New Fox the Next Major Release of Firefox Promises Changes to the User Interface and Serious Speed Benefits

Home , Acid2, Bookmark (digital), Favicon, Firefox 2, Konqueror

The next generation: Mozilla Firefox 3 New Fox The next major release of Firefox promises changes to the user interface and serious speed benefits. Firefox 3 seamlessly integrates the Gtk environment and offers a pleth-

ora of new features. By Christoph Langner

features optimize in- out of a web page you are viewing when teraction between you zoom in. In the beta release, there jacktoon, Fotolia Linux and Firefox. was no way to disable this function. The developers have also improved Overview the address line in which users enter Starting with a short web addresses. When you enter a URL, overview of the key the program not only searches in the new features browser history, but also in the book- in Firefox 3, marks. Firefox 3 gives you a two-line dis- the new play of the matches with the correspond- bookmark ing favicon while you type, making it system, easier to find a page that you visited pre- Places, viously or stored in your bookmarks. stands at the Additionally, the application marks fter almost a year and a half of top of the list. In the new system, book- websites that you access via https. development, the next genera- marks reside in a flat file, rather than in Instead of a stylized padlock, you are Ation Firefox browser release is a static hierarchy of folders (bookmarks. shown details about the certificate issuer rapidly approaching. The developers html). The bookmark system relies on and owner (see Figure 3). This makes plan to unveil Firefox 3 early in 2008 [1], tags to organize the bookmarks in a style life more difficult for phishers interested although Mozilla hasn’t announced an similar to social networks or blogs. The in capturing your passwords, PINs, and exact date. software stores the tags in an SQLite da- TANs. A beta version of Firefox 3.0 is cur- tabase (Figure 1). The Acid2 test [5] gives users a refer- rently available for downloading and A Smart Bookmarks option in the ence for compliance with web standards testing [2]. Here, I look at the Beta 3 Bookmarks toolbar lets you view the (Figure 4). Previously, Firefox 2 did not release. (Beta 4 made an appearance Most Visited and Recently Bookmarked pass the test, whereas Firefox 3 complies just before this issue went to print.) bookmarks (Figure 2). A comprehensive with all the typical standards and cor- Improvements are noticeable, espe- API [4] is available to Firefox extension rectly renders the graphic in the test. cially with Firefox for Linux. On first developers and supports extended access This puts Firefox on a par with Safari, inspection, new cross-platform features to the new system. Konqueror, and Opera. stand out, such as a new bookmark Another extremely practical new fea- Firefox has also made some improve- system called Places [3] or the website ture is Firefox’s ability to scale the im- ments under the hood. Mozilla uses the zoom function that also zooms any im- ages on a page up (Ctrl-+) and down Cairo [6] library to render page content ages on the page. Also, numerous new (Ctrl+-). This prevents altering the lay- and draw the program interface. Because

Christoph Langner is a big fan of Table 1: Performance Comparison Linux as well as a computer admin- Browser CSS Rendering Load Time Table sunSpider Memory load istrator at the University of (ms) (ms) (s) (MB) Firefox 2.0.0.11 692 1,002 18.9 100 Karlsruhe, Germany. He is currently Firefox 3 Beta 3 845 675 16.7 75 working in the field of software test Opera 9.25 (32-bit) 370 – 11.6 90 management. THE AUTHOR THE Opera 9.50 Beta2 (64-bit) 216 – 10.8 112

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Figure 1: The new database-driven bookmark system offers a variety Figure 2: The Smart Bookmarks folder provides quick access to the of sort options. most recent and most popular bookmarks. of this, Firefox renders complex web On top of this, tabs in Firefox – and but- Firefox 3 now directly accesses the Gtk pages much faster. tons for closing them – looked like the printing features. Users can access the tents in any other Gtk application. Fire- printing options they are familiar with Linux News fox has stopped trying to look the same from other Gnome programs, such as One of the most obvious changes in the on every platform on which it runs. specifying the number of pages per sheet Linux version is that Firefox now uses Previously, Linux users were unable of paper (Figure 5). genuine Gtk widgets: icons, scroll boxes, to use the mouse wheel to scroll on the and buttons. Previously, the browser did web page as soon as the mouse cursor Performance not draw widgets that matched the desk- hit a plugin (i.e., a Java applet or Flash In the past, Firefox was not known for top theme. Firefox 3 now integrates animation) because the plugin captured being the fastest browser, but developers seamlessly and assumes the appearance the wheel’s scrolling action, forcing the focused on improving the performance of all Gtk-based applications such as user to drag the mouse out of the plugin of Firefox 3. In our lab, I decided to com- Gnome or XFCE. Some bad blood be- area. This issue has been resolved. pare Firefox 2.0.0.11 with Firefox 3 Beta tween the Mozilla and KDE [7] develop- The developers have made serious im- 3 using the 32-bit version of Opera 9.25 ers explains why there is still no Qt vari- provements to the printing system [9]. and Opera 9.5 Beta 2, a 64-bit version ant of Firefox to integrate seamlessly Firefox versions up to and including 2.x that will be appearing shortly, as refer- with KDE. used lpr to address the printing system. ences. The tests were run on an AMD Firefox automatically uses preconfig- This reduced the number of options Athlon 64 X2 AM2 3800+ machine with ured icons. Where possible, the browser users had for manipulating the results 2GB RAM and Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon integrates icons from the desktop theme. when printing from the browser. 7.10 (64-bit).

