Firefox 2.0 To Debut Tuesday

An anonymous reader writes "Firefox 2.0 for Tuesday, says the Seattle PI. They give a quick recap of some of the new features, and discuss the ongoing IE vs. Fox debate." From the article: "Version 2.0 also improves on the tabbed-windows interface that Mozilla innovated and that Microsoft introduced for the first time last week with IE7, its biggest upgrade since 2001. Analysts said IE7 is a significant improvement over its predecessor, but the big question is whether it will stem Firefox's growth at Microsoft's expense. Firefox's share of the browser market has grown to 9.8 percent of the U.S. market this month, from 2.9 percent in October 2004."

Comments

innovation?

[minus_273]

geez, "tabbed-windows interface that Mozilla innovated" that is beginning to sound like microsoft innovation. Long before firefox existed, I was using tabbed windows in opera. Give credit where it is due.

Re:innovation?

[Xymor]

And I've been using since 1997 with IE

Re:innovation?

[dvice_null]

So, to whom should the credit go to?
"Web browsers are notable for implementing this kind of interface (called tabbed browsing). BookLink Technologies pioneered this interface design in its InternetWorks browser in 1994"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabbed_browsing

Re:innovation?

[unixmaster]

It was first introduced in NetCaptor browser, more history here.

Re:innovation?

[Sporkinum]

Opera might be better, and IE might be improved, but as long as Firefox has Adblock and the filtersetG updater, Firefox is the browser for me, my family, and anyone else that wants do do away with annoying (read all) advertising.

Re:innovation?

[BridgeBum]

I remember netcaptor, the tabbed interface was what drew me to it. I used it for a while until it became fairly standard (everything except IE). Real innovation, for sure.

Re:innovation?

[Blakey Rat]

BeOS had tabbed-windows system-wide since it was released. What year was that? It also had to be around 1994 or so...

Re:innovation?

[slashkitty]

"Version 2.0 also improves on the tabbed-windows interface that Mozilla innovated" That is seriously debatable. I will NOT upgrade to version 2.0 till they offer the old version again. It's seriously harder to use for power users.

Re:innovation?

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

Is taking tabs and applying them to web browsing all that innovative anyway? Surely the first program to interface a tabbed interface or equivalent (ie. switchbar), whatever it's purpose, is the true innovator and the first web browser to make use of them was simply "a good idea".

Tabbed web browsing in itself doesn't seem to be a milestone of great significance. Certainly no more so than tabbed text editing or tabbed image viewing etc.

Re:innovation?

[mnmn]

Doesnt matter where the credit goes, as long as it is 'not Microsoft'.

As far as browsers are concerned, I agree with you, Opera was the first one IIRC.

Re:innovation?

[Simon Garlick]

www.netcaptor.com

NetCaptor has had tabbed browsing far long than Mozilla.

Re:innovation?

[AcidArrow]

Are there better browsers out there? Again, without question.

May I ask what are those other browsers you're talking about? I am aware of 4 major browsers other than Firefox. Let's have a look at them and how they compare with firefox.

IE7 - It finally got tabs and a search box but still has crappy html and css standards support. Actually it's a little worse than MyIE for IE6. I'll pass.
Safari - Has a lot the basic features of a good browser and is very simple. Respects HTML and CSS standards. Has crappy PNG support (gamma correction) and for some reason scrolls slowly even on fast machines. It's a fine browser but I prefer Camino.
Konqueror - Although I have limited experience with this one, it looks like a good browser/file manager, but I am un-aware of any features (appart from passing that ACID2 test) that make it better than Firefox.
Opera - The only browser that is at least feature-wise better than firefox. But for some people Open Source actually matters. Though even with that into the equation, I can't really say which one is the better browser.

So, while you can argue and I might accept that opera is better than firefox, what are the other browsers that I've been missing that are better than the "overrated" firefox? Oh, and preferably opensource.

Re:innovation?

[cheater512]

Better browsers is dependant on the person.

Firefox is the best for most people. Opera isnt for everyone.
Personally I use Seamonkey and cringe a little when I use Firefox (I flinch whenever I see IE).

Re:innovation?

[jZnat]

Konqueror comes with AdBlock built-in, so that's an instant win in my book. It's fast, integrates with my desktop (unlike Firefox), and even has a few extensions of its own.

Re:innovation?

[skoval]

I often get into flap when I found no FF at the PC when browser is needed.
Even if I only need to view a simple local html file. And no internet connection available.

Re:innovation?

[cortana]

The reason to use Konqeror is because it integrated with the rest of the KDE desktop. That is why I use Epiphany on my GNOME system.

Re:innovation?

[Ucklak]

Why use adblock?

I've use it but it's a memory hog and slows the browser down.

I can understand for mobile users in mixed environments but if you're a stationary user, use your router to block ads.
One place to ban domains and every user attached is affected.

Re:innovation?

[elcid73]

Opera can block ads just fine. May not have all the bells & whistles, but I get along just fine with the content blocker that's built in.

Re:innovation?

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

You beat me to it. Seriously though, firefox is highly overrated. Is it better than IE6? Without question. Are there better browsers out there? Again, without question.

But in terms of compatibility with the vast majority of websites, Firefox is far ahead of every other competitor.

I'm a power user. I routinely switch between Camino, Safari, Firefox, and IE under CrossOver as I'm browsing different sites and designing web pages. But for my friends who aren't power users and want something that "just works", I always recommend Firefox. It's safer than IE and has a few nice features that they'll appreciate, but is still simple and most importantly, is going to work on 99% of the sites they visit. Safari, Opera, Konqueror, and others all have compatibility problems.

Re:innovation?

[edmicman]

How do you use your router to block ads? Does it actually supress/remove ads, objects, iframes, etc. from the webpage, or does it just block the item from loading, giving you a red X or whatever on the webpage? Is it easily updateable? Can you right click on something that got through and have it added to the list? I have a WRT54G if that helps...

Re:innovation?

[elcid73]

Why is firefox best for most people? Most people don't want to manage extensions or go in search of them. Most people just want a browser that is secure and a nice balance of features and performance right out of the box. Firefox is best for most people who are tuners or nit-picky about what goes into their browser.

Re:innovation?

[elcid73]

I believe netcaptor lays claim to "tabbed browsing" as FF uses it. Opera has always had a nice MDI implementation that I believe was adopted more in line with what we now call tabbed browsing.

Open Opera up and "restore" so it's floating in the window. You'll see the tab on the tab bar that isn't attached to the window anymore. This illustrates the two concepts the best. FF (if I recall) will not let you manipulate the size of tab in true MDI fashion like Opera will.

Re:innovation?

[c_forq]

What do you find harder about it? I've only been using for a few days now (since I updated to Ubuntu to Edgy) but to me it seems pretty much the same, just now the close tab button is on each tab (but I never used that anyways, I always middle clicked to close tabs or use Ctrl-W) and I find the little button on the side is EXTREMELY useful for when there are 8 or more tabs open at once (especially for when doing research papers, being able to quickly select the article I want instead of jumping through tabs is great).

Re:innovation?

[truedfx]

Konqueror - Although I have limited experience with this one, it looks like a good browser/file manager, but I am un-aware of any features (appart from passing that ACID2 test) that make it better than Firefox.

There are two things about it I really miss in Firefox. Firstly, when the location bar is selected, and you press Tab to go select links with the keyboard, the first selected link is that at the top of the window, not that at the top of the page. Secondly, press the Control key and each link temporarily gets a key assigned to it (unless there are more links than keys). As someone who tries to avoid the mouse, simple things like that mean a lot. (I mainly use Firefox because of certain extensions now, though.)

Re:innovation?

[cheater512]

Firefox has a good blend of features out of the box. Just because its customisable doesnt mean you have to customise it.

Re:innovation?

[Tim C]

I've use it but it's a memory hog and slows the browser down. ...use your router to block ads.

My desktop PC is just a touch more powerful than my router, even ignoring all the other reasons I'd want to block ads from within the browser.

Re:innovation?

[elcid73]

But why does that make it better then?

But your statement does remind me of the good 'ol days of slashdot. Back in Aught-three when I started using Opera (thanks to a Slashdot article) I heard nothing but comments about Opera being bloatware and a "kitchen-sink" application. Firefox was the lean browser. It's a browser first, and you extend it. Democracy! But people are realizing now that more and more features are seeping into each iteration of firefox...and extensions are often the bloated, poorly coded memory hogs.

Well, I still like the idea of Firefox... customize what you'd like. But it's gotten to the point now that most of the stuff that I would have extended the older firefox versions with are now baked into the initial install.

Re:innovation?

[Overly Critical Guy]

How about Opera? From the very article everyone keeps linking to:

"Independently, the founders of Opera built an MDI-based browser in the same year (via a technical preview not available publicly; a public release was made in 1996). The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the Internet Explorer shell NetCaptor in 1997."

Don't forget mouse gestures and pop-up blocking, other Opera features "adopted" by Mozilla.

Re:innovation?

[Overly Critical Guy]

From your article:

"The first real tabbed browser with any significant presence on the web was Netcaptor, created by the very talented Adam Stiles way back in 1997."

Yet Opera was already using MDI for pages back in a 1994 technical preview and was official in 1996's Opera 2.0.

Re:innovation?

[Plutonite]

You were using the IE engine inside a 3rd party browser, not the IE browser provided by Microsoft. I also made my tabbed IE-based browser years ago, and thousands of apps use the IE active-X object to display HTML.

In other words, point doesn't apply here.

Re:innovation?

[Anonymous Coward]

hosts file can only block whole domains, and does not collapse the html to hide where the ad was. no dice

Re:innovation?

[Arker]

Sadly, Opera won't either, unless you're on Win32. Which is why I use firefox now, as I no longer use Windows on any machine. Back in the days when I still used Windows, however, I considered Opera the best browser. Particularly version 3.62 IIRC, which could be fit entirely on a floppy disk.

Re:innovation?

[gerrysteele]

http://www.privoxy.org/ is the best way. I use it on my router.

Re:innovation?

[gerrysteele]

Should have mentioned my router is debian sarge... opps.

Re:innovation?

[doctor_no]

Yes, but the article says it wasn't released publicaly until 1996, it would be assumed that BookLink Technologies had the technology and working on it well before it was released in 1994.

Re:innovation?

[emjoi_gently]

Ya know, though Tabs are nice and all, they aren't the most amazing innovative piece of programming Ever. I could imagine they were implemented in a day, and then cleaned up and debugged over a week.

Tabs have become this big Firefox Cliche.

Re:innovation?

[CastrTroy]

The only thing that makes me like Firefox more than Opera is the idea of Extensions. The fact that the browser can be enhanced by the users creates a big advantage in my mind. I wouldn't want all those features built into the browser, because it would be huge and bloated, and there's a lot of extensions that without them my life would be a lot harder. The web developer extension makes my life so much easier, but i'm sure that 99% of internet users in the world would have absolutely no use for.

Re:innovation?

[mdew]

Sure Opera can block ads, check my list :)

Re:innovation?

[Fred_A]

Blocking at the proxy only makes sense when you want to attempt to protect a network of users. To protect your browsing session, it's much simpler and much more comfortable to use adblock. Clicking on something and clicking "block this" certainly is much more straightforward than poking around the page source and then adding a rule somewhere.

Unless they've added something to routers recently that I'm not aware of...

Re:innovation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Safari has one feature that I can't do without, and firefox lacks: autocomplete based on bookmarks/favourites.

Firefox only autocompletes on pages in history, which is not good enough. I love the ability to type a few letters of any of my bookmarked sites, and having it autocomplete for me.

Re:innovation?

[FLEB]

If it's the close buttons on every tab, set browser.tabs.closeButton to 3 in about:config.

Re:innovation?

[robzon]

The fact that you don't use it doesn't make it unimportant. I can do very fast switching between tabs with alt+number which is VERY convenient and much MUCH faster than flipping thru windows with alt+tab. Tabbed browsing is what I miss the most when I have to use a Windows box (unless there's firefox installed :)).

Re:innovation?

[VertigoAce]

In case anyone wants to do the same on IE 7, the shortcuts are:

Switch between tabs
  CTRL+TAB or CTRL+SHIFT+TAB

Switch to a specific tab number
  CTRL+n (where n is a number between 1 and 8)

Switch to the last tab
  CTRL+9

Re:innovation?

[Bitsy Boffin]

Sadly, Opera won't either, unless you're on Win32.

Bollocks. I'm in opera now on a Linux box, and I just changed a "tab" into an MDI window. Right-click on the tab, select Restore.

Re:innovation?

[Icyfire0573]

The absolute best feature that Konqueror has that beats all others hands down is the autoscroll. Hold shift hit Arrow-Down. And the screen starts to slide. I use this all the time and no other browser has it. (Or maybe they do and I don't know the shortcut.) Either way, go Konqueror!

Re:innovation?

[AmberBlackCat]

But in terms of compatibility with the vast majority of websites, Firefox is far ahead of every other competitor.

Every competitor except IE, Mr. +5 Informative.

Re:innovation?

[Ucklak]

Netgear WGR614, most I have configured have this feature as well which is:

Block Sites

That way I don't worry about doubleclick or that annoying intellitxt for anyone in my house.

For the javascript related ads, you don't see anything.
For the iframe ads, you'll see a black background where the ad should be.

I prefer it to the floating adblock notification for every ad.

I'm a fan of adblock, I just believe the router is more efficient.

Re:innovation?

