Mozilla Unleashes JaegerMonkey Enabled Firefox 4 279
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has published the first Firefox 4 build that integrates a new JavaScript engine that aims to match the performance in IE9 and reduces the gap to Safari, Opera and Chrome. This is really the big news we have been waiting for all along with Firefox 4 and it appears that the JavaScript performance is pretty dramatic and seems to beat IE9 at least as far as ConceivablyTech shows. Good to see Mozilla back in the game." The Mozilla blog gives a good overview of the improvements this brings; Tom's Hardware also covers the release.
The Slashdot Firefox Paradox (Score:5, Interesting)
Ironically, the primary site for which I really need a faster Javascript engine is Slashdot. For a heavily-commented article I switch to Chrome.
Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox (Score:5, Informative)
Switch to old-style comments viewing system... I just get a dump of comments, nested appropriately. Makes for much nicer reading on a non-mobile device, albeit being a bit more bandwidth intensive initially.
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Ditto.
Plain text slashdot is the way to go. And I use Mozilla/SeaMonkey which seems to operate faster than Firefox, and has built-in Usenet support.
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Agreed. Even on mobile, it's much easier to go through comment threads than rely on javascript to handle it properly.
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My trick is to load up the /. front page, then open the articles in a new tab. This hides the bandwidth usage enough that when I'm done scanning, the first article should've finished loading and I can read that while the rest of the tabs load.
I do dislike the javascript comment system for that reason - t
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For me in Firefox loading a Slashdot page in the background locks it up for several seconds. It seems to start about 2 seconds after the page starts loading (ie if I click quickly I can open more pages in the background) and then it locks until (I think) the page finishes loading. So this problem makes it useless. Firefox 3.6.8.
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Switch to old-style comments viewing system...
How exactly do you do that? I've tried turning on and off every god damn setting in the preferences pages, and the only thing that doesn't seem to change at all is how the comments are displayed.
Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox (Score:5, Informative)
Go to http://slashdot.org/my/comments [slashdot.org], and select "Slashdot Classic Discussion System", Display Mode=Nested, Sort=Highest First, and Threshold=1. Then go to http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=edithome [slashdot.org] and select "Use Classic Index".
You'll now have good old classic /., the way God intended.
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Neat. Thanks!
Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox (Score:4, Informative)
Ironically, the primary site for which I really need a faster Javascript engine is Slashdot. For a heavily-commented article I switch to Chrome.
Is chrome the only broswer that has problems with the idle.slashdot comment thread. It anytime I try to open a closed comment, it refreshes the page and only gives me the comment, it doesn't expand the comment inline like it does in a normal comment thread. I've always been to lazy to try other broswers.
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All browsers cry when they hit Idle. I don't think it's actually a code problem, I think everything cries at the sight of Idle.
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The site of Idle, surely?
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I'm using FF on slashdot for ages never had a "slow" feeling o.o
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What's so demanding on slashdot? All I can think of is that you're running a browser on a sam coupe, or that your machine must be swapping so much that all javascript is horribly slow.
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There is a option in the account settings to control how many comments are loaded. Mine loads 250 at a time.
In a Beta? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Alpha is when code is released in-house for testing, beta is when it's released to outsiders for testing. Presumably one wouldn't release a beta unless the features were not only completed, but tested in alpha.
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The build numbering system in the Windows package manager is designed around major.minor.build. That simple sequential number is the third number, the first two are just there to make marketing happy. What annoys me is that last number is only 16 bits, so I can't just use the Subversion version number for it, and when I'm using SVN I'd rather stick with just it's numbering system even for builds and such.
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You do realize 10000 is actually much less informative than 1.9.12.2152 do you ?
Let's see about that :
A. 10000 : it gives us one, and only one piece of info, this is the 10,000th version of the software. That's all. It could be 10 major versions over 10 years or 1 major version corrected 9999 times in a month.
You have NO idea what happened to this software !
