We had an application in production running on I. You must be wondering who the hell is still on IE6.

But we have a very heavy UI with touch screen keyboard functionality and our UI consists of Yahoo’s YUI 2.7 and JSP and JSTL.  Initially we never supported Firefox and then we did not had bandwidth to fix the whole application.

The new version of application when launched had a very bad performance in field with page load times > 15 sec.

Within our facility , even on QA server we had load time of < 7 seconds on IE. The same application loaded in <4 sec on firefox.

In Firefox 3.5, Mozilla introduced a new high-performance JavaScript engine called TraceMonkey that uses just-in-time compilation and an optimization technique called tracing to deliver faster JavaScript execution.

A decision was taken to upgrade the application to support Firefox 3.5 and we updated the application.

We are scheduled to go live end of this week with new version but QA and beta testers are pretty pleased with what they are seeing in terms of performance improvement.

Will keep you posted.

I upgraded my browser to  new version of Firefox 3.5 and then upgraded all the add ons which I was using , particularly Firebug . I  am now using Firebug 1.4.0b4

There has been some changes in the new version of firebug as compared to old 1.3 version. You can read the changes from their blog here FireBug1.4

One of the problems I faced was activating the tabs. I had to explicitly activate the script tab and the console tab.

Second issue was debugger. My debugger was not running even though i had set the break points. When I went through the blog post  of firebug, I understood the reason.

You would have to enable the firebug by either popping it in a new window or always keeping it up. If you minimize it , it will assume that you are suspending firebug and will not get activated.

Since my buttons were at bottom of page, I had to minimize the firebug which caused the debugger to be suspended.

So I popped the firebug in new window , reloaded the page and my debugger starts to work.

Happy firebugging!!!