[Bronster]

'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'

Your signature is just so... um... I won't use that I word that Alanis poisoned. No, no, I won't.

Re:innovation?

[ffejie]

I could use my router, but then every time I VPN'd in, I would get ads. So, no thanks. Adblock is much better for me. I get to have easier control, and the ads are ALWAYS blocked.

Re:innovation?

[GarfBond]

The old Opera (pre 7.0 I think? or maybe 6.0) didn't let you have both an MDI and SDI at once. You had multiple windows inside one Opera window that were not stylized to look like tabs. At some point (maybe Opera 6) you could choose between that or having more than one Opera window open (e.g. they'd show up in the Windows taskbar) but you still couldn't mix and match. Finally in like Opera 7 or so you could actually do both. That was the new thing that Mozilla brought in: Mozilla started out as doing multiple windows only but then let you add tabs inside each of those windows.

Granted, the concept itself within browsers probably belongs to Opera, but Mozilla did not rip off Opera exactly. The word innovation might be too strong, suggesting it was entirely new, but that's a word choice issue.

Re:innovation?

[Sporkinum]

Yes, I know that Opera has an ad blocker, and it works really well. FiltersetG allows my blocking to be updated automagically though. Not a big deal for me, but a huge deal for the non techy types I set up with Firefox.

Thanks for the filter set for Opera though, I installed it, and will try it out.

Re:innovation?

[X0563511]

I prefer it to the floating adblock notification for every ad.
Well, if it bothers you, turn it off. Sure, routers are more efficient, but an even smaller percentage of people have that kind of 'router' than the percentage of firefox users.

Re:innovation?

[Ucklak]

Haven't you noticed that if you have 50+ ads blocked that the browser is sluggish? Doesn't that performance bother you?

It's also a pain in the ass to block the same ad twice or more for multiple computers on the same network.

I reckon that most ./ers have some type of broadband connection and would use some type of router device, more specifically if they're wireless.
I haven't found a router that doesn't have service/site blocking.
Every single consumer router I've configured have some type or port forwarding and right next to those services are site blocking services.

Re:innovation?

[SydShamino]

It is certainly better in Kubutu now than it was in my last server OS (Xandros 2.0), but it's still barely passable. 90% of pages crashed until I disabled Java - I would crash 100% of the time when trying to click any link on CNN.com's homepage, for example. Surely there's something in Firefox's code that could be borrowed by the Konquerer team to fix that.

The tabbed browsing and integrated AdBlock are nice, yes, and I haven't bothered to install Firefox on that machine. But even when everything works, pages load way way too slowly; it needs an engine to start rendering pages sooner, before everything has loaded. (Or, if it has one, it needs to work better.)

Re:innovation?

[mr_matticus]

Blah blah blah people. Innovate != invent. Mozilla isn't taking credit for creating tabbed browsing (TFA is NOT A MOZILLA DOCUMENT/PAGE/QUOTE), and a better word for the quoted sentence would be "popularized." For people with notoriously bad spelling and grammar (does ANYONE know how to use 'its' and 'it's' properly on /.?), it seems odd that there would be such a fuss over a single word.

Re:innovation?

[BarkLouder]

I've had tabbed browsing in my file cabinet for 50 years!!!!

Re:innovation?

[bursch-X]

Extensions are the sole reason Firefox is still on my HD, for speed and looks Camino on OS X has a slight edge on Firefox while still using the same rendering eninge. I'm using OmniWeb 5.5 as my main browser though.

Re:innovation?

[shakey_deal]

Install Quicksilver for OSX and you can get this for any browser. Everything will sort of auto complete like opening programs, just type in the first few chars, find email, contacts etc. like spotlight on crack.

Re:innovation?

[amRadioHed]

Opera has always had a nice MDI implementation...

Nice MDI implementation? Is that something like a friendly kick to the nuts?

Re:innovation?

[lymond01]

Whenever I think I want to try Opera, I download it. And it always seems that it displays certain sites differently than IE and Firefox. I haven't tried it in years, I wonder if it's any better.

Re:innovation?

[Zantetsuken]

If I remember right, adblock has a "subscribe to blocked items" feature where it lets you select which public lists to use for blocking the majority of junk - so even though I'm positive it would be more of a pain than its worth (unless you run a big network maybe?) could you not make your own list and give adblock a url for the list on a LAN server?

Re:innovation?

[TheoMurpse]

Is taking tabs and applying them to web browsing all that innovative anyway?

Yes, it is an innovation because it was applied to web browsers before there was an obvious need for them. Recall that in 1997, most people were on dialup, and visited a handful of webpages, one at a time, because it too so long for them to load. Thus, at that point in time, there was practically no need for a tabbed interface.

Now, if the tabbed interface had been applied to browsers for the first time last week, well, then it wouldn't be innovation. But, in 1997 (or 1994), applying tabs to browsers was a huge interface, and showed great foresight that one day people would be reading multiple webpages pretty much simultaneously, by tabbing between them.

Re:innovation?

[Achromatic1978]

with any significant presence on the web

back in a 1994 technical preview

As has been pointed out, Opera's technical preview was not available to the general public.

For comparison, if OS X has a feature in 10.4 (a strictly hypothetical feature, sure), but Bill got up on stage in 2003 and demoed it for Longhorn, who is first to market with it?

Re:innovation?

[Siberwulf]

But in terms of compatibility with the vast majority of websites, Firefox is far ahead of every other competitor.

You're a whole new brand of naive if you think that FF is more compatible out there than IE. While IE may not be compatible with the hardcore standards, it is more compatible with websites, since those websites know the market share, and specifically cater to IE.

Re:innovation?

[Noonian Soong]

What do you mean by "it works better"? The browser itself or tabbed browsing?
If you are referring to the different behavior in tabbed browsing, there is a change in Firefox 2 that I really like. While Firefox used to go back to the tab left to the tab you just closed, Opera switches to the tab that you have used before. In Firefox 2 (at least that is the behavior I noticed in the betas), Firefox decides which tab it should switch to depending on when and which tab you close. I can't tell the exact rules for that right now, but it is a nice combination of the old Firefox and the Opera tab behavior.

Re:innovation?

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

Sorry, I wasn't clear. IE is compatible with the most sites. Out of all of IE's competitors, Firefox is far more compatible than all of the others. The more popular Firefox gets, the more this will be true.

Re:innovation?

[dmach27]

My wife uses the Web Developer Toolbar's "Disable ALL Styles" feature when going through myspace.com If anything, the common user could probably benefit from hidding all the horrible styles on a typical myspace page.

Re:innovation?

[aussie_a]

Opera might be better

It isn't. I used it for a few months and I found there were no functional improvements, and it was quite a bit slower. So I've come back to Firefox.

Re:innovation?

[poolmeister]

Opera has used tabs for a long time yes, but the Mozilla browser had tabs first. After all Firefox is just the 'slimmed-down' version of the Mozilla browser.

Re:innovation?

[aussie_a]

You're a whole new brand of naive if you think that FF is more compatible out there than IE.

It's more compatible for the websites I visit. Fortunately important websites like my banking website is compatible with Firefox.

Re:innovation?

[xtracto]

I recently switched to Konqueror and to my surprise it is really easy to import the adblock list (I download it from some site) in the konqueror preferences window as there is a specific "AdBlock filter" section. That made the change for me. I feel conqueror is more responsive and compatible with more sites. At least, my bank accepts konqueror while not accepting firefox. And I always had the memory problem with firefox too. I know not all people have it or care about it but I did have it, even after testing with different configs/extensions.

Re:innovation?

[rHBa]

Hmm...

That's the same shortcuts as FF1.5

Re:innovation?

[xtracto]

But in terms of compatibility with the vast majority of websites, Firefox is far ahead of every other competitor.

I'm a power user. I routinely switch between Camino, Safari, Firefox, and IE under CrossOver as I'm browsing different sites and designing web pages

Mmm I dont know, but you could swtich to Konqueror for once and ditch all other browsers. It is one of the most (if not the most) compatible browsers I have seen and it has adblock integrated. It allows you to enter sites that are not compatible with Firefox (for example many banking sites).

I have been using it for some months and I have never had the neccessity to turn back. The only thing I miss from firefox is the find-while-typing.

Oh, and in Konqueror you've got spell cheking (previous word is in RED) embedded. =o)

Re:innovation?

[rHBa]

I absolutely agree. It's got to the point now where I forget I have it installed until I see my favourite sites on someone elses machine and am amazed how ugly and cluttered they look to everyone else.

It's worth noting that Filterset.G makes all the difference to Adblock Plus.

Re:innovation?

[ultranova]

Now, if the tabbed interface had been applied to browsers for the first time last week, well, then it wouldn't be innovation. But, in 1997 (or 1994), applying tabs to browsers was a huge interface, and showed great foresight that one day people would be reading multiple webpages pretty much simultaneously, by tabbing between them.

Now lets wait and see who will innovate the obvious next step: multi-level tabs. That is, tabs arranged in a hieararchy, so that selecting one top-level tab can show a new row of tabs beneath the top-level one (different row for each of the top tabs), each of whos tabs can have a subrow of its own, and so on. I typically have 100+ web pages open at once, and would really appreciate the ability to keep them all in a single window, instead of having to continuously expand the number of my virtual desktops (up to 12, currently).

I tried to create an extension to do something like this a while ago, and got it to displaying the subtab row by abusing XUL, but the thing crashed with SEGFAULT when I tried to close the tab containing the row. I guess they should have used language with managed memory, like Java ;(. Which, of course, would be a good idea for a program processing extremely untrustworthy information anyway...

Re:innovation?

[hkmwbz]

Opera can be extended in many ways:

http://virtuelvis.com/archives/2005/01/opera-and-f irefox-extensions

http://virtuelvis.com/archives/2005/09/opera-and-f irefox-extensions-ii

Re:innovation?

[welcher]

PLease tell us why you'd want to have that many web pages open. It seems an awful lot.

Re:innovation?

[erroneous]

Int(Rnd*UBound(tabs))

Re:innovation?

[ronanbear]

Actually I found tabbed browsing very useful on dial up all those years ago using early versions of Opera.

Since there's a slow connection you could end up waiting a few minutes for a page to load. My connection was the limiting factor not the amount of RAM I had. I could be reading one page of while I was waiting for whatever else I wanted to read was downloading. Keep a few tabs open and as soon as you had everything to keep you going for a while go offline and read at your leisure.

Back then I thought tabbed browsing a pretty great innovation.

Re:innovation?

[Curtman]

Not a big deal for me, but a huge deal for the non techy types I set up with Firefox.

Speaking of non techy types.. I wonder how much Shaw was paid to send this spam. Or if we'll be seeing the Firefox version of that on Tuesday.

Re:innovation?

[elcid73]

I suppose. I use it exclusively for tiling my tabs in a poor man's "exposé" way.

There are a few other uses. To each his own.

Re:innovation?

[Shawn is an Asshole]

Not to mention Galeon also had it before Mozilla. Back before Pheonix* even existed. The implementation in Firefox is very close to what was in Galeon.

* For those who don't know, this was an early name for Firefox.

Re:innovation?

[Tom]

So if I have 12 tabs open, then Ctrl+8 will bring me to the 8th tab, but Ctrl+9 will bring me to the 12th?

This is a serious question. I can't believe even the MS UI-designers can be this stupid.

Re:innovation?

[CastrTroy]

The alternative that they point out to web developer is devoid of any features. You can edit the page in cache, and then tell it to reload from cache, oh, and you can do some validation. Do they even give you an easy way of opening the file in cache? or do you have to go seek it out yourself? Can you view all the form information by with 2 clicks? Can you edit the css and see the changes in real time without reloading the document from cache? Can I click on any part of the page and have it immediatly show me which styles are being applied to it, and which files those styles are coming from? Can I view all the comments in a page with 2 clicks? Can I easily outline all table cells, rows, divs, spans, or any other html element? The's a lot more to web developer than what they give you in opera.

Re:innovation?

[Monoman]

Not really tabs as we are seeing in browsers today.

It was the title bar being smaller than the width of the window and movable. This way you could stack multiple windows and adjust the title bars to give the appearance of a tabbed window.

Re:innovation?

[neersign]

For me, women create pop-ups. Some times it can be quite embarrassing, but most of the time we both enjoy those pop-ups.

Re:innovation?

[Nimey]

Yep, 3.62 was the last version of real Opera. 4.0 added bloat: mail client and Flash player.

Re:innovation?

[Digitalwingx]

Actually, it's more like the majority of the websites are developed to accommodate IE, not because IE has better compatibility.

Re:innovation?

[Petersko]

"So if I have 12 tabs open, then Ctrl+8 will bring me to the 8th tab, but Ctrl+9 will bring me to the 12th? This is a serious question. I can't believe even the MS UI-designers can be this stupid."

Somebody would use this particular design decision - one that really isn't a bad one at all - as the metric used in determining the intelligence of MS UI-designers?

Nobody would be that stupid.

Re:innovation?

[ultranova]

PLease tell us why you'd want to have that many web pages open. It seems an awful lot.

Well, my usual tactic of reading Slashdot is to open each article to its own page, and then jump from article to article, skimming the comments and opening the most interesting ones (and ones I want to answer to) in new tabs, to be returned to later with more time and detail. This makes 100+ web pages from Slashdot alone.

Apart from this, I frequent Elfwood, which is an amateur fantasy art gallery. Browsing the pics there, if I see anything I like, I often open the authors gallery in a new window, allowing me to open any interesting pics from him in new tabs. Another 100+ web pages open.

