Zimbra

We’ve aimed to blur the line between a Ajax web-client and a conventional desktop application, and this release is a leap towards reaching that goal. If you’re just joining us here’s the best part: It’s an offline capable client so you can take your data with you whenever you don’t have internet access - then sync any type of interaction that you can do in normal webmail access when you get connected again. So many cool new things I don’t know where to begin - the Zimbra Desktop team has been very busy since Beta 2.


  They’re here, and your tasks, documents, & briefcase items can now follow you wherever you may roam. If you’re already using Zimbra Desktop against a Zimbra Collaboration Suite server these will show up on next edit or item move via delta sync - while a full account sync or reset will pull in prior items. Personally, having briefcase items available offline is a major plus - as offline calendaring using the same AJAX web-client interface has already long since won me over.

Yahoo! Mail users rejoice - There’s now IMAP access through Zimbra Desktop to all free, plus, and business accounts. You didn’t read that wrong. Normally only Plus accounts have POP access, but as a perk when using Zimbra Desktop the mail is synced via IMAP; which is a much better protocol for keeping your mail organized - and yes it’s available to free accounts as well. Hook-up your @yahoo.com account or go grab one of the new @ymail.com and @rocketmail.com addresses. (Note that some apps don’t sync to Yahoo! servers yet so the data is local.)

Mailto: link handler - For Mac and Windows protocol handlers allow you to click on a mailto: link in any browser, and it will bring-up Zimbra Desktop’s composer with a javascript call. If Prism is not already running, it will start the web-app as well with a url call, then pop up compose. We don’t want to be accidentally invasive, so to turn this feature on you’ll have to check the box in global preferences to make it the default mail client on your computer.

Icon badging - To keep you informed, we now display the total number of unread messages across all-inboxes; in the dock icon for Mac and on Windows there’s now a tray icon, which changes to a new mail image if there are unread messages.

Mac & Windows users may just decide to toss out their toasters, because we now have mail & appointment notifications built-in. (Zimbra Toaster still serves as a lightweight new-mail checker with quick flag and delete features. There’s also some community contributed Linux solutions like Zimbra Notify.)

Zimbra Desktop on Windows now takes advantage of the native tray icon bubbles and on Mac of course we use Growl. (You need to install Growl separately which is quite straightforward.) You’ll also need to enable “show pop-up notification” under both Mail and Calendar tabs in preferences, since by default notifications are turned off.

The latest versions of Zimbra Collaboration Suite have also introduced browser title & favicon flashing, mail & account tab highlighting, as well as sound notifications - which have been ported to Beta 3 as well. So there’s no excuse for not noticing a new mail if you’re at your computer. Ok, we can still think of a few excuses - but note that the pop-up notifications are per account settings; so you can have some accounts on and some accounts off if you should need to ‘forget about’ that important meeting

In-case you’ve never tried Zimbra Desktop, or are still using an Alpha, and never tried it out during Beta 1 or when we served-up Beta 2: There’s also easy setup menus for setting up Zimbra Server, Yahoo! Mail, GMail, AOL, or any other IMAP/POP accounts you want to use. For Beta 3 we’ve thrown out JavaMail and wrote a brand-new robust IMAP/POP client-engine from scratch.


To get you up and running when you need it, there’s now an auto-start service. During launch of the Prism web-app a check is run to see if the background service is running - if not, it’s automatically started. This works on all 3 platforms, and proves especially useful on Linux since the service doesn’t automatically start after reboot. (See this forum thread for ways to do that.) There’s also an animated splash screen during launch of Prism so you know it’s working on bringing-up the background process.


Icon menus - On the Mac dock icon and Windows tray icon, we now have right-click menu items to check for updates and shutdown the background service.

Windows minimize to tray - Clicking on the “X” now only minimizes prism window to tray. To quit prism, right click the tray icon and choose “Quit”.


This release makes Zimbra Desktop available to a quarter-billion Yahoo! users with support for 20+ languages. The default theme is a revamped Yahoo! skin to help keep the interface familiar as it spreads to those millions of users. Hope you enjoy, and as we advance upon a GA release: Thanks to the Zimbra Community for all your bug corrections and feature requests so far. The Mozilla team developed a few of these new Prism features from scratch just for us, you can read more about some of them here. But stay tuned, we’re gonna have a closer look under the hood to see how we implemented these features and the inner workings of Prism + Zimbra Desktop in a future blog post.

