Friday, August 19, 2016

TenFourFox 45 beta 2: not yet

So far the TenFourFox 45 beta is doing very well. There have been no major performance regressions overall (Amazon Music notwithstanding, which I'll get to presently) and actually overall opinion is that 45 seems much more responsive than 38. On that score, you'll like beta 2 even more when I get it out: I raided some more performance-related Firefox 46 and 47 patches and backported them too, further improving scrolling performance by reducing unnecessary memory allocation and also substantially reducing garbage collection overhead. There are also some minor tweaks to the JavaScript JIT, including a gimme I should have done long ago where we use single-precision FPU instructions instead of double-precision plus a rounding step. This doesn't make a big difference for most scripts, but a few, particularly those with floating point arrays, will benefit from the reduction in code size and slight improvement in speed.

Unfortunately, while this also makes Amazon Music's delay on starting and switching tracks better, it's still noticeably regressed compared to 38. In addition, I'm hitting an assertion with YouTube on certain, though not all, videos over a certain minimum length; in the release builds it just seizes up at that point and refuses to play the video further. Some fiddling in the debugger indicates it might be related to what Chris Trusch was reporting about frameskipping not working right in 45. If I'm really lucky all this is related and I can fix them all by fixing that root problem. None of these are showstoppers but that YouTube assertion is currently my highest priority to fix for the next beta; I have not solved it yet though I may be able to wallpaper it. I'm aiming for beta 2 this coming week.

On the localization front we have French, German and Japanese translations, the latter from the usual group that operates separately from Chris T's work in issue 42. I'd like to get a couple more in the can before our planned release on or about September 13. If you can help, please sign up.

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4 comments:

  1. AnonymousAugust 19, 2016 at 10:43 PM

    During these 14 days using 45 as my main browser it has crashed exactly once (non-reproducible), otherwise no issues at all except the ones already mentioned.

    Localizations: I'll do Spanish today. Most of the new strings for 45 are translated into the target languages, so I can produce more installers in the coming weeks. Are the contributors to Polish and Italian are still around?

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  2. AnonymousAugust 21, 2016 at 7:09 PM

    Great finally seeing you face to face on the show (on the G5 center video). You are right about the continued viability of PPC for at least a while.

    Lately have been running into RIDICULOUS minimums even on Linux lately - installing Mint Mate 17.3 on an i3 is basically impossible now (you have to install 17.2 then upgrade - which retains the old Kernel). Cinnamon Mint - which to my mind isn't really that much fancier than a good Tiger setup pretty much has to have a good i5 and wants an i7.

    As long as our apps keep working, I have no interest in moving onto x86 for daily driving.

    With my setup, my DP MDD is really just as fast, with its new SDD as a 64-bit lower end i5, and so much nicer in software quality and feel - especially when multitasking.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousAugust 21, 2016 at 7:11 PM

    BTW - Wordpress support feels much better now since the new backend (little things like captchas are much faster, and not nearly as much drop-out in web-fonts).

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousAugust 21, 2016 at 9:44 PM

    I'm not a Power Mac user but I always keep up with your blog, it's always interesting, keep up the excellent writing.

    ReplyDelete

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