March 2008 Entries

Mozilla Firefox 3 beta 5 will, when it comes out, have some improvements in connection parallelism.

Just like IE8 increase from 2 concurrent connections per host to 6, Mozilla Firefox will also increase it to 6. The about:config entry for this is "network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server".

Furthermore the max number of HTTP connections will be increase from 24 to 30. The about:config entry for this is "network.http.max-connections".

The number of HTTP connections that can be established per host will go up from 8 to 15. The about:config entry for this is "network.http.max-connections-per-server".

If you using Firefox from behind a proxy then the max number of concurrent connections will be increased from 4 to 8. The about:config entry for this is "network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy".

All in all this will make Firefox 3 beta 5 even faster. These changes are needed since, according to Mozilla developers:

Sites are demanding more connections due to JS traffic, and we're using up more of the total connection limit with suggest requests, antimalware, extension traffic, etc.

Read the bug report about the connection changes
Read about the IE8 Connection Parallelism

For the technical people these are the new defaults:
pref("network.http.max-connections", 30);
pref("network.http.max-connections-per-server", 15);
pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server", 6);
pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy", 8);

Fasterfox which is a Add-on that has performance and network tweaks for Firefox uses these settings:
user_pref("network.http.max-connections", 40);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections-per-server", 16);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy", 12);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server", 6);

but these settings are not recommended since they, as Mike Shaver puts it, would get us (Firefox) banned from the internet.

"John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, argues that the Firefox platform is actually more robust and easier to use than "rival" platforms like Facebook, iPhone, etc. Unlike these others, Firefox is a true community platform, reflecting the tastes, requirements, and whims of a broad array of users. It plays host to a wide array of third-party plug-ins. But the community angle doesn't end with plug-ins. 40 percent of the Firefox code wasn't written by Mozilla. This has stayed constant as Mozilla has grown. This is exceptionally impressive when you consider that Firefox is 6 million lines of code."

Read the rest of the interesting interview

This is the actual headline from the largest online newspapers Ekstra Bladet in Denmark. See the full article here.

The online newspaper Ekstra Bladet had a poll about the Mozilla usage. 57% answered that they used Mozilla Firefox. The true Firefox usage at ekstrabladet.dk is much lower. The statistics shows that only 10% of the visitors are using Firefox. Denmark is Microsoft country.

But back to the free porn. One of the comments in the poll was that Firefox is much better at surfing porn. "I use Firefox as a backup browser and for surfing porn. This way I dont get busted". I think he (or she) must refer to the built-in privacy cleaner that Firefox has.

Other users are commenting about the popup blocker and the ability to remove banner ads. "This makes pages load faster and it's nice to get rid of Flash movies when my mouse cursor moves across the page."

A new about: entry has just been checked in. This time it's about:robots.

So if you're running nightly builds of Mozilla Firefox you can type "about:robots" and see this page:

For more information about this page and why it's there, turn to bug 417302.

Other known about: pages are:
about:mozilla
about:cache
about:config
about:plugins
about:buildconfig
about:credits

plus others. You can see all of them by reading the code here

The latest nightly builds of Mozilla Firefox 3 is now being build with Profile Guided Optimization (PGO). So what does this mean? That Firefox 3 is getter even faster. A lot of work has been done in making Firefox the fastest browser on the earth. And now with PGO we just got around 11% faster in JavaScript tests.

Unofficial we are now the fastest browser on the earth and more than 30% faster in JavaScript tests than the latest Opera Beta (9.5.9807)

Hopefully the next Firefox 3 beta will be build with PGO.

So what is Profile Guided Optimization?
When building (compiling) Firefox, a set of tests are run and the data from these tests are used to optimize the compiled code. The data from the tests enables the compiler to aggressively optimize code in Firefox. The data represents how the program is likely to perform in a production environment. Basically, it runs the Firefox code to see what functions get used the most and optimizes the final code around that data.

Profile-guided optimization is a relatively new feature in both GCC and Visual C++ that improves the quality of generated code.

IE already doing this
IE7 was build with Profile-Guided Optimizations and gained a 8% performance improvement with no additional code change.

For more information about Profile-Guided Optimizations:
- Profile-Guided Optimizations in Microsoft Visual C++
- Building with Profile-Guided Optimization