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."
Menu Bar..? (Score:5, Interesting)
So that's gone MIA, then? What's the current obsession with removing menu bars, creating "ribbon" interfaces and taking away stuff that has served us well for over 20 years..?
Not sure I like the look of that new interface. Aint broke, don't fix it.
Re:Retarded (Score:1, Interesting)
"the simpler an interface looks, the faster it will seem". What a joke.
For many average users, it's not a joke at all.
Personally, I don't care that much. As long as I can remove as many extra menus, bars, etc. as possible I'm happy- I like to run the most minimal menu bar setup possible.
What I would like to see happen, however, is for FF to stop allowing any installation, uninstallation, enabling, disabling, or other modification to the addons from ANY source other than the user. Any plugin or addon should be able to be removed as well.
Got that right. (Score:3, Interesting)
With the popularity of Netbooks, I see FF losing market share to Google because of the performance differences.
Re:H.264 support? (Score:5, Interesting)
From the numbers a lot of people have posted, it would only cost about 3 cents per copy of Firefox. Ask the users to pay the bill: "Do you want to still be able to view YouTube? Please donate 25 cents today!" It would fund Mozilla AND pay the H.264 royalties where it's needed.
Others have suggested that the Mozilla Foundation should just use the OS to playback video and stop complaining for nothing. H.264 has already won, it's already used everywhere. The more they fight, the longer Flash video will survive. Does Adobe pay Mozilla or what?
And some people live in countries where software patents are not even legal. Why should they pay anything?
Re:Sounds like speed holes (Score:3, Interesting)
My personal opinion is that the new version looks like ass -- where's the menubar? Ribbon interfaces don't seem fast to me, they seem like an update to UI for the sake of updating things so people will buy the latest version. If this is the best that Mozilla can do, perhaps I'd better give Chrome a try after all.
Re:Sounds like speed holes (Score:1, Interesting)
Personally, I'd rather have the browser go faster than look faster.
Right. Because, of course, the only thing they're working on is making the browser seem faster while actually being the same speed, or possibly even slower.
The fact that the presentation also discussed their plans to speed up the browser significantly means nothing. No, of course not. Focus on the one quote that was repeated in the summary.
Re:Got that right. (Score:5, Interesting)
"Noticeable" is an understatement. My primary machine is a P8600 dual-core laptop with 2Gb of RAM and firefox + 4 plugins take 5 times more to load than Chrome + 4 plugins. My workhorse is a quad-core Q8400 with 8 Gb RAM. There, Chrome loads instantly, whereas Firefox takes 2 seconds even with no plugins.
I'm using Firefox for development only and just because of Firebug (I know there's a Firebug lite for Chrome but it's not even close, like its Developer Tools).
Re:Sounds like speed holes (Score:3, Interesting)
The folks doing deCOMtamination, as they call it, would like to have a word with you.
Re:Retarded (Score:4, Interesting)
increasing user satisfaction
I'd suggest improving usability then. The shiny only works until you start to use it. You know, like how the CLI completely wipes the floor with any GUI when it comes to power users' needs.
Just for starters, why isn't "Open in background tab" the default when clicking a link? Chances are you didn't mean to watch a blank fucking screen while it's loading.
Re:Retarded (Score:5, Interesting)
That might be a good idea. It looks like Firefox 4 is going to be a "chrome-ified" (or you could say "Apple-fied") "just make it work, I don't like thinking" browser, rather than the moddable and utilitarian browser it's been up to this point. Now seems like a good point to fork it to preserve the "geekiness" of 3.6.
I sure don't like the new "background updates" idea either (as a default, I'd be fine with it as an optional setting), if anything Firefox needs to bug me MORE about updates, like when Microsoft wants to sneak an addon into it via Internet Explorer. The next time I open Firefox, it should say "WARNING: This addon was installed without your express permission. Allow/Disable/Uninstall?"
Firefox openness (Score:3, Interesting)
While I like Firefox and also SeaMonkey just fine, I have always been a bit bothered by applications (and there are many of them) that take their time updating the screen or make the UI unresponsive. Look back at the original Mac running on a 8mhz 68k or Windows 1.0 running on an 8088. Menus, dialogs and such display almost instantly after a mouse click. Now we have multi-gigahertz CPUs with multiple cores and video cards that have such powerful GPUs you almost need a built in nuclear reactor to power them! What is the excuse for not being able to display a menu the very next video frame/refresh? If data is slowly tickling in over a network, why not display what you have the instant it comes in?