Finally, I sometimes program with Java. Java's documentation is in HTML form, with a separate page for each class, so I'll easily get another 100+ pages open simultaneously there. And of course any other computer-related task is made easier when you can open the same document in multiple tabs and use them to display different parts.

Add to these Software Suspend, which allows me to shut down my computer for the night and continue at the morning from there I left on, with all the programs going as I left them, and 100+ pages aggregate fast. It's not that I neccessarily want to read a 100+ pages, but that the information I want or need is spread between 100+ pages, or in a 100+ locations in the same page.

HTML is the preferred way of presenting information nowadays. And Firefox is woefully incapable of handling massive numbers of open documents in a scalable way; it works technically, but it's a pain switching windows constantly.

Re:innovation?

[mabowman]

here is a link to the new version:
http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-1.5.0 .7&os=win&lang=en-US
and now we can all argue about what's actually in the application.

(if anyone cares, this post has been spell checked by the 2.0 official release)

Re:innovation?

[cmorgan47]

Oh, and in Konqueror you've got spell cheking (previous word is in RED) embedded. =o)

firefox too now. "firefox" is underlined with a dotted line....you'd think they'd include that in their dictionary

Re:innovation?

[mabowman]

damnit, I forgot to edit the link; http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-2.0&o s=win&lang=en-US

Re:innovation?

[Ant P.]

Konqueror has Adblock built-in, and its HTML/CSS support is the best I've ever seen (xhtml still sucks though). I'd probably use it if not for Firefox's user CSS stuff (-moz-document at-rule).

Re:innovation?

[burndive]

Concrete proof that spell check is a poor replacement for the brain.

Re:innovation?

[burndive]

Personally I avoid myspace like the plague, but for particularly gaudy blogs, I use a handy little extension called Stylish, that gives you much finer-grained control over style: you can disable everything, or just what you want, and it can be controlled per domain, per page, per whatever, so you don't have to switch back and forth.

Re:innovation?

[burndive]

...and then there's the LastTab extension, which does exactly what I expect it to do. It even controlls Ctrl+Tab/Ctrl+Shift+Tab.

Re:innovation?

[Nasarius]

Yeah, really...host files? At least use Privoxy.

Re:innovation?

[burndive]

It's called a taskbar, and this effect can be achieved by opening multiple instances of a tabbed browser.

If you really want this feature within the same window, you should write an extension for it, and then see how many other people like it as much as yourself.

Re:innovation?

[Tom]

Good design is in the details, so instances of bad design are actually a good metric of the overal effort. In UI design, it's easy to get the big things right. It's the small things that seperate the pros from the amateurs and imitateurs.

And the decision is exceptionally bad, it breaks both consistency and intuition. Why the 8 limit? How do you explain your mom that Ctrl+9 works different from Ctrl+1-8 ? Ctrl+0 might have been borderline, using a not-number is what a good designer would've done.

Re:innovation?

[sudog]

Yea it is. On all machines I use Opera on, it's faster, it gives me more control over the browsing experience, and the only thing it's missing is the integrated dev tools you can get with the plugins.

It was the primary innovator of the ad-killers way back when it initially allowed single-key image toggling and a quick-menu to turn off javascript/java/gif(and svg) animations, and so on.

Re:innovation?

[Koriani]

You can do that in any program with a slider if you have windows and a mouse with a clickable scrollwheel.

Click the scroll wheel and position your cursor a set place down below the circle thing that comes up, and slide away.

Re:innovation?

[Arker]

If it works on linux now I'll stand corrected, been awhile since I tried it there. It definitely doesn't work on Mac, The commands are there, but they don't do anything.

Re:innovation?

[olman]

De facto compatibility then?

Re:innovation?

[Digitalwingx]

To some extent, IE represents the de facto standard indeed. But IE has a lot bugs rendering HTML/CSS, and it lacks some nice features that other browsers support (e.g. stylesheet for , or input:focus which are all very nice to have). I do miss the old days when IE dominated the almost entire market - those were much easier days for web developers.

Re:innovation?

[ultranova]

It's called a taskbar, and this effect can be achieved by opening multiple instances of a tabbed browser.

Taskbar doesn't scale for lots of windows, especially when I have other programs open too. Besides, the taskbar is a flat list, and I'm thinking of hieararchical arrangement.

If you really want this feature within the same window, you should write an extension for it, and then see how many other people like it as much as yourself.

Did you perhaps miss the part where I said that I tried, but the browser memory handling is not up to it (it SEGFAULTs) ?

Tuesday?

[dvice_null]

Tuesday? The day when security patches for IE are released?

Re:Tuesday?

[The MAZZTer]

Maybe they're saying Firefox is the ultimate security patch for IE? :^)

Re:Tuesday?

[electrosoccertux]

Firefox _is_ the security patch for IE.

Re:Tuesday?

[Dracos]

Why not? People used to say that Service Pack 6 for NT4 was RedHat.

Re:Tuesday?

[wertarbyte]

Indeed. Internet Explorer is a fine browser, I use it all the time on a new windows installation - to download Firefox.

Re:Tuesday?

[Eideewt]

Way to paraphrase, buddy!

Re:Tuesday?

[antdude]

I doubt any updates are coming out on the fourth Tuesday of the month. I don't recall seeing any MS Bulletins about upcoming update releases either.

Re:Tuesday?

[CastrTroy]

Myself, I can't even bring myself to start IE, so I download my copy of firefox with the command line ftp client for windows.

Re:Tuesday?

[funfail]

There was already a (real!) SP6 for NT4.

Re:Tuesday?

[guruevi]

I can't even bring myself to install Windows let alone use IE or the Windows FTP tool.

Re:YAY!

[ShieldW0lf]

Anyone know if there any significant changes that web developers will have to account for/be able to take advantage of?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Lies

[ricree]

It depends on whether this was due to misstatements by mozilla people, or if it was just a stupid writer. Never underestimate how ignorant journalists can be.

Minimum tab size

[42forty-two42]

One of the annoying things about the new firefox interface is you can't have as many tabs in the bar at once anymore. Sure, it has a scrolling interface, but I liked the sort of spatial representation of the old system. Is there a way to change the minimum size of the tab headers in the new firefox?

Re:Minimum tab size

[AuMatar]

THis is one of the many reasons I stuck with Mozilla suite and Seamonkey, rather than firefox. The UI is just so much better.

Re:Minimum tab size

[christopherfinke]

s there a way to change the minimum size of the tab headers in the new firefox?

Set browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to 0 (or whatever you want) in about:config.

Re:Minimum tab size

[dvice_null]

Yes there is. You can remove the close buttons from the tabs (make it look like it was in 1.5) and also tell the min width for the tabs:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.tabs.closeButton s
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.tabs.tabMinWidth

Re:Minimum tab size

[atsabig10fo]

yeah i don't like all the close buttons in each tab, it makes it too cluttered and slow to navigate.

Re:Minimum tab size

[cyclocommuter]

I'm pretty sure the version of Tab Mix Plus or some other tab related extension which will be ported to run on Firefox 2.0 will have this feature. This is the beauty of Firefox... its extensibility using extensions. Sure Opera might be smaller/faster and IE might look shinier but the community that writes extensions for Firefox is what makes it the best IMHO.

Re:Minimum tab size

[pepsi_max2k]

check about:config, there's a setting in there where you can change the min. size of a tab. i forget what it is and where i found it, but it's there.

Re:Minimum tab size

[TheSeer2]

Opera has the same things. Except they're called Widgets.

Of course Firefox has the XUL bonus.

Re:Minimum tab size

[lordofthechia]

Plus you can just set your middle mouse button to close a tab.

Re:Minimum tab size

[oddfox]

Thanks for the edumacation! Nice trick I was too lazy to look up myself.

Re:Minimum tab size

[Tacvek]

Very true. However if I use Browser.tabs.closeButtons=3 then there is a problem with the drop-down list menu that is intended to be at the far right. If i use closeButtons=3, then the close button is further right than that menu, which then (in the defaulkt skin anyway) looks incorrect.

Do you know of any solution for that?

Re:Minimum tab size

[WalksOnDirt]

I tried that. I'm so used to using middle click to open links in new tabs that I frequently ended up closing the tab I was trying to select, so I turned it off.

Re:Minimum tab size

[seguso]

If you install the Tab Mix Plus extension you can do that and more. For example you can have the tab-bar take two or more rows when a lot of tabs are open.

Note the extension works for firefox 2, though you have to download it here. The version in the official addons page only supports firefox up to 1.6.

MDI

[jonasj]

Not that it matters who came first, but Mozilla did actually have tabs earlier than Opera. What you were using in Opera back then was actually MDI, not tabs.

But of course other browsers had tabs far earlier than any of these two.

Re:MDI

[Esine]

Opera still doesn't have tabs. It has an MDI interface and it calls the subwindows "pages", not tabs.
Newer versions of Opera also have a restricted MDI mode that's similar to Mozilla tabs.

  -- dbg

Re:MDI

[diorcc]

So by renaming it due to the technique used, does it mean Opera did not have/does not have tabbed windows? NO. It has tabbed windows, and they work really fast due to the method they use.

Re:MDI

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla also stole pop-up blocking and mouse gestures from Opera.

No it did not. Those existed in other browsers before Opera... primarily in IE HTML control derived Windows browsers. But hey... as usual, the Opera super-fans are out in force to make sure it steals as much credit as possible.

Re:MDI

[Tony Hoyle]

Um no.. they're talking about tabs. MDI != Tabs. Windows 3.1 had MDI but it didn't have tabs.

MDI is very unintuitive on its own - tabs make it much better by putting, well, a tab on the page so you know it's there.
Closest analogy is Windows 95 property sheets I guess, although they weren't the first (just the first that most people will have used).

Re:MDI

[Allador]

Would you care to explain the way you're using the words? Sounds like you're splitting syntactical hairs to me.

A tabbed interface is always MDI, but many MDI interfaces do not use tabs. In other words, a tabbed interface is one concrete implementation choice of an MDI approach.

Re:MDI

[Fweeky]

"MDI is very unintuitive on its own - tabs make it much better by putting, well, a tab on the page so you know it's there."

Tabs being in such a case buttons linking to the child windows. Hmm, I'm pretty sure Win 3.1 supported buttons ;)

Re:MDI

[hkmwbz]

Yes, Opera has "tabs". Whatever it's called it's the exact same concept: Click a button on a toolbar to switch to that page. Just because they didn't look like tabs doesn't mean that they actually worked differently. You clicked a button to switch to another child window. That's what tabs do.

Re:MDI

[hkmwbz]

Which ones? As far as I know, Opera did gestures and popup blocking first.

Re:MDI

[hkmwbz]

Fact 1: Opera had multiple pages within the main window before Mozilla.

Fact 2: Opera had buttons you could press to switch between those before Mozilla

Now, you may claim that Opera's window bar wasn't really a "tabbed interface", but you would be looking like a fool. They looked like buttons, but acted like tabs. You clicked them to switch to that page. That's what tabs do. They are functionally the exact same thing.

Re:MDI

[jonasj]

Now, you may claim that Opera's window bar wasn't really a "tabbed interface", but you would be looking like a fool. They looked like buttons, but acted like tabs. You clicked them to switch to that page. That's what tabs do. They are functionally the exact same thing.

No they aren't. Perhaps they appear the same to the casual tab user, who only uses them as a replacement for having two or three browser windows open at the same time, but for the rest of us they are far from the same thing.

Opera's MDI implementation was equivalent to switching to a blank workspace and opening a bunch of browser windows there -- only with Opera, you had the workspace inside a window instead. It still used z-ordering, that is, when you closed a "tab", focus returned to the last "tab" you had viewed, unlike a real tabbed browsing implementation, where focus goes to the tab next to the one you are closing; and when you cycled through your open "tabs" with the keyboard, they would come up in last-viewed order rather than linear. That is a *major* difference.

Re:MDI

[hkmwbz]

Sorry, but you are wrong wrong wrong. "Tabbed browsing" is when you click a button to switch to a tab. Opera has had this functionality for ages. You are artificially narrowing "tabbed browsing" down into something which has got nothing to do with "tabbed browsing" at all. Tabbed browsing is not about window closing order, but about having buttons that are used to switch between child windows.

Re:MDI

[pafrusurewa]

It still used z-ordering, that is, when you closed a "tab", focus returned to the last "tab" you had viewed, unlike a real tabbed browsing implementation, where focus goes to the tab next to the one you are closing; and when you cycled through your open "tabs" with the keyboard, they would come up in last-viewed order rather than linear. That is a *major* difference.

This is still true for Opera, I think those are even the default settings. You can change it to a (cumbersome) Firefox-like configuration if you so desire, of course
Following your logic Opera still doesn't have tabs.

Re:MDI

[jonasj]

I don't agree with your definition, then (neither does wikipedia, it seems). I don't consider MDI-style child windows to be tabs, as they behave quite differently.

Re:MDI

[hkmwbz]

You must be somewhat thick. The windows themselves aren't tabs. The buttons you click to switch between the child windows are tabs. HTH. HAND.

Re:MDI

[jonasj]

1) You are guilty of argumentum ad hominem.

2) I don't consider the buttons you click to switch between MDI-style child windows to be tabs, either.

3) By your definition, the buttons on a taskbar which you click on to switch between windows are also tabs.

Re:MDI

[hkmwbz]

The buttons you click to switch between MDI windows have the exact same purpose as "tabs". The look is all that's different.

