I've been running Aurora for a few months. It's been stable and gets the new toys quicker. Some add-ons break on some updates, but the few web dev. add-ons I use are always quick to update. I get questionnaires from time to time, but they don't take long to complete and are a trivial way to contribute to Mozilla. In short, give Aurora a try. It works as my full-time browser.
Good news: Mozilla fixed their damn browser
21–30 of 56 posts
Re: Good news: Mozilla fixed their damn browser
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would agree that calling ext3 obsolete is odd, but I don't know enough about the particulars of file system performance to understand why data=ordered is or is not problematic. This leads to the interesting problem of judging the opinion of several contradicting, but apparently similarly qualified people. I'm sure someone on HN is able to decisively explain: can someone do so?
Originally, ext3 filesystems maintained journals of all metadata and data changes. This substantially decreases the likelihood of the filesystem ending up in an irrecoverably inconsistent state, but it also has major performance implications. Relatively early on ext3 was extended with "data=ordered" and "data=writeback" modes (with "data=ordered" being the default and recommended mode, as "data=writeback" is marginal…
Ah, I gather firefox assumed that it could write to a given file repeatedly and it would just stay in the cache. Thanks for the explanation.
Re: Good news: Mozilla fixed their damn browser
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Use Chromium if you complain about privacy
I don't see how Chromium solves any of the issues he was complaining about. It's not like it rips out the basic designs of the browser, which are still tightly tied to Google.
Chromium and Chrome are identical except for one compile flag (which means you can at least check it yourself):
Re: Good news: Mozilla fixed their damn browser
#24[deleted]
Re: Good news: Mozilla fixed their damn browser
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google's integration is actually the reason why I'd switch back to Firefox in a heartbeat if the performance kept up -- there's some serious privacy issues involved in browsing the web using a Google browser while logged in to a Google account.
Use Chromium if you complain about privacy
SRWare distributes a Chromium build called Iron that strips out privacy problems.
Re: Good news: Mozilla fixed their damn browser
#26Not to discount the work that Mozilla has been doing, but it seems like the "improvement" they added is actually just a workaround for distros that configure filesystems incorrectly. That is, his machine is configured to use an obsolete filesystem (ext3) in a mode with significant performance problems (data=ordered). There are numerous ways that a machine can be mis-configured such that it suffers from poor performan…
I find these statements amusing... As it happens, neither is ext3 an obsolete filesystem (I have many machines using it just fine, thank you, with no intention to migrate to less tested filesystems just because they're "new"), nor "data=ordered" has significant performance problems. More amusing than this just the fact that the filesystem is a bottleneck for a web browser... an application that should be network and…
Try comparing the deleting of a large file on ext3 and ext4.
On ext3 it can take 20 minutes to delete a file that in ext4 is deleted in a few seconds. That is including a followup "sync".
It is an obsolete filesystem.
Re: Good news: Mozilla fixed their damn browser
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Originally, ext3 filesystems maintained journals of all metadata and data changes. This substantially decreases the likelihood of the filesystem ending up in an irrecoverably inconsistent state, but it also has major performance implications. Relatively early on ext3 was extended with "data=ordered" and "data=writeback" modes (with "data=ordered" being the default and recommended mode, as "data=writeback" is marginal…
Ah, I gather firefox assumed that it could write to a given file repeatedly and it would just stay in the cache. Thanks for the explanation.
Not quite, though that's part of what the problem was. There's a mechanism (fsync) for forcing the changes in a particular file to be written to disk. As a result of the consistency guarantees made by the "data=ordered" mode, synchronizing a single file often forces the filesystem to make other, unrelated writes to the disk as well. In the worst case the entire cache can be forced to disk. The end result is substantially more disk activity than would be expected.
Re: Good news: Mozilla fixed their damn browser
#28Not to discount the work that Mozilla has been doing, but it seems like the "improvement" they added is actually just a workaround for distros that configure filesystems incorrectly. That is, his machine is configured to use an obsolete filesystem (ext3) in a mode with significant performance problems (data=ordered). There are numerous ways that a machine can be mis-configured such that it suffers from poor performan…
I find these statements amusing... As it happens, neither is ext3 an obsolete filesystem (I have many machines using it just fine, thank you, with no intention to migrate to less tested filesystems just because they're "new"), nor "data=ordered" has significant performance problems. More amusing than this just the fact that the filesystem is a bottleneck for a web browser... an application that should be network and…
> neither is ext3 an obsolete filesystem
It's certainly not obsolete as in "you shouldn't use it anymore", but it certainly is as in "there is really no reason to continue using it". While moving to BtrFS may be premature for most people, not moving to ext4 is somewhat eccentric. Ext4 is more than good enough.
> More amusing than this just the fact that the filesystem is a bottleneck for a web browser...
Indeed.
Re: Good news: Mozilla fixed their damn browser
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google's integration is actually the reason why I'd switch back to Firefox in a heartbeat if the performance kept up -- there's some serious privacy issues involved in browsing the web using a Google browser while logged in to a Google account.
Absolutely. Most often I catch myself do private browsing in Chrome and 'feel' safer with Firefox. May be my fears are unfounded and yet I do it often.
I like Chrome's "private browsing" mode better than Firefox's though. Mostly because I can have private and non-private windows open at the same time (and they're properly sandboxed from each other).
Re: Good news: Mozilla fixed their damn browser
#30Not to discount the work that Mozilla has been doing, but it seems like the "improvement" they added is actually just a workaround for distros that configure filesystems incorrectly. That is, his machine is configured to use an obsolete filesystem (ext3) in a mode with significant performance problems (data=ordered). There are numerous ways that a machine can be mis-configured such that it suffers from poor performan…
I find these statements amusing... As it happens, neither is ext3 an obsolete filesystem (I have many machines using it just fine, thank you, with no intention to migrate to less tested filesystems just because they're "new"), nor "data=ordered" has significant performance problems. More amusing than this just the fact that the filesystem is a bottleneck for a web browser... an application that should be network and…
Alright, I'm going to start calling people on HN about this pet peeve of mine:
Please stop 'finding it amusing' when you disagree with people. It makes you sound arrogant and passive-aggressive. Even if the other side is totally wrong, hammering that fact in is rhetorically counter-productive.