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

Cut from Firefox2, but "removed from the roadmap"?

[Glonk]

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.

Bad URL

[evilviper]

Only one number off. So close, and yet so far.

Features cut from Firefox 2:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060430-6701 .html

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:Bad URL

[(H)elix1]

Adblock lets you nuke things at the domain level. I have *.falkag.*, *.tacoda.*, and *.google-analytics.* in my filter list mostly due to other sites. You can also use your wildcards to take out js files as well (and a mess of other stuff if you are clever with your regex) if there is something on the domain you want to see.

Re:Bad URL

[coleblak]

You could use noscript. http://www.noscript.net/whats/ It autoblocks ALL javascript then you opt in for one time or forever for each site.

Re:Bad URL

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me the first to ask you to please not disable google analytics
If you want a site to know to develop for your OS/browser, you disabling their sole source of statistics (not even individual) is going to do nothing more than tell a webmaster that designing for that sect is pointless.

Plus if you disable ads on my site, I'm going to disable your access to my site. If everyone blocks my ads, I loose money.

Re:Bad URL

[Golden_Eternity]

Anonymous Coward has a web site? Let me guess, no "Contact Us" link, right?

Re:Bad URL

[Columcille]

It's probably reasonable to say that those who block ads are those who never, ever respond to ads. They are an annoyance and intrusive to me, and I can't recall when I've ever clicked one on purpose, certainly I've never spent money as a result of an internet ad. There are those who do, enough that people are able to make money from them. I never respond to ads and I'm sick of seeing them. Adblock has become something I cannot live without.

Re:Bad URL

[Firehed]

I don't think you need to use adblock to disable javascript entirely, but it would be great if there was a "from originating site only" option as per "Load Images" and cookies. A blanket ban on JS will kill navigation on many sites, as js menus aren't uncommon (regardless of what fancy crap you can do with CSS or whatever).

For the record, though, Filterset.g updater combined with Adblock (Plus) pretty much eliminates every ad in existance. Plus has the bonus of letting you whitelist sites so you can support them by giving them ad views. An earlier verson had a "load then hide" behavior which was nice, but that seems to be gone now.

Re:Bad URL

[RobertLTux]

pardon me but your complaint is pure Horseshit!!
if you had a clue as to how a webdomain is run you would know that urchin is a very common stats service that can in fact run completely from your own website (this is why i have google-analtics.com domain blocked and not *urchin* in ad block)

Re:Bad URL

[MushMouth]

It probably wouldn't be that hard to write a content policy component that simply compares that domain of the referer and the script and refuse those that don't cut your mustard (about 30 lines of javascript)

Re:Bad URL

[the pickle]

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Hostperm.1

Have a gander at that.

p

Re:Bad URL

[lanner]

You want noscript. It's an addon. I'm using it under Seamonkey.

http://www.noscript.net/

Re:Bad URL

[keraneuology]

Same reason why advertisers send out 98 pieces of junk mail.

Re:Bad URL

[mabinogi]

if I have to stare at a blank page while my status bar says "waiting for google-analytics.com" then either I'm going to block google-analytics.com, or I'm just going to get fed up and stop visiting your site.

It really bugs me just how often I have to sit and wait for my browser to contact 5 different ad and stat sites when viewing some web sites - slashdot being one of the big offenders.

I have no problem with you providing (tasteful and discreet) ads, I have no problem with you collecting stats. I do have a problem with having to wait for that to happen, when I could be reading your site.

Re:Bad URL

[rolandog]

He's probably hosted at example.com...

Re:Bad URL

[Vyvyan Basterd]

The Adblock Plus author said on the adblock forum that he was considering adding this to the next version.

Re:Bad URL

[Nevyn]

I don't think you need to use adblock to disable javascript entirely, but it would be great if there was a "from originating site only" option as per "Load Images" and cookies.

You want the "No script" extension.

Re:Bad URL

[Adam9]

I've been having a similar experience. I put it in my hosts file to point to 127.0.0.1 a week ago.

Re:Bad URL

[Iron Condor]

if I have to stare at a blank page while my status bar says "waiting for google-analytics.com" then either I'm going to block google-analytics.com, or I'm just going to get fed up and stop visiting your site. It really bugs me just how often I have to sit and wait for my browser to contact 5 different ad and stat sites when viewing some web sites - slashdot being one of the big offenders.

If you're using Firefox, you can speed up all that stuff without having to "block" or "filter" anyhting: http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2005/06/speed_up _firefo.html (describes how to make FF send requests on up to 30 items at the same time and start showing things on the screen without waiting for everything to come in)

Re:Bad URL

[lonecrow]

The webmaster didn't read the Google instructions. If they placed their Analytics script at the bottom of the page just above as Google instructs them to, then their visitors would not have to wait before viewing the page. Just another case of they shoulda RTFM.

Re:Bad URL

[pchan-]

Thanks. However, I was looking for something that Noscript doesn't have (to my knowledge). That is, a default deny policy for 3rd party javascript, with a default allow for the current site. I generally don't visit sites that I don't want running javascript in my browser. With this policy I will (in the general case) have to do nothing special except set a checkbox in the preferences one time, and my policy will be in place. with Noscript, I will have to enable it on every site I on which I would like to use javascript.

As it is, I've got Adblock to filter out all of these ad/tracking servers. I just thought it would be a good privacy feature.

Re:Bad URL

[JulesLt]

A problem I can see going forward is that 'Web 2.0' sites are going to make it very difficult for software to automatically distinguish between a site that's legitimately using a third-party web service to serve content, and one doing the same to serve advertising. You could say that the first 'mash-ups' were actually those sites that seem to consist of nothing but externally served ads and the tiniest bit of original content.

Personally, I find the best thing to do with adverts is ignore them. However, rather like commercial television I can accept WHY they are there - it strikes me as a bit irrational to get upset by their presence while also enjoying what they are supporting. But then it's hardly new - people always complain about the number of adverts in magazines, while refusing to pay the extra for magazines whose price isn't subsidised by ads. The likes of HBO are also in a minority - while GMail is more appealing to people than paying for a private email account. People are generally cheap-skates who will sell their minds for a small saving.

Re:Bad URL

[advocate_one]

you want NoScript... NOT adblock. NoScript blocks all Javascript crap by default and you can selectively temporarily-enable or whitelist stuff that you need.

Re:Bad URL

[linvir]

It's fairly obvious that you don't have the first clue as to how people go about designing or administering their sites. Dumbass.

Re:Bad URL

[CastrTroy]

That only works when you have an internet connection that can handle 30 connections at the same time. If you have a slow connection, trying to do 30 things at once can make it slower than loading 5 things at once, 6 times.

Re:Bad URL

[turnipsatemybaby]

Sadly, I was thinking the exact same thing. ^_^

Re:Bad URL

[SnarfQuest]

Does anyone know if FF2 will have the ability to block 3rd party javascript includes?

Why should Final Fantasy 2, which only runs on the NES, have anything to do with javascript? It came out long before javascript was even a gleam in the eye of it's designers.

Re:Bad URL

[keraneuology]

I once asked the local post office to stop delivering all of the junk mail - the fliers, the postcards and whatnot. I never buy anything from these companies and you'd think they'd like to save on printing costs but the post office will deliver to everybody - there is no way to opt out.

Re:Bad URL

[leonmergen]

It's probably reasonable to say that those who block ads are those who never, ever respond to ads.

Are you familliar with the word "branding" ? It's what 95% of the internet advertising is all about, nowadays...

Re:Bad URL

[drinkypoo]

Whitelisting is not a solution. What the parent commenter is asking for (and what I'd like as well) is a way to load javascript only from the current site, or perhaps domain, when loading a page. This will eliminate any number of ads which adblock cannot catch, because they are written into the page with javascript after page load.

Re:Bad URL

[frankie]

NoScript is a pain in the ass because it's whitelist-only. You need to go out of your way to re-enable scripting on each site you visit one by one.

Both NoScript and AdBlock are equally far removed from the desired goal of "allow 1st party scripts by default, block 3rd party scripts by default, with OPTIONAL white & black listings".

Re:Bad URL

[advocate_one]

did you even follow the link for NoScript? it does everything you want that adblock can't do. and in combo with adblock, you have next to no crud at all.

Re:Bad URL

[Hemmer]

Get the customize google extension for firefox. It blocks the tracker (if its a problem). Also blocks google ads if you set it to...

Re:Bad URL

[rainman_bc]

Actually, I'm with you on that. Blocking third party javascript includes would be super great, and it would solve a great deal of security issues.

Corrected arstechnica link

[Nate Fox]

The correct arstechnica link is here: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060430-6701 .html

Re:Corrected arstechnica link

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't stray too far from your computer.

We're going to need you to repost the correct URL when this story is duped ;-)

Re:Corrected arstechnica link

[evilviper]

Maybe he'll click "Submit" a few seconds before me, next time...

Re:Ouch...

[Glonk]

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.

Re:Ouch...

[kitsunewarlock]

Aaah once again I didn't read between the lines correctly. I was thinking they had to use their cache or history (or save all their sites, which would just be ridiculous as they could just copy and paste their URLs) and manually open the html files in the new firefox then save them as favorites. x_x"

Re:fork a new branch

[Glonk]

It is still included as a feature in the "Trunk" branch for Firefox3.

Places discussion

[rayver]

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

Re:Places discussion

[hokeyru]

Yes, thanks for the link. Really, how much digging should I have to do to find out WTF the article is about?

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.

Re:Differentiation

[CCFreak2K]

I don't want to start a flame war, but maybe there's more going on under the hood than at first glance. For example, imagine a Windows 2000 Professional box and a Windows XP Professional box with the regular Windows Classic theme. They both look a little different, and they both act pretty much the same, but they're quite different.

Maybe a better example for the /. crowd would have been Linux and *BSD with X/KDE one each, heh.

Re:Differentiation

[MrNonchalant]

Right, but in order to convince users that updates are worthwhile you need visible differentiation. Especially if the update process is something of a hassle. 1.5 elicited something of a ho-hum from those I know.

Re:Differentiation

[Neil Hodges]

The close button'll be on the tabs, but that seems about the only user-visible improvement.

The Tab Mix Plus already provides this, along with a little bar on each tab showing the loading progress.

Re:Differentiation

[BobPaul]

Right, but in order to convince users that updates are worthwhile you need visible differentiation

No, that's almost true for commercial software, but for free software all you need is a bigger number and people will think they need it. Especially if the FireFox update manager says you need to update.

Actually, it turns out that's not even true for commercial software. My Dad gets the newest version of Norton System Works every time he sees it on the shelf and then pisses and moans because of the great utilities and features this new version now lacks, even though his old version was working just fine and all he really needed was a new subscription/upgrade for the AntiVirus.

Make the number bigger and people will buy. Why do you think Microsoft went towards using year numbers rather than versions? Years are four digits. That's huge.

Re:Differentiation

[Tearfang]

Feature differentiation is essential. I updated to 1.5 because of the built in ability to drag my tabs around. A little faster, more reliable and more secure is not enough it isn't worth the time and possibility of breaking all my extensions. Don't get me wrong speed, reliability and security are reasons to upgrade, but not right now. A new feature I want to use is compelling Now! A major release is something that everyone should want to upgrade to now, otherwise there is nothing really major about it.

Re:Differentiation

[Photon Ghoul]

It's a web browser. What are you expecting, Firefox to microwave your dinner?

Re:Differentiation

[Viceice]

Is Norton system works still useful? I used to use it from Win95 to Win98SE, but ever since I got WinXP combined with NTFS, it's been stable enough that i never needed the features of NSW...

Re:Differentiation

[et764]

The close button'll be on the tabs, but that seems about the only user-visible improvement.

In my opinion that's not really an improvement. I prefer having the close button on the side like it is now, because that way it's always in the same place, instead of having to find which tab is active and then home in on a new place for the close button each time I have to close a tab.

Re:Differentiation

[misleb]

I wonder what else there is that a browser could do that couldn't (and possibly should) be accomplished with an extension or plugin. I'd like to see focus put into speed, memory footprint, and standards compliance like ACID2.

-matthew

Re:Differentiation

[ShieldW0lf]

Heh. Anyone who uses mouse gestures will be very underwhelmed with the close button feature.

Re:Differentiation

[marcosdumay]

Well, a few fixes, sligtly better security, and a few cosmetic changes are well worth the $0,00 price.

I'll probably upgrade just because the number is bigger. But only when Debian tell me so.

Re:Differentiation

[number11]

in order to convince users that updates are worthwhile you need visible differentiation.

