Firefox 98 on POWER

Firefox 98 is released, with a new faster downloads flow (very welcome), better event debugging, and several pre-release HTML features that are now official. One thing that hasn't gotten a lot of airplay is navigator.registerProtocolHandler() now allows registration for the FTP family of protocols. I already use this for OverbiteWX and OverbiteNX to restore Gopher support in Firefox; I look forward to someone bolting back on FTP support in the future. It builds out of the box on OpenPOWER using the .mozconfigs and LTO-PGO patch from Firefox 95.

On the JIT front the Ion-enabled (third stage compiler) OpenPOWER JIT gets about 2/3rds of the way through the JIT conformance test suite. Right now I'm investigating a Ion crash in the FASTA portion of SunSpider which I can't yet determine is either an i-cache problem or a bad jump (the OpenPOWER Baseline Compiler naturally runs it fine). We need to make Firefox 102 before it merges to beta on May 26 to ride the trains and get the JIT into the next Extended Support Release; this is also important for Thunderbird, which, speaking as a heavy user of it, probably needs JIT acceleration even more than Firefox. This timeframe is not impossible and it'll get finished "sometime" but making 102 is going to be a little tight with what needs doing. The biggest need is for people to help smoke out those last failures and find fixes. You can help.