New Firefox

Short takes, 5 Jun 2012

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , , , ,

I’m positively uninspired this morning, trying to recover from a weekend of the most boring writing I’ve ever done in my life–something that, mercifully, only a small handful of tortured souls will ever have to see and read–so I’ll do some short takes.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this before. New Firefox.

Dave Farquhar Software ,

Firefox 9 is out. I’m running it, but due to an emergency involving a power supply deciding to cook itself, I’m running it on a different system than the one I ran Firefox 8 on. Everything’s faster on this machine–partly because I’m doing some experiments that make it stupid fast anyway–so it’s not fair to call Firefox 9 faster. Netscape 4.0 would be fast on this machine.

Once I’m comfortable that what I’m doing is safe, I’ll share.

But Firefox 9 features a new Javascript engine that’s supposed to be a lot faster, for what it’s worth. You can go get it the usual ways if you want. And if you’re conservative, given a little time you’ll be running it whether you know it or want it anyway.

And in somewhat surprising news, Mozilla and Google renewed their search agreement. Mozilla makes Google the default search engine in Firefox, and Google pays them a lot of money. So much money that Google is essentially funding the operation. Mozilla has a strange relationship with its competitors.

Firefox 8 lands, and there’s still no official Windows 64-bit support

Dave Farquhar Software, Uncategorized ,

It’s Tuesday. Time for a new Firefox release. One without official 64-bit Windows support, of course.

The official line is because there aren’t enough native 64-bit plugins yet. Although Java and Flash are available, which are likely to be the two people care most about. Release a 64-bit browser, and the other lesser-used plugins will have no choice to follow. Wait for the plugins, and tomorrow never comes. Somebody has to blink first to end the stalemate.

At this rate, it’ll probably be Google.