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Firefox is really beginning to make strives - today I've been surfing using a e10s window without a single crash. Now all they need to do is move downloads/history/bookmark manager to a tab instead of a new window!

Ditto that sentiment, they're really making it look a lot better than it used to, as much as I like the flexibility the not-so-older versions still looked like a refugee from the late 90's. A few more bits to get revamped, although there is an addon that lets you move those specific windows you mentioned into a sidebar, not quite the same but still. I just hope they start putting a lot more effort into the under-the-hood stuff, give it a much needed kick in the pants for performance and new developments, progressing but taking wayyy too long.

Our favorite Australis theme creator blinky has updated his userstyle ( https://userstyles.org/styles/96014/firefox-australis-windows-8-appearance ) to match the latest mockups of Project Chameleon ( https://blog.mozilla.org/creative/2013/11/27/introducing-project-chameleon/ )

  • Like 1

Indeed, I welcome it too as I really hated that dialog. Firefox is really beginning to make strives - today I've been surfing using a e10s window without a single crash. Now all they need to do is move downloads/history/bookmark manager to a tab instead of a new window!

 

How about the print window? Nothing about the print window looks good.

  • Compiler (JIT)
    • bug 1041781: Landed native to bytecode mapping
    • bug 1054340: Landed post-native-to-bytecode-mapping fix to remove MPcOffset instructions
  • Garbage Collection
    • bug 650161: Landed first cut of compacting GC implementation (build with --enable-gccompacting to try it out)
    • bug 995284: Made GC behvaiour deterministic in shell builds
  • Front End and Other
    • bug 1052248: Tweak the goodAllocated heuristics for JS arrays
    • bug 1041688: acquired properties analysis working but has some regressions

Layout

  • caret cleanup landed (bug 1048752)
  • CSS transitions now work for style changes that trigger reframes (bug 625289)
  • initial CSS Ruby reflow code landed, but still more work to do on ruby

Media

  • Continue to prep OpenH264 and Screensharing for Fx33.
    • Major UI redesign slated for Fx35
    • Window list rescan uplifted to 33
    • Talky.io is experimenting with ScreenSharing in their beta pages
  • Working a 2.0 blocker with QC
  • Firefox Desktop has been giving the Loop team a hand on front-end issues
  • GMP plugin sandboxing has landed

Necko

  • landed bug 820391: we're finally getting DNS time-to-live (TTL) accurately (Windows-only for now).
  • HTTP cache v2: some last bugs before we release: mostly tests but also a few real bugs (bug 1042192, bug 1054425, bug 660749)
  • minor fixups for HTTP2: we're close to being able to pref it on.

Performance

  • bug 1045108: Please review your Telemetry probes and make sure they're still useful. Also please set the expiry dates for your probes (e.g. "expires_in_version": "never", or "35" for Firefox 35) -- we'll be automatically marking unclaimed probes for expiry in Firefox 40.
  • bug 1037494: Also provide email addresses for automatic regression notifications in the "alert_emails" field.
  • Like 7

...

landed bug 820391: we're finally getting DNS time-to-live (TTL) accurately (Windows-only for now).

...

We don't actually have TTL info yet, that's coming later (That patch just moved them over from using the getaddrinfo API to the special Windows API, but didn't enable any of the new functionality)

Ideally Firefox would do DNS lookups itself (Similar to Chrome), but doing so would break certain features people rely on (Like editing the hosts file, or network computer name lookup, etc.) The standard APIs the system provides is kinda crap (No TTL info, the system can sort them wrongly like on OS X, etc.) On the upside it would provide better support for DNSSEC and stuff like SRV records.

We don't actually have TTL info yet, that's coming later (That patch just moved them over from using the getaddrinfo API to the special Windows API, but didn't enable any of the new functionality)

Ideally Firefox would do DNS lookups itself (Similar to Chrome), but doing so would break certain features people rely on (Like editing the hosts file, or network computer name lookup, etc.) The standard APIs the system provides is kinda crap (No TTL info, the system can sort them wrongly like on OS X, etc.) On the upside it would provide better support for DNSSEC and stuff like SRV records.

 

Thanks for that

 

 

what do you exactly mean by "Like editing the hosts file"

Wikipedia can explain it better than I can: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_%28file%29

The API the OS provides for applications to map hostnames to IPs isn't just for DNS, it maintains a cache of previous lookups, and can also pull information from other sources (Such as Bonjour for *.local names, WINS for Windows boxes, the hosts file for custom overrides, etc.) alongside DNS. The problem is, the API kinda sucks, so applications that want proper DNS information need to query the DNS servers themselves (Or use the better API that Windows provides, etc.), but doing so completely bypasses all the other systems the OS provides for name lookup.