If it’s not available to you via auto-update yet, you haven’t been building from source, or are even just discovering it for the first time, you can download it here for Mac, Windows, & Linux.
 

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Have an idea for Zimbra Desktop or just want a tweak built upon these new components? We’re interested in hearing your feedback on it below or over in the Community Forums. A bunch of us are at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Oregon this week - so drop in around booths 415 & 519 if you’re there.

Now that the iPhone 2.0 software update is here, here’s a sneak peek of what Zimbra Mobile for iPhone looks like.

First, if you are new to Zimbra Mobile it’s part of Zimbra Collaboration Suite Network Edition and provides over-the-air synchronization of emails, appointments and contacts between a user mailbox and their mobile device. “Push” technology can make sure that updates are delivered to mobile devices as they happen in user’s mailbox on the server. Zimbra Mobile supports a wide range of ActiveSync compatible devices, including Microsoft Window Mobile (PocketPCs and Smartphones), Treo Palm OS series, Nokia E series (and other devices running 3rd party clients like RoadSync). Now, the latest additions to our device list are iPhone and iPod Touch running the iPhone 2.0 software. We’ve been tuning and polishing Zimbra Mobile to be a great match for iPhone.

I know everyone has his or her own favorite email gadget but personally, I’m glad I have an iPhone. With iPhone’s large, bright touch screen, instant “push” delivery, HTML email display, support for all sorts of document/media attachments and meeting invitations plus a photo-enabled address book, what else can I wish for? And the best part is Zimbra Mobile for iPhone takes full advantage of all that!

OK enough words. Let’s see what it will look like in action.

Note: Zimbra Collaboration Suite Network Edition 5.0.7 is required for iPhone sync support.

Initial Sync — Pretty Darn Fast You first setup how the iPhone will sync with a Zimbra Server at your company (or at your service provider): Once the connection is established iPhone will start to download your email, calendar and address book data. iPhone is actually powerful enough to download the different data categories in parallel. You’ll see emails start to show up in the Inbox at the same time contacts are added to the address book. I believe the parallel download is a unique feature that I haven’t seen on other devices. Also many other Zimbra Mobile devices typically only download partial envelope information and some text of each message, and get the rest of the message or attachments when the user asks for them. Given that iPhone has enough memory, it can download up to 200 most recent messages in full MIME format so that everything is available on the phone.

Rendering Messages on the iPhone iPhone can view or play many common attachments, including pictures (inline view), PDFs, various audio/video formats (great for receiving voicemail in your Zimbra mailbox), Word docs, PowerPoint slides, and Excel spreadsheets. Here are some examples of messages. I really like how iPhone displays deeply nested replies.

Appointments, Reminders and Calendar Of course Zimbra Mobile for iPhone is not just about email. As iPhone receives calendar events and meeting invitations from Zimbra server, it will alert users of incoming invitations, and allow users to accept or decline meetings from the device. Accepted meetings are added to the calendar, with alarms to go off at scheduled reminder time. Zimbra Mobile for iPhone supports all types of appointments, recurring events with all kinds of exceptions, as well as participants across multiple timezones. <

Address Book Got a big address book? No problem. One of our power users has 8000+ contacts in his address book. iPhone has enough memory to download and hold it all. Contacts with photos can be synced with the Zimbra address book as well, so go take some pictures of your friends with that iPhone camera.

Zimbra Mobile for iPhone is a new feature in Zimbra Collaboration Suite Network Edition 5.0.7, and it requires the iPhone 2.0 software update from Apple. I’m really excited about the Zimbra Mobile for iPhone user experience. This is a great addition to our existing solutions for iPhone which includes ZCS optimized for the mobile Safari browser and our iSync Connector for the Apple Desktop. To find out more about Zimbra Mobile for iPhone, check out the Zimbra Mobile Forums.

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JJ Zhuang is lead developer for Zimbra Mobile.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is often seen as an alternative model to Open Source Software (OSS) for the delivery of next-generation software. However, we argue below that SaaS and OSS are independent and even complementary paradigms.

Nevertheless, with few exceptions (e.g., SugarCRM), software startups do not pursue both approaches because building out an open source community and data center/operations is beyond their reach. Prior to the merger with Yahoo!, Zimbra made our bet on open source, believing that OSS was the best means to innovate in messaging and collaboration software (without having to fund a large data center, operations team, and sales force). While I am confident that this was the right choice, ever since the initial launch of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite, end-users have been asking us where they can get their Zimbra via SaaS rather than download, and we have been pointing them toward our many hosting partners.

