Slashdot Mirror
Firefox 2 Launch - Interview With Chris Beard
ReadWriteWeb writes "This afternoon Firefox 2 will be 'officially' launched. In anticipation of the unveiling, ReadWriteWeb has a brief interview with Chris Beard — Mozilla Vice President of Products. Subjects discussed include the growing enterprise usage of Firefox, the importance of user experience and security, Mozilla's theory behind Web feeds and why they haven't included an integrated RSS Reader, the growing add-on ecosystem, offline browsing, and finally a little about the future of the browser." From the article: "It felt to us like a 2.0 product, particularly if we looked at it from what 1.0 was, to 2.0. It was like half steps, from 1.0 to 1.5 to 2.0. It's also a very stable and rock solid release - it's really ready for the masses. So it really does feel like a 2, as opposed to a 1.x product. Firefox 2 has, we estimate, between 3-4 times the number of fixes than FF 1.5 did. And that doesn't just include fixes and bugs, but all of the feature work as well as memory, stability and security issues. But there's certainly a lot in it which makes it really solid." Also on the site is a concise review of the product, and an overview of Marketing Firefox 2.0.
I've been using it since yesterday since Mozilla had it posted in their pub directory. :( But I like the new look and feel to it, plus it uses quite less memory.
So far, so good. I was upset my Daily Dilbert and FastFirefox Extensions weren't compatible though.
Good job Mozilla!
Is that like half of a hole? Or is that what you call it when someone lifts their foot off the ground and then doesn't set it back down?
That it is as fast or faster than the current release. I am always fearful lately of new releases as they typically mean slower and bloated.
I even recently downgraded all the office machines to Office 2000 from office 2003 as the minimal feature benefits do not outweigh the increased speed in loading and operation as well as far smaller memory footprint.
I love how they put an X on each tab and the tabs automatically resize after a certain number of tabs is added / removed. Every time I try to switch tabs I accidentally close one and every time I try to close more than one tab I accidentally switch to the second tab instead of closing it. Maybe I'm blind and there is a way to switch back to the old tabbing system? This one blows though IMO so someone please enlighten me! Or do I just revert to 1.5?
I look forward to the actual release. Of the American English version. For more than one platform. (This is not directed at the firefox team).
Chris said that current stats indicate that Firefox usage peaks mid-week, as opposed to the weekends - which he said is the reverse of what it was two years ago when they launched Firefox.
Where do they get these stats?
more innovation and web integration isn't going to develop Firefox any more pentetration into IE's market share. Why? Because for the most part people just don't care.
I love firefox, use it daily. Even put up with the bugs that were "ignored" for a long time (like memory leaks, having your bookmarks vanish for no reason, etc). Yet reading the review it is still clear that too many miss the point.
It doesn't matter how much better you are than IE, you have to give people a real, tangible reason to switch and then you have to make it so exceedingly easy that there is next to no effort involved. That second part is more important than the first. I like many others here can come up with many "tanglible" reasons for people to switch, I still can't get them to download it or install it.
Penetration comes with getting someone that people trust to distribute the software along side their product. May I suggest Quicken (all that tax software coming out can easily accomodate FF). Hell, get a game manufacturer to provide the browser as part of the install process. With a good windows installer it can be made a seamless part of experience.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
IE7 and FF2, I have to say its really no contest. Despite just plain hating how much vertical real estate the new tab toolbar takes up, performance with IE 7 is just horrible. Even a light page like the Google home page take about about half second longer to render on my Core 2 Duo machine. Let's not forget only really giving lip service to CSS standards, there is still going to be a ton of web pages that need hacks or workarounds for IE CSS issues. Check out http://www.positioniseverything.net/ for the latest hoops you need to jump through for IE. In no means is Firefox perfect in its CSS support but at least they respond to incompatibilities in a reasonable time frame.
Does anyone know if it's possible to get rid of the little drop-down thingy that lists all the tabs? They put it right where the close button is supposed to be (well, moved a little to the side if you re-enable the old-style close button), but it's in the way and annoying. I haven't seen anything that looked obvious in about:config to remove it, so if anyone has any suggestions, I'd appreciate it. Thanks!
And google are Ursurpers of Freedom.
Information wants to be free, don't use firefox. use a TRUE free GPL webbrowser like Elinks instead and
LEt freedom Ring!!!!
Honestly, I've been using Firefox 2.0 since RC1, and I don't find anything really compelling about it over Firefox 1.5. I mean...I use FF about 80% of the time at home, and use it almost exclusively at work, but there just wasn't anything that made me go "wow" about it.