Wikipedia can explain it better than I can: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_%28file%29

The API the OS provides for applications to map hostnames to IPs isn't just for DNS, it maintains a cache of previous lookups, and can also pull information from other sources (Such as Bonjour for *.local names, WINS for Windows boxes, the hosts file for custom overrides, etc.) alongside DNS. The problem is, the API kinda sucks, so applications that want proper DNS information need to query the DNS servers themselves (Or use the better API that Windows provides, etc.), but doing so completely bypasses all the other systems the OS provides for name lookup.

 

 

actually i meant was does it now use windows apis?

and so honors the hosts file better? as opposed to bypassing hosts allowed & blocked lists?

Oh, right :laugh:

 

It still uses the data from the hosts file because it's still using the system provided lookup APIs, just a slightly different one that gives them more info (The TTL among other things).

Thanks

would it result in better performance ?

 

& does anyone know if offmainthread are enabled yet[or stopping it] on linux?

and e10s are on schedule?

Adobe Flash Player 15.0.0.130 Beta includes improved support for browser zoom levels, an enhancement that?s specifically designed for Windows 8 devices with a touch-capable display.

Adobe says that this particular improvement has been specifically developed to solve issues experienced in the past when trying to change the zoom level of playing Flash content, with browsers on Windows 8 sometimes causing playback speed problems.

the new preview build brings a number of improvements for Chrome/Firefox users on Windows, making hardware video decoding enabled by default in this browser

Adobe says that this particular option will ?drastically? reduce the CPU usage and improve performance on supported video players. The same feature should also be introduced on Mac OS X computers in the coming months

Small UI changes:

 

- Restart to Update was seems vague as per developer since people might get confused and think of it as system *OS* restart, so they changed that string to include channel name as well.

ejEvQ67.png

 

- Default browser control has been moved to General tab in Options.

dSc1EGh.png

 

- Array and string performance improvement are happening in JS engine and not to mention Bobby Holley is working as well to improve WebIDL JS based Bindings faster.

Other bugs

mozilla::pkix ships in Firefox!

Updated Firefox VR Builds  

I?d like to announce the third Firefox Nightly build with experimental VR support. Download links:

This build includes a number of fixes to CSS VR rendering, as well as some API additions and changes:

  • Fixed CSS rendering (see below for more information)
  • Support for DK2 via 0.4.1 SDK (extended mode only)
  • Experimental auto-positioning on MacOS X ? when going fullscreen, the window should move itself to the Rift automatically
  • hmd.setFieldOfView() now takes zNear and zFar arguments
  • New API call: hmd.getRecommendedEyeRenderRect() returns the suggested render dimensions for a given eye; useful for WebGL rendering (see below)

The DK2 Rift must be in Extended Desktop mode. You will also need to rotate the Rift?s display to landscape. If tracking doesn?t seem to be working, stop the Oculus service using the Configuration Tool first, then launch Firefox.

CSS Rendering

Many issues with CSS rendering were fixed in this release. As part of this, the coordinate space when in fullscreen VR is different than normal CSS. When in fullscreen VR mode, the 0,0,0 coordinate location refers to the center of the viewport (and not the top left as is regular in CSS). Additionally, the zNear/zFar values specified to setFieldOfView control the near and far clipping planes.

The coordinate units are also not rationalized with CSS coordinates. The browser applies a per-eye transform in meters (~ 0.032 meters left/right, or 3.2cm) before rendering the scene; tthus the coordinate space ends up being ~1px = ~1m in real space, which is not correct. This will be fixed in the next release.

Here?s a simple example of showing 4 CSS images on all sides around the viewer, along with some text. The source includes copious comments about what?s being done and why.

Known issues:

  • The Y axis is flipped in the resulting rendering. (Workaround: add a rotateZ() to the camera transform div)
  • The initial view doesn?t face the same direction as CSS (Workaround: add a rotateY() to the camera transform div)
  • Manual application of the HMD orientation/position is required.
  • Very large CSS elements (>1000px in width/height) may not be rendered properly
  • Units are not consistent when in VR mode
getRecommendedEyeRenderRect()

NOTE: This API will likely change (and become simpler) in the next release.

getRecommendedEyeRenderRect will return the rectangle into which each eye should be rendered, and the best resolution for the given field of view settings. To create an appropriately sized canvas, the size computation should be:

var leftRect = hmd.getRecommendedEyeRenderRect("left");var rightRect = hmd.getRecommendedEyeRenderRect("right");var width = leftRect.x + Math.max(leftRect.width + rightRect.x) + rightRect.width;var height = Math.max(leftRect.y, rightRect.y) + Math.max(leftRect.height, leftRect.height);

In practice, leftRect.x will be 0, and the y coordinates will both be 0, so this can be simplified to:

var width = leftRect.width + rightRect.width;var height = Math.max(leftRect.height, rightRect.height);

Each eye should be rendered into the leftRect and rightRect coordinates. This API will change in the next release to make it simpler to obtain the appropriate render sizes and viewports.