I hate visible differentiation. It's disruptive. Especially change for the sake of change, I can live with it if it actually improves something. Once I've figured out how to do stuff, where the menus are, what the shortcuts are, maybe customize the toolbar a little to get the functions I actually use up there, I resent it when the developers mess with it just to say "hey, look at what we can do, aren't we cool!". Then I spend a few hours figuring out how to put as much as possible back to the arrangement it was in before.

Maybe I'm an anomaly. Or just an old fart. I rarely change the GUI from the default unless it's to make some feature easier to use. And if I do make those changes, I want them to carry over to the upgraded version. The only software I use skins with is where the default eyesore verges on unusable (for some reason, media players tend to fall into this camp). Just give me the improvements under the hood, please.

Re:Differentiation

[CableModemSniper]

Really? Mouse gestures let you close non-active tabs? Cause that's what putting the close button on the tab will let you do you know.

Re:Differentiation

[mabinogi]

Then don't upgrade.
Where's the problem?

Re:Differentiation

[morgan_greywolf]

That's because that's exactly how the marketeers of closed source software have you trained.

The Firefox team isn't trying to make software that has to sell at Best Buy. They're making a web browser that's designed to perform well and be secure.

If you don't think there's a point in upgrading, then don't. No skin off the developer's nose -- they don't have any financial incentive to get you to to upgrade.

Re:Differentiation

[ToLu the Happy Furby]

The middle mouse button already lets you close inactive tabs.

Re:Differentiation

[maxume]

You could just take the route of only using conservative extensions and looking at the whole extension system as a way for other people to test out new features. Not that I do that. It makes extensions breaking somewhat of a non problem. I do use flashblock and nuke anything. I can't stand to have flash installed otherwise.

Re:Differentiation

[zerocool^]

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

Re:Differentiation

[gomoX]

Yes, but just on Windows (or at least not under Linux).

Re:Differentiation

[LegendLength]

I wonder what else there is that a browser could do that couldn't (and possibly should) be accomplished with an extension or plugin. I'd like to see focus put into speed, memory footprint, and standards compliance like ACID2.

They are all great goals but an importance service firefox also provides is (effectively) grouping useful extensions for you and managing their updates into a single package.

Re:Differentiation

[Ash-Fox]

> It's a web browser. What are you expecting, Firefox to microwave your dinner?

No! I expect it to take back the web!

Re:Differentiation

[baadger]

IMO, It would be nice if Firefox was just a basic browser with a secure and efficient XML, HTML, Javascript implementation and things like tabbed browsing, RSS feed support, the search box, and even bookmarks were just extensions shipped (and enabled) by default.

This would put alot of focus on massively improving the power and reliability of the extension API and have the advantage that you could update these components individually (yet with one click).

I still know people that refuse to use tabbed browsing and still goto Google manually when they want to search, instead of using the search box.

That said, this would only worsen the comparison with browsers like Opera that cram in some of the functionality of something more along the lines of the Mozilla Application Suite into something smaller than Firefox.

Re:Differentiation

[EyelessFade]

Yes, and a kitchen sink would be nice too.

Re:Differentiation

[JulesLt]

I don't think you're an anomaly; it's pretty much what every GUI design expert says.

Improving the design of 'use-once' applications can be done with little impact - i.e. loan application websites, configuration wizards, etc.

Changing the layout of anything used by people on an everyday basis shouldn't be done unless there is a really good reason to do it, even if that layout it 'wrong'. People quickly adapt to dealing with wrong systems, because we mostly use systems by auto-pilot. We stop looking for the back icon and just move the mouse to where it is. Moving the icon is therefore annoying.

That's not saying we should live with bad mistakes forever, but that developers should be mindful of the cost of change. Unlike software bugs, it may be better to let GUI changes build up and address them all in one major revision, than constant small fixes. If something is clearly different this is less of an issue to be people than when it is nearly the same but there are small cognitive differences.

Joel Spolksy's short book on Interface Design also makes a couple of good points about customisable GUI - firstly, if you are a GUI designer, your job is to design usable software. If you have two options, it's your job to make a decision which one is best, rather than expecting the user to decide which one is best for them.

Secondly - a lot of people give up on GUI customisation because it's not portable. For instance if I tweak Word to completely suit me, using it on someone else's machine - particularly if they have also tweaked it in a different way - gives me a learning curve. Ditto when I upgrade machine I need to do all the tweaking again. For some people, it's worth the hassle, but for most people the inconvenience outweighs any convenience.

Re:Differentiation

[Tim Browse]

Why do you think Microsoft went towards using year numbers rather than versions? Years are four digits. That's huge.

Microsoft went to years (firstly with Windows 95, I believe - see, only 2 digits) not because the version numbers are huge but because it hammers home to people that they're using an 'old' version of Windows or Office, so they should upgrade.

The thinking is, someone with, e.g. Office v6 may be quite happy. It's version 6 - that's good, right?

Someone with Office 2000 will think "2000? It's 2006! I should upgrade, that's like 6 years old now."

Seems like they've dropped this for Windows client now (XP, Vista), and I'm not sure what Office 12 will be called. But originally it was to drive upgrade sales.

Re:Differentiation

[RevDobbs]

Yeah, that's what I want in my "point" releases...

Major changes should be reserved for major releases, i.e. 2.0, 3.0, etc. Otherwise, just keep the program steady and stable. Firefox already does everything I need it to do; if there is a new revolution in bookmarking, navigating, URIs, or anything else, save it for the next major release.

Re:Differentiation

[CastrTroy]

The problem with stuff like this is that it reminds people of how old their software was. In 2004, everyone was still using SQL Server 2000. They were still selling SQL Server 2000. Why would anybody want to buy a 4 year old computer program. Things change so much in 4 years. Sure most people don't mind using the same Database for 4 years, but try convincing a new customer to buy a product that hasn't been feature enhanced in 4 years. The other problem is that if you miss you deadline, than you end up releasing a product called 2005, just before 2006 starts. It's already a year old at release. This is why automakes sell the next year's model starting in september.

Re:Differentiation

[BobPaul]

Is Norton system works still useful?

No, no it isn't really, and I stopped buying it for my self. He's been using Norton Products since the 80s though, and is convinced he needs them. All they do really is add 3-5 minutes to his boot time...

Re:Differentiation

[misleb]

IMO, It would be nice if Firefox was just a basic browser with a secure and efficient XML, HTML, Javascript implementation and things like tabbed browsing, RSS feed support, the search box, and even bookmarks were just extensions shipped (and enabled) by default.

This would put alot of focus on massively improving the power and reliability of the extension API and have the advantage that you could update these components individually (yet with one click).

Isn't this pretty much what Firefox is? You can update extensions individually with a single click. It isn't quite as granular as you wish, but it is close. It does have a very powerful extensions API. I mean, the whole browser UI is just XUL/Javascript. You can override (overlay) any part of it.

-matthew

Re:Differentiation

[bjelkeman]

The close button'll be on the tabs, but that seems about the only user-visible improvement.

I only use Safari and Firefox. Safari has the close button for a tab on the tab itself. Firefox has one close button for all tabs (it closes the current active tab).

I find that I make much fewer mistakes with Firefox when it comes to closing tabs. Often when I shift between tabs in Safari with the mouse I will close a tab by accident. This is increadibly annoying. And I do not think that having an "undo close tab" feature is the answer. A close button on each tab may be a useful feature from a beginners point of view, but when you use browsers a lot it just becomes annoying.

Re:Differentiation

[davez0r]

my laptop doesn't have a middle mouse button.

which is a pain because i too am a middle click firefox addict.

Re:Differentiation

[drinkypoo]

[...]imagine a Windows 2000 Professional box and a Windows XP Professional box with the regular Windows Classic theme. They both look a little different, and they both act pretty much the same, but they're quite different.

But, no, they aren't. They're almost identical.

Re:Differentiation

[drinkypoo]

my laptop doesn't have a middle mouse button.

Betcha it will register a middle-click if you chord the two buttons. Well, unless you have a mac.

Or a Windows PC. I have actually seen mouse drivers that will chord middle on windows, but it's not done at the OS level, and the driver must do it. Most don't.

Re:Differentiation

[drinkypoo]

What are you expecting, Firefox to microwave your dinner?

Actually, I was expecting flame-broiling.

Re:Differentiation

[daringone]

I never used it because I never knew it was there... learn something new everyday! That's uber-convenient! Thanks!

Re:Differentiation

[rblum]

The point is that this is "mystery-meat navigation". I.e. I don't know it's there unless you explicitly tell me. A little 'x' button tells me that there's a spot for closing things.

To be fair, this is only because Windowing software has conditioned us to assume that 'x' means close. But nothing has conditioned us to assume that middle click is close. In fact, FF itself teaches the user that middle click *opens* a link - it's counterintuitive that it also closes things.

Or, in one short word: "Useability"

Re:Differentiation

[Phroggy]

Um, Ctrl-W anyone?

Firefox has the wrong focus

[Theovon]

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.

Firefox is no longer about doing the right thing. It's now all about one-upping Microsoft at their own stupid game, and the users are suffering for it. Open Source developers, apparently, are no more ammune to this competition attitude than the proprietary vendors. There is no longer anything special about Firefox. What's more, they suffer from the syndrome many open source projects suffer from, which is that they prefer to work on the "interesting" bits, rather than spending time adding some polish to make things work WELL.

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[Cheapy]

Well there goes your Karma.

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[killjoe]

It's open source, if people didn't like it somebody would have forked it by now.

As for me, I have never experienced any of your problems. It gets faster with every release in fact.

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[Xelrach]

Doesn't the fact that "Places" was delayed show that they _are_ focused on polish?

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.

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[OzRoy]

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"

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/010115 .html

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[PygmySurfer]

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.

And none of that has to do with it being BETA?

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[roca]

> Instead of fixing incessant crashes and debilitating memory leaks

That's an insult to the developers who have spent hundreds of hours fixing crashes and memory leaks and other polish issues.

Your message is also completely off base given that the article is about features being cut to allow more focus on polish.

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[getwhipped]

I was pretty much under the impression that Firefox already one-upped Microsoft. And don't go off about how IE7 is better -- IE7 isn't here yet.

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[supabeast!]

"Firefox is no longer about doing the right thing. It's now all about one-upping Microsoft at their own stupid game, and the users are suffering for it. Open Source developers, apparently, are no more ammune to this competition attitude than the proprietary vendors."

And this is why the current browser war is irrelevant. XHTML/CSS is a mess to use, none of the browsers implement the standards completely or properly, and instead of the W3C and the browser developers sitting down, getting their shit together, and creating software that just works right and displays XHTML/CSS properly, it's a continuous fight to see who can top the other guy's software. Then the features need endless debugging or outright cutting. In the meanwhile, more and more web developers will be moving to Flash, users will get better and more consistent experiences with Flash, and the browsers just won't matter anymore.

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[Diordna]

Yeah, today my Firefox crashed because I pressed the number 7 on my keypad.

I'm not kidding.

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[nwbvt]

Considering how often Firefox 1.5 crashes or leaks memory, I'm not sure that insult is all that off base.

Look, I'm sure there are many out there working on fixing these bugs in Firefox, but please don't tell the direction of the project is to make a lightweight, stable browser that got its power from optional extensions like the phoenix/firebird browsers I used several years ago. Those are gone and in their place is a new browser that is approaching the bloat of the origional mozilla project.

Maybe it is time for another fork...

As to this article, I suppose you could interpret it as a new focus on stability instead of features. I, on the other hand, interpret it as evidence that firefox developers have just spent a lot of time working on a feature that was so buggy that they couldn't get it to work and so unessential that pulling it was a viable option. In other words, bloat.

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[Gregg M]

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".

Are you talking out your ass or do you have some proof of this? It looks like this news is evidence of the opposite of what you're saying.

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[Marsell]

So what's wrong with the Opera beta?

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[Lord Ender]

Are you sure?

If I'm a volunteer, independent developer, and I want to implement something that has nothing to do with stability, who are you to say "no! you must hunt down stability bugs!"

That's not the way open source works.

I agree that stability is more important than new features. But you seem to be forgetting that not everyone wants to or knows how to fix the stability issues.

Also, I can't remember the last time Firefox on XP crashed on me.

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[cgenman]

Opera has been following the same pattern for years.

Major releases are terribly buggy with lots of new stuff. Except that every-other major release is purely for marketing reasons, and isn't really a major release.

If I remember correctly, the real upgrades were 7, 6, 4, and 2, which means that 9 as a buggy mess is long over due. Opera 1 was never released, so it's probably safe to call 2 the major release.

A timeline can be found here.

The fidgety numbered ones are stable. 8.54 will probably be the most stable opera for a while. I still have fond memories of 3.62, though I'll be damned if I could find a site that would let you on with it.

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[msuarezalvarez]

I'm not sure that insult is all that off base.

