Firefox 4 Web Demos: Web O' Wonder 145
An anonymous reader writes "Similarly to Google with Chrome Experiments and Microsoft with Internet Explorer Test Drive, Mozilla has developed an HTML5 demo site to showcase the latest features supported by Firefox 4. Mozilla's Paul Roget writes, 'Firefox 4 is almost here, and comes with a huge list of awesome features for web developers. In order to illustrate all these new technical features, we put together several Web demos. You'll see a couple of demos released every week until the final version of Firefox 4. You can see the first 3 demos online now on our brand new demo web site: Web O' Wonder. Unlike certain other HTML5 demo sites, Mozilla's site works in any browser that supports the features used in the demo."
shitty website (Score:2)
slow, clunky and doesn't work in my browser*
* what the average user might say
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OTOH the websites make it pretty clear that you should download their browser ...
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You know, it pisses me off that these sites make snarky "Download an up to date browser" comments. I mean, if I was running IE 6 or FF2 or some shit, yeah, but when I'm using the latest, bleeding edge of another browser I basically get told I'm using a piece of crap? I mean come on, this elitist asshole shit has to stop, especially on a site that claims to be open to all to try. Why not word it:"currently only browser X and Y has these features" and leave it at that?
Sorry, but it rubbed me the wrong way.
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Google's HTML5 demo site (from last summer) was no different. I tried multiple browsers, even Chrome, and it still kept telling me to upgrade.
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when I'm using the latest, bleeding edge of another browser I basically get told I'm using a piece of crap?
If you're thinking about the one I'm thinking, the answer is definitely YES, It's an old fashioned steamy pile of shit, face it and be a man about it. Wishful thinking and head burying in the sand won't change this. Neither will shouting while pounding with your little pink fists on your keyboard like a baby being weaned.
I think you're mistaking the website's target (Score:2)
Do you think that the website is mainly intended for
A) The average user,
B) The web developer.
C) Extra answer to prevent claims of false dichotomies.
All I keep reading in /. is complain, complain, whine, complain, troll, complain....
We need more interesting debates and less quasi-youtube comments.
What an experience! (Score:1, Flamebait)
I clicked on the link to the Web O' Wonder in Firefox 4 beta 12 on fedora 14... it crashed immediately.
Are they attempting to say that Firefox 4 hearkens back to memories of windows 98?
Re:What an experience! (Score:4, Informative)
Please turn on the crash reporter and repro!!
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Well, Linux, what do you expect? Working experience? Worked all very well here with FF4 Beta 12 in OS X.
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And a very nice demo it is!
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Did it ask you to submit a crash report? If so, can you please post the incident ID here? I'll make sure it gets looked into!
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You can get the incident ID by loading about:crashes in the browser; this should give you a list of incident IDs, with links to the crash data for them. Either the IDs or the URIs they link to would be great. Thank you!
Works on Mozilla SeaMonkey 2.1 (beta) (Score:1)
Looks a lot like a flash site.
:-(
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Looks a lot like a flash site. :-(
That good then?
Hard to say, if only someone could invent simple figurative expressions to go with the text we might know the writer's feeling on the subject. That's way too complicated to ever happen though.
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"It was that bad then?" as opposed to "Is that bad then?"
However, I'm merely being pedantic; your interpretation may have been the one the author was attempting to convey.
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https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikibooks/en/wiki/Lojban/Attitudinals [wikimedia.org]
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No I hate flash sites. So damn slow and baroque (gaudy). Like IMDb.com, although they have improved some.
Also works on Opera 11
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Actually, HTML5 is trying to fix a lot of those problems.
For example, it has a complete specification how to parse valid and invalid HTML.
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I was in agreement with you until around a year ago. I've developed a ~lot~ in flash over the years and, although I liked the ease of use (gui) and headache-less (all-browser-compatible) coding, I could never get it out of my head that flash was basically DHTML within a proprietary framework. Today, thanks to javascript libraries such as jQuery (that takes care of cross-browser issues by itself), it is becoming almost (but not quite) as easy to manipulate graphics and text as using flash. jQuery is already
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Say what? (Score:1)
What is that about? The "other demo site" also worked in any browser that supported the features used int the demo. Same difference.
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Oh really?
http://www.apple.com/html5/ [apple.com]
I get an error for all of them saying I need to download Safari to view them.
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Thats odd. I have to problem viewing those demos with the latest version of Chromium
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If that was the case, they wouldn't need to check the user-agent string and block it outright and would just let you try to load it ?
If you spoof the browser string it'll run. Almost all of it runs on Chrome (which uses webkit) I'm told, haven't tried it myself.
