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Firefox 3.0 Makes Leap Forward
Kurtz'sKompund writes "Mozilla has announced that Firefox 3.0 has passed a major milestone! The Places feature has been added to the alpha client slated for release next week. Places is a complete re-work of the bookmarking and history browser functions. It was at one point slated for Firefox 2.0, but will instead see release in Mozilla's next major version. '"We enabled the Places implementation of bookmarks on the trunk," said the Places team in a post to the Mozilla developer center blog. "Although there is still much to be done, this is an important milestone for us." Firefox 3.0 alpha 5 is scheduled to launch June 1. Because Places uses the open-source SQLite database engine to store and retrieve bookmarks and history entries, it's incompatible with earlier Firefox editions' bookmarks. Alpha users must convert their existing entries, Mozilla developers said."
Look, I love firefox, but I can't really think of anything wrong with regular-ass bookmarks. I have no idea why they need to be in a database of any sort. This seems like a bloat feature to me.
They're apparently embedding a fucking SQL DATABASE into Firefox 3. Given that SQL databases are not exactly known for being light-weight (in fact, quite the opposite), I'm going to take a guess that the answer is probably half-past never.
If you want a light-weight, featureful browser that doesn't require 100 extensions to make it barely usable, you might consider trying Opera.
However, the bookmarks will now just take advantage of SQLite, which they currently do not.
Oh, goody, so when Firefox next corrupts my profile (and that's a when, not an if), instead of having a nice easy-to-read text file I can easily open with an text editor and copy the bookmarks out of, I'll have a binary blob that I can do NOTHING with.
Yeah, that's really progress right there.
After all, why should things like bookmarks be human-readable? Who would ever want to pull bookmarks off a machine without launching a SQL database?!
Unfortunately I don't have moderator points at the moment; the troll moderation you received is completely unwarranted.
As you can see, SQLite is one of those darlings of the open source movement that aren't open to criticism. I HAVE used SQLite many times, and your concerns are certainly warranted whether or not they turn out to be significant. As the replies to your comment and moderation on it indicate, you're just not supposed to bring it up at all.
I know of three or four projects clinging to SQLite despite various problems it causes, some of which are deemed features. In these cases the DB has caused far more harm than good, but since the since has such a religious following it's simply not an option to drop it.
Sorry, man.