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Mozilla Software The Internet

Mozilla 1.7 Beta Is Faster And Smaller 738

ccady writes "Mozilla 1.7 beta is out. Not too many new features, but "Mozilla 1.7 size and performance have improved dramatically with this release. When compared to Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla 1.7 Beta is 7% faster at startup, is 8% faster at window open time, has 9% faster pageloading times, and is 5% smaller in binary size." I'll be downloading it."
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Mozilla 1.7 Beta Is Faster And Smaller

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  • by kentyman ( 568826 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @06:50PM (#8629750)
    Go Go Mozilla!
  • Mozilla 1.6 (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 21, 2004 @06:50PM (#8629752)
    Wow, I got here first using 1.6. Looks like some people will need 1.7 to get here faster next time
    • by Trejkaz ( 615352 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @09:02PM (#8630494) Homepage
      Faster? You mean like the guy that beat you to the first post?
  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 21, 2004 @06:51PM (#8629761)
    This is why I stopped using Netscape: each version was much larger, much slower, and much less reliable.

    How can something with the same kernel, and the same ancestry go the other way: Mozilla actually improves as it evolves.

    On the one hand, the dodo. On the other hand, the road-runner.
  • great (Score:3, Funny)

    by mr_tommy ( 619972 ) <tgraham@NoSpam.gmail.com> on Sunday March 21, 2004 @06:52PM (#8629767) Journal
    I hear its got 20% more zilla too!
  • by ciroknight ( 601098 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @06:54PM (#8629776)
    Statistics than you'll ever need...
  • by MarauderJr ( 201947 ) <MarauderJr@aol.com> on Sunday March 21, 2004 @06:56PM (#8629791)
    The next service pack of Internet Explorer plans to have longer load times, more crashes, and open a few more exploits into a Windows system.

    Modzilla keeps getting better all the time.
  • noticeable? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by davids-world.com ( 551216 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @06:57PM (#8629803) Homepage
    I seriously doubt that a performance improvement 10% is even noticeable to the user. It's great that Mozilla is trying to catch up with fast browse-only alternatives like Safari, Konqueror and also the Gecko-based browsers, but you can't seriously speak of 'dramatic' improvements.
    • Re:noticeable? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 21, 2004 @07:24PM (#8629980)
      Sure. A performace improvement of 10% is probably totally unnoticable to the user. The real point that the article fails to make is that Mozilla has been getting *consistently* smaller and faster since the 1.0 release. Subjectivley, it's pretty obvious if you use an older release that it's slower. But if that isn't good enough, there are graphs on tinderbox which show the measured codesize, pageload time, new window time and various other metrics (no link, because it would be irresponsible of me to launch an accidental ddos attack on tinderbox) - if you're interested the address is pretty easy to guess/find. Looking at the btek pageload time, I see that in June 2002 pageload was around 1210ms, now it's around 860ms and still decreasing. That's an improvment of around 30%, without cutting any features or degrading the standards support. That means that Mozilla is now competative with so called "lightweight" browsers such as Opera (I don't have comparisons avaliable because such things are hard to do).
    • Re:noticeable? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by juhaz ( 110830 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @07:36PM (#8630053) Homepage
      I seriously doubt that a performance improvement 10% is even noticeable to the user.

      Maybe it isn't. But if few releases in a row could each make 10% improvements, the cumulative 50% improvement damn certainly is noticeable.
  • by cperciva ( 102828 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @06:58PM (#8629810) Homepage
    When compared to Mozilla 1.6, Lynx is 99% faster at startup, 99% faster at window open time, has 50% faster pageloading times, and is 90% smaller in binary size.

    In all seriousness, it's easy to improve figures like this just by removing features.
  • by EmbeddedJanitor ( 597831 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @06:59PM (#8629813)
    The fastest speed up is not even 10%. That's about an extra 0.01 tits/second. Want more speedup than that.
    • by B.D.Mills ( 18626 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @07:09PM (#8629892)
      This is obviously some new use of the word "dramatically" that I am not familiar with.

      When compared to Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla 1.7 Beta is 7% faster at startup, is 8% faster at window open time, has 9% faster pageloading times, and is 5% smaller in binary size.

