Firefox 3.6 vs 8.0 • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox 3.6 vs 8.0

#61

Post by zobzu » Tue, Dec 06, 2011, 2:33 PM UTC

nl wrote: post #22

zobzu wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://arewefastyet.com/?a=b&machine=8 probably more representative

http://arewefastyet.com/old-awfy.php is the most impressive

true, but i meant that most people reading HN are likely to be running the 64 bit version

Re: Firefox 3.6 vs 8.0

#62

Post by gcr » Tue, Dec 06, 2011, 2:51 PM UTC

megablast wrote: post #30

darklajid wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the point. Was the nvidia driver update forced upon you and done behind your back? Or - did you do that intentionally and broke (by accident) stuff? If the latter (and that's what it sounds like to me), isn't that totally unrelated to silent software updates and just anecdotal bad press about the nvidia driver and its stability?

He is saying something he wants to control the updates on, obviously the important stuff. The video driver is very important, but the browser is also very important, since a lot of people would not be able to get work done without it.

Exactly. I chose to update my video driver, so I knew what broke.

Imagine that update had happened automatically. Perhaps the day before a big deadline -- a stellar choice for disaster to strike! Now I'd have no clue what just broke and now I'd have to spend hours fixing it.

Intrusive updates shouldn't be automatic.

Re: Firefox 3.6 vs 8.0

#63

Post by omgmog » Tue, Dec 06, 2011, 4:03 PM UTC

Just carried out some Kraken 1.1 runs on Firefox on OSX, here on my iMac 8,1 (2.6ghz c2d/4gb ram).

I've got all major versions of Firefox installed side by side using my shell script (https://github.com/omgmog/install-all-firefox), this allowed me to test Firefox 2.0.0.20, 3.0.19, 3.6.24, 4.0.1, 5.0.1, 6.0.1, 7.0.1, 8.0.1, 10.0a2.

Results: http://omgmog.net/kraken.html

For Firefox 2.0.0.20 and 3.0.19 the browser kept crashing, so I was unable to finish these, but all of the other versions ran well.

Re: Firefox 3.6 vs 8.0

#64

Post by ceol » Tue, Dec 06, 2011, 6:57 PM UTC

jaredsohn wrote: post #8

ceol wrote: post #4

Did Mozilla just pad their version number? Last I remember, there was Firefox 4 Beta. Why is it at 8 now?

They are now on a six-week release cycle, just like Chrome.

Thanks for your reply. Not sure why HN decided to downvote my question.

Re: Firefox 3.6 vs 8.0

#65

Post by pasbesoin » Tue, Dec 06, 2011, 7:18 PM UTC

rprospero wrote: post #26

ericabiz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really hoping you can get the remaining 3.6.x users to force-upgrade. We still have a couple people using 3.6 on our web app (where some pages won't render properly--we've labeled this 'wontfix' in our system since Firefox 7.0+ renders these pages properly.) Any word on whether there is any way to get them to upgrade? Last I saw, it upgraded them to a newer 3.x version, but then opened a page on your site with a…

Firefox 3.6 user here. I'd love to upgrade, but the new versions don't run on PowerPC

There are still extension issues causing me to wait. Also, I should probably start a fresh profile, and the effort is not something I'm particularly looking forward to.

Plus, the "Chrome wannabe" interface changes just piss me off. ;-)

Re: Firefox 3.6 vs 8.0

#66

Post by aidenn0 » Wed, Dec 07, 2011, 3:52 AM UTC

gkoberger wrote: post #28

aidenn0 wrote: post #24

So, what a Firefox 3.6 user is missing out on is running a bunch of artificial benchmarks faster?

If you haven't tried updating past 3.6, you should. Benchmarks may not be 100% accurate, but you can see the difference in JS-heavy apps (like GMail). The UI has been cleaned up and revamped. There are a ton of new HTML/CSS/JS features. Better memory management, and Firefox as a whole is faster. Restartless add-ons. The list goes on and on :)

Oh I have upgraded, and there are things that I like about it. However the title "What you are missing" isn't really addressed by showing a bunch of benchmarks. Having a real-world section talking about subjective performance on actual sites used by people would have done that.