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Mozilla's Goodger on Firefox's Future
An anonymous reader writes "The New Zealand Herald has an interview with Ben Goodger, lead engineer for Firefox at the Mozilla foundation. In it he describes how he got started, his reasons for Firefox's existence and what the future may hold for the little browser that could."
1. Firefox takes over IE's spot as top browser
2. Firefox renders slashdot correctly, since this is the site that promotes it the most.
Keep up the good work!
It'd be interesting if MS started including Firefox instead of IE, I bet they waste a ton of cash on IE development when they could just include someone else's browser and add an extension for things like Windows Update.
One cool thing about Firefox is support for extensions, extra search engines, etc. Totally configurable and that's the kind of users it's going for.
If firefox is to hit mainstream, some of the more popular plugins need to be incorporated directly into the product. At the very least, offer for download a chunky version with lots of stuff already installed. But even that won't cut it. Some features, like tabbed browsing, can't just be added on as extensions because they interact badly with other extensions.
Also, there are backward-compatibility problems with each new release. Developers of open-source extensions aren't going to keep updating their work, so supporting at least the more important extensions should be considered essential from a release perspective, and perhaps they should be incorporated into the core project where possible.
There's nothing wrong with an extension arhcitecture per se. In fact, they have worked very well in open source, e.g. Eclipse and Linux. And that's true for firefox too. However, the management of extensions requires careful consideration. In Firefox's case, there's room for improvement.
(BTW maybe this has nothing to do with the interview but it's slashdotted, that's my excuse for waffling on.)
.........that we (hypothetically) could lock down IE using policies so that IE could *only* browse intranet sites. Then install Firefox as the "Internet Browser". He said it would be too much administration for our PC support group.
:)
I came back with, "More administration than cleaning and recleaning spyware and adware from users' machines on a daily basis? Symantec and Adaware are supposed to come out with a corporate solution in Q2-05 at the cost of roughly $20-30 a seat. This would cost us nothing but the time we spend orchestrating a rollout."
I could see the gears turning, which was encouraging.
-Randy
...that ad-aware counts each cookie as an item. Therefore, if there are multiple Windows accounts, each account has its own IE profile and cookies. So cookies can be counted over and over, and by themself, aren't that malicious.
Overclockers is running a compo on the biggest infection right now (self inflicted though). Check out the current race leader!
Karma? Hey I just call it as I see it.
The number one reason I switched to Firefox is the LiveHTTPHeaders extension. This handy little gadget docks in your sidebar and displays outgoing HTTP requests and incoming responses in real time. It's a must for anyone who works with server side application technologies, load balancing, content switching, or caching. Good stuff.
Oh, yeah, the pop-up blocking is great too, so is tabbed browsing.
Be Safe! Sleep with a Marine. Semper Fi!
I spend a reasonable amount of time testing developments to our company's online DAM product. For sometime now I have insisted on including testing with firefox as well as the usual suspects (IE, safari, IE for Mac, Moz) While there are screeds of comments about trouble in certain browsers and how they should "try reading the HTML spec" before releasing the latest version of their browser, so far there have been no issues posted about Firefox. Long may it continue!
Will never catch on with the neophytes running Windows unless popular plugins install with a single button click and work seamlessly. Any idea why the Flash photo galleries on the USA Today site keep prompting me to reinstall Flash even though version 7.0.14.0 is already installed with Firefox/Win2K.
I've installed Firefox on the computers of two relatives, both have inquired about the problems rendering USA Today's contents. Unable to solve the problem I had to tell them to use IE. Yuck! I will gladly forego using photo galleries on USA Today in favor of using this browers but others won't.
The latest was the search bar that pops up at the bottom of the screen when searching in the page. How brilliant! After years of search boxes popping up on top of the text that you're reading, someone figured to drop it in a place that wasn't intrusive.
I installed the new version of Firefox the day it was released, and didn't notice anything different. I went to search for something, hit ctrl-f, typed normally, and found it, no problems.
About ten seconds later I suddenly realized "wait a second, where was the search box?" I hit ctrl-f again and . . . basically stared in total surprise.
It's brilliant. It's simple. I can't think of a single downside beyond "will people think to look for it there". Kudos to the Firefox team.