      It might be just you and me, but single-digit percentage increases in performance isn't "dramatic". It's more like "scarcely noticeable".
      • by robbyjo ( 315601 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @07:25PM (#8629992) Homepage

        but single-digit percentage increases in performance isn't "dramatic". It's more like "scarcely noticeable".

        In that case, maybe... But if you follow some compiler conference papers, single digit percentage of improvement *is* a dramatic improvement.

        More than that single digit, we need to either change the underlying algorithm, or do a more dramatic overhaul, or correct a resource hogging mistakes. Well, we all know that Mozilla coders aren't that sloppy, so I guess that single digit improvements are really good because they usually involve quite a lot of cutting corners squeezing out more improvements over the already tight code.

    • Good point .... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 21, 2004 @07:26PM (#8629995)
      Back when I designed graphics accelerators for a living we did a whole bunch of work trying to figure out what 'faster' ment - at least from a subjective point of view - turns out if you graph actual performance to subjective performance there's sort of an S curve, on the left it's dog slow and people are just annoyed, on the right it's so fast people don't notice performance is an issue at all and in the middle there's a vaguely exponential region where if every time you make things ten times faster they think it got better, maybe by a subjective factor of 2 .... 10% is in the noise .... unless your UI is in that far left dog-slow region
  • Thanks Moz Team. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pararox ( 706523 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @07:00PM (#8629818)
    I'm really impressed, and very much appreciative, of the amount of effort the Mozilla team has put forth over the years. I switched to Mozilla some 4 or 5 years ago, and haven't looked back since. The rapidity of development is truly astounding -- thanks girls and guys!

    That having been said, I've been dissapointed with the latest iteration of the Mozilla browser. I've found 1.6 to be rather slow (autocomplete lags, for example), bug prone and (if I'm correct) java support is still on the fritz.

    I'm liable to switch over to FireFox (or whatever it's called this week), except the Preference Toolbar (on which I'm hooked like a crack addiction) still does not function in this stripped down version of the Moz browser.

    Anyway, I look forward to this newest version; really, I just wanted to express, in this post, my thanks for the effort put forth by the whole Moz team.

    Regards,

    =pararox=
  • Mozilla is good... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lakedemon ( 761375 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @07:01PM (#8629832)
    I just love it and tab-browsing but there is still room for improvement:
    A resume feature in the download manager would be a nice start...
  • Kerberos Support (Score:4, Informative)

    by CNeb96 ( 60366 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @07:02PM (#8629838)
    It now support's SSO HTTP Authentication using GSSAPI Kerberos. Similiar MS's implementation of SPNEGO in IE. See bug 17578 in bugzilla for more information.

    This is compatible with both IIS, and mod_authkerb for apache.

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/modauthkerb/

    Next the plan is to make kerberos support more general so it can be used for other protocol's like IMAP.
  • by edxwelch ( 600979 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @07:02PM (#8629839)
    How much faster in comparision to other releases? What I want to know is if Mozilla is progressively getting faster, or is this just to compensate for performance regressions when they went from 1.4 - 1.5, etc.
  • by Jexx Dragon ( 733193 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @07:02PM (#8629843)
    I've been using Mozilla since 0.4 or 0.5, can't quite remember which. It's always been the best, and keeps getting better (tabs anyone?). Every release gets faster, and most get smaller, though not all.
  • Mozilla Vs Firefox (Score:4, Informative)

    by colinramsay ( 603167 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @07:02PM (#8629846) Homepage
    Seeing as Firefox is getting most of the press these days it's important to realise that the full suite is still moving along nicely. They are addressing criticisms well - a redesign of the cookie manager and speed increases are reflective of the fight against bloat and complexity.

    And don't forget, changes to the suite are picked up by Firefox since FF is based off the same source tree. So a lot of work here will affect the mini-moz too....
  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 21, 2004 @07:12PM (#8629912)
    For detailed information aboutMozilla [wikipedia.org], read all about it in the wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
  • by dh003i ( 203189 ) <dh003i@noSPam.gmail.com> on Sunday March 21, 2004 @07:16PM (#8629931) Homepage Journal
    No-one is going to notice a 10% improvement. It is a non-factor. You need to double performance to make a noticeable difference. Granted, if they keep on improving by 10% each release, it will eventually be really good, but don't call a 10% improvement "dramatic" (or whatever the original author called it).

