Simon Willison’s Weblog

Mozilla 1.7 RC 1

There are some interesting tid-bits hidden away in the release notes for the new Mozilla 1.7 RC 1 release. The following in particular caught my eye:

Mozilla 1.7 size and performance have improved dramatically with this release. When compared to Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla 1.7 RC 1 is 7% faster at startup, is 8% faster at window open time, has 9% faster pageloading times, and is 5% smaller in binary size.

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Support for server push of XML documents using multipart/x-mixed-replace and XMLHttpRequest.

[...]

This release has a new SVG backend. The feature is not yet enabled in the mozilla.org releases but developers may wish to compile with this feature enabled.

Server push of XML documents? Sounds like it could make for an interesting twist on the remote scripting idea. Hopefully the performance improvements will show up in the next release of Firefox. As for SVG support, the sooner that makes it in to Mozilla stable the sooner XUL will be able to realistically compete with the upcoming rich client platforms from Macromedia and Microsoft.