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."
Sounds like speed holes (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone remember that episode of the Simpsons? "These are speed holes. They make the car go faster."
Personally, I'd rather have the browser go faster than look faster.
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: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).
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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]
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First, the article says "seem", not "look".
Second, are you sitting there with a stopwatch, shrieking "Ah hah! Caught you! I was happier because you seemed faster, but the evidence conclusively proves that I should instead be miserable. Miserable and angry."
If so, then you have enough time on your hands that browser speed isn't your top concern.
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My personal opinion is that the new version looks like ass -- where's the menubar? Ribbon interfaces don't seem fas
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Speaking of Linux, I wonder if they're finally going to change the menu item locations to be the same across platforms... ("Preferences..." I'm looking at you!)
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Speaking of Linux, I wonder if they're finally going to change the menu item locations to be the same across platforms... ("Preferences..." I'm looking at you!)
There's nothing wrong here. Under Linux, you find Preferences under Edit. Under Windows, you find them under Tools. On a Mac, you find them under Firefox (or Cmd+,). The program needs to be consistent with the platform.
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The folks doing deCOMtamination, as they call it, would like to have a word with you.
Sounds like.. progress bars. (Score:3, Insightful)
Most progress bars on the world are there to make the wait more fun. Drawing the progress bar takes CPU, and probably some activities sould be done in a incremental way, to be progressbar friendly, where a bach apropach would be faster.
Most progress bars are not really needed, but make programs feel faster by making programs a bit slower but more fun.
Anything that make a program 0.1% slower but feel 20% more faster is better for everyone. Yea, any human.
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The ones that just have a moving gradient, or a bar that zooms back and forth don't actually indicate progress at all, they just reassure the waiting human that the machine is working, rather than frozen, which apparently makes the wait seem shorter.
Also, outside of some fairly specific niche applications(and video encoding/transcoding, which may not count as 'niche' these days), most progress ba
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A qualitatively "faster-feeling" browser and a quantitatively "faster-running" browser are not mutually exclusive. They are more likely to be utterly orthogonal.
Re:Sounds like speed holes (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I'd rather have the browser go faster than look faster.
Personally, I'd rather have a stable browser with useful features that I use than a browser that can render a page 0.1 second faster. I really don't understand this obsession over the speed of the browser.
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Now for 4.x they're talking about emulating Chrome, which I tried out briefly and found very much not to my liking
Amen. If you want a Chrome UI, use Chrome.
I mean, what next, A Ribbon?
Its bad enough that they have a huge round back button, as if I can't figure out which one I need to use to go back a page -- just like IE.
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Re:Sounds like speed holes (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, to me it looks exactly like Microsoftitis. The disease where don’t come up with other ideas, but imitate others, always runing behind them, but by definition never catching up. And if you can’t imitate or only imitate it badly, you at least make it look like it does, and make it all shiny.
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.
Maybe someone comes up with some KHTML or Opera thing that can beat Firefox’s range of extensions. (And make no mistake: People don’t switch their browser, until ALL features that they use are available PLUS some more. Same thing happened with the Internet Explorer. The same thing is true with Linux. (But with Linux, I don’t want it, since then it wouldn’t be Linux anymore, but would have become what it hates.)
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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 i
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.
H.264 support? (Score:4, Insightful)
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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:H.264 support? (Score:5, Insightful)
Mozilla Foundation is a U.S. company (Score:3, Insightful)
And some people live in countries where software patents are not even legal. Why should they pay anything?
Are you willing to foot the bill for the emigration of the entire Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation to one of these countries?
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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:5, Insightful)
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?
Why is everyone so eager to suddenly replace one proprietary format for another? I'm not saying that h.264 is the wrong choice, it certainly seems better than the competition right now, but just because the licensing group are playing nice at the moment, don't assume they will always play nice. Maybe the right choice is to stick with Flash a little longer to further development on an open source alternative and Mozilla have got it right. I guess time will tell as h.264 looks pretty inevitable now, I just hope we're not having similar discussions in a few years about how we're shackled with it as a format and the people behind it are screwing everyone.
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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.
