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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!
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 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.
to get rid of the close buttons on every tab and make it like 1.5 goto about:config and set
browser.tabs.closeButtons to 3
and to hide the Go button set
browser.urlbar.hideGoButton to true
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.
From the review of FF2: Tab Tweaks.
I've also found that this extension works fine with FF2: Tab Minus.
Small,and does the job perfectly. This was my single-biggest hassle with FF2. I do not understand how quasi-randomly moving the location of an item I use ALL the time is supposed to make things more efficient. Especially when you've opened up a bunch of images or documents in separate tabs and want to quickly scan through them looking for someting. Your eyes have to bounce around the screen, finding the stupid close button.
The old mechanism seemed to work better for that: put your mouse on the close button, and now you can focus on the *data*, not finding the button over and over... With the extension, you don't have to choose: they're both avaiable. Works for me.
Linux IT Consulting and Domino Development in Michigan
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.
Bb-B-C-C#-D
My blog
Alternatively, setting it to 0 will put a close button only on the current tab, if you prefer.
Personally, I like the default, though.
My blog
Just to add to that:
browser.tabs.closeButtons 0 = close button on active tab
browser.tabs.closeButtons 1 = default, close button on all tabs
browser.tabs.closeButtons 2 = no close buttons
browser.tabs.closeButtons 3 = Fx 1.x style, one close button on right
It updates instantly so you can try them all out and find the one you like. I like 2 because I use an extra mouse button to close tabs instead of the close buttons.
CTRL+Shift+T.
You can also right click the task bar and say Undo Close Tab.
And the History menu contains a submenu called Recently Closed Tabs.
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
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.'"
1MB?! Yikes! That's going to take an extra 3 seconds to download!
E pluribus unum
If you're doin' the Gnome/Linux thang*, open up the GConf editor and drill down through / -> desktop -> gnome -> interface. Change the key 'gtk_key_theme' to 'Emacs'. When you're focused on a textbox or the location bar, you get C-w, along with a bunch of other nifty stuff. My biggest complaint is that C-k deletes to the end of the line, but doesn't copy it into the clipboard.
More information.
* Dawg.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
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