Comments on: Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is available

By: Anon

Anon — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 07:27:07 +0000

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….

By: blizzard

blizzard — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:48:07 +0000

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.

By: Stu

Stu — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 08:34:57 +0000

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)

By: Anon

Anon — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 04:36:40 +0000

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).

By: Joanmarie

Joanmarie — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:14:01 +0000

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!