The only setting change I need now is something to prompt for overwrite when I try to create two identically-named bookmarks - this is a feature I use all the time in IE, and it's literally the only thing keeping me from switching over to Mozilla 100%.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
Here's why not:
:(
If you install it as the default browser, then it breaks updates (completely for Office). If you don't install it as default, then it frequently doesn't come up (any time a URL is launched via a shell command, which is more often that you might think)
In the end, I feel like I now need to maintain TWO seperate browsers with constant security updates (Yes, for FF too) and security settings to cover 99% the same functionality. I opined before that I also don't believe that FF is all that secure. Several surprising default settings and demonstrably anti-security minded UI features make it a little frightning.
In the end, all I really want is a browser to look at webpages, period. This was in fact a main factor for the creation of FF, to have a simple fast browser based on the Moz engine. Well it is so simple and so virtually identical to IE that there really doesn't seem to be a point in using it on Windows...
On Linux though, It's the shiz-nit! Well, with tightened security settings (hust like IE) and as long as you don't go DLing 500 plugins, it only took one to crash it for me
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
I know this is bound to light a fire under a few peoples pants, but most of TBE (Tabbrowser Extensions) really should be stuffed into Firefox itself. It's just got too many good features to be totally left in the cold as an "extension". It's one of the two extensions I consider critical to my 'Zilla browsing experience (the other one being All-in-One Gestures, because mouse gestures are, to quote a friend, "teh fucking pwn")
Lemmy start a small laundry list of TBE's perks though:
-Single window mode (EVERYTHING opens in a new tab)
-Drag & Drop tab rearranging (its just common sense)
-Undo close tab (possibly the BEST feature of the entire extension. I use it daily)
-Modifyable tab bar (move it around, scroll it, make it double layered, etc)
-Customized tab behavior for new links (hypertext/bookmarks/history/javascript/external apps/etc: choose if they open a new window, tab, or load in an existing one. Very nice for steamlining your browsing experience.)
-Tab grouping (including pretty colours!)
-Tab locking (lock a tab to a specific page)
-Auto reloading of tabs
I could go on and on... TBE is like everything AND the damn kitchen sink (which is why some people seem to have a seething hatred of it). Really though, would it kill Mozilla to add just a few of the more popular features? I know extensions are supposed to be this big, grand, wonderful idea, but I think a LOT more people (especially average joe's) would be appreciative rather than pissed off to have a couple more handy dandy features. You've got to remember that if you want your browser to go mainstream, its got to have a bit of a "smack you in the face" slant for all the little old ladies and joe-sixpacks out there that aren't gonna spend an hour sifting through the extension library. Leave the "OMG my browzer has NO bloat n' runs 1.00283% fastr on my AMD becuz I compiel'd it myself" to the geeks who know and love that kind of stuff.
Just my $0.02 anyways. In the meantime i'm just gonna keep loving the hell out of this browser. Firefox RULES! \o/
This is potentially the beginning of a huge change in the way advertising works on the internet. As people get turned on to Gecko, they will get turned on to features like AdBlock. If Gecko captures 50% market share, you can bet many of those people are viewing neither ads nor unwanted Flash content, if they're anything like me.
Does this mean an huge impending change in the way advertising works on the internet? Will companies like the NYT, who make a lot of money from ads, start embedding advertisements in ways such that AdBlocking them with regexp filters would also block out the non-ad images?
So I'm one of these slow guys who hasn't figured out smart keywords. So I go to "help" and "index" and type "smart keywords," just like the software geek says. Guess what? Nothing.
Well, I have been using the same AdBlock settings since 2001 and I rarely see an ad on Yahoo, NYT, or anywhere else. You just have to be clever with your regexps ;). In cases where you have to step through an ad page to get to the desired information, I usually get a blank screen with a "next" hyperlink on it. I just click on "next," and never have to see the ad.
... let the fun begin!
I download the ad, but tell AdBlock not to display it. Just doing my bit to bring down the system.
The point is, the vast majority of ads are completely blocked by the filters, as they have been since 2001. And as long as Gecko had 2% of the market share, sites didn't care. Now they'll have to.
It's lean, mean and quick. It's got a nice feature set, but I do find myself wanting:
- A more exposed menu to temporarily disable popup blocking.
- An option to open new tabs in the background rather than switching to them.
