The Modern Hippy Male

Firefox 3.5 Tips and Tricks: Features

Firefox 3.5 Loads Pages Faster

Firefox 3.5 is faster than Firefox 3; 2 times faster in fact. Also, Firefox v3.5 is about 10 times faster than Firefox v2. This is due in large part to the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine that is being utilized by Firefox 3.5.

An excerpt from the Mozilla Wiki regarding TraceMonkey:

About TraceMonkey
TraceMonkey adds native code compilation to Mozilla’s JavaScript engine (known as “SpiderMonkey”). It is based on a technique developed at UC Irvine called “trace trees”, and building on code and ideas shared with the Tamarin Tracing project. The net result is a massive speed increase both in the browser chrome and Web page content.
–Mozilla Wiki

TraceMonkey will help speed up many aspects of browsing the web. Videos, Images, Text… these should all load more quickly under Firefox v3.5.

Firefox 3.5 Improves Color

Firefox 3.5 makes use of improved color profiles. These will serve to help display images (and videos) with colors that are more vibrant. One limitation, however, is your monitor. If you have a monitor that does not display color well (old, cheap) you may not notice a difference.

Example?

Firefox v3.5 Manages Memory More Effectively

Firefox v3.5 also has a smaller memory footprint. However, this does not help much if the program itself sucks at managing that memory. Luckily, with version 3.5, the memory management has been improved. Past versions of Firefox, including v2 & v3, have suffered from numerous memory leaks. To combat this, a feature called the ‘XPCOM cycle collector’ works to free memory that the program no longer needs to hold.

An excerpt from the Mozilla Developer Center regarding the XPCOM cycle collector:

What the cycle collector does
The cycle collector spends most of its time accumulating (and forgetting about) pointers to XPCOM objects that might be involved in garbage cycles. This is the idle stage of the collector’s operation, in which special variants of nsAutoRefCnt register and unregister themselves very rapidly with the collector, as they pass through a “suspicious” refcount event (from N+1 to N, for nonzero N).
Periodically the collector wakes up and examines any suspicious pointers that have been sitting in its buffer for a while. This is the scanning stage of the collector’s operation. In this stage the collector repeatedly asks each candidate for a singleton cycle-collection helper class, and if that helper exists, the collector asks the helper to describe the candidate’s (owned) children. This way the collector builds a picture of the ownership subgraph reachable from suspicious objects.
If the collector finds a group of objects that all refer back to one another, and establishes that the objects’ reference counts are all accounted for by internal pointers within the group, it considers that group cyclical garbage, which it then attempts to free. This is the unlinking stage of the collectors operation. In this stage the collector walks through the garbage objects it has found, again consulting with their helper objects, asking the helper objects to “unlink” each object from its immediate children.
Note that the collector also knows how to walk through the JS heap, and can locate ownership cycles that pass in and out of it.

Other features of Firefox 3.5

• Over 6,000 Firefox Add-ons
• Internal Add-ons manager
• One click bookmarking.
• Tag sites for search
• No additional plug-ins needed to display Video and Audio content
• Save Videos to desktop as can be done with images
• Location aware browsing
• Private Browsing
• Forget this site feature