[5387] in Release_7.7_team
firefox 1.5 evaluation
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert A Basch)
Fri Dec 23 17:43:05 2005
Message-Id: <200512232242.jBNMgrs0024427@anhedonia.mit.edu>
To: release-team@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2005 17:42:53 -0500
From: Robert A Basch <rbasch@MIT.EDU>
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I spent some time looking at firefox 1.5, which is a major new version
of the browser, to see if it makes sense to deploy it as part of our
IAP patch release. Some of the new features that are of particular
interest to us include:
* New/better support for SVG, CSS 2 and CSS 3, and Javascript 1.6
(a few users have expressed a desire for SVG support in
particular).
* A configurable "Clear Private Data" tool, which can erase various
private information (history, form entries, cookies, etc.).
* Faster navigation, especially back/forward button performance.
* Improved usability, including better preferences UI.
For more information, see:
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/releases/1.5.html#new
Unfortunately, I found that the work required to integrate this
new release will likely be significant....
Some of the code that we have touched locally, e.g. relocating the
disk cache, will require non-trivial merge/update effort. Also, I
noticed that 1.5 prefers to do fcntl()-style locking of the profile,
instead of relying on the old symlink method; this caused problems in
my testing, as occasionally firefox was unable to acquire the lock on
startup (likely an AFS locking issue). So some effort would be
required here, to modify either the code or our wrapper's lock
handling.
The "Download Actions" preferences screen is improved; when browsing
for an application, it no longer seems to resolve symlinks. However,
the browser also does not allow the application path to be typed in,
so there is no good way to enter a path containing "@sys".
While I was able to build firefox 1.5 on Solaris, the build took
several hours longer than 1.0.7 does; I traced this to a very long
delay running the tool to generate build dependencies for a certain
new source file. I'm not sure what's going on here; I suppose we
could just consider this a minor annoyance that we could live with.
(One more issue I noticed in testing -- when you build this
version from source, its visible "brand" name is "Deer Park",
not "Firefox"; apparently mozilla is reserving the Firefox
brand for its own builds. So we would presumably have to
decide on our own name, e.g. "Athena Firefox").
Finally, there are reports that 1.5 is not as stable as 1.0.7,
and that it uses more memory. There is apparently a stability
update planned for around Feb. 1, but that will be too late to
fit our IAP release time frame.
As a result, my current thinking is that we should put off the 1.5
upgrade until the summer's full Athena release. That will give us
time to do the necessary integration work under a less constrained
schedule, and give us the testing benefit of a full release cycle.
Bob