Also, it seems to me that Firefox has developed a rather hefty memory / CPU footprint, and its text rendering performance is noticably slower than Opera and IE, especially on Linux. (Just to be clear that means Firefox on Linux seems to render huge amounts of text slower than IE wine'd on linux and Opera native on linux...just my experience).
Anyways, it's a solid release, and still my primary browser....good for the Firefox team...but I can't help but think it would have served FF better to release something more compelling in their 2.0 release.
Yes, autoupdate will allow you to update to 2.0. You have the option to refuse the update. If you refuse the update then the update will still offer you point releases of the 1.5.x series while it continues to be supported.
having your bookmarks vanish for no reason, etc
I have more bookmarks(a few hundred) than anyone else I personally know, and I've never seen this happen. Is this something people besides yourself have experienced?
I'm Just curious.
Cheers.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I think firefox needs a tagline. Maybe Mozilla foundation can contact BMW and include a free firefox CD with every BMW sold. (ie. the Ultimate Driving Experience along with the Ultimate Browsing experience). Things like this will help firefox's penetration. People really need a reason to use firefox over IE, and right now I can think of two good reasons:
1) Firefox doesn't have the huge ActiveX security hole that IE has.2) Firefox offers tabbed browsing (now that IE7 is out, this is no longer a Firefox advantage).
So the list of major advantages firefox has over IE is dwindling. I think integrating some form of anonymous browsing, either through a network such as Tor, or through an anonymous proxy service would give Firefox yet another advantage over IE... Maybe Firefox 3?
Gotta love how the release notes say "a shortcut lets users quickly re-open an accidentally closed tab." Anyone know what said shortcut is?
Neat sounding feature, but kinda useless if you can't find the shortcut anywhere.
P.
free music
I'm running Firefox 2 with Google Sync 1.2.20060911.3 just fine.
3) Inline spell-checking.
Not a biggie if you don't use online forums, but with the increase in the number of websites that let you write as well as read (think MySpace, Facebook, various forums, Writely/Google Docs, etc.), people are going to come to expect more advanced editing capabilities in their browser. Having spent some time using browsers that have inline (red underlining) spell checkers, such as Safari and Konqueror 3.5, going back to Firefox is always painful.
It's not nearly as much of an advantage over IE as tabbed browsing was, so there's little doubt that the gap between the two has narrowed somewhat, but it's still something.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Yet you're still a douchebag. Yay, you use Opera - go fuck yourself.
Because it has approximately 1Mb more than Opera included in the install file.
Wow, you've read slashdot for several years? You must be a god!
Look, you don't have to go in search of extensions. The browser works fine out of the box and provides privacy protection, pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing, the best javascript implementation, proper support for more image formats than any other browser including SVG, MNG (last I checked) and proper PNG... It just happens that you can add additional functionality through extensions. If you don't need it, then you don't need them. Meanwhile, they provided a very nice site from which you can download extensions so that you can get them if you need them.
There's nothing stopping anyone from making a nice website that has a great set of extensions, except that there's apparently little demand. Every so often I do a writeup on which extensions I happen to use, and post it on my website. (The last one was on a different site - I haven't updated for 2.0 yet but that's coming.) (ObDisclosure: I have amazon referral links, but no other ads.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Which hotkey do you hit to pull up your pants?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
1MB?! Yikes! That's going to take an extra 3 seconds to download!
E pluribus unum
Just get it now, without overwhelming specific mirrors:m l?product=firefox-2.0&os=win&lang=en-US/a
;)
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/download.ht
I don't see this as a bad thing, as your still getting it the way they want (using the official link that selects a mirror for you) I'm just not waiting for them to post the link, so I wrote it myself
Firefox is still relatively lean. I agree, it could be leaner. Frankly though I don't think that the install size is the problem, it's the memory leak issue. That seems to be much better, however, in 2.0.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Every time I look at the new features, this still feels like a Point Release to me. I would only justify it as going up a whole version if substantial underlying code was changed which, of course, is not visible to the user.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Among other things.
Slate is owned by Washington Post and MSNBC'es "MS" comes from Microsoft. They do every kind of possible compatibility tricks disallowing other systems rather than their Win32/IE combination too.
Slate was always kind of "independent", we must admit it. I have seen/read many anti BillG/Windows stuff there.
Firefox 2 is a major update to a browser which is used on millions of machines and started to be choice of companies. I don't favour it on OS X (feels like Windows) but it is the truth.
See where Firefox 2 release is buried on their "Technology News", you will figure it is owned by Microsoft in its full extent.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032118/
Just months ago, those fascist were suggesting to update their IE to Mac OS X using people while there is no such thing exists anymore. Just to "punish" us for not using their OS. Not to forget MS Media Player 7 was causing major problems on OS X Tiger (10.4,latest) too.