I remember running the first public Mozilla Suite builds on a Pentium 200 and how incredibly slow they were. I know there have really have been many speed improvements, but sometimes it feels like Mozilla just let the hardware get faster rather than addressing some of the core speed issues that Chrome is now putting them to shame on.
It looks like their solution to slow menus is to remove the menus? The standard way people have been interfacing with GUI applications since 1984? You people do know Chome is just trying to look like IE 7, which was trying to look like Safari, which actually does have menus just not attached to each browser window?
On the topic of video, I wish more people would provide direct downloadable links to video files so even if my browser doesn't know how to play a video, I can view it in an external player like VLC. And it seems like the only realistic answer for bundled in-browser video here is if Mozilla can negotiate some kind of special licensing agreement with the h.264 folks. Although I seriously think video should be implemented as some kind of plug-in that can be updated separately as the video-codec-of-the-day changes.
All that aside, it is interesting how open Mozilla appears to be in discussing their plains. Apple keeps their plans top secret with not a word uttered, Microsoft's plans are openly "leaked" so people feel naughty when a preview/beta , Oracle's plans are covered with legalese and subject to contract terms, Linux plans are written in some cryptic programming language or something. Well, it is just nice seeing somebody try to be open like this (even if they still wind up doing their own thing)
Re:Got that right. (Score:3, Interesting)
Curious. What version of Firefox? And on which OS?
You may be interested in http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/2010/01/19/chromium-vs-minefield-cold-startup-performance-comparison/ [mozilla.com]
Quickly != Firefox (Score:2, Interesting)
Quickly? Hundreds of tabs? Are you SERIOUS?
Runing 20 tabs makes firefox run at snails pase and freeze everytime you click a button/tab. Just opening 5 links from google search will compleatly freeze firefox for ~20seconds
(I use firefox for it's live bookmarks function) (and yes 20 tabs run without problems in opera)
Re:No, let the OS vendors do it (Score:3, Interesting)
On Linux (etc.) they could require that you download and install ffmpeg on your own time. That way, if ffmpeg gets sued out of existence, it's no skin of Mozilla's nose.
And if ffmpeg does get sued it, what, effectively kills Linux on the desktop?
Text highlight metaphor search must be improved. (Score:4, Interesting)
An example, you highlight "Give me" and it asks (Search for Give Me). This feature should be expanded via plugins, regular expression, and AI so that if I have Google open in another tab it can search for it within the Google search tab already open. This would save browser resources and make it a lot easier to manage tabs. I always leave a tab open to Google, Wikipedia, Slashdot and YouTube. Why not let me highlight text and select which site I want the text to search from? Why not use keyboard shortcuts so that I can highlight the text and hit "g" and it searches Google, "y" and it searches Youtube, "w" and it searches Wikipedia, or "d" for the dictionary if I don't know the word. And the plugin interface should allow regular expressions and individual programmers to code new features.
This plugin/extension interface would revolutionize the browsing experience because it would increase the amount of information the user can work with and take in at any given time. This should be the goal of Firefox. To help increase the amount of information users can handle rather than trying to merely simplify he interface without any known practical enhancements.
The application tab idea is good. That has a good function. But I want that application tab to be connected to the text highlight function of the browser. And then something like the pipes function in linux should be used to allow the highlighted text to be manipulated any which way and or used as input for the software applications. I should be able to highlight text on your post and have it to into my word processor application or email application as a direct quote with source citation included. This way I don't have to worry about managing the sources.
And there are a million other improvements we could probably think of that they aren't or don't seem to be considering. I hope the Firefox4 team reads this post and considers adding these features.
No mention of Chrome's best feature? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sounds like speed holes (Score:3, Interesting)
I hate to say it, but: It's the point where a project has jumped the shark.
Because projects rarely get out of that endless catching up race again. And they forget about actually innovating and leading the way.
I hope the Firefox team can quickly recover. But I don't put any money on it anymore.
Slow down there a bit friend. Everyone is currently in the Javascript speed race. Everyone is also currently in the simplify the interface faze. Everyone is also entering the hardware acceleration race. Everyone is in the add extensions support race. In short, everyone everybody is playing catch up with each other.
It was IE and now chrome that started this strange Windows interface shift. While the classic interface of Firefox has generally been popular, Firefox is now in danger of being the odd one instead of the one all the others are being judged by. The irony is that Firefox has just really started getting down making XUL emulate the native interfaces pretty well after....their long history of doing custom interfaces. Anyone remember "Modern"? Opera's custom interface hasn't caught on like wild fire either.