Re:Lies

[Toreo asesino]

There were tab-based browsers before Mozilla or course (Opera for instance), but none where you could open pages in either a new tab or new window.

Re:Lies

[dvice_null]

When has Mozilla claimed that in innovated tabbed-windows interface? You are quoting Seattle Post-Intelligencer, not Mozilla.

Hey Folks

[Nom du Keyboard]

...Firefox's share of the browser market has grown to 9.8 percent of the U.S. market this month, from 2.9 percent in October 2004."

Hey Folks,

They're both free apps under Windows! How does it really hurt MS if FF gets 100% marketshare? In fact, if FF were to take over it might actually benefit MS. How? IE has been their worst blackeye of the past couple of years. More problems with than than everything else. If MS could make all the bad IE press go away, don't you think that would be a positive? I realize this is like suggesting to Apple to let Dell build their hardware, but does that make it a bad idea? As long as FF adheres to Open Standards, everyone can compete with web-sites equally with it.

Re:Hey Folks

[dvice_null]

> How does it really hurt MS if FF gets 100% marketshare?

If all the people use Firefox, there won't be that many IE-only applications. This means it will be a lot easier to switch to other operating systems, which usually means that people stop using Microsoft software. Microsoft's strategy is to force people to stick with their system. Why else do you think they are always making their own version of standards?

Re:Hey Folks

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

IE is a loss leader, just like the Xbox. they make up by selling other stuff, like devopment kits for activeX applets and other stuff.

plus it's an anchor to hold people to their products.

how many people you know have computers only to check e-mail and browse the web ? if all these people switch to firefox, how soon they'll realize they can use FF running in linux, freebsd, mac, etc ?

what MS wants is joe sixpack to think that "internet == internet explorer" so they can keep shoveling windows on the unsuspecting masses

Re:Hey Folks

[Anonymous Coward]

If through shifts in market share every popular Windows app becomes crossplatform, then people will realize that they don't need Windows. That would really hurt MS.

Re:Hey Folks

[Tim C]

This means it will be a lot easier to switch to other operating systems

Only if IE is the most compelling reason to remain on Windows, which I suspect is not the case for most people.

Why else do you think they are always making their own version of standards?

There are plenty of possible reasons:

* It's easier
* It lets you do stuff that you consider useful/necessary/cool but that isn't in the spec
* Not Invented Here syndrome
* As you suggest, lock-in
* They're arrogant enough to think they know best and big enough to get away with it

Re:Hey Folks

[Omeger]

I highly doubt joe sixpack even knows what linux or freebsd is.

Re:Hey Folks

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to feed the troll, but... the fact is that there are far too many IE-only web applications in the business world. It is very hard to crank down the security rules (let alone move to Firefox) due to these poorly implemented web applications (or web interfaces to legacy systems)

In fact, in the browser wars of the 1990s, Microsoft required that certain license terms included the requirement that some critical part of the license holder's web site have IE-specific behavior and/or require IE to operate correctly. (I know, we refused to sign that contract and ended up having to do our own implementation of the wininet.dll - which turned out to be a good thing in the long run but cost us dearly)

(Posting anonymously, for obvious reasons...)

Re:Hey Folks

[boron boy]

Listen up, it works like this. If IE had close to 100% market share (as it did in the past) lazy web developers would only develop sites that ran properly when viewed in IE. Now that it has dropped to around 80%, web developers must make their sites compatible with all browsers.

This means that when I view these sites on my linux machine they actually work! It effectively removes one barrier to switching my OS. Now if only the game companies would release linux versions I could put linux on all my machines.

Re:Hey Folks

[ClamIAm]

Microsoft does not recoup the money they lose on Xbox hardware through other Xbox-related revenue.

Re:Hey Folks

[aug24]

I'm implementing more and more internal business front ends as browsers. Browser+office software is all the apps they use at almost anywhere I work these days, and more and more places are locking out USBs and other funky hardware anyway. There's pretty much no reason left not to switch. I reckon MS is scared shitless of that realisation spreading across the market.

You missed the 'maintain our monopoly' reason out of your list. And if you doubt that, I suggest you look at the early years of Java. I'll grant you the other reasons are possible, but 'maintain our monopoly' is proven in a court of law.

Justin.

Re:Hey Folks

[LordSnooty]

Is it that intangible commodity they used to term "mindshare"?

Re:Hey Folks

[freeweed]

How does it really hurt MS if FF gets 100% marketshare? In fact, if FF were to take over it might actually benefit MS.

Huh? Wha? Ever think of asking Microsoft themselves this question?

You don't seriously think Microsoft really spends millions in development dollars only to HURT themselves, do you?

This is insightful exactly how?

Re:Hey Folks

[Abcd1234]

Only if IE is the most compelling reason to remain on Windows, which I suspect is not the case for most people.

I don't think you get it. More and more apps are moving to the Internet, or at least, so it would appear. Microsoft's fear, then, is the commoditization of the operating system. If a large number of apps become internet enabled, and thus cross-platform, then the actual operating system one uses doesn't really matter, as long as you have a functioning browser. So, to fight this, Microsoft created IE, with all it's non-standard extensions, as a way of locking people in. See, if people create lots of apps that only work in IE, then you still need a Microsoft OS to use them.

Of course, this is all predicated on the idea that web-enabled apps can out-compete native desktop implementations. Now, a few years ago, I would have scoffed at the idea (Java applets showed some promise, but unfortunately the technology never really took off... though that could also be due to Microsoft's machinations, as well). But these days, when you consider email, and now Google's office suite (which, while limited, is probably sufficient for your average joe), the idea may not be so crazy after all.

Re:Hey Folks

[drew]

Close but not quite. It's not the IE-only apps they are most concerned with, it's the Windows only apps. If the vast majority of web browsers followed established web standards properly, it would be far too easy to replace many compiled applications with cross platform web applications. If that happened on a wide scale, then they would really be in trouble.

Re:Hey Folks

[Millennium]

Oh yes, people are sticking with MS today just to use IE. [rolling eyes]. You're somewhere between clueless and moronic.

Actually, you might be surprised. One of the big questions potential switchers to Macs ask is about whether "their websites will keep working." Among the few but very vocal people who switch back to Windows, "website compatibility" is often cited as a major reason for going back.

It is difficult to gather corresponding data on people who switch to Linux and/or back, but there's no reason to believe that the situation isn't similar. When MS controls the browser, they have a very powerful weapon for spreading FUD, and they aren't afraid to use it.

Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[JavaManJim]

Its Sunday after all right now, so why not pray for FireFox? This is FireFox 2.0 Beta running on my Windows XP PC.

1. Starts without maximizing itself to the full PC screen area. Always leaves space available. In contrast SeaMonkey correctly occupies the full PC screen area when starting (but SeaMonkey makes me create a new profile except for once.). FF thinks its full screen according to its maximize/window button but is mistaken.

2. FF fails CSS rendering because it uses an antique CSS engine.
http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/

Those are my FF issues. What are yours?

Thanks,
Jim Burke

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

Not suffered from 1, but then I just bought a HUGE screen, running full screen browsers on it, is fascicle. On point 2, it's not antiquated it's constantly being improved, just the stable releases of the engine are behind the bleeding edge you can get hold of one which can pass Acid2 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/dbaron/126886608/), but the rendering engine might crash on you.

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are my FF issues. What are yours?

Definitely its memory usage.

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

1. Never seen that problem, and have been using the Firefox 2 branch for months. 2. Wait for Firefox 3, when the rendering system will be given a major overhaul.

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[dvice_null]

Reducing memory usage in Firefox:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_-_ Firefox

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[skoval]

It takes a lot of time to build it from scratch.

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[bunratty]

Good news... There are several reports that Firefox 2 uses less memory than IE 7. Only a small percentage of users ever had problems with memory usage to begin with.

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[The-Bus]

My #1 FF issue is memory use. It could be an extension, but I don't think I have any besides IEview. I have three tabs open and Firefox is using 90MB of RAM. It's not uncommon to see it use 200MB or more. That's a bit ridiculous.

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[Ankur Dave]

In Firefox 2.0 on Linux, the Backspace button doesn't take you back a page anymore; instead, it scrolls the page up. The new Back key shortcut is Alt+LeftArrow. This annoys me no end, since I don't like having to use two small keys versus one big one to do a common function.
(There may be a way to re-enable the Backspace key, but Googling hasn't helped me.)

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[Zarel]

Well, #2 isn't going to be fixed until Firefox 3.0, as the developers mentioned a long time ago. And as for #1, I don't remember ever having that problem.

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[AcidArrow]

While passing the ACID2 test is a fine achievement browsers can brag about, does it have any real meaning? After all what it means is that it can render correctly some really convulted CSS that doesn't break any rules. I develop websites from time to time, and I never had any real problems with how firefox currently handles CSS.

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[cortana]

The behaviour of the backspace key can be changed in about:config.

FYI, I think this was done to make Firefox behave more like pagers on the UNIX platform, where Space moves you down a page and Backspace moves you up a page.

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[WWWWolf]

2. FF fails CSS rendering because it uses an antique CSS engine. http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/

Um, acid2 represents one faction's idea on what an ideal, future-proof CSS implementation should do. It's not be-all end-all test of absolute must-have features of CSS. Gecko doesn't fall too far from the goal, and rest assured they're working on the issues.

Those are my FF issues. What are yours?

I'm not using the beta yet. Um... I would terribly appreciate it if middle-click would do nothing. Currently, on Linux, middle-clicking goes into the URL that I have on selection buffer. Middle click gets clicked by accident awfully often when scrolling and I end up staring at http://www.whateverthecrapihadonclipboardwhenmymou seslipped.com/ (see below).

Um... seems like this can be fixed in about:config. middlemouse.contentLoadURL = false. I think. Didn't know this. Very cool.

Another beef is the automatic expansion of example => http://www.example.com/ which just gives me bunch of false alarms. If I find myself looking at http://www.whateverthecrapihadonclipboardwhenmymou seslipped.com/, I'm going to scream. While I'm at it, it shouldn't even assume I want http:/// there; it should demand full URLs. And above the heck all, if I want to use this as a search engine, I type "g (keywords)", not the plain address - I don't want a search bar, I don't want an intelligent search bar;I just want an ordinary address bar that also has this keyword support thing. Is it too much to ask?

I think this is at least the latter is somehow fixable through about:config, but I forgot the instructions (didn't try it at first because it appeared to have side effects). Setting keyword.url = about:blank, keyword.enabled = false has little effect...

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[Threni]

> Wait for Firefox 3, when the rendering system will be given a major overhaul.

And that's just *nothing* compared with all the goodness we're putting into Firefox 4! Why do it now when you can wait a few years?

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[miro f]

backspace as back was actually one of the most annoying features I found. Whenever I was typing in a form and wanted to delete some text, occasionally the browser would think the focus was elsewhere and cause the page to go back, usually requiring me to re-enter the form input.

If they got rid of that "feature" I'd be very happy, especially considering I hav a keyboard with a "back" button in the top left corner

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[Pantero Blanco]

I'm actually very glad for that change...I've accidentally sent myself back several pages when pressing backspace, thinking I was editing a textbox (generally when I changed tabs to look at something else for a moment). Even if they wanted to use a single key for the "Back" button, backspace seems like a bad default choice.

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[Tim C]

Its Sunday after all right now, so why not pray for FireFox?

Sorry - I'm too busy praying for Mojo...

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[JudgeJackson]

Better zooming is at the top of my wishlist. Opera and IE7 have both implemented zooming nicely - I hope Firefox will do so as well.

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[thewils]

>>so why not pray for FireFox

Thanks but no thanks. I think IE requires more in the way of faith than FF does.

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[JavaManJim]

Thanks thewils,

You are correct of course. IE needs massive faith. As far as prayer. Is it a futile exercise to pray for the devil? Would it do any good? Or would that cause a "Lio Effect"?
http://www.amuniversal.com/ups/features/lio/index. htm

Thanks,
Jim

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[ydrol]

Those are my FF issues. What are yours?

Only one. Performance. I had Firefox 2.0 RC3? and Opera 9.0.2 running side by side. (on Mandriva 2006) . With the majority of links I could click on firefox, move the mouse over to Opera, and click the same link and opera would still render the page faster. This is with http pipelining enabled on Firefox.

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[BZ]

The difference is that Gecko 1.9 (the rendering engine for Firefox 3) has been under development for over year now... If things go as they are, Firefox 4 will have basically the same web page rendering as Firefox 3 and different UI stuff.

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[kaidadragonfly]

Keywords are really easy in Firefox, you just bookmark the search engine, and put %s where you want the search string to go.

An example:
Name: Google Quicksearch
Location: http://google.com/search?q=%25s
Keyword: g

If you set up a bookmark like that and type "g slashdot", you'll find yourself with a google search for slashdot.

And yeah, changing middlemouse.contentLoadURL to false does fix the loading a new page when you middle click. First thing I change when I make a new profile.

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[Snover]

IE7's zoom is worse than useless. When you zoom, it repositions elements atop other elements, making the page completely screwed up. I'd rather have a text-resizing zoom only rather than the broken piece of shit that is IE7's zoom feature.

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[Briareos]

I think this is at least the latter is somehow fixable through about:config, but I forgot the instructions (didn't try it at first because it appeared to have side effects). Setting keyword.url = about:blank, keyword.enabled = false has little effect...
[ Reply to This ]

You're looking for "browser.fixup.alternate.enabled", and you probably want to set it to false...

