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Places Feature Cut From Firefox 2
segphault writes "Apparently, the new bookmark and history system (called 'Places') scheduled for inclusion in Firefox 2 has been removed from the roadmap and disabled in the builds. An article at Ars Technica discusses some of the implications: 'Since Firefox 2 (and all alpha builds from here on out) will use the conventional bookmark system, those of you that have been using Firefox 2 alphas (the Gecko 1.8 branch) will have to export your bookmarks to HTML in order to preserve them. As a Firefox user and a software developer, I am personally very disappointed with the removal of this innovative feature.'" Update: 05/01 01:16 GMT by Z : Ars link updated.
This feature was cut from Firefox2 because it was unpolished and unacceptably buggy still. It is now on the "trunk" for inclusion in Firefox3, so it's still on the roadmap.
In fact, it remains enabled on the Trunk nightlies for Firefox3.
Only one number off. So close, and yet so far.
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Features cut from Firefox 2:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060430-670
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The correct arstechnica link is here: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060430-6701 .html
The alpha automatically imported all data from the old bookmarks.html into the Places system. Firefox converted from IE to Mozilla's bookmarks.html already.
The later builds of the Alpha (last week or so) all included an Export functionality to dump your Places DB into a bookmarks.html file again for this next build. You can still download those builds if you need to export your Places DB to the old Bookmarks.html format.
In case someone is looking for more information about the actual implementation of the "places" concept: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Talk:Places:Design_Overvie w
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Places:Design_Overview
I really like the way Epiphany handles bookmarks with it's "Smart Bookmarks" features... Basically, you just tag your bookmarks with arbitrary tags e.g. "Work", "Sport", "Geek", and you can search for them dynamically.
I would like to see an extension of this (and I know work is in progress)... With meta-tagged files. God knows why browsers do not store bookmarks as files in a "Bookmarks" folder.
Because forking it won't get code written any faster? It's not as if forking magically gets stuff done...
Their official reason for disabling Places amounts to "either we kill this, or no new Firefox for everyone". They chose to release something with the other changes rather than wait.
Basically, in Netscape 4, bookmarks were stored in a quasi-HTML file, and history in a DB file.
In Mozilla, bookmarks are stored in a XML-that-almost-look-like-HTML format, while the history is stored in the most insane file format ever devised by mortal mind. It's called MORK. Remember that name. Remember it well. (Seriously, take a look at your history.db. It's a text file. It really is. Or it might look like one from a good distance.)
While in the new grand concept, everything is stored in a SQLite database - simple, well tested, portable, efficient, doesn't make Firefox much bigger than it already is, and above all, programmer-friendly file format that isn't causing peoples' brains to ooze out of their ears when they try to figure it out.
- Places is still in the roadmap, just not for v2.0. (maybe 3.0 if not earlier)
- Places was too buggy to work with. Nightly testers report far "too many" bugs with it... even if they were fixed, imagine all those bugs that would be uncovered if used by the masses (nightly tester build bugs are a good indication of how many bugs will be found if open , it's somewhat proportional).
More to read at MozillaZine
Here is a blog post by Ben Goodger discussing the descision to remove places. Basically it's so they can focus on making Firefox "Safer, Faster, Better"
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http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/01011
...you might see that Ryan Paul wasn't just turning his nose up at FireFox:
"As a Firefox user and a software developer, I am personally very disappointed with the removal of this innovative feature. With over 1,000 bookmarks to keep track of, I was really looking forward to being able to leverage the SQLite database engine for bookmark organization and management. That said, my disappointment is tempered by my capacity to appreciate the rationale for such a delay. In the world of software development (both open and proprietary), such delays are common and they typically result in software that is more polished and reliable. As long as inclusion of the feature isn't delayed indefinitely, the consequences of this particular decision will most likely be positive ones."
It is early adoption folks. It's an alpha. Not a big deal.
Please allow me to hate the creator of the 120-character limit: *HATES*. Thank you.
Agreed. It also makes it possible to open your bookmarks file in another browser.
I have an old Thinkpad 760, but it won't run any of the new distros. I used to be able to run OpenBSD 2.something on it with acceptable speed, but XFree86 made point revision and it stopped being reasonably snappy. Running Firefox on any modern distro, BSD, Linux or otherwise, is painful.
However, I can run Win98 on it with little trouble. Is that a good thing? I don't think so.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Especially since right now (in firefox 1.0.7, which is what i'm running, stfu) you can middle click on the tabs and close them anyway. Adding an x on the tabs accomplishes nothing.
Why do people not use the middle click in firefox? Middleclick link = open in new tab, middle click tab = close. I go through a page like fark, and middle click on the links I want to read, then they're all there waiting for me in tabbed glory when I'm done and ready to digest.
~W
sig?