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.

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 ;-)

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: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.

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[Xelrach]

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

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: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: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.

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?

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: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.