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[kyb]

1. Clicking back or forward should show you a cached copy of the page in the exact state you left it. If it came from a form load, you should get the yellow bar notifier at the top warning you that it's out of date and allowing you to reprocess it with the form data. Having a blank page is totally stupid - the default should be to do the useful thing.
2. History tree like in the Risc OS browser.
3. Best guess forward navigation - when I'm browsing an htmlized document that has an obvious 'next' link, the forward button should take me there.
4. If a page tries to load an extension, I don't want to have to add it to a whitelist for all eternity, I want the yellow bar with the option to install it just this once.
5. Speed.
6. Memory usage.
7. Text boxes should have the ability to pull up onscreen keyboards, as a way of optionally reducing the risk of keyloggers (I download and run portable firefox when I'm in internet cafes).
8. I want to be able to drag tabs out of a window to make a new window, or from one window to another. I want to be able to dock two tabs next to each other so I can refer to one while working on another. The ability to send all the tabs in one window to another window.
9. Bittorrent download.
10. Web page archive saving.
11. Closed tabs/windows (reopening shouldn't reload them, but open the cached version). Session saving and reload on startup.
12. Ability to freeze all activity on a page - stop animated gifs, javascript, etc.
13. Proxy profiles for when you're in different places on your laptop.
14. Optional listener so that you can send urls to friends which would open in a new tabgroup on their computer.
15. I'd really like fast PDF viewing built in without loading acrobad reader. Fast and integrated. I know this is possible, because I've seen it in other browsers.
16. Built in gestures that work (optionally) even on flash / java / pdf

Re:YAY!

[aymanh]

The changes are nicely summarized in this page.

I find "Client-side session and persistent storage" to be quite interesting, and wonder if any major web apps will make use of it in the near future. There are also JavaScript 1.7 which makes JavaScript more Pythonic, SVG support, and several other features.

Re:YAY!

[From A Far Away Land]

With the built in spell checker, I expect about 12% of the web's users to look smarter by at least 50% on Tuesday, with the number expected to grow as Firefox spreads.

Re:Lies

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

Yes it's BS, but Mozilla didn't write the article so you can hardly blame them for it.

TabMixPlus RC

[skoval]

I've just checked.
RC1 of new TabMixPlus version (with FF 2.0 support) is already available.

Good news for me.

Re:TabMixPlus RC

[Zantetsuken]

this is one of the biggest problems with me upgrading to FF2 - how many of my extensions will either be replaced or the developers can't (or dont want to) maintain the extension to give it FF2 compatibility? I suppose at least if TabsMixPlus works, it'll be mostly fine since thats also one of my biggest

PS: well, aside from All-in-one sidebar, MenuX, Web Developer, Adblock... well, you get the idea - about 10 or so (and yes I do actually use them)

Another reason to use Opera..

[Channard]

.. is that it actually lets you decide how much memory is used for cacheing. Firefox, on the other hand, has no such limit and I've seen its memory usage go sky-high, both in Windows XP and OSX.

Re:Another reason to use Opera..

[jrumney]

Firefox, on the other hand, has no such limit

So what is this "50Mb" limit I see in the Cache section of the Advanced / Network tab of the Options dialog?

Re:Another reason to use Opera..

[Trumpet of Doom]

Last I checked, Firefox did have a limit on how much... wait, that's hard drive space, but still, memory usage for the cache shouldn't go much (if any) above that. By any chance, the people who were using Firefox to cause its memory usage to balloon... did they have about a gazillion tabs open?

Re:Another reason to use Opera..

[bunratty]

Firefox also lets you decide how much memory is used for caching. The problem is that all images on all currently displayed pages are stored uncompressed in the memory cache, even if the storage exceeds the maximum size you've set. It's not a memory leak, so in practice the memory usage is a problem only when you're displaying pages with lots of large images, but it can cause hundreds of megabytes of memory usage on certain pages.

Re:Another reason to use Opera..

[Ergasiophobia]

ahref=http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?si d=06/02/14/2154224&from=rssrel=url2html-32372http: //developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/14/ 2154224&from=rss> Not exactly what you describe, but it will fix your memory problem.

Re:Another reason to use Opera..

[Ergasiophobia]

And that's what I get for not using the preview button :D Ah well, link is still there.

Re:Another reason to use Opera..

[slashdotmsiriv]

edit->preferences->privacy->cache->"use up to X MB of disk space for the cache"

Re:Another reason to use Opera..

[Zwaxy]

Since you asked, that's the size of the disk cache. It is nothing to do with how much memory is used for caching.

Re:Another reason to use Opera..

[Al Dimond]

Who cares if its memory usage is high because of caching? The pages that aren't used anymore just get swapped out to disk by the operating system when some other program needs a page of memory. Surely you aren't running out of space in your swap partition because of a measly Firefox cache?

People say that Firefox uses more memory than Opera without that taken into account as well. That may be true, and I've always found Opera to be very stable and fast. Opera's a great browser. I use Firefox now because it runs just as fast on this computer, it gives me more screen real estate, and because I think GTK+ apps look better than most others with my 80s-style FVWM theme. On anything with less than 128MB RAM I'd use Opera for sure.

Re:Another reason to use Opera..

[slashdotmsiriv]

Browser cache is always committed to disk. You may have a problem with firefox memory consumption if u never shutdown ur browser. Perhaps in this case it allocates more memory for cache that is not committed to disk unless ur disk space limit is large enough. I doubt it though. But if u restart it it never brings more than X MB cache in memory, actually it brings much less, depending on which pages u actually visit. So in this case, disk memory has pretty much the semantics of RAM and this is why the developers dont differentiate between the two.

Re:Another reason to use Opera..

[freeweed]

You know what I don't get about Firefox?

The new caching mechanism is claimed to cache "all images" and "all text" of a page, and this is why it uses so much memory. Why then when I hit the back button, do I often see the browser making a connection back to the original site? I've seen sites start having problems enough that hitting going back to them can pretty leave the browser displaying a blank page - even though all of this is supposedly cached and taking up major amounts of memory.

Opera's caching feature sure didn't act like this. You could browse a bunch of sites, and yank your Intenet connection, and still go back to those sites just fine.

Anyone know why Firefox doesn't seem to actually cache everything?

But where can I get my IceWeasel 2.0 ? -- NT

[zeenixus]

But where can I get my IceWeasel 2.0 ?

Re:Opera tabs.

[Cheapy]

Especially since Firefox made them popular.

Re:Lies

[MooUK]

Most other tabbed browsers were single-window-only, as far as my experience goes. FF also allows multiple windows, remember.

Also, did Mozilla say they invented it themselves, or is the writer getting things wrong? Answer that before you place blame.

Re:Opera tabs.

[Bertie]

Actually, I'm not sure it does. I preferred to have a single location for the "close tab" button, rather than individual ones for each tab. By all means add them to the tabs in addition to the static one on the right-hand side, but it was nice to have a button that you could repeatedly click on to close several tabs, without scooting along the line from one to the next.

Here's hoping.

[Grendel Drago]

I hope it won't leak quite so much memory. That'd be nice.

Re:Here's hoping.

[iabervon]

Legend has it that it won't matter, because if it's using too much memory, you can just restart it without losing what you're in the middle of.

Re:Here's hoping.

[Anonymous Coward]

If that was the reason for introducing that functionality, it seems very much like using a bucket to 'fix' a leak rather than, you know, actually fixing the leak.

Re:Here's hoping.

[freeweed]

You'd think that if that were the case, they could just put a button somewhere that says "release memory".

Whether it's a genuine leak, extentions misbehaving, or overzealous cache - if they can find a way to re-render all of your current pages while still freeing up memory, it should be trivial to code this without having to kill the app and re-start it.

Re:Here's hoping.

[ichigo 2.0]

Of course not. It's a very useful feature and was added because of that.

Re:Here's hoping.

[iabervon]

I suspect they actually added it because some people occasionally quit their browsers because they're logging out or shutting down their computers. In fact, I think that they probably didn't worry too much about the memory issue in the first place because most people don't run their browsers continuously for weeks.

FACT: OPERA DID NOT INVENT TABBED BROWSING!

[Sir Homer]

Yes. Stop spreading the myth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabbed_browsing

Re:FACT: OPERA DID NOT INVENT TABBED BROWSING!

[yoyhed]

Nope, but in 1996 Opera had buttons in their browser for each page along the top, which worked EXACTLY LIKE TABS. NetCaptor was just the first to draw them like tabs in their interface. Stop spreading the myth.

Re:FACT: OPERA DID NOT INVENT TABBED BROWSING!

[Ruff_ilb]

"BookLink Technologies pioneered [tabbed browsing] in its InternetWorks browser in 1994."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabbed_browsing

Re:FACT: OPERA DID NOT INVENT TABBED BROWSING!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, but in 1996 Opera had buttons in their browser for each page along the top, which worked EXACTLY LIKE TABS. NetCaptor was just the first to draw them like tabs in their interface. Stop spreading the myth.

(emphasis mine)

If you actually RTFA, you'd find out that "BookLink Technologies pioneered this interface design in its InternetWorks browser in 1994."

Stop spreading the myth.

Re:FACT: OPERA DID NOT INVENT TABBED BROWSING!

[Overly Critical Guy]

"Independently, the founders of Opera built an MDI-based browser in the same year (via a technical preview not available publicly; a public release was made in 1996)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabbed_browsing

Next.

Re:FACT: OPERA DID NOT INVENT TABBED BROWSING!

[Matt Perry]

Yes. Stop spreading the myth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabbed_browsing

That wikipedia article doesn't cite any sources. How about linking to something verifiable or adding verifiable sources to the wikipedia article? Until you can present your facts better people will continue to believe the "myth".

Re:FACT: OPERA DID NOT INVENT TABBED BROWSING!

[hkmwbz]

It had MDI first, and it's the only remaining browser of the first tabbed browsers. InternetWorks is nowhere to be found :)

"whether it will stem Firefox's growth"

[zantolak]

Um, definitely not. When you can only run IE7 on Vista, XP or 2003, it won't be stemming the growth of Firefox at all. What a ridiculous question.

Re:"whether it will stem Firefox's growth"

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

Um, definitely not. When you can only run IE7 on Vista, XP or 2003, it won't be stemming the growth of Firefox at all. What a ridiculous question.

You say that like you've just listed three niche Operating Systems. Sorry to break this to you, but among the three OSes you've listed you've got the one currently installed on the vast majority of computers using the web, and another which in a few months time will come pre-installed on the vast majority of PCs sold worldwide. At what point is IE "only" being able to run on these systems going to be a problem in challenging Firefox's future growth?

I'm not saying IE 7 is better or even as good as FF. I haven't used IE7 at all yet. But that's not the point. The main draw of FF to the 'non-geek' was it's tabbed browsing, popup blocking, increased security, and search boxes. Now all of those things are available within IE. Again, I'm not saying IE is better at any of those things than FF, I'm simply saying they exist and that to the casual observer FF and IE are equal in the features that matter most to most people. And when the average user sees that fact, they're probably not going to take the time to see which is truly better, they're going to see that they have 'the same features' that matter to them and then they'll pick the one that's more easily available to them. In case you're not clear, that'd be Internet Explorer.

I know that's not what you want to hear. It's not what I want to hear either. But that doesn't change what seems to me to be a fairly logical assumption: Yes, IE7 is going to pose serious problems for Firefox's growth in the coming months and years unless FF does something truly great to put it a clear step up from IE again. And I'm sorry to say that FF2.0 doesn't fit the bill.

Market? What market?

[jc42]

Firefox's share of the browser market has grown to 9.8 percent of the U.S. market this month

This has gotta be one of the weirder (mis)uses of the term "market". After all, the competing "products" aren't for sale, and a "market" is usually a place where people sell things.

Of course, it can be difficult to establish a market when the "market leader" does the ultimate price-war thing and gives its product out for free. They did kill Netscape Corp, of course, but somehow they still didn't capture the "market".

There are some bizarre (bazarre?) economic theories at work here, I think.

Re:Market? What market?

[eMbry00s]

The loss they took from making IE "free" is redeemed by increased/shifted costs in other marketes such as Office and OS. It also kills off competitors that could have made their products portable (and thus migration to other operating systems easier).

Re:Market? What market?

[EraserMouseMan]

I just think it's funny that everybody thinks that IE exists largely to keep people from moving to another OS. As if everybody walks into Best Buy and notices that only the Windows machines have IE and then say, "Oh well, I guess I'll have to buy a Windows machine then."

Most ordinary users aren't even aware of the browser wars. It's mostly irrelevant to them. As long as they can surf the web they don't give a crap whether they click on a big "E" icon or or an icon of a curled up little fox to get there.

Re:Market? What market?

[chgros]

This has gotta be one of the weirder (mis)uses of the term "market". After all, the competing "products" aren't for sale, and a "market" is usually a place where people sell things.
Well, Mozilla.com is a "for-profit", and they actually make money (although it's not their primary goal), so "market" is not necessarily that wrong. See e.g. here

Re:Market? What market?

[freeweed]

You should go check out a business sometime.

If I could run every intraweb site/application on Firefox, I could convert my desktop to Linux. If I could run Linux, most of the rest of the company could, too. Most businesses don't play games, use photoshop, or some obscure DVD-ripping software that is only available on Windows. Most businesses are stuck on Windows due to the Office stack (which is getting to be replacable) and IE-based applications. Where the business machines go, the home users will follow.