On the other hand, most every SaaS offering (Microsoft Live the exception?) makes substantial use of OSS, and many contribute back to the open source projects they incorporate. But what most of them do not do is also open source the original code each develops for their SaaS product itself. Why should they? It is a substantial amount of additional work to launch an open source community. And the cynic would argue why give up proprietary intellectual property and lock-in unless your customers or competitive pressures are forcing you to do so? Indeed, the lock-in with SaaS may prove to be more onerous than it has been with proprietary software—not only is an organization tied to a proprietary software service, but its data is now resident in someone else’s data center. At the very least, your organization should ensure that any of your data stored remotely is fully accessible via web services, so you can preserve your options. Even then, migrating from one SaaS solution to another or from SaaS to traditional software is likely to prove at least as hard as switching between software stacks has been.

Which is why we see such a bright future for software that is delivered both in open source and via SaaS. Open source leads to better software, better through community innovation and hardening. And open source affords better long-term investment protection for both SaaS and “on premises” solutions. While SaaS allows organizations to ramp up new software with minimal investment, open source means they could always bring it in house later or move to an alternative provider (or at least have the negotiating leverage for doing the same). Consider many of the universities using Zimbra: universities often want the option of on-premises software for faculty and staff, but hosted software for students and alumni, all from one unified platform. The combination of open source and SaaS seems to be the one that best meets such customer needs.

Some of the SaaS vendors will argue that this is infeasible—that SaaS software is so different from “on-prem” software that the solutions must inherently be distinct. This is false. The overall Zimbra code base today delivers a unified user and administrator experience when scaling from a user’s desktop (Zimbra Desktop) to a single server for a SMB to the large multi-tenant, multi-data center farms of large service providers that support 10,000s of businesses or 10s of millions of consumers. The key is to design the software for SaaS from the inception and support on-prem as a special case—that is, to open source a software stack that is SaaS-ready. Zimbra has been delivered via SaaS since the very early days, the only distinction was that we did not build out the data centers but rather relied on our channel partners.

Of course, one of the major upsides for Zimbra in becoming part of Yahoo! last October is to leverage our new parent’s talent and resources to provide our own SaaS offering of Zimbra. The goal is to preserve all that users love about Zimbra—its community, its innovation, its extensibility, its partner/channel friendliness, and its long-term investment protection—but package it for the ease of adoption and low-cost of ownership of SaaS. Depending on your organization type, Yahoo! either has or will soon have a Zimbra SaaS package for you. At the same time, we are committed to continuing to work with our SaaS channel partners, many of whom offer Zimbra as a “white label” solution deployed from their data centers, and some of whom will actually be integrating Zimbra SaaS from Yahoo! within their own value-added SaaS offerings. Yahoo! is committed to this vision and ultimately sees the openness and extensibility of our infrastructure to be one of our chief competitive advantages—witness YUI, Hadoop, and Zimbra as well as OpenSocial, Open Search, OpenID, and so on.

So open source and SaaS are not contradictory, and end-users will ultimately be better off if they seek out software solutions that offer both!

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Scott Dietzen is part of the Global Communications Products team at Yahoo! which spans Y!-Mail, Y!-Messenger, and Zimbra.

This week, Zimbra held a Zimbra Administration Course at the Yahoo! headquarters in Santa Clara. For those who don’t know, the administration course covers just about everything in Zimbra from A to Z.

I had the opportunity to lead the first two days of the basic/general sessions of the training course. Attendee’s learned everything from Installation and upgrades to Java Garbage Collection and Disaster Recovery.

We like to play a game during training called “stump the chump”, where attendee’s who stump me get t-shirts. Attendees also get to keep all the training materials, and exclusive access to a special training forum called “Camp Zimbra.

The Third day is the advanced course, and it was led by Anup P. Anup is a Zimbra Service Engineer who has a ton of Large Deployment experiences under his belt. He led the Third day covering things like performance graph generation, and cluster-specific options and questions.


Congratulations to the Zimbra Admin Class of June 2008 from all of us at Zimbra!

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If you’re interested in when a Zimbra Training will be available for your region, or when the next one will be available, check out our Zimbra Training Page.

With Zimbra 5.0 we’ve introduced some newer ways to make the user experience faster with the Zimbra Web Client. We’ve talked about Jetty, YUI compression, and Lazy Loading, but now there’s just one burning question: Which browser is fastest?

