Firefox Back and Forward Now Blazingly Fast

Ramona · 2005/05/05

Thursday May 5th, 2005
Back and Forward Now Blazingly Fast

The latest nightly builds of Mozilla Firefox include a new feature that significantly improves the speed of the Back and Forward buttons. When using Back and Forward in older builds, the page is retrieved from the local cache rather than the Internet but Gecko still has to reparse the HTML and use it to rerender the page, which can take a while with more complex documents. With this new feature, the rendered page is kept in memory, which makes Back and Forward performance much faster (almost instantaneous). In addition, going back or forward to a page cached in this way shows the page exactly how it was when you left it, in compliance with section 13.13 of RFC 2616.

The blazingly fast Back and Forward feature is currently disabled by default. See Chase Phillip's weblog post for instructions on turning it on. It is hoped it will be enabled by default in time for the release of Firefox 1.1. More technical details can be found in bug 274784 (no unnecessary comments please). Experience from other browsers (Opera, Internet Explorer and Safari have similar features) has shown that this is a tricky thing to get right without breaking a lot of pages.

While almost everyone approves of the faster performance, this feature is not without controversy. At the moment, the trunk is frozen in preparation for Mozilla 1.8 Beta 2 and checkins are supposed to be restricted and controlled. Some developers feel that such a major change should not be allowed to land at this time and have argued that it should have to wait until the start of the 1.9 release cycle (after Firefox 1.1). There are also concerns that the feature is rather buggy in its current state. Meanwhile, proponents of the new feature state that it would be costly to maintain it until the start of 1.9 development and have argued that it is best to get it in now so that it can be exposed to wide testing. These discussions have led to the feature being checked in but disabled by default, a compromise which we understand has left most developers basically happy.

If you find any bugs with the improved Back and Forward feature, please file them in Bugzilla. There should be no regressions when it's disabled, so please also file bugs if that's not the case.
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Westside · 2005/05/05

Hi!
I have been testing the version based on Moz1.7.8, marked FF1.04, and that based 1.8beta2, i.e.FF1.0+. My conclusion is that, truly the second one is blazingly fast, while the other one loses by a nose. 1.03, who cares?
It is fast enough now.

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Firefox Back and Forward Now Blazingly Fast

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Westside Inactive Alumni

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Firefox Back and Forward Now Blazingly Fast

Ramona Geek Member Alumni Thread Starter

Westside Inactive Alumni

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