Figure 3: See details about the certificate issuer and owner. Figure 4: Firefox 3 now also passes the Acid2 test.

JUNE 2008 ISSUE 91 47 REVIEWS Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 3

Figure 5: Firefox 3 offers an expanded selection of print options. Figure 6: The new Firefox offers improved phishing protection.

In the first test, I analyzed how long Finally, I investigated how much Overall, Firefox 3 is a critical compo- the browser took to load a complex web memory the browser needs, considering nent of the Linux desktop. In the future, page with a CSS layout. To do so, I saved that Firefox 2 has a reputation for being the software will integrate almost seam- the “CSS Rendering Benchmark” [10] a RAM hog. To analyze this, I launched lessly, at the same time adding a number test page locally, opened it in the the test candidates with fresh profiles of convenient functions. Users who pre- browser, and recorded the time for com- and loaded 10 web pages with consider- fer the KDE desktop will be disappointed plete rendering of the page. A JavaScript able content. – Firefox is yet another project that has embedded in the page handled this. Then, I used the Gnome system moni- decided in favor of Gtk. n Because the values could fluctuate, tor to investigate the memory consump- I repeated the test 10 times to determine tion of the individual processes. Again, INFO an average. It turns out that Firefox 2 is the developers seem to have made con- [1] Firefox roadmap: http://wiki.mozilla. a little bit faster. On average, it took 692 siderable progress with Firefox 3: Instead org/ReleaseRoadmap milliseconds for the benchmark, of the 100MB that Firefox 2 required, [2] Firefox download: http://www.mozilla. whereas Firefox 3 took an average of 845 Firefox 3 only needed 75MB. com/en ‑US/firefox/ all ‑beta.html milliseconds in our lab. The developers The browser’s performance is notice- [3] Places system: still have much work to do. ably improved, although Firefox still http://wiki. mozilla. org/ Places Our next benchmark investigated how came in behind the commercial Opera [4] Places API: http://developer.mozilla. long Firefox takes to render a web page browser (see the “Performance Compari- org/en/ docs/ Places with a large table. For this, I used the son” table). The Beta 4 version of Firefox [5] Acid2 browser test: http://www. Load Time Analyzer [11]. Load Time appeared after I completed these tests. webstandards.org/ action/ acid2/ Analyzer measures the time required to Mozilla worked on tuning the JS engine [6] Cairo (Wikipedia): http://en. wikipedia. completely render a web page [12] and for Beta 4, and the performance was sig- org/wiki/ Cairo_(graphics)# Mozilla display it. Again, I saved the page locally nificantly better. I added Konqueror 3.5 [7] Mozilla and Qt: https://bugzilla. and reloaded it 10 times, calculating an and 4 to the comparison and found that mozilla.org/ show_bug. cgi? id=297788 average value. Firefox 3 clearly outper- Firefox Beta 4 was competitive with the [8] Nightly builds: forms its predecessor in this discipline. alternatives. A 64-bit version of Firefox 3 http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/ firefox/nightly/ latest ‑trunk/ On average, it took only 675 millisec- (currently in development) will provide [9] Firefox with Gtk print dialog: onds, whereas Firefox 2 took about additional performance benefits. http://ventnorsblog.blogspot.com/ 1,002 milliseconds to render the page. 2008/01/ print ‑me‑print‑me‑print‑me‑ This represents a 32 percent perfor- Conclusions man‑after.html mance boost. Firefox 3 made a good impression with [10] CSS performance test: http://www. After the static website tests, I decided new features, such as improved phishing howtocreate.co. uk/ csstest. html to investigate the JavaScript engine. To protection (Figure 6) and easier installa- [11] Load Time Analyzer: https://addons. do so, I used the JavaScript benchmarks tion of add-ons that do not originate mozilla.org/ en ‑US/firefox/ addon/ 3371 by SunSpider [13]. The benchmarks test from Mozilla’s add-on page. The devel- [12] Test table: http://www.howtocreate. a number of non-browser-specific rou- opers have introduced further improve- co.uk/ jslibs/ oldindex. php tines and record the times. According to ments with Beta 4 [14]. Firefox 3 looks [13] JS performance test: http://webkit. SunSpider, Firefox 3 is 1.13 times faster likely to have support for the Internet org/perf/ sunspider ‑0.9/ sunspider. html with JavaScript than Firefox 2, which keys on multimedia keyboards and will [14] Firefox Beta 4: http://ventnorsblog.blogspot.com/ will make a big difference with popular have improved support for Gnome ses- 2008/02/ beta ‑4‑quickies.html Ajax-based pages, such as Gmail. sion management.

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