Firefox 4 Release Candidate

[senordhuff]

Hi,

Have you done any performance testing of Smartclient 6.5.1 against the Firefox 4 Release Candidate? We tried it out this morning and noticed some significant performance problems with loading data that causes no problems with Firefox 3.6.

[Isomorphic]

We don't plan to test / address issues in that version with new browsers. It's almost 3 years old.

[senordhuff]

Ok, fair enough. Not really exactly what I wanted to hear since we are still using 6.5.1 ( for good reasons we can discuss in more detail off list if you like). Surely we are not the only paying customers you have still using 6.5.1 in production , are we?

However, can you at least comment on what you've done with Firefox 4 performance testing with Smartclient 8.0?

We could have a very serious problem on our hands and I need to know how to address it.

[Isomorphic]

We don't really do deep-dive testing with pre-releases. We depend on very little correct behavior from browsers, and performance testing pre-releases is almost always a waste of time (debug code is often still present).

With the testing we've done with FF4 so far, we haven't seen performance issues. Your issue with 6.5.1 may well vanish in the final release, if not, you'll first need to isolate what the actual issue is.

[senordhuff]

Have you done any testing yet with the Firefox 4 Release Candidate? It just came out yesterday. If you haven't, do you plan to sometime in the near future?

Since we have a potentially very large problem on our hands, it would be nice to know you've verified on your side the Release Candidate looks ok.

[senordhuff]

hi there,

So, now that Firefox 4 is final, I took a deeper look at this. I can confirm that Smartclient 6.5.1 has major performance issues with Firefox 4. I'm seeing DSRequests with an elapsed time of 40 seconds on the RPC tab that normally take 10 seconds or less with Firefox 3.6.

So, it sounds like you aren't supporting Smartclient 6.5.1 in any significant way anymore. But, if you have any other users with SmartClient 6.5.1 in production like us, you may want to let people know of these issues with Firefox 4.

So, my next step was to use a patched 8.0 nightly that (sort of) works for us to test in our dev environment. And, with the patched 8.0 nightly on Firefox 4, it appears there are no performance issues. So, something has clearly been optimized or fixed to work better with Firefox 4 in between 6.5.1 and 8.0.


One item I should note with regards to 8.0 and 6.5.1 is that it appears there are issues with the dev console. I get this error using both versions of Smartclient when the dev console is open

Permission denied for <https://www.{mydomain}.com> to get property Window.screenX
https://www.{mydomain}.com/isoversion/6.5.1.1/isomorphic/system/modules/ISC_Core.js?isc_version=6.5.1.js
Line 989

On the off chance you do plan to look at 6.5.1 issues with Firefox 4, I did see these "too much recursion" errors when testing with 6.5.1

too much recursion
https://www.{mydomain}.com/isoversion/6.5.1.1/isomorphic/system/modules/ISC_Core.js?isc_version=6.5.1.js
Line 627


too much recursion
https://www.{mydomain}.com/isoversion/6.5.1.1/isomorphic/system/development/ISC_Core.js?isc_version=6.5.1.js
Line 3024