Any insult is off base.

If you think it is time for a fork, well: fork it. Maintain your fork, do a couple of releases, and then we'll talk about bloat, leaks or whatever else you want.

Meanwhile, I suggest you stop using Firefox, if you haven't already, as it is clearly giving you more pain than gain.

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[Fweeky]

I'm not sure; I've been using Opera 9 as my primary browser since TP2 and it's been very good, although build 8372 (the weekly immediately after the first beta) seems a bit more wobbly than previous builds.

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[bmasephol]

How bout the fix the freakin copy & paste function!

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[jp10558]

What really amazes me is that Opera tends to release as many previews and betas as MS does for Windows releases, yet they still spend the first 4 point releases or so trying to get it stable again.

I'm hoping the weeklies might help have 9.0 actually be stable, but I'll not be suprised if Opera 9.0-9.03 or so are hopelessly buggy.

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[hkmwbz]

What fundamental things? Opera 9 Beta works better than Firefox 1.5 final!

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[hkmwbz]

"Except that every-other major release is purely for marketing reasons, and isn't really a major release."

That's nonsense. With the exception of Opera 5 which was released as such because of a new revenue model, all major versions have offered major advances. Opera 8 had significant changes under the hood such as XMLHttpRequest support, in addition to a totally redone user interface, support for voice browsing, and so on.

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[nwbvt]

"Any insult is off base."

I assure you, I can think of many insults that have been used against people that were entirely on the mark. Or are you trying to say that Firefox developers are these holy people who never do anything wrong, and that any insults against them is off base?

"If you think it is time for a fork, well: fork it. Maintain your fork, do a couple of releases, and then we'll talk about bloat, leaks or whatever else you want."

Are you trying to argue that it is impossible to maintain an application that is not bloated and does not leak memory? If so, I can assure you that it is very possible, and there are many projects out there that fall within that category.

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[msuarezalvarez]

I assure you, I can think of many insults that have been used against people that were entirely on the mark.

An insult is never on the mark. How hard can that be to understand. Now, that of course does not mean you are to agree with anything; just express dissent respectfully.

Or are you trying to say that Firefox developers are these holy people who never do anything wrong, and that any insults against them is off base?

No, I am not trying to say that. I honestly have no idea where you got the impression I was.

"If you think it is time for a fork, well: fork it. Maintain your fork, do a couple of releases, and then we'll talk about bloat, leaks or whatever else you want."

Are you trying to argue that it is impossible to maintain an application that is not bloated and does not leak memory? If so, I can assure you that it is very possible, and there are many projects out there that fall within that category.

Maybe you should stop trying to read between the lines what I write, and read what I write instead!

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[Tesla Tank]

I'm with you, still using 8.54 here. Although, I really like some of the new features in Opera 9, I guess I'll just have to wait a bit longer.

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[nwbvt]

"An insult is never on the mark. How hard can that be to understand."

So if I said Hitlter was a jackass, that means he was really a nice guy? Come on, are you now saying that everything bad that is said about someone must be false? Are you really that naive? Or that stupid?

"Maybe you should stop trying to read between the lines what I write, and read what I write instead!"

Maybe you should stop trying to write meaningless dibble and instead try to participate in a meaningful discussion. Sorry for assuming that your statements actually meant something.

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[msuarezalvarez]

So if I said Hitlter was a jackass, that means he was really a nice guy?

No, it does not.

Come on, are you now saying that everything bad that is said about someone must be false?

No, I am not.

Just as it happened to me in an earlier post, I honestly cannot see why do you think I asserted or even implied either of these two things.

I feel there is no much more point in continuing this thread. Have a greeat life.

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[nwbvt]

Your exact words were "An insult is never on the mark". Saying Hitler is a jackass is insulting Hitler. By your logic, that means the statement that "Hitler is a jackass" cannot be 'on the mark'. Which is obviously not true.

Sorry if this goes against everything you learned from Barney the Dinosaur.

Re:fork a new branch

[larry bagina]

You can fork it, in theory, but mozilla/firefox is a huge beast. Most of the people that work on it are paid mozilla developers. forking large, complicated projects is difficult. Offhand, I can only think of gcc/egcs (which later re-merged) emacs/xemacs, *BSD (core developers leaving), and xfree86X/Free.org (again, core developers leaving). Unless the firefox programmers want to give up their paid job, (or spare time after work), there won't be a fork.

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:Use Epiphany

[Chabil Ha']

I applaud you for a very daring move. To try and recommend something other than the /. status quo is quite brave. I went to use it, however, and saw that it would not run on my distro. Too bad.

Re:Use Epiphany

[BlueEar]

Epiphany may be snappier, but it's "innovative" bookmarks make it useless for me. I have lots of bookmarks, arranged in hierarchical folders, with order set by hand, that roughly reflects my preferences and frequency of visits (say, a most frequently visited source of information for Python would be at the top of the Python folder in a Programming folder). Epiphany authors think they know better and do not allow me to create nested folders or arrange bookmarks in other than alphabetical order.

Re:Use Epiphany

[aconkling]

I went to use it, however, and saw that it would not run on my distro. Too bad.

Sounds like you're running a pretty lame distro then.

Re:Use Epiphany

[Chabil Ha']

Yeah, tell me about it. It's XP. Seriously.

yes, but

[fuentes]

Disappointing, yes, but this is what makes excellence in software. They recognized the problems, realized the time it would take to fix, and decided on a "better safe than sorry" approach. This will make the eventual release of "places" that much better!

Re:yes, but

[Penguinoflight]

The big question: is it really logical to cut out the biggest feature from a release? If you ask me that just adds a ton of confusion to version numbers.

So what are we missing?

[blair1q]

How is this better than the existing bookmarks system?

Re:So what are we missing?

[WWWWolf]

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.

Re:So what are we missing?

[nmos]

What's wrong with bookmarks as html? I've always liked being able to set my home page to point at my bookmarks.htm.

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.

Re:So what are we missing?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's still possible to do, just that there'd be a bit of extra software involved and that your homepage URL would read "http://localhost/bookmarks.cgi". And that it'd be a million times more useful.

Re:So what are we missing?

[EvanED]

Agreed. It also makes it possible to open your bookmarks file in another browser.

Re:So what are we missing?

[WWWWolf]

Nothing, really, just that it's harder to parse. Just that now, you need to fire up your XML parser if you want to extract information out of it. In SQLite, you can bind to it and do a SELECT whatever FROM bookmarks WHERE ...; and don't need to parse anything. Just like all SQL queries.

Another thing is that there's a big handful of file formats used to store configuration data. Bookmarks XML isn't used in any other situation, and in addition to that the profile directory has various plain text formats, Mork, BerkleyDB, RDF, JavaScript...

I guess you need to file a feature request that asks bookmarks to be shown at startup... though I guess they will be thinking of that anyway =)

Re:So what are we missing?

[petermgreen]

do you know where i can find specs of said format, the wikipedia article just has links to an example parser written in perl (not a language i'm too familiar with) but the parser doesn't look terriblly long or complicated.

Disappointing but not unusual

[erroneus]

When a new major release is pending and a feature is pulled from the release, you have to believe there's a really good reason for it.

Some people have compared this to features removed from Vista. Really bad analogy. The motivation behind the two projects are very very different. And so far, this is but one project.

From a rough understanding of these situations, you just have to assume that it wouldn't be made 'good enough' for the next release and keep it on schedule. There might be some differences of opinion about which is more important -- the quality of the release if it is on time, and the timliness of the release with all of the intended features. I don't have any particular leaning in this instance. However, I am rather happy with the Firefox that I run now, so I'm in no hurry to upgrade to Firefox 2.

I think perhaps it would be interesting to simply put it to a vote and let the community decide. Which is more important: The inclusion of this feature or a release made on schedule.

Re:Disappointing but not unusual

[TheNetAvenger]

And so far, this is but one project.

FTA.
"most significant change between Firefox 1.5 and Firefox 2.0."

One, ya, but significant, more than ya...

Take a leaf out of Epiphany's book

[MoogMan]

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.

Re:Take a leaf out of Epiphany's book

[nstlgc]

God knows why browsers do not store bookmarks as files in a "Bookmarks" folder. Slap me silly, but isn't this what IE has been doing for ages?

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:Take a leaf out of Epiphany's book

[thelem]

IE does. Netscape & Mozilla used to store them in a single HTML file, which was very useful becuase you could then put that file somewhere accessible and get access to your bookmarks from anywhere. Places is based on a less easily readable format, but it is more useful for the Mozilla developers.

Re:Take a leaf out of Epiphany's book

[harves]

I'm curious. How does the "use tag combinations to create hierarchies" system work? Do you select the combinations, or does it generate all, or... ?

Re:Take a leaf out of Epiphany's book

[Ash-Fox]

> God knows why browsers do not store bookmarks as files in a "Bookmarks" folder. Slap me silly, but isn't this what IE has been doing for ages?

I seem to recall that back in IE3, IE used the same bookmarking format that mozzy browsers use.

Over the years, it's become a somewhat, semi-standard. Many places support uploading such bookmark files like Yahoo!. Being able to export and import such files from multiple files is really nice.

Re:Take a leaf out of Epiphany's book

[friedmud]

It generates all... but only two levels deep.

So if you have say three tags:

linux
gentoo
forums

And you tag the "Gentoo Forums" site with all three (linux,gentoo,forums). But you only tag the Gentoo main site with "gentoo" and kernel.org with "linux" you will get a bookmark folder containing:

Del.icio.us
->linux
  ->gentoo
    "Gentoo Forums"
  ->forums
    "Gentoo Forums"
  ->"Gentoo"
    "Gentoo"
    "Gentoo Forums"
  "Kernel.org"
  "Gentoo"
  "Gentoo Forums"
->gentoo
  ->linux
    "Gentoo"
    "Gentoo Forums"
  ->forums
    "Gentoo Forums"
  "Gentoo"
  "Gentoo Forums"
->forums
  ->linux
    "Gentoo Forums"
  ->gentoo
    "Gentoo Forums"
  "Gentoo Forums"

Now this looks _etremely_ repetitive... and maybe it is for just 3 bookmarks. But what happens is as you get upwards of 50 to 100 the system makes perfect sense, and allows you to find things very quickly. For instance if I want to go to the Gentoo Forums I click on my "Del.icio.us" bookmark folder (which I have in my bookmark toolbar) and then go ->gentoo->forums->"Gentoo Forums"

You just navigate the hierarchy like you would say the words....

One word of caution. I am sure you can see how your bookmark folder will _explode_ with the number of tags you use. Try to keep a short list of relevant tags.... or else you will have this _HUGE_ mostrously long bookmark folder that will be unwieldy. You have been warned! ;-)

Have fun!

Friedmud

Re:Take a leaf out of Epiphany's book

[NutscrapeSucks]

IE will still export a Nutscrape-style Bookmark HTML file.

Re:Take a leaf out of Epiphany's book

[harves]

Then perhaps you'll like the Epiphany approach to generating hierarchies for tag-based bookmarks. We've been working on it for a while now, and it allows arbitrary depth, but is smarter about it. We'll integrate deli.cio.us stuff soon I believe.

http://peter.a.harvey.googlepages.com/epiphany

Re:Take a leaf out of Epiphany's book

[Ash-Fox]

> IE will still export a Nutscrape-style Bookmark HTML file.

Unfortunately I can't find the option, where is it located?

I googled on the issue, but it seems my search terms didn't turn up anything relevent.

Re:Take a leaf out of Epiphany's book

[NutscrapeSucks]

Help + Contents.

(J/K -- try File + Import/Export).

Re:Take a leaf out of Epiphany's book

[Ash-Fox]

Ah, found it. Thanks!

Re:fork a new branch

[Myen]

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.

Not just Firefox

[houstonbofh]

I remember a time when Linux and Mozilla on an older system would breathe new life into it. Retired business systems would be a safer and snappy web surfer for "Less Technical" relatives. No more. Try a new full featured distribution (The kind you could expect a non-tech to use) on old hardware, and it is as slow as XP. Good thing MS is coming out with a slower operating system to lower the bar for the OSS advocates.

Re:Not just Firefox

[interiot]

Come on now, browser-lite was always a niche market, and it's only getting more niche. Mozilla never tried to be the snappiest. Opera was pretty good, but lately, it's started packing on many more features too.

More and more people are spending more of their time online, learning more of their information from the web. Information propagation online is also getting more complicated (eg. del.icio.us, digg, wikipedia, rss blogs, podcasts, ....), and the tools that people use to access those also need to accomodate the greater amount of time they spend with them.

There are still browser-lite projects out there, but Mozilla/Firefox should not be one of them, it should continue to be a mainstream project.

