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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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: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.

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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: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.

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!

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?

[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?

[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 =)

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.

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

[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

[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: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

[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

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

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).

Welcome to Software Engineering

[DigitlDud]

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

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

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.

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\
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$00e$00a$00t$00u$00r$00e$00 $00C$00u$00t$00 $00F$00r$00o$00m$00 $00F$00i$00r$00\
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    =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.

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.

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...

[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.

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.

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.

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

[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: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.

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.

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.

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

If you don't like it

[Rogerborg]

You can just fork off.