There’s some amazing JavaScript handling enhancements about to be pushed into the major browsers. In-case you missed previous rounds of the browser wars we’ll tell you the answer, but you should still checkout Firefox 2 vs FF3RC1, Internet Explorer 7 vs IE8b, and Safari 3.1.1 vs SF nightlies to get more insight into how each fared on the testbed.

The gloves are off, this is a bare knuckle battle-royal fight:

The winner’s Safari!     Surprised? So were we.

We had high hopes that FF3GA would at least match Safari 3.1.1 in order to contend with Apple’s Safari 4 just around the corner. Infact that graph is simply those tested in our browser war series; the WebKit nightlies (engine for SF4) deliver a knockout blow. And it’s not just our favorite testing software that shows this; we use OpenQA Selenium which allows us to nicely calculate time rendering a page while navigating the Zimbra AJAX web-client. Other commonly used benchmarks like SunSpider & VeriTest show very similar results and Safari 4 nightlies even fare well on the Acid3 DOM and JavaScript test, beating out Firefox 3 every time. But we’ll let the judges analyze and discuss later.

The SquirrelFish JavaScript interpreter in Safari 4 is a bytecode engine which eliminates almost all of the overhead of a tree-walking JavaScript interpreter. According to the WebKit project, the SquirrelFish engine is 1.6 times faster than the engine in Safari 3.1. SquirrelFish does its magic by turning JavaScript script into so-called bytecodes, an optimized code much more suitable for run-time execution than natural language-based commands, which are longer and more complicated to interpret – and therefore are slower. It also leaves room to experiment with things like constant folding, type inference, specialization based on expression context, peephole optimization, and escape analysis.

 
In addition, Safari 4 adds the ability to save webpages as standalone web applications (Similar to the Mac favorite Fluid, or Mozilla’s Prism which meshes nicely as an add-on to Firefox.), CCS enhancements to gradients, masks, and reflections, as well as some additional native font rendering and HTML5 support.

That said, there’s more to browser choices than JavaScript rendering in ZCS - it’s a great day for Firefox. The new release is packed with over 15,000 updates and new features; from the underlying Gecko and JavaScript engines to Profile-Guided Optimizations (dual pass compiling) that bring dramatic improvements to performance, memory usage and speed. And you can’t forget the best add-on network.   There was previously a clamoring in the forums about participating in Firefox 3 download day Guinness World Record attempt. Go do your part and download this awesome browser!

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*Test machines were running AMD Opteron 1.8GHz Dual-cores with 2GB RAM against ZCS 5.0.6 GA RHEL4. As always performance will vary based on system configuration, network connection, and other factors like account data and preferences.

Firefox 2 took on FF3RC1, Internet Explorer 7 took on IE8b, so who’s duking it out in round 3? Safari 3.1.1 vs SF nightlies.

Some might be thinking it seems like a shorter gap in browser versions - why not Safari 3.0 through 3.0.4, or even 3.1 to show greater self improvement? First, we opted for current supported release vs betas. We did use Firefox 2.0.0.14 and the most up-to-date IE7 we could find for previous matches. Secondly, since we planned this series 3.1.1 became GA, so we decided to do Safari 3.1.1 build 525.17 (which was at least pushed to the masses) vs WebKit r33940 (the open-source browser engine packaged close to Safari 3.1.1 build 525.20).
 
But as you can see Safari clearly doesn’t need the moral boost anyways:

You know the drill: We used an OpenQA Selenium setup to calculate time rendering a page; across the same set of saved actions such as logging in, composing and viewing messages, navigating around various folders, switching between our many apps, and even changing options.

Those might not look like huge jumps, but Safari builds have been churned out so fast - and nothing on that graph is over 2 seconds. The older version only wins in a handful of cases, but that could easily be due to other test-harness factors when your dealing with 1/100th’s of a second.

Safari has clearly been working out - it’s fit, and plans to stay that way by avoiding dessert.   Mac users rejoice: Apple released Safari 3.1.1 build 525.20 (~WebKit r33940) on May 28th with Mac OS X v10.5.3.   Windows machines have Safari 3.1.1 but it’s still build 525.17, so some stuff hasn’t been incorporated into Windows releases yet; and Apple either takes their time distributing updates, or they’re waiting on a Safari 4 version before next push. Don’t fret, it’s still decently fast and you’ll have the latest JS engine soon no doubt.