Re:Not just Firefox

[rho]

I wanted to add weight to this argument. I once put together a system for somebody using a 486 and an old Adaptec SCSI card. This was when Pentiums (and the Pentium Pro) were cutting edge. Running Slackware, it made a seriously nice system. Quirky, but stable and useful.

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.

Re:Not just Firefox

[misleb]

I remember a time when Linux and Mozilla on an older system would breathe new life into it. Retired business systems would be a safer and snappy web surfer for "Less Technical" relatives. No more. Try a new full featured distribution (The kind you could expect a non-tech to use) on old hardware, and it is as slow as XP.

Thing is, you can still build a system like you could back then. The only thing that has change is what "non-tech oriented" distributions have decided to include by default. You can still install WindowMaker (or my new fav, XFCE) and have that fast, light system again. So what exactly are you complaing about?

-matthew

Re:Not just Firefox

[TheViewFromTheGround]

At FreeGeek Chicago (shameless link alert), we've been using the Xubuntu desktop on systems as low as Pentium II 400s. The project has been moving more and more towards being very close in look and feel to the default Gnome-based Ubuntu distro, but it runs pretty well on quite limited hardware. You don't have wonderful load times for GTK heavy apps, like FF, but the system is quite snappy -- it certainly feels lighter and more responsive than Win XP on the same hardware, and that's without spyware/malware/crapware infestation.

OTOH -- Gnome and KDE based distros definitely do not breathe new life into old hardware these days.

Re:Not just Firefox

[mmmiiikkkeee]

i dont know what the hell your talking about??? when u pick what destrobution u install u get to pick how much bloat to put on a machien..... firefox comes pretty bare bones(consistent with this articial..).... nothing too fancey unless u plugin it the hell out.... still it works fine on older hardware... how do i know.. its on my family guest computer... 700MHZ 256 MB ram ... old chunker.....that machien was going ot be scraped now its fully capable guest computer at my house.... yea at first it had some problems with too much stuff slowing it down... but i googled how to configure with old hardware... things load in VERY resonable time and once loaded there perfectly fine... i looked in to a useing a speical non-gnome(i started with ubuntu since i am pretty new to linux and i like there comunity support i have experienced so far) user-iterface.... to speed things up but that did not really show much improvements()... turned on prelnking.. and preloaded open office on start up... i can multi task on that computer very fine. i dont know how much older a machien u want to use if u go much older u should jsut set it up as dumb terminal connected to "good" computer.... honestly though... firefox is not the only web-browser out there... u dotn like.... hell u want bare bones.. use a text based browser??

Re:Not just Firefox

[Just Some Guy]

Try a new full featured distribution (The kind you could expect a non-tech to use) on old hardware, and it is as slow as XP.

Strip it down so that it only includes the functionality of XP and it'll still fly. You can hardly compare XP to a full-blown Kubuntu system featurewise.

Re:Not just Firefox

[Twanfox]

So, explain this to me. You're comparing a more modern operating system (modern Linux distros) with Win98 and complaining that the newer one that has more features and takes advantage of the power of modern systems doesn't run quite as well on old hardware? Why not compare WinXP and a modern Linux distro on an old machine and see which one is faster. Stop trying to compare apples and oranges and make grape juice.

Re:Not just Firefox

[Dis*abstraction]

What?

Re:Not just Firefox

[rho]

True enough. I could run OpenBSD 2.whatever and Netscape 4 at acceptable speeds, or Windows98 and IE 6 at acceptable speeds. You tell me which is a better compromise.

I point it out because for the longest time, the fanboys have promoted Linux as a way to turn an old computer into a new computer. Now it seems that Linux is a way to turn a new computer into a new computer that nobody offers phone support for.

Re:Not just Firefox

[ozmanjusri]

Try a new full featured distribution (The kind you could expect a non-tech to use) on old hardware, and it is as slow as XP.

Nice try at astroturfing, but eLive for example, is a full-featured distro that looks good, is easy to use and is fast on older hardware. If you're unable to find a distro that'll do the job for you, its because of your own incomptetence, not a lack of choice.

Re:Not just Firefox

[bealzabobs_youruncle]

You are correct, I can get drivers for the XP system, if I disable my audio and wireless in XP it is just like using Kubuntu. All the *buntus are great, and a huge step in the right direction, but until the "driver thing" is resolved it is still somewhat difficult to run Linux on newer hardware as a primary desktop.

Re:Not just Firefox

[rmdir -r *]

I remember a time when Linux and Mozilla on an older system would breathe new life into it.

Ignoring your point about Linux distributions and concentrating solely on Mozilla, I would like to say, 'bullshit'. IIRC, it ran horribly when I first tried it out, and look! Now that I've googled for reviews of Netscape 6 and Mozilla 1.0, my memory is confirmed!

annoyingly slow and a resource hog

it is noticeably sluggish unless you are using a fairly fast computer with ample RAM

So maybe you just used to buy new hardware more often?

Re:Not just Firefox

[DigDuality]

I have no idea what you're talking about what so ever.

Gentoo tweaked out properly will run fast as hell, as will Ubuntu.

Go to the XFCE desktop and you get even more speed, and while not for the non-tech savy, Fluxbox flies. I run Ubuntu on an old P2 machine with 256 RAM and the thing works beautifully. Smoother than XP. Do a couple of tweaks with the useless programs that start on bootup (mainly in relation to laptops) and your boot and shutdown process is a bit faster and is the experience using it.

I'm currently using a Firefox fork on my main machine (Flock) and i'm loading pages faster than Opera does on any OS and takes less memory.

How much older do you want to go to breathe new life into it? 486?

Re:Not just Firefox

[Ash-Fox]

Original poster:
> Try a new full featured distribution (The kind you could expect a non-tech to use) on old hardware

Parent poster:
> Gentoo tweaked out properly will run fast as hell, as will Ubuntu.

You expect a non-tech to use Gentoo?

I don't know any non-tech who'd want to wait a day for everything to compile.

Ubuntu isn't that user friendly, compare https://wiki.ubuntulinux.org/BinaryDriverHowto/ATI to just typing "urpmi xorg-ati" on a friendlier distro.

> Go to the XFCE desktop and you get even more speed, and while not for the non-tech savy, Fluxbox flies.

Of course it doesn't help much if the person is running a bunch of K application and hasn't started a session manager.

> I run Ubuntu on an old P2 machine with 256 RAM and the thing works beautifully. Smoother than XP.

I could probably get XP to run smoother with tweaks too, and hell knows there is a lot of things you can do.

> Do a couple of tweaks with the useless programs that start on bootup (mainly in relation to laptops) and your boot and shutdown process is a bit faster and is the experience using it.

Sounds like "disabling services" under Windows, I still don't expect the non-tech todo this.

> I'm currently using a Firefox fork on my main machine (Flock) and i'm loading pages faster than Opera does on any OS and takes less memory.

Good for you. My personal expirences however are quite different, Opera has a smaller memory footprint and 'snappier'. Unfortunately my 1GB of ram does not appease Firefox.

> How much older do you want to go to breathe new life into it? 486?

If you can get a decent desktop system working on a 486, I'd like to know.

Re:Not just Firefox

[Ash-Fox]

'ndiswrapper' may help you, with your wireless issues (lets you use Windows wireless drivers under Linux).

Re:Not just Firefox

[Ash-Fox]

Hum. Tried Slackware, Xfce4, Opera?

(That seems to run well on older hardware here)

Re:Not just Firefox

[rho]

I haven't, but I probably won't. As an Internet terminal, IE on 98 is acceptable, with the expense of having to reboot every 3-4 days when the wireless card wedgies itself.

Re:Not just Firefox

[CastrTroy]

I think the same thing. Although you're old cluncker isn't quite as old as my old cluncker (PII 266, 192 MB RAM). Current distros work just fine as long as you're willing to disable some of the eyecandy. The programs I have the most problems with are things like OpenOffice, and Netbeans/Eclipse. Firefox is the least of my worries.

Re:Not just Firefox

[houstonbofh]

Now set that machine next to my mother's Win98SE Lite box with IE6 and see which one she uses. For a non-tech user, Win98 is the lightest weight OS that will work for most applications.

Re:Not just Firefox

[Phroggy]

Have you tried Slackware 10.2? It should still run just about as well on an old 486 as old versions used to. It's a modern distro, unless by "modern" you mean "has a point-and-click GUI installer and WinXP-style automatic updates".

Speaking of updates, though, try the slackpkg package in the "extras" directory (on the second CD I think). PIck a mirror, uncomment it from /etc/slackpkg/mirrors, run slackpkg update, then slackpkg upgrade-all. Not point-and-click, but perhaps good enough? And while you're in the extras directory, grab the bash-completion package too.

Re:Not just Firefox

[Phroggy]

How do you get it to last that long? I don't think I've ever been able to use Win9x for more than about 6-8 hours (depending on what I was doing) before things started crashing.

Re:Not just Firefox

[Ash-Fox]

Windows 98 is pretty stable without anti-virus software. But who would be silly enough to run it without such software?

Not really removed feature...

[MTO_B.]

- 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

Parent isn't shouldn't be marked redundant!

[KingJoshi]

Not when the time of the other post is exactly the same!

Re:Parent isn't shouldn't be marked redundant!

[KingJoshi]

Because marking a post 'redundant' is a punishment. That's the system that we have. A person trying to help out the community by providing a proper link shouldn't be punished and their comment doesn't need cleaning up. We do have to assume the intentions of people and that's why this post shouldn't be marked redundant (at the time they starting typing, the other 'redundant' post didn't exist). If it's rated high when a previous post does the job, then you can rate it 'overrated'. That follows the spirit of the rules, IMO.

Re:Parent isn't shouldn't be marked redundant!

[damiam]

Because marking a post 'redundant' is a punishment.

No, really it's not. My post above just got modded redundant (unfairly, I might add), but it doesn't affect me at all. The same is true of any person with halfway decent karma. A couple karma points either way is not a big deal. This is why karma scores were changed to words instead of numbers: so people would stop bitching about minor things like this.

their comment doesn't need cleaning up

So, why exactly do you think the community needs two comments saying the exact same thing?

If it's rated high when a previous post does the job, then you can rate it 'overrated'. That follows the spirit of the rules, IMO.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure "overrated" modding affects karma just as "redundant" does (though it is immune to metamoderating, which is why it's such a popular catch-all mod choice). So what makes it better than "redundant"?

Re:Parent isn't shouldn't be marked redundant!

[feepness]

Because marking a post 'redundant' is a punishment.

Marking a post as redundant creates information. Interpreting that information as punishment is a personal choice.

Karma is irrelevant in this situation as the "punishment" will not occur often enough to significantly affect the other factors affecting it.

Re:Parent isn't shouldn't be marked redundant!

[reed]

-1 redundant is a filter. moderation's goal is to improve the *output* -- what posts you see when you browse at 3, 4, 5. redundant posts in that output is a waste of readers' time. it's not personal.

Wrong Link

[MoonChildCY]

The right link is this one.

Why do the 2.0 release?

[mccoma]

I guess I am a little confused what the rush is. Can't they just hold the release until they get this feature correct? It is not like they are selling a product and need the churn to make revenue.

Re:Why do the 2.0 release?

[Compholio]

I guess I am a little confused what the rush is. Can't they just hold the release until they get this feature correct? It is not like they are selling a product and need the churn to make revenue.

Open Source projects go into a state that is called a "feature-freeze" in preparation for the next release of the core product. During this time no new features may be added, only bug-fixing and removal of features can occur. This step of the release process is present in order to ensure that a feature didn't add too-many unnecessary bugs to the software that sacrifice the core goals of the project. In this case Mozilla is trying to ensure that the next set of core changes to the browser aren't messed up by the new bookmarking system since the new bookmarking system isn't as important as the changes to the internals (which is what the new release is really about).

Re:Why do the 2.0 release?

[I'm Don Giovanni]

"Open Source projects go into a state that is called a "feature-freeze" in preparation for the next release of the core product."

Please tell me that you don't really believe that this is unique to "Open Source projects".

Re:Why do the 2.0 release?

[mccoma]

Plus, it really doesn't answer the question. What is driving a deadline that removes an announced feature with code submitted and in testing? I can see if the code was so bad that they just decided to chuck it and stat anew, but that doesn't seem to be happening. It would seem you would hold your source lock down until you could stabilize your announce features. Is there some external force that is making a hard release deadline?

Re:Why do the 2.0 release?

[Compholio]

Please tell me that you don't really believe that this is unique to "Open Source projects".

I don't think a feature-freeze is "unique" to Open Source but I've seen it a lot more in the Open Source world than in the commercial world. Just about everything I've seen has been feature-driven or bug-driven in the form of "Customer X needs Feature/Bug Y by Date Z". The Open Source world has more of a "we've fixed a bunch of stuff, let's get ready for a new release on Date Z" attitude.

