Posted on 04/29/2009 9:55:14 AM PDT by CedarDave
Features in Internet Explorer and Firefox run neck and neck. Will a victor emerge? It may come down to convenience.
Every day I sit at my computer and open two browsers: Firefox and Internet Explorer (first 6, then 7 and, as of late, 8). ... Firefox opens my Yahoo and Gmail mail accounts. Internet Explorer is aimed at my banking and stock trading accounts. ...
... I made up my mind to drop Firefox altogether. [Then] Yesterday morning, I found out that Firefox released the 3.5 beta (4), and many features are the same as in IE8.
IE8 has a feature called InPrivate Browsing, which prevents IE from storing data about your browsing sessions, including cookies, temporary Internet files, history, and other data. ... Firefox 3 has Private Browsing, which provides the same functionality and does not retain visited pages, form and search bar entries, passwords, cookies, temporary or cached Internet files, and so forth.
They both offer at least one superscary privacy-invasion tool. In the case of IE8, it is called Suggested Sites, where your browsing history is sent to Microsoft to compare to related Web sites ... This feature is something that many (most) people are not pleased about. Microsoft said it will not store this information, but at the same time, Windows Help and Support information says that even items deleted from your browsing History "will be retained by Microsoft for a period of time to help improve our products and services." In Firefox, there is Location Aware Browsing (aka geolocation), where Firefox takes your IP address, information about nearby wireless access points, and a temporary cookie-like identifier and passes that off to Google ... so that searching in Google retrieves results that relate to your current location. ... That's something else I opt out of.
(Excerpt) Read more at infoworld.com ...
Well we are still waiting for FF 3.5.
Just dropping this recent note:
Firefox 3.5 RC1 delayed a bit again
Earlier notes from ZDNET:
Firefox 3.1 may become Firefox 3.5And of course that did happen.
Shiretoko to be named Firefox 3.5
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As recently proposed, the version number of the Shiretoko project will be changed to Firefox 3.5 before the upcoming fourth beta release. The process of changing the version number will have an effect on many systems, and will be co-ordinated by Sam Sidler
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And:
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JavaScript 1.8.1 is a modest update syntactically to JavaScript; the main change in this release is the addition of the Tracemonkey just-in-time compiler, which improves performance.
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The tracing JIT in SpiderMonkey consists of a generic, low level component called nanojit which is co-maintained between Adobe and Mozilla, and a SpiderMonkey-specific high level component called jstracer. The nanojit component is language agnostic, and contains no knowledge about SpiderMonkey or any other part of the Mozilla codebase. The jstracer component consists of a monitor and a recorder. The monitor watches the executing SpiderMonkey interpreter. When the monitor determines that the interpreter has entered a region of code that would benefit from native compilation, the monitor activates the recorder. The recorder records the activity of the interpreter, using nanojit to build an efficient, native representation of the execution called a fragment. The monitor then calls into the native code stored in the fragment.
A schematic diagram of the components of the tracing JIT follows:
I do most of my dev work in FF and check IE second. There are many times when I see what I want in FF and have to make special changes to see it proper in IE.
You have to use the Nightly Tester Tools and do some add-on hacks to get the older add-ons to run but, I haven't had any problems with it.
All my Firefox browsers (FF-2, 3.1) have had one problem: When I click on a news video from a TV station, they almost always don't work and I have to view with IE-6. I have shut off Adblock and NoScript but they still don't run. I suspect the 15-second ads most stations run before a news video are being blocked which means the following video of interest never plays either. No problem with YouTube or other internet video. Any ideas??
Are you running MS windows?
Someone educate me - is there a difference between firefox and flock? I know flock is built on the mozilla firefox platform, but I don’t know if the terms are interchangeable.
DUH,...nevermind...of course you are.
What’s flock?
There is Iceweasel...I think Sidux (Linux - Debian) uses it.
I guess it is different but similar.
Flock is what Netscape used to be...
I don’t know all the details - I know it’s free and I know I like it better than IE.
Flock has some social media features built in. You can access your Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr accounts in the sidebar.
Sorry, never heard of “flock.”
That won't stop them, they will keep sending the update periodically. I have to do it with IE updates all the time, same update every two or three days. I use Firefox and wish I could take IE off permanently(I am sure others wish this also). I don't care what they do with IE I will keep using Firefox.
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