Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Firefox 3.0 Makes Leap Forward

Posted by Zonk on from the go-you-crazy-dino-go dept.

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."

6 of 401 comments (clear)

  1. Bring it on... by BrokenHalo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm looking forward to this going gold for just one reason: some of the sites I visit frequently have a particularly in-your-face usage of auto-refresh which pisses me off (i.e. insisting on re-loading just when I'm in the middle of reading a particular paragraph). FF 3.0 (I heard) is supposed to be able to block this...

  2. SQLite is brilliant by athloi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This lightweight, fast, simple database eliminates many of the headaches associated with using a full-on SQL installation, and works just as well for most of what most developers and users need.

    If you're a Perl geek, like me, you will find this Perl module for seamless SQLite interface to be a power tool. The next time you need to get something working by morning, and it's 2am and the person "in charge of databases" hasn't called back, you'll be thanking it.

    --
    technical writing / development
  3. Re:Reinventing the wheel? by Coryoth · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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. Obviously you've never used Epiphany's bookmark system, with searchable tagging instead of hierarchical folders. It's rather nice and, due to searchability, you bookmark a lot more pages without worrying about getting an unmanageable mess of bookmarks. The tagging is nice because it lets you associate a bookmark with several different categories (which is pretty common). In general its just a nicer way to work with bookmarks. As to bloat -- you are aware that SQLite uses less than 250k for the entire database engine? That's hardly bloat, and the gains in bookmark management (presuming the Firefox guys put as nice a frontend on it as Epiphany did) are tremendous.
    --
    Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
  4. Native Mac UI by Kelson · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's also worth noting that native form controls for Mac OS X were enabled yesterday, something Firefox's Mac users have been clamoring for since the 0.x days.

  5. Re:When? by Trillan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    sqlite is vary resistant to corruption. In fact, the only way you're likely to see it is if Firefox for some reason tries to touch the databases with its own code rather than sqlite. Further, a simple command line query will dump everything.

    Even the phrase "launching a SQL database" indicates you're thinking of SQLite the wrong way.

    A better way of thinking of it is this: Mozilla developers are removing thousands of lines of code with an unknown number of bugs for a simple data storage mechanism used in thousands of software products, including embedded systems. SQLite works. In fact, it works astonishingly well. We're gradually using it to replace most data storage in our own products.

  6. Snappy Firefox by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I hope it makes a small leap backwards. Ever since a couple of weeks before fully upgrading to Ubuntu 7.04, when I run Evolution 2.10.1 and Firefox 2.0.0.3, after a few hours (or maybe a lot of GUI and HTTP events), some combo memory leak fills my 512MB RAM and starts crazily swapping. I have to kill both apps and restart them, recovering their sessions.

    Even if they just had watchdogs that could restart and recover session state, they'd be more useable.

    --

    --
    make install -not war