    Personally, I like Galeon and Firefox. I just need a web-browser.
  • Galeon (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AnonymousCowheart ( 646429 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @07:16PM (#8629934)
    The latest Galeon is out too [sourceforge.net]. Version 1.3.14. Works with Mozilla 1.4 through 1.7b and trunk. Loads pretty fast too;) For those of you who don't know, galeon is a browser based on mozilla, for gnome-but ofcourse works in other wm's too.
  • by jmt9581 ( 554192 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @07:17PM (#8629942) Homepage
    When compared to Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla 1.7 Beta is 7% faster at startup, is 8% faster at window open time, has 9% faster pageloading times, and is 5% smaller in binary size.

    After the news is released on Slashdot, it's now 40% slower to download. :D

  • OS X Talkback? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Megane ( 129182 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @07:22PM (#8629970)
    Does anybody know why they stopped putting Talkback into the OS X pre-release versions since 1.6 alpha? I thought that was supposed to help them find crashing bugs. Kind of hard to do when you forget to put it in there in the first place.
    • Re:OS X Talkback? (Score:4, Informative)

      by va3atc ( 715659 ) * on Sunday March 21, 2004 @08:15PM (#8630263) Homepage Journal
      Does anybody know why they stopped putting Talkback into the OS X pre-release versions since 1.6 alpha? I thought that was supposed to help them find crashing bugs. Kind of hard to do when you forget to put it in there in the first place.

      I can't speak for OS X, but as for Windows, I inquired about the removal of the talkback feature in the nightly builds they had this to say about it: [mozillazine.org]

      No, it's not possible to enable it. It's either built into the official builds or its not. Currently the official builds are not being built with talkback because of some talkback server issues, so there is no way to disable it. Hopefully by Firebird 0.9 all of the talkback issues will be sorted, but it's probably not going to happen for the Firebird 0.8 release.

      Though if you page down it appears that we shall see it in this release of Mozilla

      "The installer releases of Mozilla 1.7 Beta now include Quality Feedback Agent again, allowing users to report crashes, ..."

      Hopefully all those new bug reports will help speed up development :-)
    • Re:OS X Talkback? (Score:4, Informative)

      by rmohr02 ( 208447 ) * <mohr@42.osu@edu> on Sunday March 21, 2004 @08:39PM (#8630362)
      The talkback servers were hosted by Netscape, then AOL. The Mozilla Foundation does not have access to those servers anymore, but will hopefully have new talkback servers soon.
  • "dramatic" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sacrilicious ( 316896 ) <qbgfynfu.opt@recursor.net> on Sunday March 21, 2004 @07:52PM (#8630150) Homepage
    "Mozilla 1.7 size and performance have improved dramatically with this release. When compared to Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla 1.7 Beta is 7% faster at startup, is 8% faster at window open time, has 9% faster pageloading times, and is 5% smaller in binary size."

    It would seem that the definition of "dramatic" just got marginalized. Personally I'd think of a 2x performance increase as dramatic. 1.1x is what I'd term "laudable".

  • Firefox (Score:4, Insightful)

    by miketang16 ( 585602 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @08:02PM (#8630210) Journal
    I assume these speed changes will be transferred over to Firefox as well, since it uses the Mozilla code base. That will likely make Firefox amazingly fast, since it's already faster than the stock Mozilla.
  • by laddhebert ( 570948 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @08:50PM (#8630402)
    "Mozilla 1.7 Beta is 7% faster at startup, is 8% faster at window open time, has 9% faster pageloading times, and is 5% smaller in binary size."

    I guess that makes it.....

    29% Better!

    -L

  • Camino 0.8 (Score:4, Informative)

    by rixstep ( 611236 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @09:18PM (#8630610) Homepage
    Camino 0.8 is on the way too. [mozilla.org]

    22 January 2004: We are in the process of driving the Camino 0.8 buglist to zarro boogs. We will be branching off Mozilla 1.7 (now scheduled for April) and will release shortly after. We expect Camino 0.8 to be faster and even more solid than 0.7...

The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is the most likely to be correct. -- William of Occam

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