My favorite aspect of Firefox is that it doesn't try to do everything. It's just a browser, like... well.. IE. Only it's better. It doesn't have that Craptive X stuff.
Web designers have gotten sloppy in the last few years, coding only for IE, causing problems for those that don't use IE. The trend is changing and I welcome our new extra workload for lazy web designer overlords!
I don't have specific sites. Random porn sites that are transitory, most DEFINATELY have various trojans. Firefox lets them through, and my virus checker (http://free-av.com) picks them up. All kinds of trojans. Granted, there are probably fewer because Active X doesn't work, but depending on how much time I spend surfing, I average catching between 1-3 trojans a day that come by way of Firefox.
If you average catching between 1-3 trojans a day that come by the way of Firefox, which of course means you aren't CHOOSING to download these files (that would be no fault of the browser), then surely you'll be able to come up with specific sites and post them here for us to see.
Otherwise it's just pure BS.
Then try Opera. The open source zealots hate it because it isn't part of their religion, but it's the best browser out there, by far. And mouse gestures - once you start using 'em, you wonder why the hell they aren't available for every application.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
While I wholeheartedly agree to the spirit of your comments, I think they need addressing.
1) Yes it's a hack. Yes it's better to actually find the cause of the problem. I hate hacks as much as the next guy - but to the user it would solve all these "reflow bugs" easily and simply. There is nothing to stop them being fixed in the background and for this hack to eventually be taken out. But to a user, if a page looks screwed up, and it doesn't in internet explorer, it's firefox's fault.
Make it a preference that defaults to on, make all pages render correctly today, and worry about performance improvements later.
Functionality beats performance anytime.
2) I would suggest the refresh be double buffered, and just swap buffers when it's done. The page will take the same time to load, but after x (the time it takes it refresh the page) ms, the page will also look right.
Mozilla/Firefox already has fully customizable mouse gestures (using the nightly build).
My friend once got into a debate with me over Opera and Firefox, and it got down to him finally saying that despite how wonderful Firefox was and everything, he'll stick to Opera because he liked the ads! Well, I promptly directed him to a site where you can install ads for Firefox as well.
where does the funding come from?
Why does yahoo do this
If you're not going to produce valid HTML 3.2, why not just call it XHTML? "Hey, we produce XHTML!" There won't be any difference. Heck, I just checked the validator, and you're showing less errors for HTML 4.01 Transitional than you are for HTML 3.2. Maybe you should start saying it's 4.01?
Deprecation is not a matter of opinion in the world of webstandards
HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 offer exactly the same capabilities, only XHTML offers ease of use inside XSLT based publishing systems. Anyone else might just as well go on writing HTML 4.01.
What matters is that you write valid HTML, and that you separate style and structure, farming out all presentation to the linked style sheet. So I agree with the sentiment to use 'Strict with CSS'.
I see a lot of invalid XHTML on the web, where the use transitional or proprietary markup like 'topmargin' and 'center'. I always wonder, why did they add those slashes? What's the point?
If you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own. - Neal Stephenson
just for the record, go into opera, load slashdot, press ctrl-alt-v (validate frame) and you get back a document with some hundred validation erors against html 3.2
PAT
SEO Test: TIGI und SEBASTIAN - Online Shop - V
XSLT is for tranforming XML data between different XML formats or sometimes from XML to non-XML formats. It doesn't have much to do with "structuring layout". (I routinely use XSLT to transform Simplified Docbook into HTML, LaTeX and XSL-FO)
XSL-FO, on the other hand, is an XML application for describing (loosely) typesetting parameters. It's actually almost parallel with CSS in purpose, but CSS is more rich in functions relating to on-screen interactive content, like support for links and behaviors. XSL-FO could be used, for example, as an internal data structure resulting from applying CSS to some XHTML, although of course in practice browsers just use their own stuff. The relationship between XSLT and XSL-FO is that originally they were one lump (called "XSL") which was used to translate XML documents into FO documents for rendering, but W3C noticed that XSLT has more uses outside of that and split it into two separate specs.
Incidentally, passivetex is an XSL-FO interpreter for TeX. If you're happy specifying typesetting parameters at the lowest level it can be quite useful, but I prefer to just go straight to LaTeX since I trust it to "do the right thing" with regard to page layout and presentation most of the time.