Re:Why do the 2.0 release?

[poot_rootbeer]

Can't they just hold the release until they get this feature correct?

Sure they could. But the project leaders have apparently decided that they would rather get the other improvements that have made it into the build into the users' hands sooner than later.

"Release early, release often" is generally a good mantra for software development.

Re:Why do the 2.0 release?

[milimetric]

I agree. Moreover, I love the bookmarks in firefox. Maybe MORK is bad and needs to be changed, whatever. The bookmarks are brilliant. If you bookmark your html bookmark file, you can use find as you type to find stuff within it. It's AWESOME. If they ever take that away, I'm not upgrading.

Welcome to Software Engineering

[DigitlDud]

You start with 1000 awesome features, and end up implementing 2.

Re:Welcome to Software Engineering

[Shadyman]

I thought that's what happens when a government job gets done.

Re:Welcome to Software Engineering

[SirBruce]

>You start with 1000 awesome features, and end up implementing 2.

And 1 of them doesn't work right.

Bruce

Re:Welcome to Software Engineering

[ameline]

And the one that does work right is a memory leak.

Re:Welcome to Software Engineering

[heson]

As it should be, the design process started with two awsome ideas that became 1000 features after some feature creep.

Date-driven development

[Bogtha]

From the announcement:

As we have been preparing for the FF2 Alpha2 on May 9 it has become increasingly clear that we do not have time to complete an implementation of places that lives up to our standards of user experience and quality.

From Ben Goodger's weblog:

Firefox has never been about date driven development (within reason). The changes with Places should not be seen as a change in this sentiment.

So which is it? You can hardly drop a feature to meet your release date target while still claiming that you aren't driven by release dates.

I've felt for a while that Firefox's development has suffered and taken a back seat to marketing, and every so often, something like this happens to reinforce that belief. When faced with the choice between finishing a feature and releasing on a certain day, I believe most other open-source projects would choose to finish the feature. Whatever happened to "release it when it's ready"?

Re:Date-driven development

[Kjella]

So which is it? You can hardly drop a feature to meet your release date target while still claiming that you aren't driven by release dates.

I've felt for a while that Firefox's development has suffered and taken a back seat to marketing, and every so often, something like this happens to reinforce that belief. When faced with the choice between finishing a feature and releasing on a certain day, I believe most other open-source projects would choose to finish the feature. Whatever happened to "release it when it's ready"?

Well, that depends on how much it has slipped. If you want something that doesn't ship until it's "perfect", you're looking at Debian stable which take ages to get things out the door. I think applications should try to have a regular release schedule, but unlike commercial software: If it's not done, don't ship a buggy mess - push it back to next release. I don't mean that you should be completely fixed when it comes to dates (e.g. next Ubuntu release was pushed back 6 weeks) but don't let it grow stale. Yes, that will mean you have some lackluster releases, but ship it as you go along. From a marketing perspective I'm not sure if you should call it 2.0 or 1.6 but it is time for another release.

Re:Date-driven development

[subreality]

Deadlines for releases are different from deadlines for features.

You *have* to set a release deadline, or you'll be stuck in continuous development. That's not a bad thing unless they're trying to push half-baked features to meet the deadline. For Firefox, they're just choosing the bits that will be ready in time, and delaying the features that aren't.

So I think they're holding to both of those statements, if you look at it in terms of "deadlines for features".

Re:Date-driven development

[msuarezalvarez]

You left me hoping you are just trolling...

No one with common sense would suppose time and effort that might have gone into coding went into the FF Flicks thing, that the people doing these two things are the same, or...

I agree

[imsabbel]

Personally, 1.5.0.2 has been the buggiest version in a long time.
Closing firefox without a zombie process? No happening since 1.5.0.0...
Firefox using 350Mbyte after a few hours? Well, seems to be 50Mbyte more with every version...
Firefox freezing spontaniously when dealing with embeded media files? No problem in earlier versions, but recently everything goes bolloks.

During a normal day, the typical "oh, clicking on links doesnt work anymore->close firefox->open task manager->kill zombie process->restart firefox" procedure happens at least once, sometimes 3 or 4 times.

But downgrading otoh isnt adviceable anymore considering that nowadays there are exploits for firefox in the wild..

Re:I agree

[revengance]

Could it be the websites that you went? I never experience such problems as you said. At most, it crashes when adobe acrobat gives to get an update and the update window is hidden behind all my other windows.

Re:I agree

[cornface]

During a normal day, the typical "oh, clicking on links doesnt work anymore->close firefox->open task manager->kill zombie process->restart firefox" procedure happens at least once, sometimes 3 or 4 times.

I'm glad it's not just me. I can't figure out what is causing it. Sometimes I'll go a week without it happening. Sometimes it happens multiple times in one hour.

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.

If you RTFA...

[Hachey]

...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.

On the up side ...

[n8willis]

The world has been spared a feature with a vague, incomprehensible, metaphorically incorrect, and just plain stupid name.

n

Re:On the up side ...

[msloan]

Yeah, places sounds like one of those lame 'Web 2.0' ish names. Under this usage of 'Web 2.0', I'm more of referring to an entire ideology. The simplicity thing started by apple. It seems like it's just itching for an 'i' infront of it to make 'iPlaces'. Ugg. Maybe some people like that kind of thing, like songs overplayed on the radio I get tired of it to the point of hate and nausea. I can see the 'places' logo now. Under it, it would say "Organize. Revisit. Rethink." or some shit. Seriously, stop trying to name things with artistic simplicity. Its not working any more. A new bookmark system doesn't need a name.

Places Explained

[The MAZZTer]

There's some enlightening dev notes on the Mozilla Wiki (I don't have a link at the moment, google it :p). Two of the more interesting highlights were a universal search function, and filters for bookmarks that work like Vista's Smart Folders (pop in some parameters, and any content matching that appears in the folder).

So I guess I could make a History folder that holds all the slashdot articles I've visited. I would include a Page Title filter of "Slashdot |" and then it would show every article Places has seen me visit.

People still use bookmarks?

[jonom]

With online tools like del.icio.us or simpy or probably a dozen others around?

Re:People still use bookmarks?

[jonom]

Uh, ya...and who the fuck are you?

Re:People still use bookmarks?

[Bieeanda]

Uh, yes? The last thing that I need are my bookmarks going AWOL because there's a router down, and it affords me at least a thin layer of privacy. If I need to find a site on someone else's machine, I'll Google it. I have no interest in sharing my bookmarks or aiding some outfit's attempts at trend plotting or data mining without being compensated, either. If I wanted my bookmarks on the Web, I'd just sign up for a Geocities site or a Google home page and upload bookmarks.html as index.html.

Re:People still use bookmarks?

[deque_alpha]

"Normal" bookmarks are faster than using some other site and I'm not adding a dependency to my my ability to retrieve my bookmarks. If delicious is unreachable, so are my bookmarks. That's not acceptable to me. I use a FF plugin to keep my multiple machines' bookamrks in sync, which has the side-effect of making them also available to me from other computers should _need_ to access them from a computer owned by someone other than me.

Re:People still use bookmarks?

[jonom]

I find normal bookmarks to be a major pain in the ass, especially when you end up with lots of them. In which case I find delicious or simpy to be much quicker.

Not to mention the hours lost in trying to keep bookmarks organized...

Re:People still use bookmarks?

[jonom]

I use google a lot too, but that can take a lot more time to track down a specific topic.

I've just never like the traditional bookmarking system...works fine for a small amount of sites, but falls apart pretty quickly when trying to catalog lots of sites.

Re:People still use bookmarks?

[Bieeanda]

Ultimately, I think it's best that the core browser be as simple to work with as possible, and that includes the default bookmarking system: no unnecessary frills, ideally something portable across machines and between browsers. A hypertext bookmark list like Mozilla's works, but as you noted, it gets cumbersome if you've got a lot of sites to keep track of.

I don't use sites like del.icio.us, but I do appreciate that they're available, just like I appreciate the availability of the dozens of Firefox extensions that I don't use either. They're great for the people that can actually put them through their paces, but for the rest of us it's just unnecessary complexity and features we'd never use.

Getting back onto the main topic, I'm glad that places have been rolled back at least for a while; atop the memory leaks and assorted other bugs, the last thing that Firefox needs is a bookmarks/favourites/places/whatever interface that's complex-looking enough to send new users screaming for IE again.

Re:People still use bookmarks?

[east coast]

Not to be an asshole but why would I want to use an "online tool" for keeping track of websites that are currently on my favorites/bookmarks lists? I don't see the real purpose of it.

Re:People still use bookmarks?

[WWWWolf]

Both have their place.

For bulk of my bookmarks, I probably want to keep them in ma.gnolia. That's for "filed" bookmarks that I use a bit less frequently. But there's little reason to use net bookmark service for some things that you use really frequently; I much rather have Slashdot, Wikipedia, Bloglines, GMail, etc on my bookmarks toolbar where I can access them easily.

Re:People still use bookmarks?

[jp10558]

Isn't there some quickfind in bookmarks? About the only thing I'd love to see is some search shortcut, maybe b, that you could use in the address bar to quickfind bookmarks.

Human-readable format is prefferable?

[orthogonal]

I don't know anything about this format, so I probably shouldn't comment, but off the top of my head, it seems to me that for url bookmarks a human-readable format is prefferable and easier to convert or otherwise process.

Re:Human-readable format is prefferable?

[misleb]

Seems to me that a format you could access with SQL commands would be much easier to convert and otherwise manipulate on the whole. It also allows for more complex datasets.

-matthew

Re:Human-readable format is prefferable?

[the_womble]

SQLite is available under a BSDish license and it had bindings to a huge range of langauges. It stores data in a file and opening a database essentially means opening the file. I would think it is easier than parsing text.

Re:Human-readable format is prefferable?

[Millennium]

At least in theory, it's quite possible for SQLite to use human-readable files. Doing so requires parsers and exporters very similar to the ones currently used. Except that instead of working with data in whatever structures Firefox currently uses, a parser would insert data into an in-memory database while the exporter would extract it from said database. On the export side, the situation is similar: it takes its data from the in-memory database, but other than that works like the current exporters.

It would seem to me that this approach would give the best of both worlds, at least when dealing with formats such as bookmarks where a human-readable file format is desirable. You keep the benefits of using a relational database while the program is actually running, but the file format remains human-readable.

Re:fork a new branch

[shawn443]

I was going to echo the same comment. While fork is easy to say, doing is another matter. Philosophically saying, I think this shows both the ordinary complexity of software development and the typical benefit of open source.

Re:bad article link

[Stormwatch]

Sorry, the correct link has been removed from the roadmap and disabled in the builds.

Let me start by quoting...

[Biomechanical]

...My earlier comment on Digg when this story showed up there.

Personally I couldn't give two shits about _any_ browser getting "new and exciting!!!!" features right at the moment, and my reason is very simple,

They all fail at what they are supposed to do, first and foremost. Some fail utterly, and other fail a little bit, but they all _fail_.

There is not a single browser available for download at the moment that _fully_ supports the web standards laid down by the W3C, http://w3.org/ and developers who are working on Safari, Konqueror, Mozilla Firefox and Seamonkey, IE, Opera, Camino, and so on, all need to take a step back from their computers and say,

"Hey, how come we're adding new features to a program that isn't even standards-compliant?"

The continual lack of support for even the full subset of CSS 1 and 2.1 makes designing pages based on XHTML and CSS a frickin' pain in the arse.

If there was one browser, even just one, that was cross-platform and fully supported even just HTML, XHTML, CSS 1 and 2.1 (maybe even parts of 3), and was extensible to support such things as SVG and XVRML, then I would be using it in a damn shot, and then I'd _know_ that when a page failed to render properly, _I_ screwed up, not a bug in the browser.

Stop adding features guys, just follow the damn standards.

All I want, and I'm betting so do a great deal of other people who work with the web, is a browser that follows the standards for HTML, XHTML, CSS 1 & 2 (maybe even 3), Javascript, and DOM.

Extra features are nice, yes, but the top priority should be putting out a browser that follows the standards, first and foremost.

What good are extensions and themes and fancy bookmarking tools if the core program for seeing information on the web cannot render pages which have been correctly created?

Re:Let me start by quoting...

[cnettel]

To some degree, that tells something about the inherent problems in writing a spec years before someone has even designed, or written, code that would be able to support said spec. 2D layout is often mistaken to be an easy problem. It isn't. If you add some performance concerns, and any ability to render anything before the complete file, with all dependencies (CSS, images, ...) are loaded, it won't get easier.

