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Firefox 4 Will Push Edges of Browser Definition
Chris Blanc writes "Mozilla Lab's push is to blur the edges of the browser, to make it both more tightly integrated with the computer it's running on, and also more hooked into Web services. So extended, the browser becomes an even more powerful and pervasive platform for all kinds of applications. 'Beard wants the new online/offline, browser/service to be more intelligent on behalf of its users. Early examples of this intelligence include the "awesome bar," which is what Mozilla calls the new smart address bar in Firefox 3. It offers users smart URL suggestions as they type based on Web searches and their prior Web browsing history. He's looking to extend on this with a "linguistic user interface" that lets users type plain English commands into the browser bar. Beard pointed me towards Quicksilver and Enso as products he's cribbing from.'"
Cleartype fonts will clear that right up.
Because I would like my browser to interact with my machine as little as possible && and I am not at all into social networking.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I really dont want mozilla suggesting anything in my address bar
Didn't we try this 10 years ago, and it sucked? I want more separation between my browser and OS, not less.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Surely Firefox is going in the wrong direction! IMHO, blurring the edges of the browser should be the job of the Window Manager.
I'll get my coat..
From his picture in TFA, Chris Beard, VP of Labs for Mozilla, has no beard, despite his high-up position within the open source movement.
Does open source play by ZZ-top rules now?
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
Even though this is Open Source It sounds to Scarry.
We origionally used firefox because it was a fast simple browser without all the overhead of Mozilla/Netscape. It seems like it is going back into that direction again. Why because once it got popular people began asking oh One more thing. The firefox team needs to learn to say NO to feature requests and Yes to fixing bugs and not finding excuses not to fix them.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I don't WANT the edges pushed. I just want a browser, really. I just want to look at web pages, maybe even post to the occasional online forum (like Slashdot). I don't want a huge bloated thing that will suck up all my system resources and take two minutes to fire up. I just want a simple, standard-compliant, browser. Please, just let Firefox be that and make a new program to do all that other crap.
We're not going to fix the memory leaks.
(Seriously though, I love Firefox. But please remember why it was spun-off from Mozilla in the first place...)
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
Anyone else find the security aspect of this a bit frightful? They want a database which will track our browsing habits, constant updates to the Mozilla servers, and integration with the OS?
Firefox starts to sound like the next big brother.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Odd that Firefox was spun off from Mozilla because Mozilla was too bloated and heavy, and now we're back around where Firefox is going to be (is?) the bloated one -- and the new Mozilla, SeaMonkey, is actually light and simple compared to Firefox.
So I've switched to SeaMonkey. So long, Firefox. I've used you since the early days when you were known as Phoenix. I shan't be using you any more, given the direction you're heading.
This is a sig. Deal with it.
I tend to agree. I think this is fine for the crowd that knows nothing about computers and WANTS to know nothing about computers. You doubleclick one icon and it does everything, they can't tell it's laggy and they don't care.
Techies need techy programs, quick/fast/onlywhatyouneed. For some reason FF3 (which I have been impressed with up until now) has seemed to lag quite a bit lately. I'm trying out Opera 9.5 (my 3rd go at their beta) and Webkit (forced to use windows here, webkit is my choice on OSX). Both have quite a bit of merit.
- Gestation: Initial release of totally awesome browser is developed.
- Infancy: A few people start using the browser and see how totally awesome it is. Word spreads.
- Childhood: User base grows explosively. People start complaining that totally awesome browser doesn't have feature X.
- Adolescence: More and more features get tacked on to browser. Side effects of bloat become noticable. Users start to ask for a lite version.
- Maturity: Browser starts performing tasks entirely unrelated to web browsing. Browser becomes hefty and clumsy (FireFox is somewhere in this stage)
- Entrenchment: Browser has enough of a user base to establish its own nonstandard rules for web content, essentially branching the web. Alienation and hostility ensue.
- Death:: User base dwindles becuase the browser doesn't play nice with the rest of the world anymore.
Those of us who think the new vision is a bad thing aren't necessarily curmudgeons who don't want anything to change. We know a lot of very specific things about how we want to interact with a computer, and we don't want the same organization that produces our web browser of choice to dictate the rest of that interaction. It doesn't really matter whether they get it right or not.The whole original premise of Firefox was that it was lightweight, fast, and actually worked. Because of this, I think they should keep the firefox brand as-is... make it smaller, faster and more lightweight, but no reason to go fill it up with these features.
I think they should fork development into a new product. Basically going in the direction that they are discussing with version 4. These features look like they could be a great idea. A lot of really progressive and great things look stupid on paper, but once you see them and use them, they can surprise you, at times.
Personally, I think they need to make firefox even moreminimalistic. Something that will have the absolute smallest memory footprint after being launched and be snappy and responsive. Modern websites have a TON of code ([x]html/css/javascript) and graphics so it's understandable that the footprint would grow when you have 30 tabs open; but on slower hardware such as the eeepc or older laptops, I'd like the browser to not impact the system quite as much in the memory department.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
Firefox will be a great OS. The only thing it lacks is a decent browser.
