Well, let's see how less bad 31 beta 2 is for you

OK, beta 2. This is the same Mozilla code drop as beta 1 with the following changes: IME keyboard composition of characters is fixed (accented characters, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc.), navigating to an MP3 audio file doesn't crash the browser now, off-main-thread compositing is turned off, generational garbage collection is turned off, and I've tuned the GC timeslice a little more based on some heavy testing this afternoon while hacking up phlegmy yuck from my inflamed respiratory passages.

Of the remaining problems, performance seems a bit better overall. The G5 doesn't care about OMTC, but does benefit from having GGC off. The Sawtooth, iBook and iMac G4 systems did much better with both of them off, so I turned everything off. The stall with Adblock is still there, but is literally about half as long (i.e., I measured it with a stopwatch), so this is an improvement, and it's still one-time-only on all of my test systems.

This is, at least right now in my virus-addled state, as much as I am currently able to do to crank up the browser until I can get better profiling support again. It gets it back to a state approximating Fx29 (minus the bugs). I am going to ship 31, and probably when it reaches release -- the work is done, and staying on 24 is not a viable option. Download it and get used to it. But while you use it, you have a small question and a big question for your homework assignment:

1. It looks like Safari bookmarks import is broken again. It is possible, nay, probable, that Mozilla doesn't test against Safari 4 anymore and possibly not even Safari 5.0. There is no Mozilla bug for this but that might simply be because Mozilla doesn't care about older versions of Safari. I don't know how bookmarks change between versions but it's probably time to consider just ripping this code out since we advise people to use HTML export from Safari anyway. Opinions?

2. Is 31 where we should drop source parity, i.e., fork and add things to 31 rather than trying to keep up? It's far easier to do this at the beginning of an ESR cycle because we can just start adding things we want (HTTP/2, SPDY updates, NSS updates, root certificate updates, ECMA6/HTML5/CSS3 features) as they start rolling out while still having security support from Mozilla, rather than try to catch up on a huge backlog when support runs out (Classilla). I had long thought what would doom us is some 10.6+ specific feature that's critical for the browser, but so far we've been able to hack around all that. Instead, what's more likely to doom us now is that our machines are just getting too slow to handle what Firefox expects to throw at them. The average age of a Power Mac is at least a decade; even the quad G5 is celebrating its eighth birthday. We are already having to cut marquee features to keep browser performance acceptable, and soon we will not be able to cut them: while we might get away with no generational GC for awhile (especially since Mozilla doesn't use it on FxOS devices yet), we already know OMTC will be mandatory soon, and those are just the land mines we know about right now. If we fork and go to feature parity, at least we can keep the browser core reasonably up to date but not have to contend with these issues.

The situation I worry about is that we will struggle up to 38 and have a browser that is crushingly slow on all but the highest-spec G5 systems with no solution for laptops or other G4 computers (let alone the G3), and it will be much harder to backport the things we want by that time. 31 is already a substantial compromise between performance and future compatibility. Where should that dividing line be? And don't forget that 10.6 support will be fading away too; when 10.6 goes, Mozilla can make even more assumptions about the hardware that won't be true for us. (Right now 10.6 is still holding on to about 20% of the Mac user base, which is an incredibly stable figure, but it's not growing and it's likely to slip as hardware ages, computers are upgraded and Apple stops supporting building against the 10.6 SDK.)

While you think about that, downloads, and updated release notes. There will be one more scheduled beta a couple weeks prior to final release just to put any lingering issues to bed, and in July we'll also do our annual update on the state of the Power Mac userbase. Now I have to go cough up some more nasty mucus, so excuse me.