Faster Firefox cold startup, now in nightlies

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.

2011-06-20 02:49:46+0900

p.m.o

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16 Responses to “Faster Firefox cold startup, now in nightlies”

  1. Firefox 5 Ready To Launch: Why It Matters | ConceivablyTech Says:

    […] already know that Firefox 7 will get a much more advanced 2D graphics API called Azure as well as a much faster startup engine. I won’t be predicting any GUI improvements anymore, but it is clear that Firefox is about to […]

  2. Grzes Says:

    Firefox 7? Sounds like 2020 in Debian then :(

  3. Ahmad Says:

    Is this patch in today`s build or already shipped?

  4. WL Says:

    We keep saying Iceweasel == Firefox

    However, Firefox in any other distro/OS is already in version 4 while Iceweasel in sid is still in 3.5.19-2.

    We shouldn’t kid ourselves saying that there’s a repo somewhere etc .. It’s just like saying download firefox-4.0.1.tar.bz2

    Agree with Grzes when he/she is saying – Firefox 7? Sounds like 2020 in Debian then :(

  5. antistress Says:

    @ Grzes & WL : As you may know, Mike Hommey (the author of this blog) makes new iceweasel versions available on Debian through http://mozilla.debian.net/

  6. skierpage Says:

    Nice, the end of an era.

    I noticed after nightly update of Linux x64 Nightly and in latest-trunk/firefox-7.0a1.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2, the firefox and firefox-bin executables are identical sizes but have different contents starting at byte 54970. That’s odd since the bug and Makefile.in suggest one is a copy of the other.

    There’s still a run-mozilla.sh script, is it still useful to run other Mozilla binaries? I think some MDC pages that talk about run-mozilla.sh (e.g. Debugging Mozilla with gdb) need updating for Firefox 7.

    Now can you develop a BIOS that loads omni.jar at a fixed memory address and jumps to it, bypassing all that OS cruft? ;-)

  7. glandium Says:

    > However, Firefox in any other distro/OS is already in version 4 while Iceweasel in sid is still in 3.5.19-2.

    Iceweasel in experimental has been 4 for a while. And this is not some remote repository. And mozilla.debian.net has packages for 5.0b, 6.0a, and soon, 7.0a…

    As for 4 or 5 in unstable, that depends on http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=pkg-mozilla-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org;tag=xulrunner-2.0

    But that’s completely off-topic on this blog post.

  8. Linux Blog » Blog Archive » Firefox 7 bude startovat výraznÄ› rychleji Says:

    […] verzi Firefoxu 7, mohli jste si povÅ¡imnout, že startuje rychleji než pÅ™edchůdci. Může za to jedna úprava, o kterése diskutovalo již dříve, a která by mÄ›la v závislosti na rychlosti disku zrychlit […]

  9. glandium Says:

    skierpage: the .gnu_debuglink section is different because the binaries are stripped after the copy. As for run-mozilla.sh, yes, it’s still useful for other binaries such as xpcshell.

  10. LLogic Says:

    > Mike Hommey (the author of this blog) makes new iceweasel versions available on Debian through http://mozilla.debian.net/

    With mozilla’s speeding up it’s release (eg FF5 is out today), will it be better to introduce something like, stable/beta channels like chrome, so that users do not need to keep changing mozilla.list so frequently and still get the “latest” update?

  11. glandium Says:

    > will it be better to introduce something like, stable/beta channels like chrome

    That’s what the aurora and beta channels are for. There will also be a release channel, but that needs some changes that I’m not ready to do yet. Will in the coming weeks.

  12. Shmerl Says:

    Any progress on rebranding Iceweasel back into Firefox btw?

  13. Dan Says:

    about:startup doesn’t take into account users using the profile manager does it? So any delay between the profile manager appearing and me hitting Enter will affect the results. Can that be fixed?

  14. glandium Says:

    Dan: it doesn’t. That’s something I thought about, but as i understand it, the profile manager is going to disappear in favor of an external application.

  15. gouchout Says:

    @Grzes – “Firefox 7? Sounds like 2020 in Debian then :( ”

    I’m running Debian Wheezy & I’m viewing this through FF 7.0a1.
    Sure, Iceweasel may be slow to catch up, but this isn’t an issue if you aren’t exclusively wedded to it. I’ve got FF AMD64 Nightly in my home dir – it updates automatically. There’s no dependency issues & I’m not polluting the rest of Wheezy. I’d recommend this for any Debian user – I love getting the latest version & I can always fall back on Iceweasel or Firefox4 if Nightly borks(it hasn’t for ages, if ever)

  16. gouchout Says:

    I’m trying Iceweasel 6 now, thanks to the Debian Mozilla guys at mozilla.debian.net. Excellent

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