June 2007 Entries

To help find memory leaks in Mozilla Firefox the Mozilla developers has the last couple of weeks landed the so called XPCOM cycle collector. This tool thats built into Mozilla helps to avoid memory leaks that can make Firefox take up too much memory and make it slower. It periodically checks the Firefox memory usage and tries to free any unused memory. More and more areas of the Firefox code will support this feature and hopefully we'll have a Firefox 3 that will use less memory.

But memory garbage collection, which the XPCOM cycle collector does, is hard, so dont expect miracles. Bugzilla reports that there's 237 open memory leak bugs

So how does it work. From the XPCOM cycle collector webpage:
The cycle collector spends most of its time accumulating (and forgetting about) pointers to XPCOM objects that might be involved in garbage cycles. Periodically the collector wakes up and examines any suspicious pointers that have been sitting in its buffer for a while. If the collector finds a group of objects that all refer back to one another, and establishes that the objects' reference counts are all accounted for by internal pointers within the group, it considers that group cyclical garbage, which it then attempts to free.

Read much more about the XPCOM cycle collector.

Read the meta bug about the collector.

Apple release the Windows version of thier browser Safari yesterday and the community welcomes them on the Windows platform with a bunch of security bugs found after only two hours of the release. Hard to believe since according to Apple:
"Now you can enjoy worry-free web browsing on any computer. Apple engineers designed Safari to be secure from day one."

My own experience with Safari is really bad. I installed it with no problems but when I started it, I got the browser but cant see any text all. Both all the text in the browser window and in the menus are gone. The File and Edit menus are just empty and the browser cant show text but only images.

Apple also release some performance tests that shows that Safari is the fastest web browser around. Again according to Apple:
"Safari loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2."

But now has Wired News Benchmarks has shown that Safari 3 is slower than IE 7 and Firefox. And Wired News has some good news:
"The verdict? Firefox may be getting bloated, but it's still the fastest Windows browser, particularly for running Google web applications."

Yet again it's time for an updated list of the extensions I use for Mozilla Firefox. I did some cleanup of the installed extensions so I only have those extensions installed that I actually use. This also helps on performance.

All of the extensions (except one) listed below works in nightly trunk builds of Mozilla Firefox. The only extension that I needed to do some code change to, is the del.icio.us bookmarks extension. Since the landing of the Places code the extension stopped working. So I had to do some minor code change so that it worked.

• AutoAuth Automatically submits saved HTTP authentication credentials.
• Autofill Forms Fill out web forms automatically
• ChromaTabs Colors browser tabs based on contents.
• Closy Provides you different Close tabs functionality fx Close all blank tabs and Close all duplicate tabs
• Console² The next generation error console.
• Copy URL + Copies to clipboard the document's URL along with the title or the selected text.
• Dansk ordbog - Danish Dictionary
• del.icio.us Bookmarks Access your bookmarks wherever you go and keep them organized no matter how many you have.
• DOM Inspector Inspects the structure and properties of a window and its contents.
• Fullerscreen Really full screen...
• FxIF View EXIF data in image properties
• InfoLister Lists installed extensions and themes
• InspectThis Inspect the current element with the DOM Inspector.
• JSView View the source code of external stylesheets and javascripts.
• LastTab Allows tab navigation in a most recently used manner.
• Launchy Open links and mailto's with external applications like Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, Outlook etc
• Link Widgets A site-navigation tool
• Linkification Converts text links into genuine, clickable links.
• Linky Open/download/validate links and pictures in tabs or windows
• Live HTTP Headers View HTTP headers of a page and while browsing.
• MR Tech Local Install Local Install power tools for all users. (en-US)
• Nightly Tester Tools Useful tools for the nightly tester.
• Print Hint Helps you to quickly find printer-friendly versions of webpages
• ProxyButton ProxyButton creates a toolbar button to quickly turn proxy on and off.
• Reliby Reload all your Live Bookmarks
• Resizable Form Fields Resize HTML form fields, including textareas, select boxes, text fields, and iframes.
• Slashy Fixes Windows backslash file separators in links and images
• Talkback Sends information about program crashes to Mozilla.
• TDC CMS Extension for TDC CMS (Company Internal extension)
• Update Notifier Notifies you when updates are available for your extensions and themes.
• Validaty One Click Validator. Provides you a button to validate a page using a validator like validator.w3.org
• View Dependencies Adds a tab listing dependencies and their sizes in the Page Info window.
• Web Developer Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.
• wmlbrowser Display WML (Wireless Markup Language) content.

Notes:
Some of the new extensions are AutoAuth which removes HTTP auth dialog boxes. I've also found a super replacement for AutoFill which was an extension I used for filling out forms. The new one is called Autofill Forms and it's really really nice. New is also Resizable Form Fields which helps you on pages where input boxes are way to small.