MozillaZine

Unofficial Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1 Windows Build Optimized for Pentium III

Wednesday August 13th, 2003

Jack Comics writes: "Jack Comics commissioned scragz, a MozillaZine reader, to create an updated, unofficial, Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1 milestone build for the Microsoft Windows platform, optimized for the Pentium III. This build contains the original Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1 milestone along with the additional patches for bugs 210229 and 212556. Please note that while this build is optimized for the Pentium III processor and above, it will run just fine on any Pentium or above processor. If you're interested, you can download it here."

#1 version optimized for athlon

by octupe

Wednesday August 13th, 2003 2:15 AM

Will anyone build an optimized version for athlons? would it be worth it? are you gonna get much more speed? I guess more speed is always good :)

#2 Re: version optimized for athlon

by Sho

Wednesday August 13th, 2003 3:22 AM

Just visit the Mozilla Firebird Builds forum here hat MozillaZine (click the little "FB" at the top of the front page); there are plenty of optimized builds (milestone releases and nightlies) available for a variety of plattforms. Thanks to many contributors.

#3 JVM integration

by jeti

Wednesday August 13th, 2003 3:34 AM

Would it be possible to recompile Mozilla to unmanaged .NET byte code? That way it would be theoretically possible to get an optimized build for any architeture running Windows.

Has anyone tried anything like that?

#4 Re: JVM integration

by Racer

Wednesday August 13th, 2003 7:12 AM

It is my understanding that Mozilla for Win32 is moving away from using proprietary compilers (Visual Studio/.NET) towards gcc. I expect that in the future, most development and final builds will be done with gcc. As a result of this, it is my guess that VS support will probably fall into disrepair unless someone (like yourself) sees the need to keep everything up-to-date with regular test builds using VS.

#6 Re: JVM Integration

by RobertM

Wednesday August 13th, 2003 10:40 AM

JVM integration is not related to the .NET Framework, and I'm not quite sure what you're aksing. Let me assure you, Mozilla is *not* .NET-managed in any way; the closest it comes to this, perhaps, is that Windows binaries are compiled with Visual C++ (version 6), but that doesn't matter. It *can* be compiled with Visual C++ .NET ("7"), but that still produces unmanaged code.

As for moving away from VC++, you can now use GCC to compile it--with mixed results. Visual C++ is still the only thing that's officially supported as a "tier 1" platform; GCC is not, and it's more of a thing for fun for now. I'm not sure if they have plans to eventually move away from VC++, but I don't see it--no matter how much I wish they would. :) In the mean time, compiling without VC++ leads to incompatibility with plugins and the like.

#7 Re: JVM integration

by jeti

Wednesday August 13th, 2003 10:57 AM

The login messed up the title. It's from an old message.

AFAIK even unmanaged code can be compiled as bytecode for the .NET runtime. Ideally getting a build optimized for your system would be as easy as starting Mozilla (with an installed .NET runtime).

I'm not sure how well this works in practice. But MS seems to be careful to offer a migration path for existing C++ applications.

#5 Re: There is a MozDev project...

by gregoryk

Wednesday August 13th, 2003 8:59 AM

This build rules. It opens as fast or faster than IE6.0 and _way_ faster than previous FB/Mozilla builds.

#8 Re: Re: There is a MozDev project...

by asa

Wednesday August 13th, 2003 11:12 AM

gregoryk, can you run startup and new window performance tests on this build and compare the times with the 0.6.1 release builds? I'm curious if it's actually faster than the official release.

I've seen several people commenting about the improvements to performance that can be gained by optimizing for a particular CPU architecture. Has anyone done any comparisons between one of these "optimized" builds and an equivalent not-optimized build? I'm not interested in anecdotal evidence but rather, real hard data gathered with tools like

http://www.mozilla.org/performance/measureStartup.html or mozilla -chrome file:///drive:/mozilla/xpfe/test/winopen.xul

--Asa

#10 Re: There is a MozDev project...

by gregoryk

Wednesday August 13th, 2003 12:53 PM

I used my TIMEX IRONMAN and my thumbs. I'll look into doing the official timing scheme as you mentioned, but I have a junkload of extensions and the non default profile which may cause differences. I'll look into removing those.

#9 P4 and Athlon Builds

by jedbro

Wednesday August 13th, 2003 11:57 AM

Should point out that over in the Firebird Build Forum there are also some excelent optimized builds for Athlons and P4 ;)

If you have a p4 I suggest one of AB's builds, thay are extremely fast!

cheeers

#11 WOW !!!

by xerxes

Friday August 15th, 2003 11:24 AM

Im using this build on an AMD Athalon and it just rips. I thought there would be a mild improvement but ... WOW !?! I'm sticking with this build until firebird hits 1.0 optomized for wintel. I can't believe it.

#12 Re: WOW !!!

by tseelee

Friday August 15th, 2003 4:11 PM

You should hope that's NOT the case. ;-)