The invalid claim is simply that in order to support an open web, we've created these demos, but you can't see them unless you using this propriatry technology. And you have to use it because we make checks for it.
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So what? the GP's point that it doesn't let just any browser that supports its features see it still stands.
Just admit you were wrong and stop this charade, alright?
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I got an addon which spoofs the user-agent string and pretended I was viewing it on an iPhone, and guess what, it mostly worked. Some minor bugs but the ones I tried out on Firefox 4 pretty much worked. See, that's the open web in action.
However the one we're talking about is basically a safari advertisment, because lets face it, apple doesn't care about open standards. Apple cares about controlling everything itself - there are tons of proofs for this, I'm not going to bother listing all of them.
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Blink (Score:1)
Blink
Marquee (Score:1)
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Ironic (Score:3)
Was quite enjoying the experience, then it crashed my firefox 4. Go figure.
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At least you got that far, in chrome on the mac it completely hard locked my machine. And again after a fresh restart. HTML5 demos, now fucking your machine harder than flash.
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That they don't test their own websites to see whether it'll run on it? I would have hoped they'd start their bug hunting at home.
Web Sockets in Firefox 4 (Score:2)
What's the status of Web Sockets in Firefox 4?
I heard that there were concerns about whether the technology was mature enough, but it sounds like a very important web tech so I really hope it makes it.
If it doesn't get into Firefox 4 that takes all pressure off of MS to include it, and it will probably be years before it gets widely deployed.
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WebSockets is currently supported in Firefox 4 and Opera, but disabled by default in both.
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...because the specification has a significant security hole, IIUC
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Do other software is:
Transparant caching proxies that do not properly implement HTTP.
Websites can silently inject fake data in the cache of such a proxy.
The reason for it being disabled is because Mozilla and atleast Opera wants to implement a version of the protocol which can not be abused this way.
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Disabled by default for security reasons [mozilla.org]
Interesting link on the history of HTML5 (Score:5, Informative)
And why HTML, XHTML, XML, MIME is such a clusterfuck ...
http://diveintohtml5.org/past.html [diveintohtml5.org]
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That has a really weird font though, like a badly scanned book from 1910.
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Not having the same font as every website since 1990 is kind of the point...
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Hey, do you know you can just leave out all the fancy stuff and only view the real content ? It is all interpreted you know and you can make the browser interpreted it as you like. You can make a lot of stuff just disappear.
For example with this addon:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/readability/ [mozilla.org]
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Actually found out this was a better addon:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/reader/ [mozilla.org]
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That's another good link!
Cheers
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I bet that was written from his lawn.
The internet, like anything else, is subject to Sturgeon's Law. Starting over won't change this.
Missing the point? (Score:1)
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Let me get this straight.
You want a website which showcases new features in firefox 4 to work with firefox 3.6?
What would we be the point of THAT?
Wrong audience (Score:1, Insightful)
"Firefox 4 is almost here, and comes with a huge list of awesome features for web developers."
How about fewer features for web developers - and more for web users? Remember us? They guys who are the reason for all those web developers?
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Those that get new features in every single release, you mean?
Seriously, if Firefox had stagnated like IE6 did for so many years I'd understand your concern, but as it stands...
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Seriously, if Firefox had stagnated like IE6 did for so many years
FF1 and FF2 most certainly did stagnate for years. They are still stagnant and will forever onwards be stagnant.
The last IE6 version was released in 2004, the first IE7 version was released in 2006. The correct argument to make is that IE6 was popular for so many years...
Damn IE6 for not having any successful competition for so many years (this is coming from a long-time Opera user.. so dont even try to claim that I am an IE fan-boy, like the guy in my signature was)
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You are an idiot because you have taken a quote from Jobs out of context so you could use it as a troll.
How is it out of context? You realize that its my signature, right?Didn't I even say that it was my signature?
Don't these facts make YOU an idiot?
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addons.mozilla.org and userscripts.org has a nice selection for such features.
Firefox is the base on which webpages and addons run.
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Wow, it's like people forget what Phoenix was forked for
Just stop adding crap to Firefox and tighten up the code, remove the bugs and have the rendering engine improve to keep pace with new developments in HTML (non)standards.
Or you could put an HTML editor, IRC a
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Firefox 3 (Score:1)
Is their URL bar faster? (Score:2)
Otherwise I don't give a crap about stuff that will make life easier for the people who create mostly lame websites. The URL bar is slow as an evil year and would be wonderful if it was fast. But it isn't.