Today?s Nightly 34 build includes the bug 286355:

 

a profile unlocker for our Windows users. This should be very helpful to those users whose workflow is interrupted by a Firefox instance that cannot start because a previous Firefox instance has not finished shutting down.

 

 

Firefox 34 users running Windows Vista or newer will now be presented with this dialog box:

 

 

profile-unlocker.png

 

 

Clicking ?Close Firefox? will terminate that previous instance and proceed with starting your new Firefox instance.

 

Unfortunately this feature is not available to Windows XP users.

 

 

While this feature adds some convenience to an otherwise annoying issue, please be assured that the Desktop Performance Team will continue to investigate and fix the root causes of long shutdowns so that a profile unlocker hopefully becomes unnecessary.


The DNS changes on Windows got backed out because they broke IPv6 connections.

 

 

Any idea when it will re-land?

The e10s team is asking everyone to dogfood their first milestone of e10s.
 

Chris Peterson wrote:The e10s team has completed our M1 milestone to fix major pain points for dogfood testing. Now it's time to dogfood!


To enable e10s, flip the "browser.tabs.remote.autostart" pref to true and restart Nightly. If you have any problems or questions, drop by the #e10s channel on IRC.


PLEASE read this list of known issues you are likely to hit:




If you file e10s bugs, please include the word "e10s" in the summary and/or set the "tracking-e10s" flag to '?' to ensure your bugs get triaged.


For a list of tested add-ons (compatible, incompatible, and popular add-ons we'd like people to test), see:





thanks!

chris

  • Like 6

Anyone been able to run Java with a e10 build? I've tried both Java 7 and 8 and latest Firefox tinderbox build.

 

Java version doesn't display when checking for version. http://www.java.com/sv/download/installed.jsp

 

Another issue that's quite annoying is when clicking on links that open in a new tab. When I click a link on e10

it opens a empty tab and loads the new page in the current tab. Anyone else getting this?

Big changes coming with FX35 Nightly train on September 2nd with switch to Visual C++ 2013 compiler.


Some benefits from this change:
* No more linker OOM crashes. VS2013 includes a 64-bit toolchain for 32-bit builds, so the linker will no longer be limited to 4GB address space.
* The linker capacity opens the door for merging our binaries into libxul (like we do on the other platforms)
* More than 2x improvement in PGO build times
* Better language support

Easy theme switching through Customization: http://msujaws.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/new-in-firefox-nightly-recommended-and-easy-theme-switching-through-customize-mode/

 

mxxcXhT.png

 

New Private Window content page following new simple design process:

