Archive for June, 2011

I just pushed Iceweasel 5.0 to Debian experimental. Why not unstable, some will ask? Well, because we still need to give some time after a first notice before breaking plenty of packages (Thanks to Julien Cristau for the MBF, by the way).

I also discontinued the Iceweasel 4.0 backport for Squeeze, as Iceweasel 4.0 won't be receiving security updates. Speaking of security updates, 3.6.18 was also made available on mozilla.debian.net for Wheezy, Squeeze and Lenny. However, I still have to backport the necessary patches to 3.5 in Squeeze and 3.0 in Lenny. My real life schedule wasn't compatible with the security release schedule, so I got late on the security backport train.

In the coming weeks, there will also be some additional changes to the mozilla.debian.net repository, but I'll give more details when that happens.

The 20-line patch to Firefox 4 that makes startup on Windows up to 2x as fast and the stupid one-liner that does the same on Linux both grew into a full fledged preloading solution working on all our supported platforms. This involved major changes to how we initialize Firefox, and a few glitches with our leak detector, but this time it should stay for good (it had been backed out twice already).

Users shouldn't notice any change until after they reboot after upgrading to the latest nightly. It is possible to watch how things evolve with the about:startup extension.

These cold startup improvements will be available in Firefox 7.