 
There’s already a developer seed of Safari 4 released. Which includes the SquirrelFish JavaScript interpreter (renamed from GlassFish to avoid confusion with Apple’s other Java stuff). SquirrelFish is a bytecode engine which eliminates almost all of the overhead of a tree-walking JavaScript interpreter. It also leaves room to experiment with things like constant folding, type inference, specialization based on expression context, peephole optimization, and escape analysis but they haven’t implemented all that yet. Safari 4 adds the ability to save webpages as standalone web applications (much like site-specific browsers such as Fluid, Adobe AIR, Bubbles, the favorite Mozilla Prism and countless others), some CCS enhancements to gradients, masks, and reflections, as well as additional native font rendering which provides a better experience for Windows users.
 
You can grab the nightlies (currently WebKit r34581) here. Or grab the current Safari GA by heading over to Apple’s site.

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*Test machines were running AMD Opteron 1.8GHz Dual-cores with 2GB RAM against ZCS 5.0.6 GA RHEL4. As always performance will vary based on system configuration, network connection, and other factors like account data and preferences.

Round 1 covered Firefox 2 vs 3RC1 and the results were much easier to predict and extrapolate, but it wasn’t the same for Internet Explorer 7 vs 8b. In the heavy weight division IE7 is often compared to a 500-pound gorilla, but could Microsoft convince it to go on a diet for IE8?

Once again we used a customized OpenQA Selenium setup to calculate time-taken rendering a page after clicking a particular button/link; across the same set of saved actions such as logging in, composing and viewing messages, navigating around various folders, switching between our many apps, and even changing options as done on Firefox. And IE7 connected a hard blow right off the bat.

It certainly wasn’t going to be a pushover fight. IE8b wiped the blood off it’s face from the initial loading and decisively won all the little forays. However, when throwing bigger JavaScript rendering tasks at the contestants it often looked to be anyone’s fight. The really crazy thing about it is that while there’s tons of CSS handling improvements in IE7 as opposed to IE6; IE8b touts more JavaScript enhancements than IE7 (what should matter for ZCS) but I just wasn’t blown back in awe. While IE8b’s endurance clearly won in the end, IE7’s punches are gonna leave a few bruises.

 
It’s good that Microsoft finally realized that people were tired of switching between Internet Explorer and a separate development environment such as IEWatch or Visual Studio and polished up their debug tools for JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. (We’re gonna cover our favorites from Firebug & Charles to Eclipse, IntelliJ, & GDB later.) They also included more ways to give feedback and track feature requests for this beta period as opposed to last time. IE8b contains sparse CSS3 support, but finally complete HTML4 adherence - though we’re rounding on HTML5, and CSS2.1 compliance isn’t new - it was even aimed for IE7 but ended up sub-par. As far as I can tell most of the JavaScript rendering speed reported by others have been because of DOM enhancements (how you store meaningful amounts of client-side data in a persistent and secure manner) rather than the stated JavaScript the engine overhauls. Either that or it just took so long to warm up for a noticeable kick in our tests.

Granted IE8 is farthest out, so hopefully that gives Microsoft time to refine their closed source browser. Don’t get me wrong IE8b is an improvement; but we’re rounding on GA release of Mozilla Firefox 3 next week, while Apple pushed Safari 3.1.1 into OS X 10.5.3 and already has a game-plan for Safari 4, so Internet Explorer better step up the training regiment.

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*Test machines were running AMD Opteron 1.8GHz Dual-cores with 2GB RAM against ZCS 5.0.6 GA RHEL4. As always performance will vary based on system configuration, network connection, and other factors like account data and preferences.

A few years ago I thought the days of rambling off your entire schedule to someone else, over the phone or via email, to find a meeting time were long dead and gone. What I’ve found after a couple years in the work force is that most of the collaboration platforms today essentially only share free-busy information within your group. More often than not, in broad working units the folks on the other side have a different system. How do you really get anything done when there really is no seamless scheduling interaction between those platforms?

While we’d love the whole world to instantly convert to Zimbra, we realize that from time to time people in this situation for whatever reason (slow migration or stubborn departmental preference) have that one peer organization running different software. How to seamlessly find timeslots for meetings? And what to do for cases where you may not want to share your entire calendar with a huge list of people, a distribution list, or don’t want all your calendar events public?

Well, the CalConnect Roundtable we talked about earlier is finishing up, and as the week drew to a close we had another ace up our sleeve: Free-Busy Interop.

Both the Network and Open Source Editions of Zimbra now support two-way free/busy information with Microsoft’s Exchange Server, IBM’s Lotus Domino Messaging Server, Meeting Maker, and a slew of other third-parties that interact with our API. Plus, the framework is completely available to anyone who wants to build an extension for other platforms!

