So, there’s been some complaining on the Web about FF 3.5. With 3.0, the FireFox team pulled out a great browser that was faster, standards compliant (close enough) and a better alternative to IE 7′s aging alternative.
But 3.5 seemed like a rushed release. I mean, 3.0 was chugging along just fine (for me at least) and suddenly we went from 3.0.x to 3.5? It’s not like there was anything (beyond an engine upgrade) worthy of a that big a release. Make it a 3.1 or something.
I digress. So, what’s the reason to hate 3.5? JavaScript execution. Seems there’s an issue that makes life harder for Web developers. If you’ve got a JS include in your Web page and there’s an interpreter issue (e.g. typo in a function name) or an Ajax timing issue (e.g. Ajax call hits earlier than expected), instead of outputting an error some where (even in FireBug) isn’t happening.
I was porting some code over from a page into an include JS file and discovered this wonder as JS execution just stopped at some point. Eventually I managed to track it down to some functions that were missing from the page (weren’t copy over). No thanks to FireBug or the Error Console. IE? Oh, IE’s fun…it just keeps running the JS without generating an error…but that’s IE.
Still trying to figure out a different issue related to Ajax calls bumping into each other (at least that’s my guess) but found something interesting. JSLint is a “JavaScript Code Quality Tool”. Not the best tool (it doesn’t know what the “navigator” object is and I got an error because “alert is not defined”…it’s part of the friggin standard!) but it definitely helps zero in a bit on possible issues–better than a line by line walk through miles of code.
Mozilla: please, please put together a 4.0 release that basically goes back to the 3.0 release…but is faster and better of course. You’re fucking up your lead big time.
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