Yeesh. There must be 6 highly-modded comments already that all say "home users don't care about the browser, so they'll never switch to Linux/OSX!".

Sorry folks, you need to get out of the basement more. Home users are unimportant in the big picture, because they never choose anything anyway. They either buy what work uses, or they buy what Best Buy has on the shelf.

One-time importing from SessionSaver?

[steveha]

We've been heavily using the SessionSaver plugin feature with Firefox 1.5. When (not if, when) Firefox 1.5 uses up all the system memory and Linux kills it, we restart a minty-fresh new instance of it and all our windows come back.

It turns out that SessionSaver doesn't work with Firefox 2.0, and it doesn't really need to because Firefox 2.0 has a session saver feature built in. I have several dozen pages open, and I'm wondering: is there any convenient way to bring those pages forward? Basically I just want to import my session.

If no one knows any way to do this, I'll probably whip up a quick Python script to convert the SessionSaver saved URLs into a format that Firefox 2.0 can understand.

P.S. I really hope that Firefox 2.0 will take longer to use up all the memory and fall over. Or even, dare I hope for it, not leak significant amounts of memory at all.

steveha

Re:One-time importing from SessionSaver?

[code65536]

The funny thing is, SessionSaver's notorious memory problems is probably the reason why you were restarting so much. ;) Being able to give SS the boot was probably the single biggest benefit for me upgrading to FF2.

Re:One-time importing from SessionSaver?

[jci]

Well, "Bookmark All Tabs..." for each of your open windows then import the bookmarks. Would probably be easier than a python script.

Hope I'm not missing anything.

Re:One-time importing from SessionSaver?

[AkaXakA]

"Save all tabs as.."

Re:One-time importing from SessionSaver?

[putte_xvi]

I have several dozen pages open, and I'm wondering: is there any convenient way to bring those pages forward? Basically I just want to import my session.

I suppose you've already solved it by now, but if not: Create a bookmark of all the tabs. Then open that folder in 2.0 and select "Open All in Tabs".

Something wrong w/ your system

[skoval]

I could get similar results only in 1.0.x versions browsing all day long: opening, closing, rearranging and restoring several tens times an hour.
In fact I haven't seen FF using more than 100M RAM for a long time.

Maybe that's because of pictures switched off/on?

Bad release date

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad Firefox 2.0 release is going to be shadowed out by the release of Frozen Bubble 2.0 coming up on the same week :^)
Teaser here. Rumors has it the game will be networked..

FireFox still rules

[Mike_K]

I'm a Windows user. I used to think that Firefox used too much RAM - I have about 30 tabs open in 2 windows, and it consumes over 140MB. In my book that's A LOT.

Few days ago I installed IE 7. I know, installing brand new MS software is a bad idea. But I'm reinstalling this OS soon anyway, so I wanted to give it a try. I opened the same tabs in the browser. Some of them didn't have my cookies, so slightly different pages loaded. But to my surprise, IE7 was taking up over 400MB of RAM. That's almost 3 times as much as Firefox. It got sluggish compared to Firefox. (I have a gig of RAM in a decently fast computer)

I'm sticking with Firefox. I'll test out 2.0 when it comes out, and baring bugs or bloat, I'll be using it as my main browser on all 3 computers I use.

m

Re:FireFox still rules

[ben there...]

My solution has been to browse problematic pages in Opera, and still use Firefox for everything else. I still feel more at home with Firefox, but it's nice not to have to restart the browser because of memory usage on those sites.

Re:YAY!

[ilovepolymorphism]

With the new spellchecker they will also be introducing a new attribute to the input tag: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Controlling_s pell_checking_in_HTML_forms Is this a non-standard attribute? Are we going back to each browser adding stuff and hoping the other one stays relatively compatible? I'm not saying whether this is a good or a bad thing. I was just curious.

Re:YAY!

[Julia Cameron]

With the built in spell checker, I expect about 12% of the web's users to look smarter by at least 50% on Tuesday, with the number expected to grow as Firefox spreads.

U ar right.

Re:Opera tabs.

[AelMalinka]

yeah and that button is ctl+w

I wonder how long I'll have to wait for Portable

[Zorque]

I use Portable Firefox on my computers since it's much simpler to transfer my profile to new computers and to keep my settings in case of a Windows reinstall. Hopefully I won't have to wait too long for PF 2.0 to come out.

Sending in bugs

[MBMarduk]

I used to be a bugzilla poster and nightly tester a long time ago.
I haven't been able to find where the FF2rc-nightly builds are hosted.
Some Google results are dead links and others are FF3 builds. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Got a good URL?
Or can I use a FF3 nighly to check against a FF2rc bug?

IE 7 Quick Tabs

[DrDitto]

The IE 7 "Quick Tabs" feature is very cool. It shows a tiled view of all tabs open with all pages rendered so you can quickly find your way and click a tab. I don't think any previous web browser has this feature.

Re:IE 7 Quick Tabs

[elcid73]

maybe not, but I've had a custom mouse gesture in Opera that tiles my (MDI) windows for ages.

It's essentially the same thing.

Gesture one tiles all my windows (I used to also enable small screen rendering as well... but this is off currenty). (gesture up, gesture left)

Then I move my mouse over the window I want and make another gesture to restore all the windows again. This brings the window that the mouse cursor was over into focus at the forefront.

I've always thought this was a slick use of MDI

Re:IE 7 Quick Tabs

[imbaczek]

foxpose has had it since, um, I can't remember. I'm pretty sure Opera has this built-in, but don't take my word for it.

Re:IE 7 Quick Tabs

[gozar]

The IE 7 "Quick Tabs" feature is very cool. It shows a tiled view of all tabs open with all pages rendered so you can quickly find your way and click a tab. I don't think any previous web browser has this feature.

Omniweb has had it for a little while, here's a screenshot.

Excellent

[edmicman]

So 2.0 drops on Tuesday, and the biggest topic /. has to discuss about it is whether or not Mozilla actually pioneered tabbed browsing or not? Come on....

I've been using the 2.0 betas since they were publicly available, and have to say it's a big improvement. The individual tab closing button (it's nice...just give it a shot), the spell checking, improvements in the preferences interface....all around, a very nice job!

Re:Excellent

[imbaczek]

So 2.0 drops on Tuesday, and the biggest topic /. has to discuss about it is whether or not Mozilla actually pioneered tabbed browsing or not?

Of course.

Since you have a lower id than me, I feel entitled to say these words...

Welcome to slashdot. Enjoy your stay.

;-)

Re:Excellent

[Guey_X]

Ctrl + W. It will close your tab and save you 0.48283 valuable seconds.

Re:Excellent

[freeweed]

The individual tab closing button (it's nice...just give it a shot)

We have given it a shot. It's how Opera worked in the 6/7 days (not sure if this is still the case, it's been years for me).

We hated it. It's not nice. It's far too easy to close a tab by accident.

Believe me, if you think Slashdot harps on this feature too much, just wait till the general public start using it. I expect forums full of "how the hell do I turn this off!!!" posts.

extensions

[ArbitraryConstant]

Opera is better out of the box, but Firefox is better once you start installing extensions. Provided you need them anyway.

Who cares?

[swillden]

Let me know when IceWeasel 2.0 is out. Now *that* will be a great browser!

Opera is the first to go tabbed and other features

[diorcc]

geez, "tabbed-windows interface that Mozilla innovated" that is beginning to sound like microsoft innovation. Long before firefox existed, I was using tabbed windows in opera. Give credit where it is due.

I only second that, which the author did not take into account.

Re:Opera tabs.

[mabinogi]

Which is great if you already have your hands on the keyboard. But most browsing is done with the mouse.

Re:Opera tabs.

[Overly Critical Guy]

Actually, Opera did, which is why Mozilla/Firefox "borrowed" them.

Same with mouse gestures. And pop-up blocking.

Re:The Netscaping...

[Tweekster]

Except IE7 has been heralded as mediocre at best.

No one has anything to worry about that half assed new version.

I'm a web developer

[suv4x4]

For me the big question as such is:

should we care to support Firefox 1.5 now?

We know we'll have to support IE6 for years to come, even IE5. But Firefox users typically upgrade their browser quickly.
So: do I check my sites in FF 1.5? Do I even keep it?

Before you tell me "but they all render perfectly and the same": it's not true. I keep Firefox 1.07 for this reason here, since it handles quite a bit of elements/CSS in a different manner (even clearing floats differs a little in some cases).

There's also lots of bugs fixed in 1.5, but not in 1.07. And there's also new oddball behaviours in 1.5 not present in 1.07...

FF has 10% market share. I'm just split if it's worth it going into so much detail.. maybe I'll just support 1.5 for a few months and move to 2.0.

Please share your opinion.

Re:I'm a web developer

[Anonymous Coward]

You're writing HTML. You don't "support" any browser. Browsers support what you write.

There are these things called "standards", if you didn't know. From what I hear from "web developers", most do not. Look them up. Here, I'll even give you a URL: http://www.w3.org/

Now stop coding "for a browser" with overly complex garbage and code for standards. If it breaks a browser, that's the browser's goddamn problem. Tell your users to go where the standard lies, which is, generally, the latest Firefox.

I hate to respond as AC but this is admittedly a trollish response. However, it has to be this way because I'm really tired of "web developers" griping about how different browsers do things differently. Code to the standards and let the browsers come to you, not the other way around.

Re:I'm a web developer

[Anonymous Coward]

The 1.x branch of Firefox used Gecko 1.7
Fx 1.5 uses Gecko 1.8
Fx 2 uses Gecko 1.8.1, so a much smaller change (as in no new feature in HTML/CSS, just bug fixes I think). The new features are in SVG (textPath support), JavaScript (1.7) and Client-side session and persistent storage
Fx 3 will be the next big jump to Gecko 1.9, with the reflow that will fix Acid 2 and incremental layout bugs, plus more CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 support.

Re:I'm a web developer

[code65536]

*agrees* In addition, there shouldn't be any sort of major change between Gecko 1.8 and 1.8.1 (FF1.5->FF2).

Re:I'm a web developer

[Kjella]

In theory, I'd say screw the browser and code to the w3c standards.

In practise, you probably need to make one exception for IE. However, beyond that my patience with bugs is extremely thin. I guess it depends how much pressure you have on you, but I'd rather you spent almost as much time giving them another bugzilla report as putting in your own workaround. If we have five different code branches for IE/FF2/FF1/Safari/Konq/Opera then we've replaced one non-standard standard with another. IE/W3C is one too many already, but that is the way it is. And if it's fixed in FF3... well, tell them to hurry up. Drop support as soon as you feel it reasonable. I think the best thing FF could have, is demanding web developers.

Re:I'm a web developer

[Anonymous Coward]

"Code to the standards and let the browsers come to you, not the other way around."

Users don't care about standards. Users only care about the pretty pictures on the screen. If the pretty pictures look goofy, the users will be unhappy and you won't get paid.

I'd rather get paid for writing ugly HTML than not get paid for writing beautiful HTML that looks ugly in the browser. People do not pay for quality HTML. They pay for results. Standards based HTML is (unfortunately) not the way to get results.

I'd starve if I waited for the browsers to come to me. Please, leave your mother's basement and get a real job. Then you'll understand what the adults are discussing. In your fantasyland, perhaps coding to standards is more important than how it looks on the screen. In the real world, screen appearance is everything; source view is nothing.

Re:I'm a web developer

[Spliffster]

i can code to standards and add a few hacks for IE and still get payed. Maybe you just want to leave out the browser specific bullshit like document.all..., ...>, etc. and start creating pages which degrade greacefully if the client's browser doesnt support all the bells and whisles (read xmlhttprequest for example).

On the other hand, i would certainly make more money when IE7 comes out and i could remake all the sites for "the new browser" (as long as the customer would understand the need).

Cheers,
-S

Re:I'm a web developer

[suv4x4]

JavaScript (1.7)

Ah yea, JS 1.7, otherwise known as the worst update in the entire history of JavaScript.

Re:I'm a web developer

[suv4x4]

Tell your users to go where the standard lies, which is, generally, the latest Firefox.

You're not better than a developer who writes IE specific sites with that statement. Firefox is not heaven, it has bugs, it doesn't implement quote a lot of CSS (go check it with Acid2), and in FF 2.0 it introduced a bunch of JavaScript extensions which contradict with the ECMAScript standard they should follow.

So before you start teaching me what "web standards" is, you may try making your living with commercial sites and face the actual challenges of supporting all browser clients your users demand that you support.

I'm not surprised I got a bunch of replies form CSS/W3C zealots who teach me how I should code to standards. Surprise: I already do, to the extent they are supported by what people have out there.

And to check if my code operates properly, I gotta have browser X, open it in browser X and test everything is OK.

I can't just sit down, code up some code according to CSS 4 draft 3 and then bitch about how "it's a standard so install Opera 11 alpha or go to hell".

Ay least you realize your reply it trollish. Trolls have rarely something of substance to add to a discussion.

Konqueror is rock solid and light on resources.

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides having far better CSS support than Firefox 2.0, Konqueror also uses only a fraction of the resources. Opening the exact same sites in Firefox and Konqueror will often show a major difference between the two in terms of RAM usage.

For example, when I simultaneously open about 15 of the blogs and websites I read daily, top reports Firefox 2.0 rc3 as using 149 MB of virtual memory. Konqueror, on the other hand, uses a cool 28 MB for those exact same sites. Opera uses 31 MB. So as far as I can tell, Firefox is the lame duck when it comes to effective memory usage. This is with a build right from mozilla.org, without any additional extensions installed. I also disabled the cache for all three browsers, since I've heard that Firefox has a policy that leads to excessive memory usage.

