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Firefox Losing Its Way?
An anonymous reader writes "NeoSmart Technologies has a recap on Firefox 2.0 and its shortcomings. Aside from the technical aspects, the article raises some good questions about the Firefox 'community,' it's future, and what it's goals are at the end of the day. Their conclusion? Firefox 1.5 was a much better open-source project/community model than 2.0 ever will be, and that 'It seems Firefox has lost its way somewhere along the passage to fame.'"
To change it back to the old setting (x on the right of the tabs bar) go to about:config (in your address bar) and change the value of browser.tabs.closeButtons to 3. .tabMinWidth settings
For the issue of tab size and overflow managing, you can edit the browser.tabs.tabClipWidth and
Nice troll. Looking at bonsai, of the eleven distinct patches checked in on trunk during the last day, two originated with people without CVS access (aka, third parties).
There hasn't been a *single* patch to fix flaws in FF2. Not. A. Single. One.
There haven't exactly been a lot vulnerabilities found either. The only one I know of found in Firefox 2 since its release is marked as less critical by Secunia. I'm sure that if you can find critical errors in Firefox, they will be fixed quickly.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
> I think "lost its way" is too strong of a phrase.
I agree. The developer are mostly focusing on Firefox 3.0 anyway, because of the major improvements it will have. The 2.0 was just a small upgrade in the middle, mostly because of the PR. Because the changes in 3.0 require a lot of development and a lot of testing, they didn't want to hurry it. So I wouldn't judge Firefox because of the 2.0. Better wait for 3.0.
Have you ever tried out Opera?
Let's look at the facts for Opera:
CHECK 1. Stops popups automatically
CHECK 2. constant updates and improvements every x months
CHECK 3. better security than IE
CHECK 4. the option to easily clear cookies, history, temp files, etc on close
5. Is faster, more standards compliant, and more stable than FF or IE.
6. Includes nearly everything needed for the average user in the core build so no downloading and installing of extensions is needed.
IMHO The Opera browser is the best browser available and I wish more people knew it existed because the majority of people I know think the only choices available are IE and FF, many of them have never even heard of Opera.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
I disagree heartily. There has been a bug on OSX for *two years* which makes firefox almost unusable.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
If you look in the layout, view, xpcom and xulrunner directories, you'll find a lot of the core code. The browser directory is for the JavaScript and XUL files which make up the interface and product-specific parts of Firefox. :-)
Brendan Eich addresses most of these issues http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/20 06/10/mozilla_2.html
You should know that they do intend to compete in the mobile web space. That means they have no choice but to clean everything up without the excuse "oh memory is so cheap anyway.."
Firefox Power http://firefoxpower.blogspot.com/
The Mozilla codebase is a mess. However, it is getting better. Did you look at it at all when Netscape first released the source? It was absolutely terrible. The Mozilla guys have done a good job at cleaning it over the years, but it's still a mess. They really should have just started from scratch and used the old codebase as a reference.
Hold on a minute! They did do that. They rewrote the whole damn thing starting on October 1998, a mere seven months after the initial release of the source code. One year later, mozilla shipped nothing, and JWZ resigned citing lack of progress. In 2000 -- two years after the rewrite started -- mozilla released the new layout engine, Gecko. Jaws all around had to be picked up off the floor. It was a horribly buggy. (The most obvious bug to me was the fact that scrolling to the bottom of a page, then back up, then back down a second time, caused TWO copies of the page to appear in the window. Repeat N times, and you got N copies. I discovered that bug within the first five minutes of use.) FOUR years after the rewrite, Mozilla released version 1.0. Now four years after 1.0, 8 years after the rewrite that is widely considered the biggest blunder of mozilla's history. A blunder that is made all the worse since it's outcome was immediately forseeable.
Now you're not seriously proposing the repeat their old mistakes are you?