And that's from a professional point of view.
But let's go a little further : what's t
Re:In a Beta? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:In a Beta? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's a novel approach. Normally when *I* drink Jaeger all night, I end up shitting in the fucking shower in the morning.
Seriously. That stuff is like using a brass-bristle brush on the inside of your bowels and then using clamps to pry your asshole open to give the residue unimpeded egress.
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Like version numbers, alpha/beta/etc are subject to interpretation...
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What you say is in line with my traditional view of alpha/beta. I think you need to accept that it's a lot more complicated than that in large software projects. Often betas are released to get customer feedback. That's an important feedback loop if you really want to nail your scenarios. Sometimes you're simply missing something.
But in this case, yea, I'd tend to agree that a lot of features are landing late. If they were being stabilized and turned on by default, that would be a lot different. Oh well.
Kinda Sad (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone else kinda sad that now Firefox is playing catchup. When no one cared about JS performance, the Open Source crowd was king, then all of a sudden big corporate money was poured into JS performance and now FOSS is lagging behind.
It seems that FOSS can't compete head to head with corporate backed projects, if the corporation actually cares. For example, MS didn't care about JS performance in IE6/IE7 and Firefox was king. Now, Microsoft is trying to compete in the browser space again and IE9 is catching up in features and exceeding Firefox in certain respects.
This is coming from a very long time Firefox user, but I have definitely switched to Chrome for general web browsing. I stick with Firefox for development though because of the large amount of niche plugins specifically tailored for development.
Compatibility (Score:4, Informative)
Firefox lagged chrome mostly because firefox cares a LOT more about compatibility, and adding all this crazy JIT compiled JS stuff is hard when you're trying to support all the introspection features which people have been using in firefox.
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Firefox lagged chrome mostly because firefox cares a LOT more about compatibility, and adding all this crazy JIT compiled JS stuff is hard when you're trying to support all the introspection features which people have been using in firefox.
Firefox cares about compatibility [mozilla.org]? Are you kidding me? Reported: 2000-03-28
Doing a basic html element wrong for 10 years is not compatibility.
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Firefox lagged chrome mostly because firefox cares a LOT more about compatibility, ...
I wish Firefox could display my Netflix queue properly. It's impossible to delete an item that shows the DVD/Bluray listbox: the delete icon is lost.
I was forced to use IE but now there's the IE Tab Plus addon that invokes the embedded IE engine in a FF tab. Mediocre solution.
Re:Compatibility (Score:5, Informative)
The reason for that is that Mozilla is honest. Unfortunately, honesty is rarely appreciated.
Opera and Webkit just added little tricks to pass the ACID 3 tests. They don NOT really correctly support all the stuff that ACID 3 is testing.
It's comparable with graphics drivers that include tricks to score higher in specific benchmarks, but do not really make the graphics card faster. It's simply cheating.
Re:Compatibility (Score:4, Interesting)
What's interesting about conformance tests is that unless they're exhaustive the only thing you can tell from them is how much a browser cares about conformance... by looking at the score when the test is first published, before people go and fix just the issues that are tested for.
As far as I know Opera is not "cheating" on its sputnik results but is in fact "cheating" (in the effect of implementing effectively bare-minimum functionality needed to pass) on some of the Acid3 bits. Precisely the ones Firefox is not passing, as it happens.
Re:Compatibility (Score:5, Informative)
Focussing too much on the acid3 test, or any other scorecard list of features, is bad for Web Standards.
You'll find that the Webkit developers have outright states that they have bare-minimum implementations for some standards just to pass the last few points of acid3 that isn't really usable. Hixie listed as one of his bullet points of lessons learned to focus more on useful web standards rather than just any old non-widely-implemented standard.
