There has been quite a bit going on with Firefox lately – the old and new JavaScript engines have been merged, the next Beta is slightly delayed and 386 and old Athlon PCs may not run Firefox anymore. Meanwhile, Google has released the sixth generation of its Chrome browser
, which we like to call the naked browser, about 2 years after the first release of Chrome.
Web browsers is most dynamic end user software segment these days. I can’t quite remember a time in which browser changed that much every week. Google just announced the final version of Chrome 6, about 3 weeks after the release of the first beta. However, we also know that Google said that it would accelerate its release schedule and Chrome 6 was nearly final after an unusually long developer phase when it went into beta on August 11.
Chrome 6 is notably faster than Chrome 5 and has a significantly different interface with less buttons. There is a dynamic stop/reload button, the Go button is gone and the bookmark button has been moved to the right side of the URL bar. The two menu options have been merged into just one Tools menu. Google has added three unique copy, paste and zoom buttons, which can also be found in the latest Firefox 4 betas in the reduced menu configuration, and some believe that this is a sign of a mobile browser with touch screen features. You can find more information about the GUI changes in Chrome 6 in our Naked Browser feature here.
Mozilla’s Firefox team seems to be awfully busy these days as replies to inquiries are somewhat scarce. However, we know that the new Beta 5 is scheduled for August 7, which is 4 days behind original schedule. The feature freeze for Firefox 4 is still scheduled for September 10 and if everything went according to plan, then Mozilla should now have a Firefox version with a JaegerMonkey Java Script engine, which we have not found yet. The JaegerMonkey team is now publishing benchmark results of a merged JaegerMonkey/TraceMonkey and indicates that the merged version is about 5% slower than JaegerMonkey alone in the Sunspider test, but about 25% faster in Google’s V8 benchmark. In fact, in V8, Mozilla is now only 20% slower than the basic WebKit release.
There is also interesting news as far as supported Firefox platforms are concerned. Earlier this year, Mozilla stated that minimum platforms are Windows 2000, Mac OS X Leopard (10.5; no OS X for PPC will be supported with Firefox 4 anymore), and now it seems that Mozilla is also considering leaving old x86 hardware in the past. Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner said that they are considering “dropping support for 386 architectures which do not support SSE2 (older Athlon CPUs, some VIA chipsets)”.
SSE2 is, according to our knowledge. also not supported by 486 CPUs as well as Pentium, Pentium II and Pentium III processors. Wikipedia states that SSE2 requires at least a Pentium 4-class processor or an Athlon 64 processor, or later. Mozilla’s statement is a bit confusing at this time and we will have to wait to see how this idea pans out. Beltzner said that there is no final decision on this matter yet.
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