Mozilla Reveals Firefox 4 Plans 570
Barence writes "Mozilla has given a breakdown of its plans for Firefox 4. Perhaps the most striking change to Firefox 4 is the user interface, which takes a great deal of inspiration from Google Chrome. 'Something UI designers have known for a long time is that the simpler an interface looks, the faster it will seem,' said director of Firefox Mike Beltzner during the presentation. Also mooted was the ability to give applications such as Gmail and Twitter their own permanent tabs for easy access, and the introduction of a 'switch to tab' button, allowing power users running hundreds of tabs to quickly find the one they want. Beltzner said Mozilla was also looking at replicating Chrome's tactic of silently updating the browser in the background, removing the annoying wait when Firefox first loads up."
Re:Finally surf the WWW with FFF (Score:5, Informative)
You're probably thinking of "Fox Force Five", from Pulp Fiction
http://www.whysanity.net/monos/fox.html [whysanity.net]
Re:H.264 support? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Please, please, (Score:2, Informative)
Seriously, what is the point of having Firefox then? The fact that I need to open new tab in Chrome in order to access some bookmark pisses me off and pretty much makes bookmarks pointless.
RTFGSR [google.com] (google search results, for "chrome bookmark menu" and quit your whining.
Video presentation. (Score:3, Informative)
For those who don't want to rtfa, there's a video presentation on the director of firefox, Mike Beltzners blog: http://videos.mozilla.org/serv/air_mozilla/firefox4.ogg [mozilla.org]
Re:Please, please, (Score:2, Informative)
SIGKILL during shutdown might leave Firefox broken (Score:3, Informative)
First, install the update when I shut down the browser. You're not wasting my time then because I'm done using it.
When you shut down the browser, you could be shutting down your computer.* Firefox doesn't want a SIGKILL from sudo shutdown -h now to make the updater leave the system in an inconsistent state. So if startup is unacceptable and shutdown is unacceptable, the only remaining solution is to do so in the background while the browser is in use.
* Not everybody is as lucky as you are to have proper driver support for hibernation. And some people apply security patches to their operating system kernels every month or two.
Re:Menu Bar..? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Retarded (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't help that the linked article is terrible. A whole pile of performance updates are being made in addition to the UI changes:
JagerMonkey
HTML5 Parser off main thread
64 bit support
Startup timeline optimizations
Reduced I/O operations on main thread
JS threads and GC
DOM Performance improvements
Layers for compositing, scrolling
+
Graphics compositing with Layers
Hardware acceleration using Direct3D
Multitouch support
Aero Peek integration
OSX integration
I'd suggest reading the actual presentation for more information:
http://beltzner.ca/mike/2010/05/10/firefox-4-fast-powerful-and-empowering/ [beltzner.ca]
Re:H.264 support? (Score:3, Informative)
My reasons for wanting to do so are:
1. Flash is a performance hog on platforms that aren't win32.
2. With H264 it will be easier to download youtube content for safekeeping.
3. H264 has hardware acceleration in a lot of portable devices.
Re:H.264 support? (Score:3, Informative)
Well, here it's much easier [wikipedia.org].
Re:H.264 support? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU... (Score:2, Informative)
Chrome's way of handling this is pretty clever. After the second alert box from a site, it gives you a "STFU" checkbox on the next ones.
Re:H.264 support? (Score:3, Informative)
You know, we at Mozilla have all these people working on this problem and amazingly enough, no-one thought of your idea of using the OS libraries yet! How dumb we suddenly all feel... Clearly, you have more brains than all of us put together.
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2009/06/directshow_and.html [mozillazine.org]
Gerv
Re:Mozilla Foundation is a U.S. company (Score:3, Informative)
Surely they wouldn't need to physically decamp there, just re-incorporate themselves in that country (wherever you're talking about)?
If a company has a "nexus" on U.S. soil, it has to abide by U.S. patents.
Re:H.264 support? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sounds like speed holes (Score:4, Informative)
More likely it's Adblock causing the problem. I've run a Firefox with Noscript only for the last 1.5 yr (Win7-64/RC>-Retail Win7-64) and have had no crashes due to any extensions. I have had crashes due to Plug-ins such as Flash/Quicktime/WMP but that's been endemic to the OS itself.
I personally gave up on Adblock since it was slowing FF down simply due to the number of blocks I had. After Entered most of them into the Hosts file, I was able to get rid of it and go discovered that NoScript configured to disable flash/silverlight and everything else worked as well if not better then the combo of Noscript/Ablock.
Re:stop messing wih the UI (Score:2, Informative)
I don't know what you're talking about with https://./ [.] I just browsed over to my banking site, and https:/// [https] is in the address. It's even green, and the little padlock is on the right side.
My university has an open wireless system that uses a self-signed cert for a logon page. Chrome throws up a big warning. https:/// [https] is in red and is crossed out, not to mention the big warning on the page itself.
I'd say that Chrome's alerts about https:/// [https] are perfectly fine.
Version 5.0.375.38
Re:stop messing wih the UI (Score:3, Informative)
Er, 25 years ago HTTP didn't exist. Let alone SSL.