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Re:Kinda Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Why the heck should anyone be sad? One of the reasons open source is so important to the industry is to prevent the state of the art in software from becoming moribund. Microsoft practically stopped working on IE once it had what it thought was an unbreakable monopoly on browsers. Imagine where we'd be today without Firefox and the Apache Group. It might be a world of IE6 browsers served from VB ASPs on IIS 5.
Even people who don't use F/OSS benefit from it.
Re:Kinda Sad (Score:4, Insightful)
I just threw up in my mouth a little.
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It might be a world of IE6 browsers served from VB ASPs on IIS 5.
:: cry :: Make him stop, mommy!
Re:Kinda Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Last I checked both WebKitCore and V8 were faster than IE9 and were both open source (the former LGPL and the latter NewBSD). I don't think this is a FOSS vs. Proprietary thing, just a Mozilla vs. Everyone Else thing.
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Big corporation and FOSS aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. I use Chromium on my Linux machines. It's open source, and it's blazing fast.
Re:Kinda Sad (Score:4, Interesting)
Isn't Chrome open source? And isn't IE9 still unreleased?
Look, there's nothing wrong with Firefox. Performance improvements are lagging a bit behind Chrome, but obviously they're working on it. It's still a great browser.
Safari, Chrome, and Firefox are all great browsers, and they're all (at least to some extent) open source browsers. When a story comes out about how Firefox is preparing a new release with substantial performance improvements, I think you have to bend over backward to turn it into a sad anti-FOSS story.
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Exactly. Opera is also (from reports) a great browser and IE9 is making great strides catching up with the rest.
It also looks to be close as to when Firefox and IE9 are released to see which browser will be first to have a major release supporting hardware acceleration.
Exciting times.
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Chromium is not proprietary.
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I'm pretty sure there's a name for this kind of argument, but it's basically a regular fallacy.
Firefox JS performance has nothing to do with being open source. Javascript did not matter for a very long time, it was only used for seldom tiny effects. That's why Firefox JS engine was not super high performance (albeit still much faster than anyone elses at that time), because it would have been seen as totally overkill.
Things have changed and Firefox JS is adapting. Since it's using an old codebase, it's not
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It seems that FOSS can't compete head to head with corporate backed projects, if the corporation actually cares.
Since when was javascript performance the most important feature in a web browser? If you compare all of the features Firefox 4 has to Chrome/IE/Safari besides javascript performance (which is very comparable anyways), you'll see that Firefox isn't lagging at all.
Competition (Score:2)
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Firefox has support for MathML (and has done for a long time) which WebKit and Chrome are only just starting to introduce. Firefox has just/is landing support for using SVG in img tags.
Firefox improved support for the ARIA accessibility standard in FF3, beating the support in other browsers and with no support in Chrome 1 -- http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/aria-tests/ARIA-SafariaOperaIEFF.html [paciellogroup.com] with an updated list at http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/?p=474y [paciellogroup.com].
There are a lot of standards out there and diff
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Also, Firefox were first to start to investigate and write code to use hardware accelerated graphics through Direct2D/DirectWrite.
At the end of the day, who was first does not matter. What matters is that we have decent performance (JavaScript, graphics and other areas) and decent standards support. Most of that was either pushed by Opera or one of the open source browsers/engines (Firefox, Chrome or WebKit). This is good for the customers as everyone gets these improvements to varying degrees no matter whi
The big news we have been waiting for? (Score:2)
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It's not really news we've been waiting for anyway when all the work has been public all along.
Take a shot of Jaeger (Score:3, Informative)
And cheers to the release!
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Were you in a fraternity?
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Funny you mention that.
I imagine Chrome had a really cool name for the javascript engine build that would make me think of advanced sentient computer systems processing my JS at blinding speeds while still deciding on whether or not to wipe humanity from the Earth....
Then I see the name JaegerMonkey and envisioned a drunk little monkey inside my computer throwing poo at the screen....
what hardware for video (Score:2)
Anyone know what hardware they were using in the demo video (tom's hardware) to get the 12fps and 91fps comparatively. Is this the kind of performance increase the average user will see or just people with high end systems?
