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Mozilla Firefox 2.0 Alpha Peeking Out (Or Not)
anadgouda writes "Mozilla Firefox 2.0 alpha is released. The links for download were not available directly on Mozilla.com website. Being Alpha, all features might not work and most of the plugins might not be compatible." Reading thru the comments, it appears there's some disparity as to whether or not this is actually just a naming scheme that they use; but let me reiterate that there has been no official announcement from Mozilla, so take with a giant grain of salt. Some good screenshots at OSdir.
Okay, seemingly little to no information about what comprises the new Firefox. For those who also might be curious, I have found these features described in a Firefox 2 Roadmap, but don't know if and how many of these made it to the new release.
Anyone else have any links to release notes?, what's new in FF 2?
Mozilla Firefox 2.0 alpha NOT released.
The nightlies are now branded 2.0 alpha because... well, for some odd reason they like to brand their CVS builds before things get released, to make sure the act of rebranding breaks nothing. IIRC that actually hit them way back and they got scared.
Firefox 2.0 will be considered released when you see it on www.mozilla.org / www.mozilla.com / irc.mozilla.org
Quote from Asa Dotler's blog:
When we make a new release, we'll say so. Please don't report new releases because someone checks in a change to the user agent or similar. If we're actaully doing a release, we'll announce it. Thanks.
I was looking for the same thing as you, documentation about the features. You provided an interesting link, here's another one from the latest status meeting which includes the features, but a lot more :-)
Animoog.org
Where's the link?
Where would we be today if Linus came along and said, "Well guys, I'm working on a Minix clone and it's going to be totally k-rad, and I'll keep the development open to anyone who wants to help out, but you can't download it anywhere. Sry, kthxbye!" ?
Not that the Firefox team is all that willing to let anyone just start developing the core stuff, but note the nick and try not to concentrate on that.
I tried it on my computer. I didn't see any significant changes, and as others have pointed out, there was not much information on what exactly went into this release, but great job in making advancements.
Karma whore +99999
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Changelog for Opera 9 TP2: http://snapshot.opera.com/windows/w90p2.html
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I can't believe that after Firefox actually implemented tabbed browsing *well*, people insist on ruining it in the name of "progress".
The fact that firefox has just one "x" button that closes the current tab, rather then a close button per tab, is a *feature*, not a bug. Users of Lotus Notes, like myself, are all too familiar with what happens when each tab has a close button: you often click on the wrong one, and destroy the wrong tab! With Firefox 1.5's single tab close button, you can never accidentally close any tab: you can only close the tab you are now seeing.
So I hope that if the "improvement" of having many close buttons makes it to FireFox 2, it will at least be configurable, so that users made miserable by the new feature could at least disable it.
.. i can tell you that there is one thing that "breaks" most extensions: In the extension, you can specify a maximum version number under which the extension works. Normally, the extension developer sets it to a version he has personally tested (the actual release). Whit each version-bump, he retests and changes just the maximum version-number. If you want to do it yourself: get into the manifesto of the extension and search for this String "1.5" and replace 1.5 with a higher number.
Tab Mix Plus is an extension that has the "Undo Close Tab" feature, as well as many other useful ones. (The extension's page on the mozilla site is here.)
If you want only Undo Close Tab, that feature is also available in an extension called (what else?) undoclosetab.
There's a "portable" version available here:
http://www.cybernetnews.com/?p=411
Definitely a plus b/c it let's you avoid dealing w/profile incompatibilites/conversion between the different versions of firefox and instead stores it in the directory with the portable firefox program
The idea of people who actually write markup language specifications and know a heck of a lot more about the internet than you do.
See also A blog post by someone who actually makes browsers and also knows a heck of a lot more about the internet than you do.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
1. Mozilla puts the release out so users can report bugs. Unless you already have a Bugzilla account, I suggest you wait until a release candidate is out.
2. If Firefox 1.5.0.1 is crashing so often or leaking memory so badly for you that you need to restart Firefox every day or so, you might want to try 2.0 Alpha to see if it fixes your problems. Of course, if it doesn't you should report the problem (see #1).
End users generally should not be downloading alphas because of the downsides you mention.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
At least with an open source project you know they're not going to go crazy adding features to please the marketing droids.
4 5
:)
what about google and firefox being in same bed?
doesnt mozilla bend over backwards over googles millions? http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/11/05392
oh and last i checked google are making billions from marketing
so to put the 2 together
THEY ARE going crazy adding features to please the marketing droids
That would be the case... if Firefox extensions needed to be compiled. Which they don't.