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Because there is no other choice at the moment which stands a snowball's chance in hell of actually being used. You can support Theora as much as you want, but that just means content producers will keep using Flash, because that is what gives them the video quality they want.
Your choices are: Flash and h.264, or just h.264. The latter gives you the choice to sneak in Theora on the side for those who still want it. What sane person would pick the former choice?
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Oh I don't disagree that Flash needs to die, this has been my standpoint for much of the last decade for numerous reasons (accessibility and indexability of sites even back before mobile devices and performance and security issues made it a hot topic). Nobody would be happier to see the back of it than me, for all the reasons you list and more, but the fact is that it's going to be around for a while yet anyway (there are too many people using browsers with zero HTML5 support), so it might be a good idea to
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From the numbers a lot of people have posted, it would only cost about 3 cents per copy of Firefox.
Neither Firefox nor x264 could be used that way, the GPL requires an essentially limitless sub-licensing rights (technically it could be limited to GPL only software) and that's not part of the license. The closest you could have is a non-free plugin not based on x264, since flash is ok I guess that is too. The best solution would be to simply let the system codecs handle it, and if not fall back to flash. Win7, OS X has it native and most Linux users will install x264 anyway...
Re:H.264 support? (Score:4, Insightful)
Supporting H.264 doesn't mean FF has to actually ship the codec. Go learn about GStreamer and DirectShow, then rethink your silly argument.
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For the record, my OS does not ship with H264 support.
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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
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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?
Re:H.264 support? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:H.264 support? (Score:4, Insightful)
h.264 and HTML5 aren't synonymous - HTML5 just provides a video container, the browser vendor decides what codecs to allow, so it's entirely possible to fully support HTML5 yet still have no h.264 support.
It was also possible to sell fully functional VCRs that weren't VHS. But it wasn't easy finding content for them.
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Well, here it's much easier [wikipedia.org].
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It is not exactly easy to find H264 content either.
It is quite possible that everyone will stick to FLV, because it will continue to be the most widely supported format. Its also possible, if less likely, that Google will be able to persuade everyone to install VP8 plugins by using Youtube to spread it. Its also possible (if still less likely) that Theora will gain enough steam to be a contender (everything except IE and Safari will support it out of the box, if those two groups can be persuaded to install
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No. Well that was simple.
Re:H.264 support? (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Most people hate it. However most graphics and UI designers, tech reporters and iThing owners love it because it is the latest and most shiniest flashing glitter ball that they must play with. These are the people who make and demand interface changes. These are the people who actually think that menu bars are a "waste of screen space". These are the people who think that putting tabs outside of the program window frame is either a useful or desired change. These are the people think that "minimalism"--giving the user less and less controls or options--constitutes a step forward at all costs.
Firefox's UI is fine. But because of these people, resources at Mozilla are being wasted on needless keeping up with the Jones at Google. Meanwhile actually needed features like speed, process separation and support for self signed certs are being sidelined while the team focuses on making the browser shiny.
Google is a steamroller, and is aiming to squash the other browsers flat. Firefox included. Lack of realistic leadership, as manifested in these proposals, will only ensure that Google succeeds where Microsoft has failed.
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Silent update (Score:3, Insightful)
It won't be "silent" if it keeps that obnoxious behaviour it does now, where it interrupts you with a new version splash page. It's no less rude than a popup ad.
Finally surf the WWW with FFF (Score:2)
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:Finally surf the WWW with FFF (Score:4, Funny)
Ketchup!
"the faster it will seem" ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems faster? In my experience it has been more than "seems", Chrome actually is faster. The thing keeping me on Firefox is the various add-ons which I cannot get in Chrome. If Chrome were to get vertical tabs, that would go a long way towards making a switch.
It would be nice if Firefox did improve performance though. Would be a lot more significant than a trimmed down interface while the program runs just as slow.
removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you! That is the most annoying part of Firefox. I hate when I open Firefox and it makes me wait while it updates, and then when it finally does open, it does so on a pointless tab that offers me absolutely no useful information and once again delays what I'm trying to do.
I don't like the secret/stealth update either. Here's a very simple idea:
First, install the update when I shut down the browser. You're not wasting my time then because I'm done using it. Second, don't give me a tab telling me what I already know. I know it was updated, I just fricken saw it updated. I'm not an idiot.
