Wednesday, October 9, 2013

24.0 gets off the ground

Finally, blogging from within a debugging build of 24.0 after a string of false starts and fixing bugs to get the browser to stabilize. We still fail that lone asm.js test that methodjit also failed, plus an obscure debug-mode-only test which looks like it might possibly be a Mozilla error; neither are causing issues for the regular browser so far. The last remaining crash bug in BaselineCompiler has been fixed, and some other polishing up has been done to make the browser now functional enough to do some larger scale testing. The change to PPCBC has made some things better and some things worse, but mercifully the net performance change is closer to a wash than I had thought. I'll try to give you harder metrics when I have an opt build working and have done more optimization work, and I'd like to see if we can reintroduce jemalloc after I do some testing with its memory consumption.

As I received no objections from the floor, starting with TenFourFox.next (whatever it is after 24), the 10.4 SDK will be the only supported target for linking and the leftover 10.5 SDK code still in the changesets will be gradually purged as it bitrots. Remember, this is only for linking against the SDK. The browser will still run on 10.5, and you can still build it on 10.5, but the only build target will be to make a 10.4-compatible browser. If you want to look at 10.5 specific code, you could look at Tobias' AuroraFox changesets, though quite a lot has changed since then.

If all goes well, you should have a testing beta of 24.0 at long last in a week or two, and then our localizing team will have a full cycle and then some to do translation work which should be hopefully plenty of time for Chris and our gracious volunteers. The plan will be to migrate everyone to 24.0.2 on 10 December as the new stable branch.

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4 comments:

  1. AnonymousOctober 10, 2013 at 9:59 AM

    Thanks for all your efforts! In general, how does the performance of the various versions compare? In going from 17 to 22 to 24 are things generally getting more bloated and slower, or are things going the other way? I have noticed on 22 that the browser is not always using lots of CPU doing nothing while in the background (like 17 often would).

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    1. ClassicHasClassOctober 10, 2013 at 8:01 PM

      Because Mozilla is paying more attention to the performance of FirefoxOS, which runs on a resource-constrained computing platform (know any platforms like that?), the browser as a whole with certain notorious regressions excepted is also becoming more performant. It's not perfect, but it certainly does help us.

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  2. AnonymousOctober 11, 2013 at 1:30 PM

    Another OT post: http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/
    It's like pdf.js, but for Flash. Still far from perfect, but I think it's the right approach. If you look at this: http://roflzombie.com/flash/fahrschule.swf, there are still some rendering errors (and no sound; compare in Safari), but the performance for vectorized animations seems to be pretty decent.

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    1. ClassicHasClassOctober 15, 2013 at 6:19 PM

      Shumway is indeed neat. It won't really be workable on TenFourFox until we get IonMonkey fully working, though.

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