o8PZIjx.png

  • Like 3

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  • Posts

    • AMD RX 9070 GRE AI, Blender benchmarks vs 9070 XT, 7800XT, Nvidia RTX 5070, 4070 by Sayan Sen Earlier this week, we shared the first part of our review of AMD's new RX 9070 GRE. It was about the gaming performance of the GPU, and we gave it an 8 out of 10. As a follow-up, similar to how we did with the 9070 XT and non-XT, we are doing a dedicated productivity review for the RX 9070 GRE as well, where we compare it against the 9070 XT, 9070, 7800 XT, as well as Nvidia's 5070 and 4070. This will include AI, rendering, compute, and more benchmarks. AI performance, especially, is a very important metric in today's world, and AMD also promised big improvements thanks to its underlying architectural improvements. We will be pitching it against the data we already have for the RX 9070, and RX 9070 XT, but also the Nvidia 5070 FE, MSI GeForce RTX 4070 VENTUS 2X 12G, and Gigabyte Radeon RX 7800 XT GAMING OC 16G as they are in a similar price class, but also because we do not have a comparable 5060 Ti card lying around here that we can compare it against. Before we get underway, this is a collaboration between Sayan Sen and Steven Parker, who lent me his test bed. Also, there was no editorial input from AMD. First up, the specs of the RX 9070, 9070 XT, and 9070 GRE, which were given to us by AMD: Radeon RX 9070 GRE Radeon RX 9070 Radeon RX 9070 XT Boost Clock: Game Clock: up to 2.79GHz up to 2.20GHz up to 2.52GHz up to 2.07GHz up to 2.97GHz up to 2.40GHz Stream Processors 3,072 (48 CU) 3,584 (56 CU) 4,096 (64 CU) Ray Accelerator 48 56 64 AI Accelerator 96 112 128 ROPs 96 128 Texture Mapping Units 192 224 256 Memory 12 GB GDDR6, 18Gbps Clock, 192-bit Bus 432 GB/s 16 GB GDDR6, 20Gbps Clock, 256-bit Bus Effective Memory Bandwidth: 640 GB/s Infinity Cache 48 MB (3rd Gen) 64 MB (3rd Gen) Card Bus PCI-E 5.0 X16 Output 2x HDMI 2.1b 2x DisplayPort 2.1a Power consumption 220W 304W Recommended PSU 650W 750W Slot width 2x 3x Price (SEP) $549 $599 As you can see from the specs above, it is less than the standard RX 9070 in every way that counts, except for slightly higher Boost and Game clock speed. Design Moving on, the RX 9070 GRE we were given is an XFX Swift triple-fan, dual-slot design with two 8-pin connectors. At 30cm (self-measured), it will fit in most systems easily. There is no RGB either. The AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE by XFX from all angles. Test system Our test system consists of the following: Lian Li O11 Dynamic Mini V2 Flow (Amazon|Newegg) ASUS Z890 ProArt Creator WiFi (Amazon|Newegg) Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus (Amazon|Newegg) Thermal Grizzly KryoSheet - 44x37 (Amazon|Newegg) 2x 16GB G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB (7200 MT/s in XMP) (Amazon|Newegg) Sabrent Rocket4 Plus 2TB SSD (Amazon) Windows 11 25H2 (Build 26200.8246) AMD shared a press driver based on the recently released Adrenaline 26.5.2 that we were required to use. We now move on to our benchmarks. First up, we have Geekbench AI running on ONNX. For some reason, the 9070 GRE does exceptionally well here in both half-precision (FP16) and single-precision (FP32). It manages to beat the RTX 5070 and RX 9070 non-XT, and is only behind the 9070 XT. Since Geekbench runs in short bursts instead of continuously hammering the graphics card, it seems the GRE's faster boost clocks are helping here. Next up, we move to the UL Procyon AI test suite, starting with the image generation benchmark. We chose the Stable Diffusion XL FP16 test since it is the most intense workload available on Procyon. The Nvidia cards do very well here, as even the 4070 out-muscles AMD's best fairy easily. The positive thing about the GRE is that it gets quite close to the 9070 non-XT in this test; this indicates that the VRAM does not play a very big role here, as SD XL relies on float16 (FP16). So this is something to keep in mind again. If you wish to work with float32 AI workloads, graphics cards with larger than 12 GB buffers would likely emerge as victors. Regardless, the gains are still massive on AMD's 9000 series compared to the 7000 series. Following image generation, we move to the text generation benchmark. This is one test where the 9070 GRE struggled, quite a lot. It seems that the 12 GB VRAM and lower memory bandwidth of the new Radeon 9070 GRE are hurting it quite a bit; the split is massive, especially in a test like Llama2, which packs 13 billion parameters. As such, in all the tests, the 9070 GRE is the slowest of the lot. Next, we tried Blender, and here the AMD GPUs were beaten by Nvidia. Rendering is something the Green team has always had a lead over the Red side, and it has not changed so far. On the positive side, though, the 9070 GRE shows significantly better results than the 7800 XT, which means AMD is on the right path. Catching up to Nvidia, though, will require a lot more effort. And we hope HIP and ROCm can keep improving. Wrapping up AI testing, we measured OpenCL throughput in the Geekbench compute benchmark. The RX 9070 GRE alongside the 9070 did not fare well here at all, even falling behind the 7800 XT. Interestingly, even the RTX 5070 could not beat the 4070 on OpenCL, so perhaps this suggests that OpenCL optimization may not have been a priority for either AMD or Nvidia in the modern era. Conclusion We reached the end of our productivity performance review of the 9070 GRE, and we have to say it's a mixed bag. Unlike the 9070 and 9070 XT, the GRE excels in some areas while losing ground fairly easily in others. Similar to how it happened in gaming, any time the card's memory subsystem gets hammered, it tends to fall behind the others. This was the case with text generation, wherein we saw the VRAM sometimes hit its maximum available 12 GB of usage with larger model sizes. So what do we make of the RX 9070 as a productivity hardware? It can certainly be used, but you have to know it has its limitations. For those looking for a GPU that can deal with more, AMD recently unveiled the Radeon AI PRO R9700, which is essentially a 32 GB refresh of the 9070 XT with some additional workstation-based optimizations. On a similar note, the new Ryzen AI Halo platform is something you can consider if you want to set up a local AI processing station. Considering everything, we rate AMD's Radeon RX 9070 GRE a 7.5 out of 10 for its productivity performance. Price is less of a factor for those looking at productivity cases compared to those considering the GPU for gaming, and as such, we felt it did quite decently on many occasions and can be handy if you need a 12 GB GPU and, for some reason, don't want to get Nvidia. Purchase links: RX 9070 / XT / GRE (Amazon US) As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
    • Does anyone here know if these updates are integrated into the UUP dump isos?
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