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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."
It's a very lightweight C library which basically enables "on the ground" SQL queries and such. No client/server mechanisms to worry about, no middleware (other than sqlite.dll, and even then you can just take the source and compile it in), and the security of the database is handled by security permissions on the file. That's right, "the" file. A single file contains the schema and data.
It fully supports transactions and is appropriately ACID. For someone who's had his Firefox bookmarks hosed before, this is very welcome for me.
The benefit of this will [hopefully] be fully searchable bookmarks and easy to move the bookmarks around to other computers.
I've used it in the past and it's been great for me. Check it out: http://www.sqlite.org/
More Twoson than Cupertino
SQLite is developed for embedding so it is miniscule (less than 250KiB). It was already included in Firefox 2.0 so it does not add any size to Firefox 3.0. It also allows for some interesting ideas that are being played with for the new release, like site annotation and full text indexing.
SQLite has this name because it is... lite! It has a very, very small footprint. By your comment, I can tell you have never used it. I have. It is designed to be small and easy to embed into an app with out requiring a bunch of resources.
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
You think a SQL db that only takes up 250K is significant? Geez, what do you have like 4MB of memory? The SQLite DB is already in FF 2. So it will not add anything to FF 3. However, the bookmarks will now just take advantage of SQLite, which they currently do not. This will give you plenty of ways to sort your bookmarks and store more info for each bookmark. For example, in FF 2 you can give a bookmark a keyword. This way you can just type that keyword and go to that URL. I use can type "/." and press enter and get to /. with no clicks. I have a lot of keywords setup for my most used bookmarks. Bookmarks in FF are more than just list of strings. They have a URL, name, keyword and description. One big problem with bookmarks in FF 2 is the inability to sort properly. FF 3 should fix that now that FF 3 will be able to use Order By to sort how the user likes.
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
Places still writes the bookmark.html file.
It just doesn't read-it anymore (but you can tell it to import it back if you like)
BTW, sqlite stores everything in one file so nothing is really changed
if you wan't to save, you just have to copy one file
if you wan't to move/copy you profile, it's just a file to copy
it will be much more robust, powerfull and allow new things to be done.
also the sqllite code is stable and field tested by hundred of projects so it's a very good idea to reuse it instead of using some mozilla only solution.