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It pisses me off that randomly my Firefox install will suddenly and without warning install an update when starting up. I have been caught out several times by that until I turned off automatic updates. In my view, automatic updates should be off by default, with a dialog during install asking if you want to turn them on.
Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless the whole reason you're shutting it down, as is often the case for me, is that FF has been running so long that it's become an enormous memory hog and you need to shut it down then restart it so your system will speed back up. Or you're shutting it down in order to shut down or reboot your entire computer. I agree with the previous commenter, just give us the choice.
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 mon
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.
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Re:Menu Bar..? (Score:4, Insightful)
You can fit the menu bar, navigation buttons, address bar and search bar or even Google toolbar (don't ask) on one horizontal section saving tons of vertical space. See image:
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y113/benfenner/Firefoxmenubar.png?t=1273593698 [photobucket.com]
As long as I can still control how things look I should be happy. Give me a ribbon I can't turn off or re-configure (MS) or tabs I can't move down (Chrome?) and I'm not a happy camper. Make it configurable.
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Re:Menu Bar..? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is the menu bar really that useful? Apart from using it as a way to get to Preferences, I can't think of a single option that I use the Firefox menu bar for. Also, it takes up some screen area; on small screen devices it may be more optimal to drop the bar make the functions accessible from elsewhere.
Aint broke, don't fix it.
Maybe. On the other hand, Chrome has grabbed 20% market share in one year which is no small feat. There are reasons that people are switching to Chrome - allegedly quicker browsing and the user interface. It's worth experimenting with a similar approach in Firefox. Maybe it will work out, and maybe it won't, but if they don't try we will never know.
Re:Menu Bar..? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Menu Bar..? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, dammit. Someone shoot this guy.
Options that are very specific to an object can be attached to that object’s right-click menu. The right-click menu for the page in Firefox is fine as it is. Mine already has a Reload Every option (added by my Tab Mix Plus addon, I think), View Page in Coral IE Tab, a DownloadHelper submenu, RefControl options for the site, and a ScreenGrab entry. Those are all options specific to the page that I’m viewing.
File, edit, and view are better served by keyboard shortcuts and/or mouse shortcuts (e.g. ctrl-scroll zoom).
History, bookmarks, preferences not specific to the page that I’m viewing, and help should not be cluttering up the right-click menu. Give me my menu bar and leave me alone.
Re:Menu Bar..? (Score:5, Insightful)
I use Bookmarks menu to access and organise my bookmarks. I use the history menu to open tabs I've recently closed or go back to websites I've recently visited. I use the tools menu to access options, addons and clear history. I use the file menu for print, work offline and occasionally import.
In answer to your question then, yes the menu bar is very useful. It provides rapid and structured access to a lot of functionality. When I use an application with a menu bar I can always find the functionality I'm looking for easily but in applications without a menu bar (Office 2007, Chrome etc) I can never find what I'm looking for.
Menu bars provide a consistent interface across all applications so even if you haven't used an application before you know where to find options and featurs. Removing it gives every application a custom interface, making it very hard to use unfamiliar applications. Put a Office 2003 user in front of Office 2007 or an IE6 user in front of IE7/8 and and they'll struggle to use the application. However if you get an Office 2003 user to use Open Office or an IE6 user to use Firefox they'll be able to adapt very quickly thanks to the consistent interface menu bars offer.
When Microsoft started the trend of removing menu bars with Vista and Office 2007 I believe their aim was not to improve the user experience but to lock users into their applications. An Office 2003 user can adapt rapidly to any other Office suite thanks to the similar interfaces, however if someone is only familiar with Office 2007 it will be very hard for them to adapt to other suits because Office 2007 has a completely custom interface that is inconsistent with all other applications. This way they're locked into MS Office and Microsoft wins again.
The removal of the menu bar is a travesty of interface design but it's a massive win for Microsoft and, bizarrely, organisations such as Mozilla seem happy to help them along.
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No, their aim was to solve the problem that menu bar discoverability doesn't scale, to the point where the top 10 feature requests for Office were features that were already in Office.
See:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/tags/Why+the+New+UI_3F00_/default.aspx [msdn.com]
Please, please, (Score:2, Flamebait)
Nooooooo!!!
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.
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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.
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This behaviour greatly puzzled me on Chrome / Win32, because on OS X it still has a dedicated Bookmarks menu. Obviously this is because there is somewhere to actually put it on OS X (with the split between the window itself and the top bar) but it's still a strange inconsistency between platforms. I would have expected them to either all have a bookmarks menu, or all of them to lack a bookmark menu - not a mishmash.
Meh.
Plugin isolation (Score:2)
UI (Score:4, Funny)
Perhaps the most striking change to Firefox 4 is the user interface...
There's a shocker.
The faster it will seem? (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because an interface looks simple doesn't mean it looks faster. Who thinks like that? The "Speed holes" reference" above is quite right. Those UI designers either have been misquoted or are just complete fools.
What a simple interface means is that common tasks should be more obvious to do.
Don't give the users 100 options at once, especially things that only power-users use only once in a while. I'm not a fan of putting options in tabs and sub-menus, but sometimes it's the right thing to do.
Put the basic features at the beginning, the most obscure ones at the bottom. Put them in named groups such as "Basic", "Advanced" and "Expert" if necessary, so that non-technical users aren't afraid to mess with the basic ones, and advanced users don't waste time looking for what they need in the basic and advanced options.
slides don't work in Gnash (Score:2)
His slides (on "slide share") don't work for me, using Firefox and Gnash.
C'mon guys. Attention to detail with your open web!
Thanks for nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
Great. That means I will be staying with the current version of Firefox for a long time. I just tried Chrome a few days ago and the user interface totally sucks. What is is with these people who have to fuck up a good design just so they can make it different and justify a new version number.
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]
tabs on top (Score:2)
I used chrome for several days but went back to firefox because I hated having the tabs at the top.
stop messing wih the UI (Score:4, Insightful)
its hard enough to convince users that the internet isnt the blue E on their desktop and use Firefox instead.
keep changing the UI and sure as dammit they will be back using the blue E,
it may take us geeks a couple of minutes/hours to get used to a new UI but the average user it takes forever and they want familiarity they dont want to hunt for that buried option or find the new print button, hell some people dont even know what a home button is! and they absolutely hate having to throw away the knowledge gained on learning an applications UI just for it to change again
Tweak the default UI slowly, very slowly.
and for the record Chrome's UI sucks like Fisher Price (an example in gone too far in dumbing down)
eg. removing https:/// [https] from the location bar after we (the security/it industry) have spent 25 years teaching people to look for it when signing into their bank/mail etc.
lets trash all that training and start again ? after all that business training is free right ?
and and people wonder why IE is standard in corporations ?
perhaps Mozilla should start working on aiding administrators (group policy options (have you seen IEs massive list?) /locking down functions/ automatic updates that are truly automatic and dont need user interaction etc)
instead of playing with fluff.
A.Dmin
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Step 1 - replace Firefox or Chrome icon with the blue E.
step 2 - set the new browser to default and remove all ability of the user to fire up IE for web browsing.
Step 3 - there is no step 3. if they ask, It's a new version of the "internet" and they need to get used to it.
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Er, 25 years ago HTTP didn't exist. Let alone SSL.
Hundrerds of tabs? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hundrerds of tabs? (Score:4, Funny)
Seriously...if you have 100s of tabs open, you have ADD or you need to learn to let go of your tabs. Relax. Close them. They'll still be there when you wake up.
So will the ADD ;-(
Re:Hundrerds of tabs? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or you use open tabs as your todo list.
Central Management Please! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd love to switch our companies users to FF but having no way to centrally manage/monitor and update is a complete killer. There's no way we can have users with 10 different versions and different issues, etc. It's a nightmare. Give me a cool central control panel and have each browser be able to be hooked into it and it would be amazing.
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Give me a cool central control panel and have each browser be able to be hooked into it and it would be amazing.
It's called Landscape [canonical.com].
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.
Tips to make things seem faster (Score:5, Funny)
2) Add some motion blur when scrolling a page.