4.0b5 on Snow Leopard (Score:4, Interesting)
So far as I remember, this was an Apple issue not necessarily a Mozilla issue, but still disappointing.
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Huh. I get Safari=7, Chrome=5, and Firefox3.6.9=3 running that test on a pretty recent MacBook Pro - current stable versions of each, I believe.
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8 core Mac Pro with 10GBs of RAM and I only get 5fps on Safari and 2fps on Firefox.
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Err...it tells me 17fps. Windows 7, FF 3.6.9
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I'm betting that screen resolution makes a pretty decent difference for some systems - FWIW, my numbers were at 1920x1080. All tests should be valid when compared against different browsers on the same machine, though.
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Mozilla chose DirectX not OpenGL (Score:2)
...for their acceleration. Pretty friggin sad.
It is a MOZILLA issue.
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On Windows they use DirectX and also use Direct2D/DirectWrite if available (Vista or later).
On Linux, they use XRender (2D) and OpenGL.
On Mac, they use the relevant Mac APIs, including IIRC Quartz.
This is like what games do when they choose between DirectX 8/9, DirectX 10/11 and OpenGL. I bet Chromium, WebKit and Qt do similar things for their accelerated graphics.
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72 fps , FF4b4 Linux, i7620m
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should have included it but oh well:
6 FPS , chrome 6.x Linux i7 620M
i'd say firefox is a bit faster. lol.
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92 FPS with
Browser: Firefox 4.0b4 (64-bit), haven't gotten around to compile the latest beta yet
OS: Debian GNU/Linux amd64
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3.6 GHz
GPU: Nvidia GTX 260
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Firefox 3.6.9.
Ubuntu 10.04.1
Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz
GeForce 9400 GT (with nvidia driver)
Are We Fast Yet? (Score:5, Interesting)
Check out http://arewefastyet.com/ [arewefastyet.com] to see the speeds of several JavaScript engines compared to Mozilla's.
Re:Are We Fast Yet? (Score:5, Interesting)
OMG, all the 32bit Browsers beat the 64bit browsers!
Why did I bother for a 64Bit Windows 7 OS!
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Re:Are We Fast Yet? (Score:4, Informative)
The JaegerMonkey team understands why it's currently slower on 64-bit than on 32-bit. One reason is that the larger pointers on 64-bit systems don't play well with the value representation [mozilla.com]. If that can be fixed, perhaps by using a different value representation in 64-bit versions, it might end up faster on 64-bit than on 32-bit.
They're working on speeding up the 64-bit version. They have to, because of the plan to ship Firefox 4 as a 64-bit application for Mac OS X 10.6 ;)
(Btw, arewefastyet.com shows speeds of naked JavaScript engines, which are usually slightly faster than JavaScript engines inside web browsers.)
Wrong versions in summary (Score:4, Informative)
The linked article is about 4.0b6-pre which is the first version to include JaegerMonkey. The other two links are to articles about the public release of 4.0b5, which doesn't include JM (it's headline feature is really the DirectDraw support on Windows).
4.06-pre isn't currently being pushed to regular beta testers AFAIK.
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
Who cares? You can't make a guess at answering that question? Okay I'll give you the answer: everyone but you.
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Re:I Want Advanced Blocking Capabilities (Score:4, Informative)
Install ad-block and noscript.
Re:I Want Advanced Blocking Capabilities (Score:5, Funny)
A /. viewer who uses firefox, but hasn't heard of ad-block or noscript?
Todo list:
[ ] Turn in geek card
[ ] Write a will
[ ] Buy shotgun
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Are you joking?
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Is the multiprocessor functionality of chrome optional? That is, I like the fact that a bad page ( usually bad java script or flash ) can only hang one core and not my entire processor.
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What?
I have 8 cores. I open 5 tabs, creating 5 processes. One tab crashes. One process crashes. The remaining 4 remain as they are; usually, it's quite simple to regain the crashed page by loading it.