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Pretty much everything is faster. A good hunk of the UI is written in JS, and the JS engine got a significant speed boost this release.
When I highlight a URL in the AwesomeBar and hit a key, the time to display the drop-down box full of results is imperceptible on my machine.
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For what it's worth, while the url bar is indeed a lot faster, that's not really related to the JS changes.
In fact, the new method jit isn't even enabled for chrome JS by default in Firefox yet. You can flip a pref to thus enable it.
just.. (Score:1)
WebGL performance/conformance (Score:2)
I ran 1-2 tests from the demos.mozilla.org site and they did not seem to work as intended (especially the Remixing Reality one). My guess was that maybe WebGL was not working properly on my system and I ran the webgl-conformance-tests suite found at https://cvs.khronos.org/svn/repos/registry/trunk/public/webgl/sdk/tests/webgl-conformance-tests.html [khronos.org]. Results were 5389 of 5468 tests passed, 1 timed out. Same results with latest Minefield.
Now I'm a bit at loss: the above tests (the failure of which may or may
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WebGL is probably the hardest part to get right of all the specifications, because it so depends very much on other parts of the system.
The page was mostly for developers and knowledgable users I would guess.
But luckily WebGL is only a very small part of all the new stuff. IE9 will not support it, so that might be a reason people won't be using it much.
The specification has been made and people are doing testing because if you don't do that, the problems will not be found and fixed and it will never advance
Crazy Flash-like shit is not content (Score:3)
Look, look with your special eyes:
https://demos.mozilla.org/en-US/#dashboard [mozilla.org]
I don't know what to do here. I don't even know what I'm looking at here. I move the mouse around the screen and things glow and whir and slide, but none of it makes any sense to my mind. HTML 5 apparently means "Hey now I can do that crazy shit I used to do with Flash, right in my HTML."
Yeah, and now instead of that crazy Flash shit being isolated to a little box of your page that I could disable, now your entire page is rendered a confusing mess of utter unusability to anyone over the age of 30.
When will web site designers learn that people don't come to their websites for their crazy Flash shit or really anything they do. They come to their web site for their CONTENT. Content doesn't mean what your web site designer does. Content means what's between the covers of a book. Content means a video. Content means user discussion boards.
Great technical browser implementation, guys. You're doing good work, but this crazy Flash-like shit shouldn't be the poster child for your work.
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Web site designers usually are users too and fully agree with you. But marketing seems to keep asking for it and I guess some people comply because they want to keep their job.
I think it is the job of browser vendors to make it easier for the user to remove/disable certain style types/elements so all that is left is the real content.
Like so:
https://www.readability.com/ [readability.com]
I think Safari implements something like that as well ?
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Actually found out this was a better addon:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/reader/ [mozilla.org]
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I think you're missing the point of what a demo is. This is to demonstrate the new features that HTML5 will enable for web developers. Just because the demo has spinning icons, scrolling bars, music, video, 3D, etc, all packed into a couple of pages, does not at all mean that this is how most future pages will look or behave. The point is that some of these features will be useful for different applications.
A couple of decades ago, the demoscene was making programs that didn't do anything but show 3D object
Worry (Score:1)
The following does make me worry:
I hope they also check the quota. Not everyone is sitting at a single-user system, after all.
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In this third millennium it's a non issue.
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Quotas are just disk space and my argument is as valid, when disk space gets cheaper quotas can be expanded.
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I'm pretty sure that quota is not in fact checked yet. For one thing, I'm not sure there are reliable ways to check quotas in all cases (short of trying to write and failing)...
One thing I don't understand (Score:3)
On the website there is a showcase of the HTML5 capabilities of rendering 3D graphics in the browser. But, hey, I remember for sure that browsers had this ability in the nineties and already then nobody cared about it.
Another thing I don't understand is why there is a constant need for new standards...HTML3, XHTML, CSS, HTML4, HTML5, etc. etc. Why? To keep committees busy? To piss of browser and web developers? To make sure that overlay ads can be displayed in any browser?
I understand the benefits of XHTML over HTML. However, wouldn't it be wise at some point to just freeze the features and perhaps focus on the content instead?
If this trend of turning my browser into a slow, clunky meta operating system continues, I will revenge myself by writing my own proprietary, slick binary web protocol, implement my own browser, and distribute it among friends. And others will likely do that, too. Goodbye HTML!
You have been warned! ;-)
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Actually, HTML5 is kind of a revolt against the ideas of XHTML.
XHTML specifies if their is a single mistake on the XML you should stop rendering and only display a warning, this is not acceptable for (read: useful to) the user.
