Following this news at Slashdot.org
http://www.extremetech.com/internet/89570-firefox-8-is-20-faster-than-firefox-5-matches-chrome-14
"Thanks to continued improvements to start-up and first paint performance, tweaks to memory footprint and garbage collection, and the addition of a new 2D graphics backend called Azure, Firefox 8 is some 20% faster than Firefox 5 across all major metrics — and actually about equal with Chrome 14 on JavaScript and 2D rendering performance. Azure (which is new with Firefox 7) replaces Cairo, and instead of dealing with Direct2D and Quartz, it allows Firefox to deal directly with the Direct3D and OpenGL subsystems — resulting in a 20% speed boost under Windows, and probably even more under OS X."
It seems that porting this release to eCS-OS2 it is not going to be simple. Any thoughts ?
It also seems very confusing. I've heard about the new numbering system, but now I'm really confused..is Firefox 8 already out?
Firefox 8 is not out, I'm not sure if it is on beta stage.
The versioning system it is different, but Im not sure if it good or bad. Seems that Mozilla want to do it like Chrome, that is on version 12 and I got no idea when they get to that version ;)
But just look it as "Firefox 8"="Future version of Firefox".
My main concern is that this future versions of Firefox seems to make a major shift in the technology that is used to have, and it seems to me that it is going to have more challenge to port it eCS-OS2.
Quote from: miturbide on 2011.07.11, 21:00:17
My main concern is that this future versions of Firefox seems to make a major shift in the technology that is used to have, and it seems to me that it is going to have more challenge to port it eCS-OS2.
Sure: It seems to me as then someone has to port Azure first. I fear that trends like that will be responsible for an early death.
Quote from: aschn on 2011.07.11, 21:23:49
Quote from: miturbide on 2011.07.11, 21:00:17
My main concern is that this future versions of Firefox seems to make a major shift in the technology that is used to have, and it seems to me that it is going to have more challenge to port it eCS-OS2.
Sure: It seems to me as then someone has to port Azure first. I fear that trends like that will be responsible for an early dead.
I am willing to bet that Azure will have a cario compatable fallback mode, after all even in the Linux/Windows worlds (especially embedded) devices may have substandard or poorly implemented OpenGL Drivers. This is really mentionable as far as embedded devices are concerned since battery life vs slight performance increases become increasingly important. I however would love to see some tweaking to the OS/2 version of firefox to improve screen rendering performance, though I fear that comes down to needing updated accelerated video drivers for our display adapters. There is only so much you can do without proper hardware support. I know the authors of panorama would like to argue that, but real world usage cannot be disputed.
Hi All
I doubt it will be simply a case of porting Azure - surely we need the underlying OpenGL or Direct3D drivers for Azure to work with?
Regards
Pete
...whatever happened to GL/2? :'(
Quote from: Robert Deed on 2011.07.11, 21:33:00
I am willing to bet that Azure will have a cairo compatible fallback mode, after all even in the Linux/Windows worlds (especially embedded) devices may have substandard or poorly implemented OpenGL Drivers. This is really mentionable as far as embedded devices are concerned since battery life vs slight performance increases become increasingly important.
Thanks for the info.
Quote from: StefanZ on 2011.07.11, 23:20:09
...whatever happened to GL/2? :'(
Well, Demetrious made updates as late as the first of june in fact, http://svn.netlabs.org/gl2/timeline .
Hi Guys,
Quote from: Robert Deed on 2011.07.11, 21:33:00
Quote from: aschn on 2011.07.11, 21:23:49
Quote from: miturbide on 2011.07.11, 21:00:17
My main concern is that this future versions of Firefox seems to make a major shift in the technology that is used to have, and it seems to me that it is going to have more challenge to port it eCS-OS2.
Sure: It seems to me as then someone has to port Azure first. I fear that trends like that will be responsible for an early dead.
I am willing to bet that Azure will have a cario compatable fallback mode, after all even in the Linux/Windows worlds (especially embedded) devices may have substandard or poorly implemented OpenGL Drivers. This is really mentionable as far as embedded devices are concerned since battery life vs slight performance increases become increasingly important. I however would love to see some tweaking to the OS/2 version of firefox to improve screen rendering performance, though I fear that comes down to needing updated accelerated video drivers for our display adapters. There is only so much you can do without proper hardware support. I know the authors of panorama would like to argue that, but real world usage cannot be disputed.
Robert is correct - see http://blog.mozilla.com/joe/2011/04/26/introducing-the-azure-project/
in part it states "Cairo is our failsafe implementation. It's the backend we'll use before others are ready or when we explicitly choose not to use hardware acceleration, for example because of driver issues. We also need Cairo for printing support."