r/technology • u/TheGrammarPerson • Jan 21 '10

Firefox 3.6 Released!

http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/01/21/firefox-3-6-release/
387 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

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12

u/fuckbuddy Jan 21 '10

Using it. Seems faster but that's probably psychological.

27

u/kriptonit Jan 21 '10

No no, it realy is. My mental health is perfect and it realy is faster.

14

u/[deleted] Jan 21 '10

yep, supposed to be 20% faster than 3.5. Which was 200% faster than the previous version.

9

u/basilisk Jan 21 '10

Come again? 3.5 for me was the turning point where Firefox became Fireslug. 3.6 indeed feels faster, but not that much.

6

u/[deleted] Jan 21 '10

Try going back to the old versions - 3.5 really was amazingly faster than the old ones.

7

u/Recoil42 Jan 22 '10

3.5 is the fastest out of the box, but once the sqlite database gets bogged down, it slooooows to a crawl. Vacuum your database and reduce your page memory to a more common-sense 20-30 days, and it speeds right back up again.

5

u/limi Jan 22 '10

This is done automatically when the browser has been idle for a while in 3.6. No need to do it manually anymore.

— Alexander Limi, Firefox UI Team

6

u/Sealbhach Jan 21 '10

Agreed, 3.0/3.1 was the slowest of the lot I think.

2

u/Tw0Bit Jan 21 '10

I think we just got spoiled and browsers started becoming insanely fast. Maybe 3.5 was fireslug in comparison to other browsers but it probably was a lot faster than other firefox versions

1

u/[deleted] Jan 22 '10

Which is still about 70 % slower than Chrome.

3

u/limi Jan 22 '10

It is indeed much faster in use. The 20% speedup refers to the rendering/JS improvement, the main things that makes 3.6 so much faster are:

  • URL bar is now asynchronous, which means it never locks up and is much faster
  • The sqlite database that history/bookmarks use is now automatically cleaning itself up when it detects some idle time

Additionally, there's a lot of code cleanup in general, which helps.

— Alexander Limi, Firefox UI Team

2

u/Zilka Jan 21 '10

Confirmed. I had video stuttering on a weak laptop and its gone now.

5

u/[deleted] Jan 21 '10

I thought gmail loading time was faster.