Tuesday, March 24, 2020

TenFourFox FPR21b1 available

TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 21 beta 1 is now available (downloads, hashes, release notes). I decided against adding the AltiVec GCM accelerator for this release, since it needs some extra TLC to convert from VSX to VMX, and I'd like to test the other major changes independently without introducing a bigger bug exposure surface than necessary. As promised, however, this release does have support for higher-speed 0RTT TLS 1.3 with HTTP/2 (particularly useful on Google properties) and has additional performance adjustments to improve parallelism of TLS connections to HTTP/1.x sites (mostly everybody else). I also updated Reader mode to the most current version used in Firefox 74, incorporating several important fixes; for a slow or complex site that you don't need all the frills for, try turning on Reader mode by clicking the "book" icon in the URL bar. You can do it even while the page is loading (reload after if not all of it comes up). FPR21 will go live with Firefox 68.7/75 on April 7.

Saturday, March 7, 2020

TenFourFox FPR20 available

TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 20 final is now available for testing (downloads, hashes, release notes). This version is the same as the beta except for one more tweak to fix the preferences for those who prefer to suppress Reader mode. Assuming no issues, it will go live Monday evening Pacific as usual.

I have some ideas for FPR21, including further updates to Reader mode, AltiVec acceleration for GCM (improving TLS throughput) and backporting later improvements to 0RTT, but because of a higher than usual workload it is possible development may be stalled and the next release will simply be an SPR. More on that once I get a better idea of the timeframes necessary.