Next Up For Firefox: Instant Sync

Originally launched as an add-on for Firefox 3.5, Sync was developed to give Firefox an edge in the browser platform to bridge traditional desktop with mobile devices. Eventually, it became one of the big new features in Firefox 4, but Sync was not perfect and even a bit late to the party. Instant will be the first major revision of this feature and promises to give Mozilla the edge it promised more than a year ago.

 

Revolutionary as it may have been, Sync was really failure due to its complex set-up procedures and time consuming Sync process. Not only did Syncing itself take considerable time, but every time you use a new password or bookmark a new page, you have to manually re-sync Firefox. If you want your newly synced data to appear on another computer or mobile device, then you have to follow the same procedure on those devises as well.

Unfortunately for Mozilla, Sync has not been worth people’s time and aggravation so far. Even when it was working as intended, it was still faster to just type in your password or visit your would-be bookmarked page in the traditional way via the URL bar. Compared to Chrome’s Sync, Mozilla’s version is simply way too clumsy.

However, Mozilla, which got a lot of complaints regarding the new feature, has been working on a fix for Sync. Firefox 5 was marketed with a better Sync feature, easier setup and more responsiveness. Still, the biggest problem remains and you have to do more work to sync your devices than just use them separately. Firefox 5 had a lot of features planned out for it and the release did not exactly pan out as expected, at least not from the user’s perspective. While it was a great release to stabilize their core product and signify the success of the new fast release cycle, Firefox 5 was a disappointment when it came to new features, or revamps of old ones, like Sync.

Sync wasn’t forgotten about, but pushed back a version or two. Sync is yet another item to add to your ever growing list of why Firefox 7 is going to be the best version Firefox yet: “Instant Sync” is on track and chugging along just fine and should be here in time for that version of Firefox sporting the retro biblical number 7.

Instant Sync will work by automatically syncing new passwords and bookmarks to the sync server as they are created – in the background. No more going through menus or clicking buttons, no more waiting for synchronization to finish. In short: Sync should just work. What about your other devices? They should sync on startup, when you first launch Firefox and hopefully without slowing down the browser’s startup time anymore.

Syncing will also work during a browser version: Let’s say you decided to take a break from reading news on your smartphone and instead chose to switch to Angry Birds. Assuming you played for long enough to prompt Firefox to automatically go into idle mode, a sync progress will triggered when you return and should deliver anything new you got while you were playing.

Clearly, this would work better if you were doing work on your PC at the time instead of playing games, but you get the picture. The same idle function exists on the desktop version of Firefox as well, so if you use multiple PCs and you switch between them, they should always be fully synced.

While Instant sync is still several weeks away from the standard user, you can try it now with Firefox 7 Aurora build or Firefox 8 Nightly. However, keep in mind that you will need those Aurora and nightly versions on all the devices you want to keep in Instant Sync. There will be no more excuses to not use Sync as Instant Sync functions the way it was always meant to. This time it should be the great feature Mozilla promised all the way back for Firefox 4.

Michael Rabinovsky in Products on July 12

WordPress Tops 50 Million Sites

WordPress is now more than 50 million blogs strong and about 25 million of them are hosted by WordPress.

According to WordPress’ statistics page there are now 50.1 million blogs based on this technology. Those blogs that are located on WordPress servers generate about 500,000 new posts and about 400,000 comments every day. 283 million people are visiting those 25 million-or-so blog every months, resulting in more than 2.5 billion page impressions.

The organization said that WordPress blogs are published in 120 languages – 66% of the blogs are in English, 8.7% in Spanish and 6.5% in Portuguese.

According to Go-Globe.com, WordPress is downloaded about 50 times per minute. Earlier this year, Microsoft completed its transition of Live Spaces blogs to WordPress, which resulted in a net gain of about 1 million blogs for WordPress.

Kurt Bakke in Business on July 11

Chrome And Firefox Get WebGL Fixes; Firefox 5.0.1 Coming

Both Google and Mozilla are reacting to recent security problems affecting WebGL, as well as Microsoft’s claims that WebGL is “harmful”.

Google announced that the upcoming Chrome 13 will no longer support cross-domain images and videos to be used as WebGL textures. It was previously discovered that shaders in WebGL could be used to exploit an information leakage vulnerability. Mozilla fixed this issue with the arrival of Firefox 5.0 on June 21.

The issue was described by Microsoft as serious enough to consider WebGL as generally “harmful“. Both Firefox and Chrome were first to support WebGL as a way to accelerate the display of web graphics, IE9 has not adopted the technology yet, but relied on Microsoft’s own Silverlight. However, it appears that Silverlight has similar problems.

Mozilla also announced that it will be releasing an unplanned update for Firefox 5: Version 5.0.1 will be addressing a “serious” crash problem in Firefox 5 that Mac users will encounter when updating to Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. The update is being pushed as Lion will be shipping before the availability of Firefox 6.

Firefox 6 is making its way into the beta channel at this time and is expected to be pushed to beta users beginning today. Firefox 6 is expected to deliver more dramatic changes than Firefox 5 did. However, Firefox 7 seems to be shaping up as the big Firefox release this year as it will include Mozilla’s new and faster Azure 2D Graphics API as well as substantial memory improvements.

As some of our users already noticed, Firefox 8 has been released to the nightly builds and can be downloaded from Mozilla’s FTP server.

Daniel Bailey in Business Products on July 07

Firefox Posts Huge Memory Improvements

Firefox users have been complaining about excessive memory usage of the browser for quite some time, but it appears that the company is now successfully addressing those concerns as JavaScript memory usage has been improved by 20 – 30%.

