Necko Has Landed!Thursday July 29th, 1999Necko, the new, modular networking library, has landed in the main branch of the CVS tree. Builds should be spun today containing the new Necko code (I tried downloading the latest win32 build from the FTP site - 1999-7-28-23-m9, and it seems corrupted, though). Necko will be stabilizing over the next few days, and the plan is to get all the functionality of M8 before spinning off an official M9 build. If you're not familiar with Necko, read up on it. Netlib was the last major piece of the code to undergo a modularization process. Does this mean that they slipped, or that they have just backed up the milestones a bit? The milestones are subject to change at will, and changing them does not mean they are 'late'. Being late seems to sound off sirens in many people (especially the pundits in the press), and is construed by the clueless as a sign of failure and shame. They have always known that introducing necko would mean that some functionality would have to be reworked, that it would take time in the near term to reap long term benefits, such as better performance and modularity. I looked through the newsgroups, and it's not clear if work on proxies made it into m9, or got traiged out. If they are _in_, I can get some of my development team to use mozilla as their normal browser, therefore getting testing done. I'd have thought that a lot of other people would be in the same situation, so it has to be in the best interests of mozilla to get the proxy stuff in as soon as poss? It's great to know that all the olde code is going away, at least. Death to the 'classic' codebase. I seriously cannot wait until M9, because of all the greatness of mozilla will be found in the later milestones. Then the press will see how great an open source browser is. Has anyone tried a necko build yet? I tried the latest working Win32 build on my local network today and boy is it fast. BeakNecko is perhaps a better name. It is considerably quicker and more responsive than pre-Necko builds... Of course it's missing a cache, proxy support, etc, etc but it's still a brilliant first step. Go the netlib guys! Dave Fiddes(forgot my login - again) Get the binary in the 1999-07-28-15-M9 directory. It's not corrupted but does that have Necko? I don't think so, since I installed it under C:\Program Files\, and it worked fine, just like older builds. Same caching bugs. I'm spinning a necko linux build now. See how far I can get. Will necko (and the rest of mozilla) allow threading (by default if possible)? It would be a nice speedup on duals (besides being trendy and cool) and could make things simpler (one thread blocks on I/O, other blocks on Xlib calls waiting for an event, other one redraws the page...) Mozilla only has one UI thread but Necko has a bunch of threads to handle the network layer, caching, etc. Making the UI multi-threaded would probably not be much of a win due to the increased complexity of the code and the fact that some platforms(Mac users please raise your hand) can't handle threads in their GUI. Having said that... Dave Hyatt would appear to have had a fruitful evening adding embedded message loops(just with PeekMessage/PostMessage on Windows for now) at strategic loopy points in the system. Just adding about 30 lines(admitedly not XP code yet) would appear to have improved the responsiveness of the UI no end. ... and the fastest browser on the Web gets yet another speed improvement! Hmmm, I wonder what it outclasses IE and Netscape by now? 10x the speed? 20x the speed? Maybe more =) -=Yusuf=- cheers wildly I tried M9 this morning (first milestone I tried), but on my machine (Mac 7500/100 Mhz, 56 Mb RAM) it runs a lot _slower_ then Communicator 4.6. It takes some 4-5 minutes to load! Maybe not enough memory reserved? cheers, Martijn (M.Thomassen@phys.uu.nl) Some of that is also do to improvements that have been made in the reflowing/repainting code so that boxes update only themselves and not the whole window.... It's not all Necko, but Necko certainly is a good improvement. The app will really be tremendously "fast" (in this case, responsive in the UI) when Hyatt (or some compadre thereof) lands the new fix that causes the UI to catch certain events correctly.... Hyatt says his changes make the UI 100% responsive; every event fires, the progress bar updates while the rest of the UI is working, etc. M's 9 and 10 should be when people start seeing the benefits of optimization of events (in layman's terms, you'll see the thing blaze). Still missing the nfs: URL-scheme. At least very important in the Unix-world... smb:-URL would be also a good thing (IE5 supports them)... (This is hyatt.) What I did was really just a hack to demonstrate that Gecko needs to make its content sink processing a little more fine-grained. It can't hold off inserting things into the frame tree (which is what it does right now with tables). Expect some nice boosts by M10 especially. In the meantime, the box improvements + necko will make M9 substantially faster than M8. Is this why gecko won't draw a list until all the elements have loaded? That certainly needs to be fixed... any idea on time-scales? -BenRI bredelin@ucla.edu Dude, you rock Hyatt. I've been a 'lurker' on the mozilla lists for awhile, and have always respected your insites when the entire conception of the new Mozilla was being formed. Thank you _very_ much for the Gecko speed improvements! I downloaded M6 and M7 and was very depressed at the slow speed of XUL and the scriptable chrome system; I thought that the interpreted nature of the chrome system was going to make things very slow, and the speed of these two milestones confirmed my fears. However, I just downloaded M8, and the thing is damned FAST! I'm once again very excited about Mozilla, and am learning all I can about XPCom, XPConnect, and the XPToolkit system. I'm a very experienced Java developer, but a very inexperienced C++ developer, so I've had to sit on the sidelines somewhat in Mozilla development. However, with the new Blackwood project to allow Mozilla scripted with Java components, I'm very excited that I can begin to use Mozilla as a web-operating system platform. Thanks. I just download the Macintosh version of Necko, but it freezes on startup. It doesn't lock my computer up or anything, it just seems to die. Oh well...wait for tonight's build, I guess. I posted that before I saw the message from Troy Chevalier that it wasn't an option. Sorry 'bout that. :) Sounds encouraging either way. don't install the latest necko builds in folder or directory hierarchies with spaces... e.g. c:\"program files"\netscape this applies to mac and windows.. bug has been filed and fix should show up in nightly builds in the next few days. thx chris h. I know everyone has the FTP site bookmarked but me, but could someone link to the darn thing? Being new to programing, Is necko used in everyday use of Moz.? Or is it for Lans, Wans ect. |