With stock firefox, that usually means pulling each of those 5 pages out of history again, after restarting the whole browser.
As far as "hanging one core and not the whole processor" you do realize that in a modern operating system, processes are not inextricably linked to a core? If your whole system locks due
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Also does the FF3.0 JS engine work on AMD64 linux yet?
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Agreed. They are working on multiprocess, it's called Electrolysis [mozilla.org]. It's very quiet, so I imagine they're behind schedule. It's also my impression that it's a very small team.
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The point is that multiprocess, except for plugins (which is already done) isn't a big advantage at all.
They actually implemented it on Fennec, that's Firefox mobile if you prefer, because it would yield an advantage here.
On regular desktops, not so much, in fact, it uses quite some memory. It's not because "others do it" that it's necessarily "teh future embrace or die!".
It also encourage sloppy programming since it's more fault tolerant, chrome tabs crash all the damn time in comparison to firefox which b
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Yes, I've had Chrome tabs crash on me many times as well. Actually Firefox Betas are more stable.
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It's not completely quiet, the Fennec (Firefox Mobile) beta or alpha version already has it. And they are working on improving on it. Multiprocess is very high on my list though, It it is probably the feature I want the most.
The trick is Firefox is the browser which uses the least amount of memory by some test (there are very little tests being done). This is where multiprocess is going to be interresting to watch, I think that is why they started on mobile.
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And it usually downloads the adverts before deciding to hide them
Hyperbolic flamebait (Score:4, Insightful)
the only thing Firefox has going for it is adblock and the huge extension repository. Even then, its debatable
Apparently access to source code and the ability to be compiled and run on platforms like BSD and Solaris doesn't count for anything any more.
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Apparently access to source code and the ability to be compiled and run on platforms like BSD and Solaris doesn't count for anything any more.
If you are one of the 97% of the web who doesn't care about this, yep, that's exactly right. This hardly makes it hyperbolic flamebait because Firefox contains 1 feature that you personally benefit from--all of the other features he mentioned are almost "must-haves" for mum and pops and their flash games.
You should be more interested in making the use of FOSS more widespread for good reasons; not the pretty fact that you can install it on whichever random OS you choose to run on your desktop.
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No, it really doesn't, especially when 90% of the users are non-programmers who just want it to work.
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Chrome does not support the HTTPS Everywhere extension. Once it does, I may switch. But privacy is my first concern when using the web.
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You mean Javascript? ;)
I care a lot about it. As a partial JS developer it means I can do more without lagging the heck out of my users. I can create more complicated fun stuff instead of doing bare minimum. I can run that extra DOM check that I was scared to do previously looking for items that match some jQuery string. There's just so much more than that and those just sound like the "lazy" stuff.
(It's not about laziness of coding... more: "I can't add this because..." -- I do interactive stuff in Fl
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As a partial JS developer
Which part? Or should I better not ask?
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YHBT?
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They're getting pretty close to matching chrome and safari: http://arewefastyet.com/ ... and getting there without breaking backwards compatibility horribly like chrome and safari have.
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I wish I could mod this flamebait. The early preview speed tests for IE9 compete with Chrome very well.
Re:Back in the game? (Score:4, Informative)
According to http://arewefastyet.com/ [arewefastyet.com] they have come from being 2x-3x slower than Safari and Chrome a few months ago (v8/sunspider benchmarks) to being within a few percent to 25% of Safari and Chrome, depending on the benchmark.
I think that's pretty impressive - it basically puts them in the right ball game now, and narrows the performance gap to the barely noticeable range for most practical purposes.
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If they do decide to play follow the leader with the tab bar, I hope they include the option to have it the normal way. The taps-at-the-top UI bugs me as I then have to move my mouse that much more to switch tabs.
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actually chrome has a real adblock now
but i'd still stick to firefox for other reasons