This reminds me of "wars" kids in my neighborhood would have when I was about ten years old. Each group of kids would think up highly elaborate plans of subterfuge, sophisticated camouflage, and spying, that, when executed, basically consisted of throwing some moldy walnuts over a fence at the other groups of kids.
What they both have in common are groups of children with too much time on their hands.
* The stop/reload button has moved to the right end of the URL bar.
* The status bar is gone; URLs appear in ghosted text on the right side of the URL bar when you hover over a link.
* You can enable an "add-on bar", which appears to be a replacement status bar that add-ons can add icons to. None of the add-ons I have installed (about 20) are making use of it, so the transition from overlaying the status bar to overlaying the add-on bar must not be automatic.
* In the Add-ons Manager, an explicit "Remove" button has replaced the small "X" icon that used to be used for uninstalling an add-on.
The performance is much better. I’m getting sub-one second app launch times, page load is much faster than safari, page render is comparable.
The app is still a bit of a bad citizen in that it doesn’t have any of the native text views allowing for system spell-check or any of the system services, and the app’s cpu usage still runs at 4% with no windows open (expected behavior is that windowless apps use 0)
And to be pedantic, there’s something still Java-y about the interface. Fonts are just a little bit bigger in places, and the main bar, despite being 7px smaller than safari’s (amazing feat, firefox dev’s) still feels chunkier.
Weird things in the interface vein: The feedback button’s dropdown hangs left automatically. Proper system behavior is to drop it down to the right, and then push it left based on the monitor’s viewport. The textfield resize grab changes the mouse cursor.
Weird stuff like that. Since it’s a beta I can understand the rough edges strapped to the oversized V12 engine. I still have nightmares about trying to run Firefox 2 on Tiger in 2005 or so.
There have been significant advances to the underlying code, see this post here by Josh Aas, Gecko platform software engineer with Mozilla Corporation:
I think moving the status bar to the location bar was a bad idea. The area in and around the location bar is already quite cluttered so I don't see the point. In many cases the bar isn't even big enough for the entire URL of the link being hovered over, unlike when it was in the status bar.
The importance of the <popular movie person> mentioned in the movie preview is directly proportional to how good the movie is going to be. e.g., "From the director of Avatar..." is probably going to be a good movie. "From the sound editor of Forrest Gump" doesn't have quite the same chances.
I can't recall what movie it was, but I once saw a trailer that touted itself as "from the company that distributed <not very good movie>." The movie proved to be terrible.
Agreed that most of these would be good components of an overall browser benchmark, but the linked benchmarks are JavaScript benchmarks only, so things like browser start-up time and chrome dimensions wouldn't apply.
When users think "fast", they think "fast" as in "fast", not "JM fast" or "TM fast". It would be better for "arewefastyet.com" to address "fast" from the point of view of the user rather than from the point of view of the Javascript engine developer.
As I understand it, arewefastyet.com was created as more of an internal/community dashboard specifically for the JIT team at Mozilla rather than to reflect on the browser as a whole to the userbase.
To supplement the comment I left regarding TurboTax (https://hackertimes.com/item?id=1783200), I thought I'd lay out exactly how and when I interact with the IRS. About 50% of my income comes from freelancing; the other 50% from a full-time job.
January 15: Send the IRS a check for 28% of the gross freelance income you made between September 1 and December 31 of the previous year along with a 1040-ES (http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040es.pdf) Also send an estimated payment to your state of about 5-7%, based on your state's income tax bracket for your income. (My state, Minnesota, has easy online payments, so there's no paperwork required.)
Between March 1 and April 15: Do your taxes. Use TurboTax; it will simplify your life. Take appropriate deductions for everything that TurboTax asks, but make sure to have documentation.
April 15: Repeat what you did on January 15, but for income received between January 1 and March 31.
June 15: Repeat January's step again, but for income from between April 1 and May 31.
September 15: Repeat January again, but for income from between June 1 and August 31.
Note that you only really need to make estimated payments if you expect to owe more than $1,000 on tax day if you were to not make estimated payments. If you owe more than $1,000 when tax day comes, you may be charged a penalty if you didn't make estimated payments. (I'm not an accountant, so your mileage may vary.)
Based in part on the tax brackets shown here: http://www.moneychimp.com/features/tax_brackets.htm and several years of adjusting my estimated taxes in order to get as close to a zero-balance as possible when I do my taxes in April.
I've used TurboTax for my return for the last five (?) years; I have a full-time job (W-2), but I also do a fair amount of freelancing (1099).
I doubt that I would be able to do my return on my own without TurboTax; it walks you through all of the deductions you can take if you have contracting income - the portion of your mortgage that applies to your home office, any whole-house improvements you made to your home (heating/roofing/etc.), any improvements you made directly to your home office, depreciation of assets used solely for your job, etc. I'm sure that the ~$50 I spend on TurboTax each year is more than offset by the money it saves me.
Honestly, even if you understand the forms well, TurboTax is decent software to manage the process. OK it's crappy software... but it's better than spreadsheets.