The query and propagation of free/busy data is done via REST and WebDAV interfaces. You can catch a in-depth walkthrough of how it’s done in this overview PDF.

For info on how to set it up, checkout SRC/ZimbraServer/docs/freebusy-interop.txt. Grab a copy via perforce, this post, or ask us about it in the ZCS forum section.

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Don’t need interop? You can also visit http:// zimbraserver.domain.com/home/username?fmt=freebusy to display an aggregate HTML calendar of the user’s free-busy data. (Of course you can always choose to select “exclude this calendar when reporting free/busy times” on your calendar properties if you wish.)

iCalendar (the standard .ics not the Apple program) only gets you so far. We’ve previously covered CalDav in Apple’s iCal for Mac, but where does the CalDav field stand for Windows and Linux users?

It’s important to push communication between different programs, platforms, and technologies. We’ve just completed a free-busy interop that we’ll blog more about that later, but you can checkout the forum announcement.   This week, Jong L. and John H. are at CalConnect Roundtable XII from June 2nd to 6th, 2008. Where they’re doing some heavy testing with other clients and servers to make sure that we’re compatible and standards-compliant.

A good consortium for that is CalConnect’s Interoperability Test Events (C.I.T.E.) the latest we attended during a previous Roundtable back in February. It included all sorts of IOP and Mobile IOP events, where interoperability testing between different calendaring and scheduling implementations were preformed. Organizations participating in the C.I.T.E. events were Apple, Microsoft, Zimbra (Yahoo!), Oracle, Sun, Kerio, Marware, Scalix, and Sony Ericsson.

While there’s plenty of CalDav compatible programs out there our server-team judges are firm: Pizazz and setup wizards won’t get you anywhere if you can’t correct that meeting time or properly notify others of the change.

If you want strict specification adherence in a cross-app & cross-platform thick-client: Our winner is Mulbery for Linux, Windows, & Mac. In addition to being a Swiss-army-knife of protocols, it’s also Open Source.

How to set it up? Checkout the wiki article CalDav and Mulberry - Zimbra :: Wiki or drop in over at the community forums for help.

Download and give it a try: http://www.mulberrymail.com/

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Leave us a message below if you got another contender you’d like us to put through its paces.

As we’ve mentioned before it’s about time for another ‘clash of the titans’ in the never ending web browser wars. Raja Rao of our QA team had previously built a sweet AJAX client testing framework, so we decided to pit the major browser’s current releases and nightly builds verses one another. Who will go down in this first round?

Before you go “Wait, is this particular article just Firefox vs Firefox - aren’t newer versions expected to preform better anyways?” think of it as just a warm-up to instill confidence by beating personal records in preparation for some looming, ugly battle-royal. Plus the gym was destroyed last time we had them all in one place, and our graphs just get too cluttered, so you’ll have to come back for other matches like IE7 vs IE8b and Safari 3.1 vs Safari 3 nightly builds.

For Firefox memory bloat tests have been popular lately, but we wanted some real world JavaScript tests through a set of ZWC tasks on 5.0.6 - such as logging in, composing and viewing messages, navigating around various folders, switching between our many apps, and even changing options.

 
FF3RC1 clearly won every test, so Mozilla deserves a pat on the back for advancing their browser. While completing little web-client actions there was often barely a difference. However, where heavy rendering had to be done the improvements were significant - in some places half the rendering time or even three times as fast!

What’s the test harness?   We used a customized OpenQA Selenium setup to calculate time-taken rendering a page after clicking a particular button/link. Test machines were running AMD Opteron 1.8GHz Dual-cores with 2GB RAM against ZCS 5.0.6 GA RHEL4. When we compare other browsers we will be using the same set of saved actions. Try it out yourself and discuss it in the forums - if you’d like some other testing ideas you might play with the other commonly used benchmarks like VeriTest & SunSpider.

 
So what has made Firefox 3 so speedy? Perhaps it’s the Profile-Guided Optimization (dual pass compiling) builds now being created that are greatly improving performance, or lots of combined JavaScript engine enhancements. Have you been comparing all the nightlies leading up to RC1 or noted the exact change that has enhanced it so much? Discuss it below and stay tuned, I hear Safari is pulling out all the stops - get your bets in now.

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Think working on complex AJAX apps is cool? Head over to the developer section in the community forums and see if you got what it takes. Who knows, you may just decide to come join us.
*As always performance will vary based on system configuration, network connection, and other factors like account data and preferences.