I'm sitting it looks like the two browsers focus on implementing different features at different times. One will add a development tool, and then the other will add a similar but different tool a while later. Obviously they're both going to copy what works best from the other. Google has a bigger budget than Mozilla, so they might be more likely than Mozilla to add a given feature first, but they're both innovating and they're both copying each other. They'd be fools not to.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2015, @07:44AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2015, @07:44AM (#206850)

    When Chrome eventually gets around to adding ahead-of-time compilation for asm.js are you going to say they're copying Firefox?

    There's a difference between something being a good idea in general (e.g. better performance), and something that caters to one group of users (those already on Chrome), while driving away another group (those who prefer Firefox over Chrome).