Browsers are becoming more and more the centerpiece of our computers, which is why we are much more particular about the value and performance they deliver. A key focus these days is how the browser interacts with low-end systems such as tablets and netbooks, products that are basically made for Internet browsing. A critical issue has been memory usage for quite some time as especially Firefox spent the available budget excessively and occasionally drowned an entire system with its overly generous approach of using memory.

 

Not surprisingly, memory optimization is turning into a big deal at Mozilla and we are seeing more and more information trickling through from Mozilla developers such as Gregor Wagner and Nicholas Nethercote. While catching memory leaks has been a focus for Mozilla QA for some time and while the team has sponsored memory leak hunts in the past, Mozilla has made it both more efficient and easier to spot leaks just recently. I participated in those hunts in the past and witnessed how elusive memory leaks really are: Is it a leak, or is it just a dynamic process that just hasn’t gone through garbage collecting yet? What if there is a timer on it which leaves a footprint for a little while after the process has been closed?

Mozilla’s latest “memory multi-reporter interface” helps analyze memory leaks. This new version of about:memory is available on all latest Nightly and Aurora builds and it reveals both a more detailed overview of what process is using how much memory on a device and provides the tools to try and detect memory leaks in a much more efficient way. It also enables users to “garbage collect” (the process in which a browser releases non-occupied memory) manually and reduce memory usage. So, if Firefox is running slow, pop into about:memory and hit one of those buttons at the bottom and you will see an improvement.

Optimizations for Firefox 7

Of course, in a perfect world, you shouldn’t have to go anywhere or press anything in order to get Firefox to work right. Mozilla has made some progress in that direction and recent optimizations have been made to the Firefox engine to account for many JavaScript memory problems.

Mozilla said it has capped memory leaks and added some interesting and apparently effective enhancements as well. “Reduced JavaScript heap fragmentation” is a new feature that you will get when you take the recent nightly builds (Firefox 7/8) for a spin.

Similar to how your hard drive works, JavaScript is stored in chunks. Each chunk is 1 MB in size. The problem is that core JavaScript Firefox will not be removed until after the browser is closed, meaning that while a garbage collect may remove any evidence of your last Facebook visit, as long as a tiny part of any given chunk contains a core eliminate in it, that chunk will continue taking up space. These little buggers add up. Gregor Wagner grouped the entire core elements in one part and all the site elements in another to prevent both from mixing. This approach minimizes the number of chunks Firefox needs to use for its core components and completely clears the site components – which translates in a 100% efficiency after you close out of a tab: The idea is that your memory usage is the same before opening a certain tab and after closing this tab. According to Mozilla, this feature can lead to a reduction of over 5 times in JavaScript heap sizes. In some cases, this can be more than30% of your entire memory usage. Needless to say, this can be quite a bit.

Add that to the fact that the native garbage collection triggers have been improved to work not only on chunk pile sizes, but timers as well. The result is a much more efficient Firefox browser, at least as far as memory usage is concerned.

Improving memory is not a feature that is quite as tangible for users as a UI change. However, it is significant progress for the Firefox core and it is the kind of innovation that makes Mozilla special. Firefox’s memory consumption has been a very strong argument against the usage of the browser for a long time. It’s good to see Mozilla listening and fixing this issue.

Michael Rabinovsky in Products on July 06

300,000 Android Phones Per Day = $4.5 Million For Microsoft?

Microsoft is apparently asking for $15 per Android handset as a patent licensing fee. It appears that Android may become a billion dollar business for the company by simply watching.

Microsoft has asked Samsung for a $15 licensing fee for patents that are affected by Samsung’s Android smartphones. HTC is already paying licensing fees to Microsoft and there is a consensus that other Android handset makers are either under contract already or will be under contract soon.

Google recently said that more than 300,000 Android handsets are currently activated every day which would provide Microsoft with $4.5 million in license revenue every day, if the $15 fee is universal. Korean media, however, reported that Samsung may be able to reduce the fee to $10 per handset, as Microsoft needs Samsung as a manufacturer of Windows Phone 7 devices. Even at a universal $10 fee, Microsoft could be generating $90 million per month in Android licensing revenue – or close to $1.1 billion per year.

Not too shabby for an accidental business and the fact that Windows Phone 7 is still waiting for a watershed moment of explosive growth.

Ethan McKinney in Business on July 06

Mozilla Is Back: New Firefox Aurora 7 Looks Promising

Mozilla today released a new Firefox Aurora release: As Firefox 6 is moved into beta, Firefox 7 is beginning to take shape and will deliver substantial performance improvements across the board.

As much as Firefox 5 was a letdown to some Firefox users (it was actually a pretty successful release for Mozilla), the next two releases of the browser will carry much of the innovation and enthusiasm Mozilla was founded upon. Firefox 7 is confirmed to receive substantial memory leak fixes as well as a much better garbage collector that releases unused memory more effectively.

There is also a new Sync feature that syncs passwords and bookmarks instantly, improved font rendering, an integrated telemetry feature to help Mozilla improve the performance in future Firefox versions, as well as added support for CSS3 text overflow.

Perhaps most importantly, Firefox 7 will ship with the new Azure 2D graphics API, the basis of Firefox graphics performance. Azure dramatically improved the graphics performance especially in Canvas 2D HTML5 scenarios (see benchmark results here.)

Wolfgang Gruener in Products on July 07