A problem I have had with the Firefox 2.0 release candidates is crashes. This doesn't happen with Konqueror, or any other application I'm using, so I doubt it's faulty RAM. These crashes aren't easily reproducible, and I frankly don't have the time to bother debugging an application that I really don't use, and that crashes the few times I do try it out.

Re:Konqueror is rock solid and light on resources.

[Abcd1234]

Opening the exact same sites in Firefox and Konqueror will often show a major difference between the two in terms of RAM usage.

'course, it helps that Konqueror can leverage a ton of the infrastructure already present in KDE, and as such, it's actual resident set size can be much lower (since many more of the libraries it utilizes will be shared with other apps).

The question is, how much total RAM is that monster KDE desktop taking up?

Of course, if you're using KDE already, then you're absolutely right, konq will be a better choice if your goal is to reduce memory footprint. However, for folks such as myself (I use WindowMaker), there's probably little advantage to using one over the other.

I also disabled the cache for all three browsers, since I've heard that Firefox has a policy that leads to excessive memory usage.

Actually, that's incorrect. What you want to do is disable the fast back/forward cache. It is controlled by a property called "browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers". Set that value to 0 to disable the feature. This can significantly decrease the amount of memory used by FF at the expense of slower back/forward response.

Re:Konqueror is rock solid and light on resources.

[OneSeventeen]

I'm sold!

Where do I download the windows version?

Re:Konqueror is rock solid and light on resources.

[HeroreV]

Too bad it's not an option for the majority of computer users. If the Konqueror team actually cared about getting people onto a better browser they would have a Windows version available at Konqueror.org.

Re:Konqueror is rock solid and light on resources.

[JabberWokky]

For a decent (native feeling) version for Windows, you'll have to wait for KDE 4.0.

--
Evan

Re:The Netscaping...

[FudRucker]

naw naw naw, it will be "The Netscaping of Internet Explorer7" :P

Re:The Netscaping...

[suv4x4]

Except IE7 has been heralded as mediocre at best.

No one has anything to worry about that half assed new version.

Says who? I don't think geek reviews and Firefox fanboys count when they call IE7 "half assed".
I know myself I *MAY* start using IE again to browse the web when I grab IE7 (well I have it, but.. I mean on my main machine).

I'm sick of FF crashing and hanging on me. I tested which extension may be the source of the problem, but I'm starting not to care about it anymore. Of course, I'll first give a try to FF 2.0. They say it was improved in terms of stability and memory usage. We'll see that.

full screen

[chocolatetrumpet]

IE can go full screen - and I mean full screen. Even the toolbars autohide up into the top of the display.

Firefox has always left the toolbars around to eat up valuble screen real estate. The application goes full screen, but not the web page.

If firefox wanted to 1-up IE, they could make the toolbars autohide, and then even make the scrollbar autohide. Then it would be true full screen. How's that for marketing speak?

But in all honesty, this is a feature I would enjoy.

Re:full screen

[FunWithKnives]

If firefox wanted to 1-up IE, they could make the toolbars autohide, and then even make the scrollbar autohide. Then it would be true full screen.

Actually, Opera (9.02, at least) 1-ups both of them. It autohides both the toolbars and the scrollbar (F11 key). Oh, and it also passes Acid2, for what it's worth.

Re:full screen

[Briareos]

There is an extention that does this, not sure of the name, but look it up on the extention site.

Incidentally, that would be the "Autohide" extension, and you can configure it to hide everything including the tab bar - okay, so it'll show scrollbars if the content is bigger than the screen, but I guess that's to be expected; at least I'd assume you'd need to use CSS on the BODY tag of the displayed page to get rid of those.

Re:full screen

[Keeper Of Keys]

Yep. body { overflow:hidden } But why would you want to do this?

Users' feedback

[skoval]

Many users asked for a bundled packet of extensions distributed with Firefox or even simple inclusion of nice features in the browser.
In days of 1.0.x I had about 4-6 extensions installed.
After 1.5.x was released I reduced their number to 2 because I don't need others any more.
Now I often don't install extensions at all because Firefox is already sufficient for my browsing.

I don't need forecasts or bookmarks manager. I just want a convenient browser.

and this is news !?

[FPF422]

I'm using Firefox 2.0 for at least 2 months... I'm already on RC2 since 2 weeks.

Re:and this is news !?

[mh101]

This would be the final release version of FF 2.0. Not everyone wants to use prerelease software.

IE7 is horrible

[Anonymous Coward]

The inteface is crappy. I installed it and asked my wife to use it. She was frustrated in 5 minutes. No menu on by default. No favorites on by default. The bookmark manager is bad.

What the hell was MS thinking? IE7 doesn't touch Opera or FF.

Re:IE7 is horrible

[Felonious Ham]

No menu on by default. No favorites on by default. The bookmark manager is bad.

I can see where those things would confuse a new user, but I thought it was quite clever to hide the menubar. I rarely use anything on the menubar, and the "Alt to show" functionality feels right. With IE6, I would smash all the toolbars into one, with only the File menu showing. Same for the Links bar--I like the placement of the star to access the bookmarks.

Overall I like the look and feel of IE7 better than FF2.0, but FF has the edge in functionality (certainly when you consider the Addons).

The elephant in the room...

[William_Lee]

I am a big fan of Firefox in terms of philosophy and features, but have been driven to Opera (which I actually prefer for most things) due to the ridiculous amounts of memory that Firefox consumes. With multiple tabs open, I can routinely see Firefox over the course of a day or two of remaining open consume upwards of 900K, and it will continue to grow until it is shutdown and restarted. This is a serious issue for many Windows Firefox users, and the developers seem either unwilling or unable to focus on fixing it. This should have been the number one priority for version 2 in my opinion. It results in a shoddy product that would be unacceptable in a commercial application. Why is it that this elephant just sits in the room while FF developers pretend it's not there. Restarting an application should not be the solution to any problem, let alone one this serious. It's widespread and should have been addressed a long time ago!

Re:The elephant in the room...

[Nicolay77]

I second that. I have over 40 tabs (formerly known as pages) open in Opera, 7 of them YouTube videos, other are nintendo Wii videos, lots of programming articles, and lots of other stuff. I usually have even more tabs open (like when browsing slashdot or digg). I only have 512MB in RAM.

I can change between the pages dawn fast holding right-click and using the mouse wheel and then use another mouse gesture to go back in the history of any of them and it's fast as hell. In fact the only thing I don't like is that the tabs/pages list is too long and uses two columns instead of one, but that's my fault.

All this while having my programming environment open, sometimes Paint Shop Pro 9 as well and iTunes in the background playing music or an internet radio station. And Opera is still fast.

However to be fair, I have to add, that the superb session management in Opera was a result of the browser crashing a lot in a previous version, I believe it was version 6.

Re:The elephant in the room...

[anaesthetica]

Restarting an application should not be the solution to any problem, let alone one this serious.

I wholeheartedly agree. No one thought Windows 98 was acceptable merely because numerous problems could be fixed by rebooting. We shouldn't tolerate the same low standards from Mozilla either. Firefox 3.0 ought to focus on two major changes: #1) Implementing Gecko 1.9 in order to increase web standards support, and #2) Comprehensively rethinking memory usage from the ground up. All other features ought to be peripheral to these two key objectives.

Re:The elephant in the room...

[freeweed]

I can routinely see Firefox over the course of a day or two of remaining open consume upwards of 900K

Yeah, 640K should be enough for any web browser!

Re:The elephant in the room...

[William_Lee]

Yeah, 640K should be enough for any web browser!

For the record, I actually meant 900 megs in the original post, not 900K...but I like the cut of your gib...

Re:The elephant in the room...

[lpangelrob]

Not sure what your setup is, but I routinely used up to 500-600K of memory (as defined by Task Manager --> Processes --> Mem Usage) in Firefox 1.5. A few times I've cracked 800K, which slowed the box to a crawl.

First upgrade was to Firefox 2.0 RC 2, and I've never come close to 150K since; I've also dropped a couple of extensions because they were built in. I suspect statistically most users have had this experience.

Win2k SP4, 2.8 GHz P4, 784 MB RAM. Unfortunately, FF 2.0 RC 3 on OS X is still inferior to the latest build of Camino.

Re:The elephant in the room...

[lpangelrob]

Meh. Make that 500-600M, 800M and 150M respectively and then you'll get the right numbers. The argument still stands. :-)

I question the improvement

[briancnorton]

I cast serious doubt on Mozilla's claim of tab "innovation" but IE7 definitely perfected it by allowing me to REALLY turn it off! (Middle mouse button and all)

Just not true

[briancnorton]

Consider the moniker "major"

Only two browsers are "Major" and that's a combined Mozilla/Firefox and a combined Internet Explorer. And that's being generous to Moz/FF. The others are curiosities. Fine software perhaps, but certainly not "major."

Re:YAY!

[ChadL]

I already use the Google Toolbar for Firefox that has built-in spell checking. When I get Firefox 2, I may get rid of the Google Toolbar, as that is really the only reason I use it.

Summary Is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera pioneered tabbed browsing, not Mozilla.

You just put egg on your face with that comment because clearly Mozilla copied that idea from Opera. Is it OK for Mozilla to copy but not MS?

Re:Opera tabs.

[robzon]

You only need one hand on your mouse. The other hand is for ctrl+w.

Re:Opera tabs.

[TheRaven64]

Most people have two hands, and most people use their right hand for the mouse (even a lot of left-handed people). The W key is on the left with most keyboard layouts, so meta-W can be hit with the left hand, even if the right is on the mouse.

Having a close button on each tab means that you can close tabs without switching to them, which is a huge advantage if you have opened a lot of tabs. For example, when I post a comment on Slashdot, I usually open the reply page in a new tab, switch back to the story when I hit submit, and close the tab when it's finished loading, without looking at it.

Yet microsummaries can't be turned off

[saikou]

Hm... release day is Tuesday. How soon there will be a little piece of spyware attached to Bookmarks via Microsummaries?
Yet I can't seem to find the way to turn it off :(

Re:YAY!

[gamefreak1450]

I find "Client-side session and persistent storage" to be quite interesting, and wonder if any major web apps will make use of it in the near future.

Probably not too many, seeing as how web developers rarely cater to the ~10% of users that use Firefox. Personally I like the features and standards-compliance of Firefox, but the fact that 90% or so people still use IE haunts me.

Why wasn't this in imdb?

[auroran]

I find this rather surprising.
Who do they have playing Gant?
Are they going to make the MiG-31 look different in the special effects?
Will it be better than the original movie?
http://imdb.com/title/tt0083943/

Oh, nevermind.

Re:YAY!

[Mercano]

Gah. With proprietary CSS extensions, they all have the moz prefix. Why couldn't they have taken advantage of XML\XHTML's namespacing features and put the attribute in its own namespace (i.e. moz:spellcheck). For what its worth, though, been using the FF2 betas/RCs for a while, and I love this feature.

Firefox 2.0 Themes

[aplusjimages]

They already have Firefox 2.0 themes out.

Re:Firefox 2.0 Themes

[MtViewGuy]

Introducing new themes is one thing, but making sure your current themes and extensions installed in Firefox 1.5.0.7 migrate to Firefox 2.0 is quite something else. Remember the fiasco of extensions and themes breaking on the change from Firefox 1.0.7 to 1.5?

Re:OPERA INVENTED IT THE VERY SAME YEAR, YAY FOR C

[zzatz]

Opera did not invent mouse gestures. Mouse 'strokes' have been part of the UI for Mentor Graphics EDA applications since the early 90's, and weren't invented there, either. The first appearance at Mentor was in IC Station, in response to competing tools from either GE Calma or Computervision.

No, I will NOT admit that Opera was first. They weren't.

Re:The Netscaping...

[Nicolay77]

Well, I'm really expecting that a lot of people, most of them corporate users, change to IE7. They won't use anything different than a version of IE.

If that happens I could make my web pages look much better, using features like alpha channel pngs and more modern CSS.

It doesn't matter if I can see the wonderful CSS Garden web pages in all their glory with my faithful Opera, the people that use the applications I code will use IE for the foreseeable future.

Now I get it.

[Kadin2048]

the memory usage is a problem only when you're displaying pages with lots of large images

Ah ... now I see why so many Slashdotters feel this is a very serious issue.

Tabs are dead; long live tabs.

[Kadin2048]

Tabs are definitely nice, but they're hardly a selling point anymore. There comes a time when it doesn't matter if you invented a feature or not, everybody's now using it, and if you don't keep developing new cool features, you'll be nothing but a subsection in a Wikipedia article somewhere.

Everybody and their cousin now has tabs. It may have taken them more a seriously embarrassing long time, but even Microsoft has seen the light. Therefore, it's no longer worth talking about. Tabs are here; stick a fork in them, because they're dead. At least from a selling-point perspective.

What is FF2.0 going to offer the average person that's going to make them care, now that IE7 has tabs as well? I don't see many features that are as slick as tabs were. The best thing I've seen is inline spell checking. Microsoft still hasn't figured out that it's not just for word processors anymore (and you'd really think that they would; seeing as Word basically popularized the whole red-underline-means-you're-wrong thing). But at least based on what I've read, IE7 isn't going to do it, and that gives FF a small advantage, at least for people that use online forms. As more and more Web 2.0 / interactive stuff comes out, this becomes a nicer and nicer feature to have. (Heck, it's why I use Safari instead of Firefox right now.)

