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.

Comments

Differentiation

[MrNonchalant]

I tried the Firefox 2 beta briefly and wasn't impressed. There's very little in the way of real differentiation from 1.5 and 1.5 had very little differentiation from 1.0. Prior to this improvement was obvious, now it seems like there are a few cosmetic and stability/security changes but nothing serious. If you take out Places for 2.0, what's really left? The close button'll be on the tabs, but that seems about the only user-visible improvement.

Use Epiphany

[Anonymous Coward]

The other day I decided to try Epiphany instead of Firefox. It is much "snappier" than Firefox, has a smaller memory footprint and has a smarter topic-oriented bookmark system. Those who are disappointed about this functionality being removed from Firefox should seriously consider Epiphany.

Re:Bad URL

[pchan-]

Does anyone know if FF2 will have the ability to block 3rd party javascript includes? Right now I have to adblock them manually, but it seems like a handy feature. For example, the Slashdot page I'm currently viewing is serving me:

http ://a.as-us.falkag.net/dat/dlv/aslmain.js
http ://a.as-us.falkag.net/dat/njf/104/slashdot/develop ers_p1_top_leaderboard.js
http ://an.tacoda.net/an/11711/slf.js
http ://anrtx.tacoda.net/rtx/r.js?cmd=ADW&si=11711&r=de velopers.slashdot.org&v=3.1.0.26azzz&cb=0.17824836 675866051
http ://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js

And that's slashdot, a relatively well-behaved site (I had to put the extra space in there to stop the stupid comment filter from auto-linking those).

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[QuietLagoon]

Just like Microsoft, Firefox developers have gotten stuck on the feature-creep treadmill. Instead of fixing incessant crashes and debilitating memory leaks, they add more whiz-bang features to compete with the "enemy". Instead of adding features to make their browser more robust and responsive, they add more crap to make it bigger, slower, and buggier.

Opera's stuck on that same treadmill. The recent beta of Opera 9 is pretty bad. Lots of new features, but fundamental things just don't work right.

Woah...

[The Real Nem]

He's not kidding, take a look at my history.dat file:

// <!-- <mdb:mork:z v="1.4"/> -->
< <(a=c)> // (f=iso-8859-1)
  (8A=Typed)(8B=LastPageVisited)(8C=ByteOrder)
  (80=ns:history:db:row:scope:history:all)
  (81=ns:history:db:table:kind:history)(82=URL)(83=R eferrer)
  (84=LastVisitDate)(85=FirstVisitDate)(86=VisitCoun t)(87=Name)
  (88=Hostname)(89=Hidden)>

<(4B6E=LE)(4B6F=http: //www.google.ca/)(4B70=1146443053431000)(4B71
    =google.ca)(4B72=G$00o$00o$00g$00l$00e$00)(4B73
    =http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=slashdot&btnG =Google+Search&meta=)
  (4B74=1146443064149750)(4B75
    =s$00l$00a$00s$00h$00d$00o$00t$00 $00-$00 $00G$00o$00o$00g$00l$00e$00 $00S\
$00e$00a$00r$00c$00h$00)(4B76=http://slashd ot.org/)(4B77=slashdot.org)
  (4B78
    =S$00l$00a$00s$00h$00d$00o$00t$00:$00 $00N$00e$00w$00s$00 $00f$00o$00r$00 \
$00n$00e$00r$00d$00s$00,$00 $00s$00t$00u$00f$00f$00 $00t$00h$00a$00t$00 $00m$00\
a$00t$00t$00e$00r$00s$00)(4B79
    =http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/06/04/3 0/2128229.shtml)
  (4B7A=1146443070774750)(4B7B=developers.slashdot.o rg)(4B7C
    =S$00l$00a$00s$00h$00d$00o$00t$00 $00|$00 $00P$00l$00a$00c$00e$00s$00 $00F\
$00e$00a$00t$00u$00r$00e$00 $00C$00u$00t$00 $00F$00r$00o$00m$00 $00F$00i$00r$00\
e$00f$00o$00x$00 $002$00)(4B7D
    =http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=18 4502&cid=15234094)
  (4B7E=1146443122321625)(4B7F
    =P$00l$00a$00c$00e$00s$00 $00F$00e$00a$00t$00u$00r$00e$00 $00C$00u$00t$00 \
$00F$00r$00o$00m$00 $00F$00i$00r$00e$00f$00o$00x$00 $002$00)>
{1:^80 {(k^81:c)(s=9)[1(^8C=LE)]}
  [3ED4(^82^4B6F)(^84^4B70)(^85^4B70)(^88^4B71)(^87^ 4B72)]
  [3ED5(^82^4B73)(^84^4B74)(^85^4B74)(^83^4B6F)(^88^ 4B71)(^87^4B75)]
  [3ED6(^82^4B76)(^84^4B74)(^85^4B74)(^83^4B73)(^88^ 4B77)(^87^4B78)]
  [3ED7(^82^4B79)(^84^4B7A)(^85^4B7A)(^83^4B76)(^88^ 4B7B)(^87^4B7C)]
  [3ED8(^82^4B7D)(^84^4B7E)(^85^4B7E)(^83^4B79)(^88^ 4B7B)(^87^4B7F)]}

That's one way to kill interoperability.

Re:Take a leaf out of Epiphany's book

[friedmud]

You can do this in firefox now... _and_ have your bookmarks stored on an external server so that wherever you are they are available.

Just go sign up at http://del.icio.us/ and start posting and tagging sites...

Then nab Foxylicious: http://dietrich.ganx4.com/foxylicious/

Fire it up and set it to "use tag combinations to create hierarchies" or whatever... and there you go.

I have been using this system for a while and I love it... because between dual-boots and different labs on campus I will use 6 or so different firefox installations on any given day... it's great to have my bookmarks roam with me.

Friedmud

Re:So what are we missing?

[Jerf]

Let the master, jwz, rant about Mork (it's in the comments round about the second page for most people):

#
# And Now, The Ugly Truth Laid Bare:
#
# In Netscape Navigator 1.0 through 4.0, the history.db file was just a
# Berkeley DBM file. You could trivially bind to it from Perl, and
# pull out the URLs and last-access time. In Mozilla, this has been
# replaced with a "Mork" database for which no tools exist.
#
# Let me make it clear that McCusker is a complete barking lunatic.
# This is just about the stupidest file format I've ever seen.
#
# http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/arch/mork/primer. txt
# http://jwz.livejournal.com/312657.html
# http://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html
# http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24143 8
#
# In brief, let's count its sins:
#
# - Two different numerical namespaces that overlap.
#
# - It can't decide what kind of character-quoting syntax to use:
# Backslash? Hex encoding with dollar-sign?
#
# - C++ line comments are allowed sometimes, but sometimes // is just
# a pair of characters in a URL.
#
# - It goes to all this serious compression effort (two different
# string-interning hash tables) and then writes out Unicode strings
# without using UTF-8: writes out the unpacked wchar_t characters!
#
# - Worse, it hex-encodes each wchar_t with a 3-byte encoding,
# meaning the file size will be 3x or 6x (depending on whether
# whchar_t is 2 bytes or 4 bytes.)
#
# - It masquerades as a "textual" file format when in fact it's just
# another binary-blob file, except that it represents all its magic
# numbers in ASCII. It's not human-readable, it's not hand-editable,
# so the only benefit there is to the fact that it uses short lines
# and doesn't use binary characters is that it makes the file bigger.
# Oh wait, my mistake, that isn't actually a benefit at all.
#
# Pure comedy.