3) Lower your desk. Generally, the closer to the floor you are the faster it seems. I am using go karts as an example.
4) Make ALL youtube videos play at 2x speed except for videos about rival browsers, which shall be played at 0.5x.
Wrong definition of "power users" (Score:3, Insightful)
allowing power users running hundreds of tabs to quickly find the one they want.
Sorry, that”s not “power using” but “being a messie who clutters things up”.
The same type of person whoses desk is full of paper sheets and his display borders are full of post-it notes.
In other words: No a very healty person, and not someone you would want to hire.
A power user would use TabMix Plus storable sessions and bookmark folders, plus TagSifter tagging.
Or even one writing his own extensions.
But I guess the guy who wrote it considers using any kind or CLI something only experts use...
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)
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU... (Score:4, Insightful)
FINALLY.
Never again will I be alert-bombed.
(I looked for an add-on to change script alerts, confirms, and prompts into something non-modal. I couldn’t find anything.)
Why copy Chrome? (Score:3, Insightful)
I ask the Mozilla folks: why copy Chrome? If I wanted to run Chrome, I would run that instead. I run Firefox because it's firefox and has a GUI which provides a lot more functionality, and I install extensions to add to that functionality (firebug, web developer toolbar, adblock, tinyurl, colorzilla, cooliris, google toolbar, etc). I LIKE menu bars, and being able to turn features on and off, but having a basic toolbar, status bar, and menu bar enabled by default. I hate the current trend of dumbing down UIs and making them look like they were designed using Play-Doh (make that play-d'oh).
Want to know what you should work on instead? Sandboxing each tab, sandboxing plugins, decreasing memory utilization (with the realization that you can't do much about flash, quicktime, mplayer, etc. plugin memory utilization), fully multithreading the UI so one tab waiting for a message queue doesn't freeze the entire browser, and work on the javascript engine so it is on par with Chrome, etc.
Seriously. If all you do is reinvent Chrome, why bother? By offering a Chrome clone, any reason to run Firefox disappears.
No mention of Chrome's best feature? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Retarded (Score:4, Insightful)
"the simpler an interface looks, the faster it will seem". What a joke.
Re:Retarded (Score:5, Insightful)
It's pretty obvious what the man means. An application with a simple user interface works much nicer than an application with a UI that's littered with ambiguously labeled buttons and hidden menus. If you have to click 4 times to get something done, an application will feel (seem/look/whatever) slow compared to when you can do that in one single click as well.
One thing I hope is that "silently updating in the background" doesn't mean there will be some sort of "Firefox updater.exe" service loaded in the background when I start up my PC. I hate it when applications do that.
Re:Retarded (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, because increasing user satisfaction shouldn't be an objective for a browser which is constantly trying to increase its market share...
Much like the story of people complaining about elevators taking too long to arrive, and the installation of mirrors stopped the complaints, this is much the same. If users perceive the browser to be faster, then that is just as important as it being faster from a user satisfaction point of view.
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, Insightful)
If you don't understand the difference between perceived performance and actual raw performance, and how the former can frequently be more important than the latter, then I'm guessing you haven't had to deliver a complex user interface based product before.
Re:Retarded (Score:5, Funny)
You've got to admit, lynx seems pretty fast these days.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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: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?"
Re:Retarded (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Retarded (Score:5, Funny)
4 will crash and burn. We need a successor to rise from the ashes. We could call it Phoenix.
Alas, that name is already taken. Maybe we could call it Firebird instead!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
On my aging Mac, I started out with Safari, then switched to Firefox when Safari started getting buggy as hell for no apparent reason. A couple months back I switched to Chrome just for kicks, but after a while started noticing it wasn't as stable or bug-free as Firefox (specifically, Flash would die and my Youtube vids would have to be restarted, also when I have lots of tabs open some pages appear to be blank
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Whoops. I wasn’t done.
Contrast that to the Ribbon, which is no easier to actually use – once you know how – than menus were – once you knew how. It’s selling factor was that it’s easier to learn to use.
So everyone who already knew how to use the menus has to re-learn a new system, albeit one which is supposedly easier to learn than menus were. The easiest thing for them, however, would have been to not learn anything and continue using the system they already knew how to