On the other hand, what reasonably complex system is available in several standard-compliant implementations? There are deviations from even some of the fairly basic RFCs if we start looking at odd (or not so odd) cases. Some of them even make sense. Welcome to the life of writing code (even when it isn't Turing complete).

Re:Let me start by quoting...

[belg4mit]

Eh-hemm, though it does appear to have stagnated a bit of late there is Amaya

Re:Let me start by quoting...

[cnerd2025]

Hey, man, I know what you mean. Hold on, I need to open this other page in a new tab... there we go. Alright, I agree. I mean Firefox is definitely better in the standards department than its Microshaft counterpart, but it still isn't perfect. Why the hell doesn't Mozilla get faster volunteers?! They are a "corporation" now, after all. I mean half of the SVG standards don't work on Mozilla browsers. Check out the w3schools tutorial and you'll see that all the animation examples are just static pages. Of course, it is ABM - anything but M$. I really wish Mozilla would demonstrate their dedication to the web and a standardized web by fully standardizing their browser. Hell, I have a T1 connection; I can handle a few extra megabytes. I am also outraged at how MathML doesn't render absolutely perfectly without 3 extra fonts. That is inexcusable to me, working at a lab as I do. And I too wish that CSS was more fully supported. I'd much rather use the flexible steel of predefined CSS than the brittle rubberband known as dynamic JavaScript. So, in summary, browser companies or developers should stop adding so many features but should focus more on keeping up with new standards. One new standard a week is no big deal; any good businessman knows that to keep ahead, you have to develop quality with haste. I swear, I'd switch to Amaya if only it had better features.

Re:Let me start by quoting...

[man_of_mr_e]

Unfortunatlye, that's easier said than done. For a variety of reasons. There are parts of the specs that some developers don't agree with, for instance. There are other parts that are so hard to implement that nobody has done it yet. Also, the standards themselves have been notorious for being vague and poorly worded. And what's not confusing is often missing. There's a lot of unspecified behavior.

Fact is, we need an entirely new set of standards that are complete and well written. Patching the existing ones hasn't been working.

Re:Let me start by quoting...

[ydrol]

though it does appear to have stagnated a bit of late there is Amaya

Last release 6 days ago .. but every time I tried Amaya in the past it just crashed fast and hard under windows. I gave up trying about 2004. Maybe I'll give it another shot under Linux.. Not sure why though!

Re:Let me start by quoting...

[Nimloth]

"Hey, how come we're adding new features to a program that isn't even standards-compliant?"

No RDBMS has fully implemented the SQL92 standard yet, while working on the next gen of features, and I don't see you going off about it.

The standard is mostly good, but it's not 100% plausible nor feasable.

Re:Let me start by quoting...

[great throwdini]

Fact is, we need an entirely new set of standards that are complete and well written. Patching the existing ones hasn't been working.

That judgment is facile. Truth is, if you push any existing Web browser on the better written and more "complete" (er, least ambiguous and self-confounding) recommendations, they tend to cover a great deal of ground yet manage to leave gaps behind (some small, others rather large).

My own assessment may be as much a gloss as yours, but in attempting to corral these tools to work alone or in unison according to what passes for specs, too many times have I personally been let down. Browser camps need not take an all-or-nothing approach to recommendations (and when taken, it's inevitably a mess: Mozilla's early back-and-forth on "pure" HTML only; Microsoft's recent reluctance to engage more fully CSS 2.1 for IE7 because it wasn't "finished") but it would be nice for a change for any/all teams to better grasp what's more important in the real world and what isn't (Safari, I'm looking at you: CSS drop shadows are pretty, but can y'all consider implementing a little more of HTML 4.01?).

There is always ambiguity in a large enough recommendation or standard, but to cease improving what's already there in favor of something wholly new is akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Re:Let me start by quoting...

[belg4mit]

Of yeah, the project is still alive, I meant stagnated feature wise (they only claim partial CSS2 support).

Re:Let me start by quoting...

[BZ]

> that _fully_ supports the web standards laid down by the W3C

That's impossible to do, since some of those standards contradict each other.

Also, keep in mind that W3C is a bunch of companies getting together to standardize. Not all standards are relevant to all the companies. For example, SVG 1.2 Tiny has all sorts of things pushed into it by cellphone makers that are no-starters in desktop browsers (for security reasons, because those features are already available, etc). Do check out the socket networking APIs in this "vector graphics" specification. It's an educational view of the W3C.

Re:Let me start by quoting...

[vague]

The first a foremost mission of my browser is provide myself with a pleasurable and/or useful browsing experience. Everything else is secondary, including any and every kind of technical standard. This goes for any piece of software, it must be useful and usable (in that order) first, technically competent second. Standard compliance and, more generally, technical excellence, is means to an end, never the end itself.

At least parts of MS has understood this for a long time. Depressingly few in the OS community appreciates the full consequences of this even today. Too much technology with a little usability on top, exactly the wrong priority.

Re:Let me start by quoting...

[r3m0t]

The ACID2 test does not just test compliance. It also tests "graceful fallback" - something Amaya has never been interested in.

Re:Let me start by quoting...

[caudron]

They all fail at what they are supposed to do, first and foremost. ... The continual lack of support ... makes designing pages ... a frickin' pain in the arse. ... All I want ... is a browser that follows the standards

Then write one.

Seriously, you got the Firefox code. Go in and write the browser you want. If you are right that the silent public is clamoring for your vision of a simple---but completely standards-compliant---browser, then I'm sure your project will take off like crazycakes. I wish you all the luck.

But in the interim, quit bitching about the work people are volunteering to do for free just becuase they love what they do. Offer constructive criticism, offer praise, offer help, but bitching in at least two forums (according to you) about how they have failed and are a pain in the ass to use isn't constructive or helpful. It's just annoying and whiny.

There's an old adage about beggars and choosers you should look into.

Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/linux.html

P.S. Equally annoying: Seeing a message like this modded up on /. I guess the balance of moderator power on /. has shifted from those that understand the volunteer-nature of Free software to those that don't. Therefore, I suppose I'll be dropping some karma over this post.

Re:Let me start by quoting...

[Legion303]

"There's an old adage about beggars and choosers you should look into."

I fail to see how "Choosy beggars choose Jif" has any bearing on his situation.

Re:Let me start by quoting...

[poot_rootbeer]

developers who are working on Safari, Konqueror, Mozilla Firefox and Seamonkey, IE, Opera, Camino, and so on, all need to take a step back from their computers and say,

"Hey, how come we're adding new features to a program that isn't even standards-compliant?"

The continual lack of support for even the full subset of CSS 1 and 2.1 makes designing pages based on XHTML and CSS a frickin' pain in the arse.

I agree with you, but I also recognize that browser developers are not guided by what would make us web designers the happiest. They ultimately report to USERS, not to us.

Why should a user care that CSS-alpha-channel-transparency-with-a-twist-of-lem on isn't properly implemented in their browser? They don't know there's a problem with it, and even if they knew they wouldn't care. But new toolbar icons? Holy crap, the users eat it up! What an improvement!

bookmarks replaced with web-services?

[ksw2]

I've wondered in the past if the traditional web-browser bookmark system will be replaced with a web-service (like del.icio.us?) or maybe even a combination of a web-service and firefox extension.

Re:bookmarks replaced with web-services?

[tweek]

I've all but done this by hosting Insipid on my own server.

The best feature is the "snapshot" feature (at least for me). If I get an inkling that some static content will suddenly disappear, I snapshot it so I can go back to it.

It's not as fancy as delicious and it's not all Web 2.0 but it does the job for me. It supports tagging and access control.

Re:bookmarks replaced with web-services?

[adtifyj]

There are already a few extensions on https://addons.mozilla.org/ that provide online bookmarks:
* Foxmarks, currently featured: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2410/
* del.icio.us: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1153/
* de.lirio.us: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1566/

Also, the Flock browser includes this functionality natively. http://flock.com/

Re:bookmarks replaced with web-services?

[barzok]

http://www.flock.com/

Could be a good thing

[unoengborg]

The ability to use the mozilla bookmark file as an ordinary html file, is a very nice feature that I would miss if they used a database engine instead.

If they should use a database engine, they should use some kind of client server solution so that bookmarks could be shared between multiple machines or users. Preferrably they should use some abstraction layer such as JDBC or ODBC, so that users could have a choise of what database engine to use.

There is also a need for standardization in bookmark storage. Free and open source browsers should agree on a common standard, regardless if it includes databases or not.

Re:Could be a good thing

[Ash-Fox]

Preferibly they should use LDAP for multi-user things.

FIX THE DAMN MEMORY LEAKS ALREADY

[ameline]

Sorry for shouting, but I'd be happy if they did *nothing* but fix the memory leaks.

Memory leaks are unforgivable.

Re:FIX THE DAMN MEMORY LEAKS ALREADY

[Shacky]

I agree 100%...

245mb of memory used on one open firefox window that displays a static text only homepage..


Oh wait, that crazy amt of memory usage is a "feature"

Re:FIX THE DAMN MEMORY LEAKS ALREADY

[smartdreamer]

I'm not sure if their is many memory leaks in firefox, but I thing that is broken for sure is the "infinit cache" problem. Firefox never flushs its caches and fills X's memory until you close the application. They call that a feature, I call that a conceptual mistake. Caches must be fixed size or should flush after some trigger (time!?).

This problem bugs me like hell.

Re:FIX THE DAMN MEMORY LEAKS ALREADY

[ameline]

Mine rises to 800 meg and more until the OS grinds to a halt and everything goes pear shaped. Just load some pages that are really heavy with images -- it leaks them -- all of them, and nothing short of terminating the process releases the memory, and it never reuses the leaked memory. And I have the cacheing "feature" (can't remember it exactly) turned off, and it still leaks horribly.

Re:FIX THE DAMN MEMORY LEAKS ALREADY

[radish]

Exactly the same problem here, I've seen it push over a gig and the machine grinds to a halt. Really really frustrating. In fact, I just bought more RAM purely to try and keep firefox running a little longer. I must be insane...

Re:FIX THE DAMN MEMORY LEAKS ALREADY

[Shadow Of The Sun]

Caching in memory to the point of bloat is really silly given that they store the files on disk.

I think I would give the users a pref that let them say how many pages to keep in memory (default=10 perhaps). As the user goes through pages, old ones are flushed. If the user has more pages open than the limit, then no memory cache is used at all. If the user visits an old page, it can always be reloaded from disk cache.

Isn't this how browsers use to work?

Re:FIX THE DAMN MEMORY LEAKS ALREADY

[Ash-Fox]

"Do you use Firefox?"
"No"
"Take back the internet, get Firefox!"
"I can't, I only have 1GB of RAM!"

Re:FIX THE DAMN MEMORY LEAKS ALREADY

[novus ordo]

Sorry but we are too busy working on innovative features that we would like to cut until we can implement them 5 years later when the size of memory leaks can contend with the size of the federal deficit. Thank you and enjoy this public announcement.

-Firefox Staff

Re:FIX THE DAMN MEMORY LEAKS ALREADY

[Smack]

Calling them "unforgiveable" doesn't make them easy to fix.

Re:FIX THE DAMN MEMORY LEAKS ALREADY

[ameline]

> Calling them "unforgiveable" doesn't make them easy to fix.

No, once they've been there for a while, they become hard to fix -- as are many bugs that have been around for a while. But just because they are hard to fix, doesn't make them forgivable.

These sort of bugs are generally indicitave of architectural flaws and broken development processes. What needs to be done, right from the start of a project, is constant performance measurement and memory footprint measurements. And when things start going bad, you *stop* feature work right away and fix the problems. Before they become too hard to fix.

Agile works well for this -- every iteration should be shippable. No leaks or performance problems (or other bugs for that matter) should ever live more than two iterations, otherwise you hit the big virtual stop button and fix the damn problems before proceeding.

Once things like this creep into your code base, and the accepted wisdom is that they're too hard to fix, you get this tolerance for mediocrity setting in amongst your developers as they see the problems, and ignore them because it's just accepted as normal. This is the beginning of the end for a software project.

If you are an architect or development manager, never accept mediocrity -- fight it with everything you have. It's the only way to create software you can take pride in and that your users will love. And the people working on the project will appreciate it too.

Re:FIX THE DAMN MEMORY LEAKS ALREADY

[ameline]

It leaks horribly regardless of that setting

Re:FIX THE DAMN MEMORY LEAKS ALREADY

[ttfkam]

These sort of bugs are generally indicitave of architectural flaws and broken development processes. What needs to be done, right from the start of a project, is constant performance measurement and memory footprint measurements. And when things start going bad, you *stop* feature work right away and fix the problems. Before they become too hard to fix.

