-
Oct26
Mozilla Minefield Browser: Yeah It’s Fast. Really Fast.
Filed under: Uncategorized; Tagged as: camino, firefox, javascript, minefield, mozilla, nightly-tester-tools, performance, safari, tracemonkey, V8, webkit
When it comes to browsers, I’ve tried them all and was really disappointed when Google released their Chrome for Windows only. I regularly switch between Firefox and the latest nightly build from Webkit (essentially Safari) right now. Firefox has the extensibility I rely on. I had hoped that Chrome would magically become my new go-to browser. Unfortunately, Chrome is not yet nearly as extensible as Firefox, and isn’t available for Mac (yet).So imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon the latest experimental Firefox build from Mozilla, called Minefield. This Minefield should not be confused with the unofficial optimized builds of Firefox, which are also referred to as Minefield. Minefield is Mozilla’s code-name for this generation of Firefox, and the code name is used for unofficial builds to avoid infringing upon the Firefox name.
Now, what’s so special about the Mozilla Minefield build? It’s fast… smokin’ fast. This is essentially a version of Firefox with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine under the hood, and as Ars Technica reports, it tests even faster than Google’s V8 JavaScript engine.
As most Mac users have noted, Firefox is kind of pokey on the Mac platform, particularly compared with WebKit or even Safari, and even when compared with Firefox on a similarly spec’d Windows machine. Version 3 of Firefox was supposed to fix the performance problem, and while it’s somewhat better, it’s still not great.
Well, Minefield is great. Using Gmail or even a complex content management system is a breath of fresh air. I feel like my web apps are finally keeping up with me.
Surprisingly, though, Minefield has been very stable in my testing — not yet crashing in a full day of testing. I have restarted it a couple of times due to suspicion that something strange was going on, but I can’t say for sure if it was.
If you use it with your regular Firefox profile rather than creating a new one, Minefield will complain that most of your extensions are not compatible. Using Nightly Tester Tools, I re-enabled all of the extensions that it disabled, and every single one of them appears to be working normally, even the complicated ones like Better Gmail 2 and TabMixPlus.
One last note: being a nightly build, you will likely find that new versions are available, well, nightly. Mozilla makes the process of upgrading to the latest version virtually painless by using the built-in version monitoring process that Firefox uses.
9 Responses to “Mozilla Minefield Browser: Yeah It’s Fast. Really Fast.”
-
Vladimir October 26th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Minefield betas on OS X are great for speed, especially if you turn on the (experimental) JIT compiler for Javascript, by going to about:config and setting javascript.options.jit.content to **true**. The only thing is, Google Mail crashes Minefield when sending a message, so it’s not absolutely stable yet. Vladimir
-
Hi,
i find this article quite interesting would you mind putting a link to the software in this article?
-
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/minefield/ since you left it out of your post.
-
Thanks for the info!
Where can I download it for linux? -
If you are finding it hard to run things on OSX, then don’t use it. Use Linux or Windows. At least you can have fun and play games with Windows (new games, not old games ported to OSX a year after they were released).
Xubuntu is a pretty nice build of Linux. It is much more secure than either OSX or Windows.
-
Where do you download it? I want to try it but on the http://www.mozilla.org/projects/minefield/ there is no download link.
thanks
-
Mozilla is the best bowser
-
Sorry
Mozilla is the best browser -
Mozilla is elegant fast effective and smart browser
thanks to the team had made it