Extensions are programmed in Javascript and XUL, and for some advanced ones, XBL. They don't need to be recompiled, because they don't need to be compiled in the first place. The fraction of a percent that have more demanding interaction with the host system don't even necessarily need to be recompiled, depending on how they hook in to the mozilla code.
You'd be right for other programs, but that's not how Mozilla works.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
Actually, the overwhelming majority of extensions are not even compiled. They're pure XUL/JS/CSS/RDF. The maxVersion arc mentioned in the sibling is the reason. It's used to guard against the browser internals changing under them - and yes, pretty much most of the things you can usefully change are considered browser internals. :( Then there's also the things randomly being ripped out (cf. the bookmarks and history going away and being replaced by "Places")
;)
And as long as you do no use frozen interfaces (including defining MOZ_STRICT_API, not defining MOZ_INTERNAL_API, and linking against XPCOM glue), it should work fine most of the time. It's just that, depending on what you want to do, that might not be possible
Oh, and for informational purpsoses:
Firefox = official public release
DeerPark = developer's copies, optimized and/or individualized bulids, and all those other builds that aren't the official issued-for-the-general-public builds. Which, it would stand to reason, would include all the alpha and beta builds.
Z
2: Losing stability/higher memory usage (come to think of it, this isn't really a change)
3: Bugs galore - possible security issues?
Repeat after me:
1 Compatibility issues are *normal* in alpha software. That's what they release it for: to find problems.
2 You *shall not* evaluate stability, performance nor memory usage in an Alpha stage software. Jeez, it has debugging code in it!
3 You *shall not* install Alpha or Beta software in a production environment, or on machines whose security might be at risk.
Karma whoring wikipedia entry about developement stages here.
It's called quality assurance. There needs to be someone in charge to avoid the scenario you describe: someone takes a buggy pre-alpha nightly, and distributes it as "Firefox 2.0".
That would obviously be devastating for the project. I'm glad Mozilla.org is in charge, albeit the only thing really preventing the previous scenario is community respect.
Isn't this all a community written thing? Can't someone just take all the source-code and say "It's released"? This is my version of the released Firefox.
First off, the source code is there. But claiming it is a release (as in Mozilla.org's) when it is not is just misinformation. A minimum of honesty in advertising would say you've made your own fork of Firefox.
Secondly, you don't need to give out source unless you give out binaries. So you could (though this is only realistic on smaller projects or those controlled by one company) say "When we make a new release, we'll release the source". I think Apple did that with their Safari browser.
Third, the GPL doesn't change trademark law. You can take the code, but you can't release under the same trademarked name. You can make a clone like CentOS is of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but you can't release under the name itself.
So when YOU make a release YOU'LL say so (presumably under another name, since Firefox is trademarked). It only gets stupid when other people is making release statements on behalf of someone else.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You're welcome to make a release, but you can't call it Firefox. Firefox is a protected trademark, as is Mozilla.
Besides, that's not what the article said.
The Burning Edge, one of Jesse Ruderman's pages, is a pretty good resource to get a summary of what is the latest and greatest in Firefox development.
He also has one that summurizes the differences between releases: http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/releases/. It looks like he hasn't updated it for 2.0 yet though.
Based on the screenshots, there isn't much new. While they readily admit the GUI isn't in place, I'd expect even an alpha build to reveal more of the functionality (otherwise it isn't alpha yet).
:)
One thing in the GUI that really catches my eye is the History menu, and the search option in particular. While you can search History via the sidebar in FF 1.5, it's somewhat weak. I'd guess that if they devoted a menu to History, they've vastly improved it.
One thing I would LOVE to see is all of Tab Mix Plus to make it into the core functionality of Firefox. Actually there is a number of things Firefox (core application) sorely needs, natively out of the box:
- a resizable search box (whose bright idea was it to make it a fixed width anyhow? Why should I have to download the Resize Search Box extension for such a basic thing?)
- Session management - Opera does this out of the box, and I really like the session management extensions.
- User agent switcher: Opera and Konqueror both do this natively. Firefox should as well, so that we can use coded-for-ie-and-only-ie web sites - again, without having to download and install an extension
- Tab Mix Plus (mentioned above) - every other tabbed browser does natively what Tab Mix Plus adds. Firefox should do everything this extension provides, natively. Also, I should be able to "detach" a tab - this has really grown on me in Konqueror.
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