So maybe XML is technically better, but HTML is more useable in practise.
The reason we are now getting all these new specs the W3C is because W3C wanted XML-syntax for HTML and all these 'innovations' got delayed.
Have a look at the longer story:
http://diveintohtml5.org/past.html#timel [diveintohtml5.org]
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Well, you could do that, but you'd lose the whole point of moving to xhtml that is well formatted and usable by any generic xml tool. Only browsers that implement all these hacks and quirks could parse it, because everything else would correctly complain that this isn't xml.
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XML is strongly typed like that on purpose, since its used for MUCH MORE important stuff than just displaying websites (SOAP, interconnections between OO languages, Serilisation) - in that case, if there's a mistake in syntax, then it means that there's something wrong and you shouldn't be using it that way.
If we all switched to XML-based stuff for our websites, automated parsers would love it, but if you make a single mistake everything could break. In this case the robustness/laziness of HTML is far bette
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> Another thing I don't understand is why there is a
> constant need for new standards
Some of the new standards are web developers keep asking for new features. Part of this is an expanding set of use cases, and part is expanding demographics. Now some of these revisions are more substantive than others...
For example, HTML3 introduced the and tags because authors wanted those capabilities. HTML4 introduced and various other things. XHTML introduced an XML formulation of HTML. HTML5 introduces n
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If you want to parse HTML as XML, just use HTMLTidy. I know it can create proper XHTML-document (thus XML) of pretty much any HTML4-document. I guess it can handle HTML5 too, but haven't tested it.
Web-o-Wonder provided me with a unique experience (Score:3)
When I reloaded Chrome, it came up without the tabs I'd been looking at.
Impressive.
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May I recommend filing a bug on your X package with Ubuntu, since it's clearly buggy?
Might want to file one on Chrome too, in case they want to work around the bugs, I suppose... This sort of thing is why Firefox is shipping with WebGL disabled on most Linux graphics setups. :(
Bloat (Score:3)
And to think, the original purpose forking Firefox from Netscape was to remove the bloat.
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I'm using it right now, and so far the demos are working in my daily from the PPA...
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bad bad hits on the web-o-wonders.... its down baby.
It's working fine for me. It doesn't seem to be slashdotted.
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They "did" SSL correctly. They just didn't encrypt all images, which makes sense in this case (in fact, using SSL at all is overkill for this page).
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that Firefox 4 Beta erroneously suppresses the error.
Uh, no. They treat it like a non-encrypted page, the same that Chrome and Opera do, and it's correct since the certificate is valid - so there's no suspicion of MITM - you simply can't rely on the HTTPS since some of the elements use HTTP.
Browsers treating this kind of pages as "potential threats" is bad, because it forces people to drop all SSL if they can't pr
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Opera treats this as an "insecure" page but doesn't warn you. It just doesn't show it as "secure" (with yellow, green or anything else for the padlock icon).
It is, in effect, an "insecure" page because of that a single missing SSL element, which is correct, but not worth shouting about because you should be checking for the padlock before you eve TYPE anything sensitive in. And it's a completely worthless site to have SSL on, except to bump up the system requirements.
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suspicion != possibility.
Yes, it's possible the page is being MITM, but there's no reason to assume that. A broken certificate, on the other hand, is a reason to be suspicious.
Which is probably why Chrome in fact does flag the page broken, and I'd hope Opera does too.
Firefox 4, on the other hand, just happily goes on like nothing's wrong...
Firefox does not treat the page as safe. It treats the page as unencrypted, which is the right thing to do.
If you go to https://paypal.com/ [paypal.com] you'll see that the URL bar has a green zone with Paypal's logo. Yet, in the Web O' Wonder there's no such green zone.
So yes, Firefox 4 does recognize that the page isn't safe.
What Firefox 4 does
Re:Graceful degradation? (Score:5, Informative)
The All-In-One Entirely-Not-Alphabetical No-Bullshit Guide to HTML5 Fallbacks [github.com]
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Then disable the damn PDF-plugin, problem solved (if you ask me).
It is safer too, because it won't automatically load the PDF in Acrobat/whatever.
Acrobat has many, many issues and will never be fixed. Even Adobe does not know how to even make a specification which is not ambiguous:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54XYqsf4JEY [youtube.com]
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Only difference is, the user can make the browser display the content in anyway they want it displayed.
For example, like this:
https://www.readability.com/ [readability.com]
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Actually found out this was a better addon:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/reader/ [mozilla.org]
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You can make Firefox 4 look like Firefox 3 if that is what you want.
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That is very very cool!