Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is available
by Christopher Blizzard
Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is available for downloading and testing. I’ve been using it now for a few days with TraceMonkey enabled and it seems pretty stable for me (aside from the lack of extensions.)
I also wrote up a big post that goes over some of the new web developer features in this beta in the web-tech blog. There’s a pile of stuff in there that most people don’t even know about, so taking the time to look through the list even if you’re not going to download the beta is worth it. We’ve got some neat stuff coming up for 3.1.
Beta 2 will feature some more user-visible features and a pile of new web developer features as well. So much good stuff coming down the pipe.
Enjoy!
There’s also a healthy number of accessibility fixes which have been added. I’m afraid I don’t have a list, and I’m losing track because I’ve always run the latest nightly trunk…. But suffice it to say that Alexander Surkov, Marco Zehe, Ginn Chen, and others have been working very hard — and that their efforts are VERY much appreciated!
Does it still have to use fsync for its sqlite databases? I don’t think it will ever matter how few fsyncs the Mozilla team manage to get Firefox to do when it’s being used on slow write media with ext3. Firefox 3.0.3 just keeps stalling on this EeePC but I guess with ext3’s behaviour there’s nothing that can be done if you are using sqlite (although Firefox 2 doesn’t seem to suffer the same fate but that doesn’t use sqlite).
Does it seem more stable ? FF 3.0 seems more unstable for me (can crash it if I start something else during certain operations – annoyingly haven’t been able to pin it down any more than that, just that it crashes a lot more than 2.x did (which was pretty much never) 3.x crashes for me at least 1nce a day now)
The code will likely use fsync() for a while. Sadly, if we want to maintain database integrity we need to know when something’s been committed out to disk. There’s a lot of work to make it fsync() less frequently which will be in 3.1 but it will still keep calling it.
Thanks for posting a reply about fsync blizzard – much appreciated. I suspect the stalls I see on an eeepc aren’t going to go away until the filesystem is replaced (I guess that’s what you get for using slow write media). Ah well….