The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Mozilla pushes out second Firefox 3.1 alpha

Alastair Smith

Errr... 

Thumb Up

I can already drag and drop tabs between browser windows. Maybe I'm already using the alpha without realising it.

Unlimited

"redmonds huge market share" 

Dead Vulture

define: "huge"

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

IE7 is getting destroyed by FF

IE6 is dying

Anonymous Coward

@Alastair Smith 

No you can't. You can only drag URLs to existing tabs. The original tab stays there, and you don't create a new tab where you drop it either.

Rob

@Unlimited 

Joke

Because of course a site that is dedicated to Web Designers is gonna show a really fair assessment of Browser usage

/sarcasm

Nic Brough

@Alastair Smith @ Anonymous Coward 

Coat

>No you can't. You can only drag URLs to existing tabs. The original tab stays there, and you don't create a new tab where you drop it either.

Umm, no, he's right, you can drag tabs to other instances, I've been doing it for months. Firefox 3.0x - open two copies of Firefox, open 2 tabs in each one (for clarity, make sure all 4 tabs are different sites). Drag a tab from Firefox(1) into Firefox(2), and the net result is Firefox(1) has 1 tab, and Firefox(2) has 3 tabs.

However, *you have to drop the tab onto the tab bar* Dropping the tab onto the browser page causes the behaviour you describe

Mine's the coat with the middle of the fence in the pocket.

Anonymous Coward

@AC 

Paris Hilton

Oh yes you can... drag the tabs to a new window works fine in FF 3.0.1 - as long as you have the tabs bar visible on the target window.

Paris because she checks her pantomime costume

Anonymous Coward

@Alastair, @Nic 

Flame

Do you mean to imply that a journalist made a statement without trying to verify his facts?

Recall the recent journalistic furor around the release of Google's "new" browser, notable only for its inability to block Google's ads.

I could point a finger at journalists and make faces and shout rude names. However, it's not like this is a new phenomenon. Frankly, I'm probably an even bigger fool for constantly being disappointed.

Ray

Drag and Drop 

Linux

Apparently drag and drop will not reload the tab when dropped onto the new window as it does in 3.0

wayne tavitt

perhaps 

Coat

ff will finally get quicker, we know it's possible courtesy of google.

Mines the one with the disabled javascript badge

Quirkafleeg

@ @Alastair Smith @ Anonymous Coward 

Boffin

Actually, it's *one* instance with two windows.

Dougal

Wonk! 

Happy

Genius, I thought the Reg had forgotten about this word... the last time I read it was when you decided Wonk was the word for www...

ahh good times spent wasting my life reading reg articles....

Nic Brough

@@@Alastair Smith 

>Do you mean to imply that a journalist made a statement without trying to verify his facts?

I would never dare to suggest that ;-) Maybe it was just a quick skim of the press releases?

>Actually, it's *one* instance with two windows.

Very true. Is that how Chrome handles it too? They claim one tab = one thread which would be nice, especially if it's one container app, like Firefox

Shame I can't try it (no windows box at home, work blocked install)

Charlie Clark

Playing in catch-up again? 

Video?

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/a-call-for-video-on-the-web-opera-vid/

Nearly a year ago. Conclusion: Opera users get there faster.

Steve

downgrading 

Well, let's hope that they make that crappy new URL bar optional, fix the postscript printing on Solaris/Linux, and get the performance back to snuff, else I'm staying on FF2.

I didn't realise how slow FF3 was until I went back to FF2 because of the first two problems, and boy did FF seem fast :(

David Hayes

@Unlimited 

Stop

Straw poll, how many non-developers know or more importantly care to install a different browser to IE.... I'd argue not that many. How many non-developers are going to visit w3schools.... I'd argue not that many...

"Anyway, our data, collected from W3Schools' log-files, over a five year period, clearly shows the long and medium-term trends"

Go to a football match at Wembley, between say ManU and Chelsea, and carry out a straw poll of people outside the grounds who their favourite team is. 45% ManU, 45% Chelsea, 10% other. Now ask the whole country, and get a much more different, and more RELEVANT statistic...

Statistics are dangerous, because people use them to misrepresent facts.

Anonymous Coward

@Nic Brough 

Boffin

Chrome is actually one *process* per tab, plus a process for the tab manager, plus a process for add-ins.

It gives all the isolation that a process offers but it's a huge overhead when browsing many tabs - especially cos a lot of tabs will just contain an image/attachment/simple html page.

I would have liked to see something like the .NET AppDomain model but I'm not sure of how cross-platform that would be....

David Hayes

Javascript updates 

Maybe I'm missing the ball here, but according to http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/08/08/22/Mozilla-boosts-JavaScript-performance_1.html, the 3.1 trunk was supposed to include native code compilation for JS. Running 3.1 alpha is just as slow on SunSpider tests as 3.0.

Ho hum, uninstall Shiretoko for me then!

John Werner

But I still can't see... 

Stop

That's great news, but until they fix the issue with screen updates failing on super high resolution displays with multi-monitors (monitor 1 = 2048x1536, monitor 2 = 1280x800) on Windows, It's still FF2 for me.

On my linux boxen, it's FF3.

Thomas Steven

I thought it was just me 

I have the sucky multi monitors problem as well (monitor 1=1900x1200, monitor 2 1600x1200), and went back to FF2.

Nigel Jones

enable jit 

Not sure if the new alpha has the jit -- to check go to "about:config" and then type "jit" in the filter. You may be able to enable it, just off by default.

A little buggy too from the dev builds I'm trying, but fast.