A programming note: My wife and I will be at the revised, resurrected Vintage Computer Festival XI August 6 and 7 in beautiful Mountain View, CA at the Computer History Museum (just down the street from the ominous godless Googleplex). I'll be demonstrating my very first home computer, the Tomy Tutor (a weird partial clone of the Texas Instruments 99/4A), and its Japanese relatives. Come by, enjoy the other less interesting exhibits, and bask in the nostalgic glow when 64K RAM was enough and cassette tape was king.

I'm typing this in a G5-optimized build of 45 and it seems to perform pretty well. JavaScript benches over 20% faster than 38 due to improvements in the JIT (and possibly some marginal improvement from gcc 4.8), and this is before I start doing further work on PowerPC-specific improvements which will be rolled out during 45's lifetime. Plus, the AltiVec code survived without bustage in our custom VP8, UTF-8 and JPEG backends, and I backported some graphics performance patches from Firefox 48 that improve throughput further. There's still a few glitches to be investigated; I spent most of tonight figuring out why I got a big black window when going to fullscreen mode (it turned out to be several code regressions introduced by Mozilla removing old APIs), and Amazon Music still has some weirdness moving from track to track. It's very likely there will be other such issues lurking next week when you get to play with it, but that's what a beta cycle is for.

38.10 will be built over the weekend after I'm done doing the backports from 45.3. Stay tuned for that.

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2016/07/and-now-for-something-completely.html