Testing various types of Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.

[johnlgalt]

Mel, perhaps you can clarify this for me, or else link me to the info I am seeking.

I have spent the last 2 days reinstalling Windows 7 from scratch b/c of a botched app install, and I am curious about something.

I went to the Mozilla FTP site to get the latest builds of the pre-releases and / or trunk builds, and I saw something that made me stop for a second.  Specifically, with Minefield 3.7a1, thre is a Places version, a Tracemonkey version, and a trunk version.  I think Tracemonkey is the JS engine that is in 3.5, and I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that it would be in future versions as well - so, if not, is this actually a 'downgrade' of Minefield, using a 'stable' JS engine over something newer, or am I thinking in reverse, in that Minefield was originally developed with the old JS Engine and thus the Tracemonkey builds would be more stable....And what is the Places build?

IIRC, previously I was using either a trunk build or else a Places build, but I am not sure which I should be using / testing....

BTW, hopy you and yours have a safe and Happy New Year!

[mrtech]

Those may be builds used in automated testing, but I would definitely stick with the standard trunk/minefield builds.  I use them regularly with minimal issues, I've also enabled some of the latest enhancements (below):

dom.ipc.plugins.enabled: This will run plug-ins in a sub-process which should help Firefox not suck or crash as much (ie: Flash)
http://twitter.com/mrtech/status/6766459928

html5.enable and html5.* timing tweaks: should be better/faster/more accurate parsing of pages.
http://twitter.com/mrtech/status/6966260889

[mrtech]

I've tweaked this a little just now but it should also help with hacking around:

http://www.mrtech.com/forums/index.php/topic,2418.0.html

[johnlgalt]

Thanks for the info - I already have those tweaks enabled in my Minefield profile, luckily.  That last blog that you posted helps out a lot - gonna get into twitter and tweet it

Also going to be blogging about my multiple disk architecture and how to easily install the OS and have Fx / Tb / Sunbird / Songbird back an working the way it was before the OS re-install.  I'll tweet that as well.

BTW, I noticed that the last Shiretoko build 3.5.7pre was dated 12/21, and now there are 3.5.8pre builds instead.  I suppose that means that Fx is about to get updated to 3.5.7 very soon.

[mrtech]

yeah, not sure about Shiretoko, I primarily test trunk on Win/Mac and Namoroka on a 10.4 Mac.  Very stable.

[johnlgalt]

Weird.  Minefield is giving me grief on Windows, constantly crashing, 70% of the time when I try to open a new page (and one that usually involves some sort of Flash animation, now that I think about it).

I thought it was previously due to me having the Beta version of Flash installed, but on this install I have nothing but the default version availalbe as of yesterday for both Flash and Shockwave....