We need a new killer feature to replace tabs, now that they've become germane. I'm not sure that an inline spell-checker is it, but it seems to be the best thing going at the moment.

crashing every 5 min

[majortom1981]

Maybe i am the only one having this problem but with firefox 2.0 rc3 it crashes every 5 min on me. that is unusable. I hope it gets fixed for the final revision.

s/germane/mundane/g

[Kadin2048]

We need a new killer feature to replace tabs, now that they've become mundane. I'm not sure that an inline spell-checker is it, but it seems to be the best thing going at the moment.

Yeah, can't really come up with a good excuse for making that error. It's Monday; let's go with that.

Deja Vu

[Chapium]

I've seen this comment before....

Re:YAY!

[bwilson]

Is this a non-standard attribute?

We wanted web pages to control the spellchecking defaults to some degree. For example, webmail applications will want to automatically turn it on for subject lines, even though it is normally off for <input> elements.

We discussed with the WHATWG web standards group to come up with the attribute. I'm not sure about the status of this in any of their specs, as I'm not sure there was any strong consensus. That's one of the problems coming out with a new feature not currently supported in any other browser or mentioned in any standards.

- Brett (Firefox spellcheck contributor)

Re:YAY!

[zmotula]

Sorry for offtopic, but adding a new attribute that controls the spell checker reminded me of two similar functions. I would like to have a system solution for disabling text selection (because selecting web application interface is dumb) and disabling text completion for input boxes (because for some boxes the completion simply does not make sense). You might be familiar with this -- does WHATWG work on something like it?

Re:YAY!

[Anonymous Coward]

But if you are a writing web pages for say Slashdot with over 60% FF users then it's worth catering to.

Reason to remain on Windows

[Udo Schmitz]

Only if IE is the most compelling reason to remain on Windows, which I suspect is not the case for most people.

As long as there are web sites that are built for IE (important stuff like online banking) this is a reason for people to stay with IE and Windows. I hear it all the time. As IE looses more marketshare, companies are compelled to think about shutting out potential customers. That will lead to their web sites being compatible to web standards. That will make one less rason for people to switch away from windows. That again will lead to some chair throwing in Seattle.

IE7's Zoom / Magnifier..

[Chicane-UK]

I've now used Firefox exclusively for about a year and a half and as far as i'm concerned Microsofts neglect for IE for so long means that on principle alone, i'll never go back.

But I do some website testing and as a result felt it was in my interests to install IE7 now that it is released and see what its like.

Yes - shameless UI tweaks borrowed from Firefox and Opera (did we expect anything else?) but the one thing I do really like is the new magnifier feature for web pages. It just works really rather well and seems to handle most pages well.. and doesn't break formatting at all on any site I tried it on. It even scaled up Flash movies to 400% without making my machine die on its backside.

So certainly for people with sight issues, it'd be hard not to reccomend!

Re:IE7's Zoom / Magnifier..

[pedestrian crossing]

Yes - shameless UI tweaks borrowed from Firefox and Opera (did we expect anything else?)

One could say a similar thing about FF 2.0.

Restore session after crash and individual tab closing buttons - both have been in Galeon for some time...

While true innovation is admirable, improving by learning from others is also a good thing. The users benefit, the "ecosystem" is improved overall.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Re:IE7's Zoom / Magnifier..

[Knutimus]

The "new" magnifier is something which opera incorporated a long time ago.

Hrmpf!

[Udo Schmitz]

I'm a web developer.

For me the big question as such is:

should we care to support Firefox 1.5 now?

Gaaaaahhhh. Code to the already existing standards. The browsers then are meant to support your site, not the other way around.

Better than IE6!

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

"Windows 98, its biggest upgrade since 1995. Analysts said Win98 is a significant improvement over its predecessor, but the big question is whether it will stem Ubuntu's growth at Microsoft's expense."

IE7 is better than IE6. So what? Both are too little, too late. No significant number of people is going to switch from Firefox back to MSIE.

Microsoft should put MSIE into maintenance mode, adopt Firefox, and actually be a market leader with superior technology, for once.

Microsoft's case of not-invented-here syndrome is what made the company almost miss the Internet boat, and if they're not careful, they're going to make the same mistake again.

I sometimes wonder what a technology company (as opposed to a marketing company, which is what Microsoft is) could do with the resources that Microsoft has.

Opensource and portability

[DrYak]

The thing I like most and why Opera is not my primary browser, is because of its open-source nature, Firefox is easily recompiled/ported to other architecture. Whenever a new architecture spawns into existense, there's almost immediatly a Linux distro for it and geeks over the world feel obligated to Firefox(*) to it just after emacs/vi, even if this new platform is just an internet-enabled toaster.

The same isn't granted for opera even if they're very present on the embed market.

---

(*) or at least a rebranded port a la IceWeasel, since Mozilla(tm) fells important to protect the "FireFox (tm)" brand's image.

Re:OPERA INVENTED IT THE VERY SAME YEAR, YAY FOR C

[hkmwbz]

However, Opera came up with the concept of using them in browsers. A novel idea at the time, and most people had no idea that gestures even existed.

Me too!

[Winckle]

Yeah firefox 2 RC3 keeps crashing on me every 5 minutes also, i'll be typing a slashdot comment and then suddenl

Do I need to upgrade to ..

[scotbot]

Firefox 2 to be able to run Dotcom 2?

*ducks*

Still doesn't mesh with system theme?

[jiawen]

Does the final release candidate still not mesh with the system theme? I don't want Firefox to have a completely different theme from the rest of my UI -- I want it to fit nicely into my system theme. Has the system theme issue been fixed in the final version? Is there some sort of workaround for this?

Auto update to 2.0?

[brunes69]

Can anyone tell me if Firefox will auto-update itself to 2.0 once it is released? Or os that only done for point releases?

I can't find any info on the Firefox site.

Re:Auto update to 2.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

It will update using the auto-update feature however it will ask you first (even if you have set it to update quietly in the background) because it is such a large change.

Re:Lies

[pafrusurewa]

When has Mozilla claimed that in innovated tabbed-windows interface? You are quoting Seattle Post-Intelligencer, not Mozilla.

Not sure about Mozilla but Asa Dotzler once posted an incredibly erroneous tabbed browsing history, asked if he had missed anything and didn't react to corrections.

Re:Can Firefox 2.0 turn off blinking GIFs?

[j_sp_r]

Yeah it's called addblock

Maybe I'm missing something...

[Churla]

Can someone give me a run down of all the things being added to qualify this as a major number release? I see anti-phishing, anything else? Are there some major things going on under teh surface which weren't evident in the FF sites and such? Is this an overglorified minor revision?

Or is this a case of them figuring htat since IE had a major number release to seem like they were keeping up they needed a major number release?

Grammar

[Klaidas]

Shouldn't the title say....ON Tuesday?

No need to wait

[bconway]

While it won't be officially "released" until tomorrow, Firefox 2.0 is available now.

IE7 can never touch this: Portability

[jbarr]

One of Firefox's insanely amazing features is its portability capabilities. With an app like FirefoxPortable, I can maintain a single, portable browser environment on a USB Thumb Drive that lets me tailor my browser experience to MY liking, and have it wherever I go--something IE simply cannot do. And by using an extension like Google Browser Sync, I can maintain many of my user preferences and bookmarks across multiple browsers at work and at home, again giving me a predictable, consistent browsing experience.

Internet Explorer is so tied to a single Windows installation that it makes such portability impossible. In fact, I'd say that the whole influx of the customizable portal stems from IE's inherent lack of portability features. Firefox is not the end-all-be-all answer, but it offers many user-tailorable functions and features that IE will never have.

I'm simply waiting for someone to create a truely portable, secure online working environment that moves with you from browser to browser, has rich features and capabilities, isn't a bandwidh hog, and doesn't cost an arm and a let. THAT will be the next "killer app"...

don't ignore what really matters

[walterbyrd]

No matter what features a browsers may have, it doesn't mean a damn thing unless it actually works for a given web-site.

There are a lot of main-stream sites that only work correctly with msie. I don't know why so many people make their sites like that, but they do. Comedycentral, a lot of yahoo, a lot banks, and so on just don't work with anything non-msie.

Already available?

[BlackPignouf]

No need to wait for the official announcement!
http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefo x/releases/2.0/

Re:Already available?

[MtViewGuy]

But is this the official final release build of Firefox 2.0?

Re:Already available?

[BlackPignouf]

We'll know it tomorrow!

Re:Already available?

[BlackPignouf]

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/23/204125 2 :)

Do not go gentle into that good night!

[Goaway]

Rage, rage against the dying of the light!

Re:YAY!

[namekuseijin]

hello? eXtensible in XML techs is there for a reason, ok? If a browser doesn't understand a particular tag or attribute, it simple ignores them, like they've been doing for the past decades. Browsers which understand the meaning will provide a better experience.

It's not like people were getting a hard time with IE6, despite it's handicapped CSS handling, for instance.

Download

[JoeKuboj]

http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefo x/releases/2.0/win32/en-US/Firefox%20Setup%202.0.e xe

Re:YAY!

[ubergenius]

Sure they do. Especially ones that see that the FF market is not stagnant at 10%, but rather growing steadily. Plus, for niche markets, 10% is sufficient.

Now, of course no major corporations are going to revamp their company websites to use technology only available to 10% of their potential market, but a small, start-up company would certainly write a web-based app that works for only 10% of the market if that app is so much more better because of the tech being used.

Re:YAY!

[zmotula]

Thanks for the link, I did not know about that. I wanted a bit more, I wanted to know whether is this feature (and the text selection control) is going to get standardized somewhere. I am just skimming the Web Applications 1.0 spec by WHATWG and it seems that not the text selection control nor the autocompletion is there. (I'll try to submit a comment if I have enough time to go through the spec draft.)

Re:YAY!

[zmotula]

I know, it is. That is why I asked whether there is some solution supported by WHATWG, because that could end up being standardized and implemented in more browsers.

Firefox 2.0 out a little earlier

[lickylarry]

Firefox 2.0 discovered live and downloadable on Monday:

Re:hey, what does this remind us of? MMMMMMMEEEEEE

[Ash-Fox]

everyone remember when Windows ME was rushed out because their main competetor, Apple, just released a new OS and they didn't want to lose the market share

Nope. I don't remember Apple computers even being sold here when Windows ME came out.

Re:Mozilla is as guilty of copying ideas as Micros

[Ash-Fox]

Version 2.0 also improves on the tabbed-windows interface that BookLink Technologies innovated in InternetWorks and that Microsoft introduced for the first time last week with IE7

There, fixed it for you.

IE7 vs Current Firefox

[CFBMoo1]

I've noticed that IE7 has moments where it needs to think about rendering a page where Fire Fox would just do it. The new IE is nice but when those moments of hesitation occure it's like you can feel extra bloat in the browser or something holding it up. Firefox isn't without its quirks, now and then it locks up in memory and you have to kill the process because of some interaction with Sun's JVM. Not sure if it's the VM or Firefox, but thats one thing I noticed there.

Go ahead and get it now.

[abcxyz]

It's available on the ftp site so the mirrors get updated before the official release tomorrow:

http://mozilla.mirrors.tds.net/pub/mozilla.org/fir efox/releases/2.0/win32/en-US/

-- Rick

Re:Can Firefox 2.0 turn off blinking GIFs?

[Arctic Dragon]

Enter about:config in the address bar and look for an option called "image.animation_mode"... change its value to "none."

Re:Opera tabs.

[livewire98801]

Or middle click. . .

Re:hey, what does this remind us of? MMMMMMMEEEEEE

[Ash-Fox]

well where were you?

Szczecin, it's right next to Berlin.

All my teachers, techtv when it was techtv, and most of my techie friends all have stated that ME was a quick release of what they had done so far on XP or 2000 or whatever and they released it because OS9 had just come out.

The wiki entry on Windows ME doesn't speak of it either. I am also having trouble finding news articles on Google discussing this.

Re:Opera tabs.

[mabinogi]

except that I use the mouse on the left, so ctrl+w is really awkward.

Re:Opera tabs.

[mabinogi]

I'm a right handed person that uses the mouse on the left. (now that my right hand has taken all the mouse abuse it can cope with) Which is admittedly not very common, but I think ctrl+w was chosen simply for the fact that "w" stands for "window", rather than placement. It's just coincidence that it happens to be convenient for right mouse users.

In any case, I'm not entirely sure which is best of the two close button locations - when I'm using FF1.5 it bugs me that I have to switch to a tab to close it, when I'm using FF2 it bugs me that I have to play "chase the tab" when closing a lot of them.
Adding both would be irritating because it wastes space...

I think FF3 needs to implement "close the one I mean" ;)

SessionSaver.

[Grendel Drago]

Yeah, it's called SessionSaver, and I already use it. The same functionality is built into Epiphany already.

For the last time

[jonasj]

The look is all that's different.
Yeah, that and the behavior.

Re:For the last time

[hkmwbz]

No. The behavior is: Click a button to switch to a child window. That's what tabs do. That's what Opera does. That's what IE7 does. That's what NetCaptor does. That's what InternetWorks does. Indeed, InternetWorks - "the first tabbed browser" had true MDI, but with... tabs. Exactly like Opera got later, only Opera's functionally equivalent tabs were skinned to look like buttons instead.