Okay hotshot, name ONE project you've worked on that has the complexity and wide audience of a web browser? This example you give must incorporate a complex UI (not in terms of use, but necessary complexity on the back end), advanced embedded scripting, render quickly, and yet not ignore security concerns.

Methinks you have no project in your resume that even comes close to what the Mozilla Firefox team has produced. And yet the processes you have used in your smaller scale and smaller scope projects should trump their efforts for the last six/seven years? Riiiiiiiiiight.

Agile works well for this -- every iteration should be shippable. No leaks or performance problems (or other bugs for that matter) should ever live more than two iterations, otherwise you hit the big virtual stop button and fix the damn problems before proceeding.

In theory, theory and practice are the same thing. In practice... well... the real world works differently. I tend to regard the Linux kernel as an effective development process. The same with the Apache web server. The BSDs. Postfix. The list goes on.

NONE of them have a development model as stringent as the one you propose. Your solution works for small-scale, one-off solutions on a contract basis for one or a small set of customers. It has no relevance to the discussion at hand -- especially not for a collaborative programming effort like the popular free software and open source codebases. For most projects, release early/release often tends to work out the best -- with less emphasis on "perfect" and more on "good enough for a milestone."

If you are an architect or development manager, never accept mediocrity -- fight it with everything you have. It's the only way to create software you can take pride in and that your users will love. And the people working on the project will appreciate it too.

Yes! Just like the Amiga! Oops! That failed in the marketplace. Err... Like BeOS! Hrmm... 3DO! *sigh*

Software will cease to be mediocre when users stop accepting mediocrity. As it stands, not only does the general user not seem to be moving in this direction, s/he is still surprisingly accepting of less-than-mediocre on a regular basis. But if you want to rush the windmills, go right ahead. I'll be watching from a distance, cheering you on.

Re:FIX THE DAMN MEMORY LEAKS ALREADY

[Phroggy]

Don't forget where Mozilla came from. That stuff you're talking about that should have been done at the start of the project? Completely irrelevant now, because the start of the project was at least 15 years ago, and most of what Firefox does now hadn't even been dreamed of then.

What problems?

[try_anything]

Fixing Firefox's memory problems might be an unglorious task, but many commercial projects are plagued with the same problems. An ambitious developer could turn Firefox's problems into the beginning of a lucrative career as a performance analyst and bug hunter, if he managed to make a significant difference and get credit for his work.

Re:thank god for small favors

[RobertLTux]

the problem is this was supposed to sync the history and the bookmarks (and at the same time enable some neat things)
and if you want to talk "brain damaged" speak to the developers about MORK

MOD PARENT UP

[Trogre]

Putting close buttons in individual tabs is nothing but evil, wrong and stupid.

One mis-click on a tab (which is very common when managing a dozen or so tabs) and you've just closed an important page with no confirmation dialog.

See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=335453 for the current gnome-terminal fiasco.

Just don't do it.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[mattkinabrewmindspri]

I just use an extension called Tab Clicking Options, which lets me close tabs by double-clicking on them. This is much more consistent with behavior that's already in Firefox, since you can already open a tab by double-clicking on the tab bar. It's also easier to double-click on a larger target, a two-inch tab, when compared to a 16x16 close box. It saves space on the tab for the title.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[man_of_mr_e]

I prefer the way IE7 does this, the X only shows up on the currently active tab. You have to activate another tab for the X to appear.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[quacking duck]

Ironically, a lot of Windows users griped about how Macs, in the good ol' OS 8 and OS 9 days, had to make a background window active before they could hit the close box.

Now it's completely turned around--a window element (tab) in IE7 must be activated before it can be closed.

Not making a statement about whether this is good or bad, just an observation.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[AxelBoldt]

One mis-click on a tab (which is very common when managing a dozen or so tabs) and you've just closed an important page with no confirmation dialog.

Big deal, that's what the "Undo Closed Tab" and "Closed Tabs List" features are for. You're running Tab Mix Plus, right?

I find close buttons on every tab useful to quickly close tabs that I'm not currently reading.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[cgenman]

Opera also has close buttons on tabs. But you can Undo closing of windows, and everything restores including text box. I was under the impression that Firefox did this now as well.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[LegendLength]

Why not just middle click them to close, rather that installing a mod?

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[pcgabe]

One mis-click on a tab ... and you've just closed an important page with no confirmation dialog.

Tab Mix Plus

Optional individual close buttons on each tab (or current tab, or tab currently under mouse, or...). And if you accidentally close a tab? "Undo close tab". Or open up the closed tab list and find it.

And many, MANY more features. It's like the best of all the tab extensions, rolled into one.

This is an essential plugin for anyone using a lot of tabs.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[mattkinabrewmindspri]

Because I use a Mac, and like many Mac users, my middle-click is assigned to Exposé, which is useful in all applications, rather than being assigned to tabbed browsing, which is only useful in one.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[balloonpup]

Because I use a laptop, and its pointing device only has two buttons.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[CastrTroy]

Maybe you can find a setting in your mouse preferences that enables "Chord Middle" or pressing both buttons at the same time to signal a middle click. I know the software I installed for my logitech trackball allows me to do this. I

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[mgblst]

I prefer the way opera does it. Each tab has a close button dialog. And if you accidently close the wrong one, there is a trash can at the end which lets you 'undo' the close. Right now I can undo any of the last 100 closed windows that I have done. Such a simple add-on, but oh so useful.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Fri13]

"One mis-click on a tab (which is very common when managing a dozen or so tabs) and you've just closed an important page with no confirmation dialog." That place for close button is not problem, it is how it could work. If that button works like default buttond does, it can be problematic for someone. If that button works like konversation tab close button, it would be great. Konversation "close button" works so that you need hover mouse cursor over it a 500ms until it allows you to press it. And when tabs have own close button, user can much easily close tabs what he wants without opening them first/again.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Jamie Lokier]

Opera does the same thing: you have to click on an inactive tab before the tab's X appears, then you can close it.

Despite this, I still find myself accidentally closing tabs I don't want to close. Most often, it's because of the substantial time lag between clicking a tab and activating it, or deleting a tab and it disappearing, and the way all the others move in response to those.

-- Jamie

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[reed]

It's not as bad as middle-click closing a tab.

If the close box is the right size, it's not a big problem. For example, in Safari the close button is a small circle, you have to be pretty precice to hit it.

Fitt's law can actually be exploited for positive effect sometimes.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[drinkypoo]

That makes no sense either, because I frequently want to close tabs without switching to them, forcing them to re-render, which can be a slow operation if I'm on a low-memory system and I'm closing them to recapture memory I need to deal with stuff on other tabs, or in another app - now I have to do a bunch of paging so the content needed to render the page is reloaded into memory, and the page is rerendered.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[man_of_mr_e]

Firefox (and IE) pre-render their pages. That's one of the reasons Firefox's memory usage is so outrageous. Even if you disable it, the current page stays rendered in memory. It's just redrawing it. Switching from open tab to open tab does not show any significant change in memory or CPU usage. If it did it the way you suggest, tabs would be all but unusable.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[balloonpup]

It's just the bog standard Windows mouse driver... and to be honest, there are some (albeit rare) times that I do need to hit both around the same time. The only place I've found it to be a problem is in Firefox, to be honest.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[drinkypoo]

Switching from open tab to open tab does not show any significant change in memory or CPU usage. If it did it the way you suggest, tabs would be all but unusable.

And on a system running Windows XP with 128MB RAM, it is all but unusable. I'd have three tabs open and I'd be swapping my ass off. I'd have to close one of the tabs just to free up memory so I could get something done in one of the other ones - and when switching back to a tab so I could close it (I know, I could have done it from the pulldown menu, but I had no right button) I'd have to wait as long as half a minute for paging operations before Firefox would even become responsive again.

BTW, redraw is the same as rerender in this case - I'm talking about drawing the screen, which is not just done from a cached bitmap.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[drinkypoo]

And frankly, you're an IDIOT for trying to run WinXP on a system with so little memory. Come back when mommy buys you another 512MB for $40.

Point the first: The machine in question is a laptop which takes SDRAM SODIMMs. Further, it is an IBM and some memory I tried in it didn't work. Ended up getting 256MB of Kingston memory for $100, which was the best price for ram I knew would work in the system.

Point the second: Go fuck yourself sideways. I'll use what machines I want. 128MB with WinXP is enough to do enough photoshopping to handle web graphics and low-megapixel photomanipulation. I did a lot of it on that system for years. Being able to run photoshop and use filters but not being able to websurf (and no, not at the same time) is fucking bullshit.

Point the third: Go fuck yourself upside down, too. I might be someplace out in the world using portable firefox from my flash drive, and there might not be a better system to use, yet if I used Opera on that same system, it would not uncontrollably shit itself like firefox will. Don't get me wrong, I love firefox dearly, but its memory requirements are utterly unacceptable.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Trogre]

Thank you for putting me onto Tab Mix Plus. It certainly is a useful extension.

However the Undo Closed Tab/Closed Tabs List features are not as good as it could be. They do not actually save/restore the tabs, they just cache URLs.

This means if you had any data on that page (a form, for example) it's gone forever.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Trogre]

Thanks I was put onto this extension by another reply here. It certainly is a useful extension.

However the Undo Closed Tab/Closed Tabs List features are not as good as it could be. They do not actually save/restore the tabs, they just cache URLs.

This means if you had any data on that page (a form, for example) it's gone forever.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Ignominious]

What's wrong with middle clicking? You Mac users not have a middle button?!

B-Boom-Tsss

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Mr. Slippery]

Putting close buttons in individual tabs is nothing but evil, wrong and stupid.

No, failing to provide each individual tab with its own close button is evil, wrong and stupid; until Tab Mix came along I wouldn't switch from Galeon to Firefox exactly because of the poor tab control in Firefox.

Aren't we fortunate that thanks for the values of freedom and openness held by Firefox developers, we can both have the behavior we want?

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Denek]

I use a Firefox extention that shows close buttons on each open tab. I find it immenselly usefull. Yes, sometimes I close a tab by mistake but the "Undo Close Tab" menu option allows me to reload the page to its original condition.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Trogre]

(I've posted this response to other posts in this thread).

I was put on to this extension by another reply here. It certainly is a useful extension.

However the Undo Closed Tab/Closed Tabs List features are not as good as it could be. They do not actually save/restore the tabs, they just cache URLs.

This means if you had any data on that page (a form, for example) it's gone forever.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[fbjon]

Is there any thrashcan feature/extension for FFox? As in Opera: closed tabs get put into the thrashcan, and you can "undo" with Ctrl-Z to resurrect them, or pick out individual pages. I think blocked popups also get sent there, for optional viewing..

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[dylan_-]

The undoclosetab extension restores the tab completely (at least, I think it does, might require Session Saver too...) I don't use Tab Mix Plus though.

Re:thank god for small favors

[kv9]

Storing bookmarks and history in a sql database is possibly the dumbest idea I've heard in a long, long time. With any luck, this will remain a feature of the future...forever.

FYI SQLite is small, fast and stores everything in a file. it's not like they want to store your bookmarks in a fucking Oracle installation. SQLite is embedded and fits the purpose quite well. perhaps not very boner-inducing from a user standpoint, but a programmer can clearly see the benefits of such a thing: easy access, searching, management, etc. even for third party tools.

a vast improvement over the current XMLish kludge (i won't even mention the MORKiness, plenty of other slashdotters did). if you ever tried to do anything else with an XML file (besides transforming it) you know how *fun* that is.

2.0 Already?!

[goaty_the_flying_sho]

So we're at 2.0 already.

If it's anything like the jump to 1.5 I'll take my time updating my machines. A few interface tweaks isn't a major version revision. Are we on track for heading IE off at the big eight point oh?

Re:thank god for small favors

[misleb]

SQL, as in file based, not server based. I mean, it isn't like you have to run MySQL to store your bookmarks. It is really just a file format and an access library (SQLite). Like Berkley DB, but way better.

-matthew

I find it useful

[SuperKendall]

In Safari the tabs have close buttons and I find them really handy - a lot of times I am usingthem to close tabs I am not even on, which is why I like them because they make it quicker to close off a few tabs all at once.

Blocking google analytics is good.

[Homestar Breadmaker]

You don't need stats to design your site correctly, that's nonsense. And google tracking the details of everything you do on the thousands of sites that use urchin is certainly something worth blocking.

Better off with it as a web service anyway

[technopinion]

For example, the just-launched iFaves is a very nice system with support for tags, RSS, sharing, image thumbnails, etc, and a very friendly UI. The problem with it as a browser built-in is that you're stuck with what's there. As a web service, you have your choice of which site to use, and you can access your bookmarks no matter where you are in the world, and no matter which browser you're on.

