Wednesday

TraceMonkey and howto run two versions of firefox

It seems the next thing in browsers performance is going to be javascript performance. With the V8 that Google Chrome uses, the standard is quite high, and it seems Mozilla was working with the same approach with their TraceMonkey, which is really fast.

Now you can try TraceMonkey by downloading firefox-minefield.

Since TraceMonkey is not used by default, you need to go to about:config in the address bar, then search theses two keys: "javascript.options.jit.content", "javascript.options.jit.chrome", and press toggle true.

But since minefield crashes, how do I enjoy its speed and browse my important webs in a safe Firefox?

You can run two versions of Firefox by following these steps:

Create a new profile for firefox.
Ubuntu: firefox -profilemanager -no-remote
Windows: Goto Start >> Run >> type: firefox.exe -profilemanager -no-remote

This will start up the profile manager. Create a profile, I've called it 'minefield'.

Then we need to launch Firefox adding "-P minefield -no-remote".

Ubuntu: In the installadion dir run "firefox -P minefield -no-remote &"

Windows: Righth click on a Minefield shortcut, update the target field to look something like this: "C:\Program Files\Minefield\firefox.exe" -P minefield -no-remote