Mozilla might have made a mistake to name a project. Well, there is no room to complain because my company is kinda like alcoholic drinks. However, what’s about “Mindfield”?
Mindfield is the codename of the developmental version of Mozilla Firefox 3.1 by Mozilla Organization. According to many people’s test drives and my own test drive, it is sometime surprisingly faster than the fastest stable web browser in the market now.
Generally, many people in the web development industry know that either Safari/Chrome or Opera is the fastest stable browser on earth. I had no objection to that until I saw Mindfield in action. My first impression is that Mindfield don’t let you even think about the speed of what are you opening. From my testing, Mindfield can open the official website of Ubuntu 2 times faster than Safari where both browsers may use cache.
In conclusion, it may not be stable as it is developmental/experimental in my perspective but it can be the toughest challenger in the web browser wars.

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Finally, Mozilla decided to release Firefox 3 Beta 1. It has so far caused any significant trouble.  Although I haven’t tested on Linux and Windows because I am very busy as the end of term is drawing close to its end, Firefox 3 does give me the good impression and it makes me keep trying.

I’m running it on Mac OS X 10.4.11 (32-bit). I can clearly see that its UI has been improved but its download manager is somewhere needs improvement. And sometimes, a scroll bar inside the display panel is not properly rendered. Its UI also don’t really work well with some languages like Japanese. At the moment, I cannot really say much about rendering speed. However, as far as I can see, some JavaScript instructions does not work at all or they work improperly. I’m not 100% sure but the good example is a web-embeded WYSIWYG text editor. I found this problem in Movable Type 4.01. Well, it is not Firefox’s fault, by the way.

Aside from the technical problem, Firefox 3 adds support in word warping for some languages like Thai but the font is displayed at the size of ants. It is damn small in some sites.

Since Firefox 3 starts using SQLite to store various stuff, I can see that Firefox become slow just the beginning of use.

Later today, I tried the same version on Debian 4. I haven’t done much test but I was impressed. At the first time running, it incompletely rendered CSS of the front page. I was so touched to forget to save the screen shot. What the hell!?!?

At the moment, personally, I think Firefox 3 Beta 1 needs improvement in its UI rendering and Gecko engine 1.9. Firefox 2 is now still way ahead of Firefox 3 in the term of stability and correctness of output.

Revision History
2007.11.25: Firstly published
2007.11.25: Add the review of Firefox 3 beta 1 on Linux

Recently, I have chance to try the forth beta of KDE 4. My impression? It is way better than KDE 3.5+. It is now fully using the composition feature used to be experimental when KDE 3 was released. Now, we can see that KDE 4 try not to stick with the old fashion of GUI for OSs and make it somehow better that its (apparently supposed) model Windows Vista’s Desktop Management System. However, as I can see from KDE 4 on unstable Debian GNU/Linux 4, the GUI in general is kind of way too new for me. But, I hate it? No. It is something making me want to use KDE 4 more (if I don’t have to keep my server stable all the time by running stable Debian GNU/Linux 4.)

For more information to entertain yourself, try to read more about it and take a sneak peek on KDE 4 at http://kde.org/announcements/announce-4.0-beta4.php.

It’s been a while that I have VMWare Fusion. I use Windows XP (on VM) for testing and working while I’m using Debian 4 Lenny/Sid for testing new packages before the stable release come out. VMWare Fusion, as far as I can see, still has the number of bugs. Sometimes, I cannot turn the machine off due to the interrupt from Fusion and leave me no choice to do force shutdown.

Before the story about Mac OS X 10.4.10, the performance of Debian and Windows XP is something I should mention first. The latest build of Windows XP is known as stable, reliable and useful more than its predecessor, except Windows 2000. However, in the world of virtual machines, Windows XP consumes more CPU time and memory, comparing to Debian GNU/Linux. I found no problem with Linux system so far. But Windows is hell a lot slower. And in my testing, I’m running VMs on MacBook running Intel Duo Core 2.0 GHz with 1 GiB of RAM. The number of programs running concurrently along with Windows XP are 25% less than the number of programs running concurrently along with Debian. However, Debian still responds slightly faster that Windows. I will leave the conclusion up to you guys, the readers.

Now, bugs on Mac OS X 10.4.10 are rarely to see and I don’t think many people really care about but I do. Mac OS X 10.4.10 has problems.

1. Spotlight sometimes causes the Finder to relaunched. I don’t really know what happens. My educational guess is that there is timeout while Spotlight is initializing.
2. Frozen Processes/Applications usually happen when a machine runs at the maximum CPU speed and consumes lots of physical memory. My educational guess is memory paging probably crashes while killing processes is called. And because Mac OS X seems to design the way that does not often disclose any crashing information to the users.

Aside notes:

1. In my opinion, Mac and Linux are pretty much similar. Many people are tended to buy Mac because it looks nice but they eventually suffer from the difference between Mac and Windows. Eventually, things all turns out that many people really installs Windows via Bootcamp or VM applications like Parallel or Fusion for working or everyday uses. I still don’t understand that why people want to spend more money on what they cannot utilize the ability of what they purchase.
2. I personally recommend Linux since there are the number of substitute applications which are widely used nowadays. I also personally disagree of purchase of Mac if you have no idea what you want to do specifically on Mac. For my personal reason of purchase Mac, I found out that programming on Windows was not funny at all and I had to switch to Linux almost every time. However, since back then Linux has limited support on multimedia in the Windows-specific formats or protocols. It is really pain in my ass. Mac is the solution because it is integrated the ability of UNIX system, which I can work on, and the partial ability of Windows supporting multimedia and a number of specific software which are only available on Windows and Mac such as Adobe Creative Suite 2.
3. Recent announcements from EA showed that there exists a number of games on Mac platform such that we can leave our Windows alone.