Re:Better off with it as a web service anyway

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

...as long as the site responds, of course. No offence, but I wouldn't bet my money on http://www.ifaves.com/ being there for, let's say, five years...

NO CLOSE ON TABS!

[MikeFM]

I hope the close button on tabs is an option because I hate that feature in browsers like Opera. Some other programs, like Azureus, do it that way too. It makes it to easy to accidently close a tab and it makes you keep moving your mouse to remove multiple tabs. In general it's just not a good UI choice. You make it slightly easier for newbies but make it harder for everyone who actually uses tabs.

If you want to copy a good idea from Opera instead why not make pop-up windows open as virtual sub-windows or tabs. There are existing FF extensions that do this and it's such an obvious good idea that FF would be better off using that than making some extension to add close buttons to tabs mainstream. And make the extension that suppresses loading new pages/tabs for blank pages (such as happen with some downloads) a default. I've yet to see any reason anyone would want those blank pages to appear. Oh, and the extension that opens downloads in your choice of a tab or a sidebar would be a good mainstream change if you polished it up a little.

Re:NO CLOSE ON TABS!

[Poingggg]

A bit off-topic, but in Opera it is a choice to have the close-button either on the tab or on the upper right of the page. No problem there!

Re:NO CLOSE ON TABS!

[MikeFM]

Good to know. I don't use Opera enough to have been aware of that.

Re:NO CLOSE ON TABS!

[Fweeky]

Prefs -> Advanced -> Tabs.

Of course in Windows turning off per-tab close buttons gives you a close button that's instead immediately under the close button for the entire window. Doh.

Luckily you can always close tabs using mouse gestures (RMB, draw an L) or using MMB on the tab, or using Ctrl-W or whatever you have that set to (evil, I have this mapped to delete-word like God intended). In Opera 9 there's also a "trashcan" on the tab bar that lets you reopen closed tabs. In previous versions of Opera this is exposed via the Windows -> Closed submenu. I'd be surprised if there isn't a FF extension that does something similar.

Re:NO CLOSE ON TABS!

[MikeFM]

I knew one of the people doing the FF extension that added gesture support but I never really cared for it much. It's not so much a bad concept IMO as the mice we use are to bulky and unsuited for that sort of motion. Hand tracking or even something like a pen device would make gestures much more practical I think.

Being able to un-close stuff isn't a bad idea although actual UI for the feature seems to bloated for my tastes. A simple CTRL-Z would be good.

Re:NO CLOSE ON TABS!

[Fweeky]

Ctrl-Z is undo in forms. Reopening a closed window/tab is Ctrl-Alt-Z by default ;)

Re:fork a new branch

[dryeo]

What are you talking about. Firefox (named Phoenix IIRC) was a fork from the Mozilla project. Sopposed to be a lighter web browser. Then Mozilla decided to adopt the fork and abandon their browser. Now there is another fork maintaining the old Mozilla code renamed as Seamonkey.
Funny enough now Seamonkey feels quicker and lighter as well as having more features

Re:Cut from Firefox2, but "removed from the roadma

[Ohreally_factor]

Maybe so, but it's pretty clear to many of us that Jim Allchin needs to be removed from the FF dev team, perhaps forced to retire early.

something needed since the beginning

[Tumbleweed]

Is FF2 going to have a multi-threaded UI? I keep waiting, and keep getting disappointed. I've looked through the lists of what's coming up, but have yet to notice this. For heavy tabs users like myself, that would have a MASSIVE impact on performance.

UI testing & tabs

[kbrosnan]

"So, some early data coming back from cognitive modelling done by Google and NASA's HCI group is showing that the liklihood of accidental close in cases where there are 1-5 tabs is less than 1%. It hits 2% around the time tabs hit 135px."
http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.apps.fi refox/browse_frm/thread/626a60dd0e21082e/4ce85210c 4c46fb3?tvc=1&hl=en#4ce85210c4c46fb3

The Mozilla employees have looked into this issue and feel that with the current information and with the additon of features such as undo close tab and a tab overflow soloution that close buttons on the tabs stay.

Re:UI testing & tabs

[Trogre]

2% accidental close rate at 135Px?

That means if you have a 1400x1050 screen and a maximised firefox window with only 10 tabs (about 135px each with chrome) you are likely to accidentaly close one every 50 clicks. That's not good enough.

At the moment I have three windows open each about 75% screen size, with about 25 tabs each. Each tab is about (launches kruler) 40px. What do you think the error rate will be there once a 10px close button is introduced?

I've just been told that the term "Fundamentally Bad UI Paradigm" has now cropped up on the gnome mailing list (with regards to this bug creeping into gnome-terminal).

Hmmm...curious

[multimediavt]

Me thinks, me smell a patent infringement. Possibly? Anyone? Anyone? Don't know for sure, will go looking.

no, really

[Doktor Memory]

Yes yes yes, I know what SQLite is. It's still a monumentally dumb idea. The current format is simple, machine-and-human parseable, portable and reliable. SQLite is none of these things. This is a non-solution to a non-problem, brought to you by the usual bozos who always think that adding a database to something makes it swoopier, without considering the real-world failure scenarios for a heartbeat.

Aside to the moderators: my "flamebait" comment is essentially the same opinion as the guy who wrote Communicator 1.0 and 2.0 for linux, so kindly bite me.

Re:no, really

[kv9]

The current format is simple, machine-and-human parseable, portable and reliable. SQLite is none of these things.

i respectfully disagree. SQLite is:

• simple - IMNSHO it's simpler to use an embedded database to manage a huge list of items and metadata instead of a plain XML files
• machine-and-human parseable - while not as easy as vi-ing a textfile this tool helps a lot. it's very elegant and you can always dump and edit the text.
• portable - "Database files can be freely shared between machines with different byte orders."
• reliable - ACID compliance

all that and an elegant API to access your data. some scripting languages have support for it too and you can jump straight to coding right away (PHP for example)

Aside to the moderators: my "flamebait" comment is essentially the same [...]

i don't consider your comment to be flamebait. you just seem to have a serious aversion to databases that get `misused', but you also fail to provide solid reasoning.

and i'm probably biased too, because i use lots of different databases (embedded or not) to store lots of shit, as it's really great to have a nice interface to your data stores.

hell, i might be wrong but in this case it seems a good idea, and i gotta admit i'm pretty dissapointed that they bumped it.

just my 0.02RON

Re:no, really

[vrt3]

machine-and-human parseable - while not as easy as vi-ing a textfile this tool helps a lot. it's very elegant and you can always dump and edit the text.

Or http://sqlitebrowser.sourceforge.net/.

is firefox ever going to allow

[circletimessquare]

the declaration of external entities in xml?

if i write

<!ENTITY somevariable SYSTEM "blahblah.xml">

it works fine in ie, but not firefox

it's not a security issue, i mean if you consider it a security issue then you are also saying firefox shouldn't process css files. whatever security is set up for css (such as, from the same domain as the html) can apply to external entity processing too

this bug/ failure to support standard xml is a major bummer and has prevented me from adopting firefox

Re:is firefox ever going to allow

[The One KEA]

It does allow that - but the entities are defined in UTF-8 text files, not XML files.

Firefox - the new Vista

[suv4x4]

Mod me down and call me trolly, but if Firefox slips to a 2010 release with half its features removed, you'll know that delivering large projects out the door ain't easy, maybe we'll have more pitty for Microsoft's poor Vista then. ;)

Re:fork a new branch

[larry bagina]

The firefox fork was started by 2 paid mozilla developers. So far, SeaMonkey development has consisted almost entirely of backporting firefox/gecko patches. Not a real success story.

It's no big deal!!!

[MoxFulder]

I haven't used the Places feature personally, but it DOES sound cool.

The way I see it, if the current developers think it's a cool feature, they'll keep developing it as an extension. And if not, it'll become abandonware ... until someone else picks up the code and starts hacking on it.

Gee, ain't open source wonderful? =) Nothing ever disappears as long as there's someone willing and able to keep developing it!

Who cares? It's not an earth-shaking innovation

[ishmalius]

'Places,' which appears to be nothing more than a URL cache and storage, seems to be a rather lame feature for people to be stressed about. Better to worry about SVG, XForms and dynamic rendering. Give inifnite user control over how content is rendered. What about a page that refuses to render without popups? Let the user tweak the xhtml, client side, to override that. Refuse redirects. Send the headers in the request however the user wants. That would be a feature.

wrong, this is a serious problem

[circletimessquare]

and it's turned me off of firefox

look:

http://copia.ogbuji.net/blog/2006/Mar/06

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69799

Firefox is BUTT UGLY SLOW

[4phun]

Why hasn't anyone else noticed that compared to the IE7 that FIREFOX with a dozen extensions is just plain BUTT UGLY SLOW. I like FIREFOX for a few web sites but as I learn more and more about some of the hidden improvments and the abilty to extend IE7 with custom features I have switched back to IE as the default browser. I also like the fact IE7 is FAST to start and fast to render pages.

So, what's wrong with this?

[crazy blade]

Let me get this straight. The developers have realized that the time frame to the 2.0 release is not enough to iron out the several bugs related to the UNBELIEVABLY IMPORTANT bookmarks and history storage system and decide to give themselves more time on this by leaving it out for the next release... and that is a bad thing?

Can anyone say: Whooops! Firefox has lost my bookmarks!

NoScript

[Julian Morrison]

NoScript extension will allow you to whitelist by hostname (or by partial hostname), and block by default. For example on this post page I'm whitelisting slashdot.org and google-analytics.com but forbidding tacoda.net and falkag.net.

If you don't like it

[Rogerborg]

You can just fork off.

MOD PARENT DOWN.

[hkmwbz]

He is seriously confused. Does he really think that someone working on, say, user interface features, will suddenly jump over to working on the actual core and standards support? Of course not. Different developers generally have different tasks.

ACID2 Compliance?

[GeneOff]

Does anyone know if FF2 comes any closer to ACID2 compatibility? How does it compare to IE7?

Thanks

new mice == shit

[Ender Ryan]

How recently have you purchased a new mouse, or a new computer for that matter. It is fucking HARD to middle click. Being a saavy user myself, I configure a different button than the wheel button to be middle click. On on machine, it's just an extra, assignable button on the mouse. On my laptop, I have a mouse that has a wheel that scrolls up and down, clicks straight down, or left / right. Clicking it straight down is nearly impossible. So I assigned the left tilt of the wheel to be middle click.

*sigh*

My mouse selection is also limited by a requirement for wireless. *sigh*x2

Speaking of mediocrity

[ttfkam]

What best-of-breed applications have YOU made, Mr. The New Stan Price? What's that?

I thought so.

People can complain even though it's free. Example: you.

The coders do worry about losing money since the Mozilla Foundation does in fact make money.

Firefox is one of the best browsers available.

I'm sorry, did you have a point worth reading?

Re:Speaking of mediocrity

[ameline]

>Firefox is one of the best browsers available.

That's very true -- and people wouldn't complain about it if they didn't care. And they wouldn't care if is was no good at all. But it does have problems. And some of those problems just do not belong in a "best-of-breed" application as you put it, regardless of its complexity or size -- like leaking a gigabyte of memory, for example... :-)

Take a look at Jeteye

[jkelly23]

(Full disclosure: I'm a developer at Jeteye)

If you're looking for another way to manage links, images and notes across multiple machines, check out http://jeteye.com/. We have a Firefox extension that lets you drag and drop all sorts of web content into packages.

We just released a new version, so, yah, check it out and let us know what you think.

http://www.jeteye.com/getjeteye/download/

-James


p.s. We should have a developer API based on Atom Pub rolling out in the next few weeks...stay tuned.

Re:Take a look at Jeteye

[friedmud]

Thanks for the heads up... I'll check it out!

Friedmud

Re:AMEN, brother. Testify!

[Ash-Fox]

Linux is slower than windows 98 with anti-virus software (which is silly not to have under windows)?

Re:fork a new branch

[Crypto Gnome]

It's not as if forking magically gets stuff done...

All things being equal, statistically speaking if you do enough forking you're likely to get pregnant. So if that was a goal then you've gotten something done.

And if it's done right, forking can be pretty magic.

Lightweight???

[Deinesh]

From TFA:
Although the bookmark and history system will not be included in the next major update, the underlying SQLite-based MozStorage engine, which was built for the new bookmark and history system, will be included for use by plug-in developers.

Didn't firefox get popular because people wanted a lightweight browser (which mozilla wasn't)? Now they are bundling a db with the product???

I liked firefox beacuse it was a lightweight browser with good support for plugins. I was looking forward to see it run on $100 devices, celphones and so on... Looks like it will not happen because of all the bloat that firefox was supposed to stay away from.