What we need is the browser equivalent of vi. And it actually exists. How wierd is that?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I like the idea of Weave. I log into 3 different Firefox browsers each day. None have the same bookmarks or history. My last attempt at synchronizing them over the internet resulted in Google deleting the vast majority of my bookmarks. I wasn't about to try that again. That said, I really don't want my cookies, passwords or favorites ending up on a desktop in Thailand unauthorized, for any reason whatsoever.
I also like Prism. I know people like to complain about the bloat of Firefox. It's not like FF has been getting any slower. In fact, through the last 3 beta versions of FF3, it's been getting faster, and the memory usage has actually gone down. What's the big deal?
The primary roadblock at this point is network access. Sometimes I don't have network access on my MacBook, depending where I am (Alaska comes to mind). The ability to continue working on web-based applications, absent of a network, is tantalizing, to say the least. Imagine writing a whole bunch of emails on Gmail, and synchronizing once you get network access. (Like all the stability of Outlook (ha!) and all the continuous service updates of Gmail, rolled into one.)
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
Mozilla Lab's push is to blur the edges of the browser, to make it both more tightly integrated with the computer it's running on, and also more hooked into Web services.
So what they're saying is, "We're cloning internet explorer"?
Doesn't Firefox already use up enough memory? Currently Firefox is running on my computer using up nearly 800MB of RAM. I have 3 tabs open and none of them are doing anything intense. I'm glad my computer has 2 gigs of RAM but I bought that for Photoshop not Firefox...
Where the women are easy and the booze is cheap!
You can't take the sky from me...
Score: 5, Confused
It seems that the world is moving back to a thin client setup; but instead of a client having a network connection to a server, its communication is via several abstraction and generic transport layers (HTTP / AJAX); instead of using a relevant protocol, everything is translated into XML-based RPC; and instead of using a useful widget set, everyone is bastardising HTML (eg, the hundreds of javascript-based calendar widgets; when all GUI toolkits I know of have one built in).
Is it just me, or is this hideously inefficient, ugly, and Wrong(tm)?
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
"Get off my lawn"
All I really want is for the address bar to include sites I've visited many times, but just have never typed in the actual URL before. It's a real pain to start typing only to find that the address isn't coming up in the suggestions and resorting back to the bookmarks menu. Anything more complex than that is a pain for me -- I want less typing, not more.
I'm sure you can turn it off with a plugin that will break with every single release.
There are no nutrients in [rock]. Dragon kills you. You are dead. [Restart?]
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Tagged with "jumpedtheshark".
A web browser should be a web browser, goddammit.
The Mozilla Foundation is the single biggest thing hurting Firefox. The MoFo has already turned Firefox into proprietary software. Seriously, Firefox isn't as free as you think, all while falsely claiming Firefox is open-source. They commit extortion against people who make custom icons, and they've announced that no one is allowed to distribute Firefox without MoFo signing off on it. Debian and the FSF want nothing to do with them, and for good reason.
I have much less of a problem with Opera. Opera doesn't hide the fact that they're not free at all. It's a closed-source browser that admits it. The Mozilla Foundation lacks that honesty.
Not to mention performance: Firefox is a giant memory leak, while Opera just keeps chugging along. Then again, Opera has managed to piss me off with 9.50...I hate how 9.50 totally locks up my computer and makes my hard drive grind for 30 seconds flat every time I type a URL into the address bar.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
Nope
the Awesome Bar is what Chuck Norris shits out every morning.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They really need to just work on having the fastest and most standards-compliant Web browser available. That is what people want and expect from Firefox.
Microsoft has been trying to "blur the lines" of their browser for years, and look at the mess that's ended up being. Once you start blurring the lines and hooking more and more into the operating system- you create security and reliability risks. Firefox is popular now because it is more standards compliant than IE 7 (and probably IE 8) and is considerably safer and more reliable. Why ruin a good thing?
To all the people panicking about IE like OS integration, I think you're all over-reacting and missunderstanding. There's more than one way to join two things together.
The article doesn't go into specifics, but I'd imagine that what Beard is talking about is creating a browser that has a richer UI, and not limited by the traditional browser window. The effect would be a browser that doesn't look like a browser, and webapps that don't look like webapps. This doesn't mean a tightly-coupled OS/Browser combo like IE is/was. Obviously Mozilla can't really do that, since they don't have control over any OS.
AccountKiller
Web surfing, period. If I wanted to do other things, I'd get the other things that would do it. At least make it a plugin please.
What makes me wish a web page were more tightly integrated with my OS? Absolutely nothing.
What makes me wish the address bar did more than go to where I type? Absolutely nothing.
Things that I wish for:
1) A fast, stable, independent browser that launches and terminates quickly.
2) The address bar not to reset focus when a page is done loading if I am typing.
Firefox is great because of all the plugins. I managed to get it just the way I want it, and I couldn't have done it without them.
Firefox sucks out of the box though, so maybe the developers can work on making a more impressive initial package.
Of course it is inefficient and Wrong(tm), and I have commented before on this same issue. And don't get me started on writing rich web applications that run on different browsers. Cross-browser compatibility very frustrating and maybe even harder than cross-platform compatibility.
However, what else do you suggest?
1. A Browser is already available on most systems, nothing to install.
2. Having an application run inside your Browser is reasonably secure.
3. HTTP is a protocol that is enabled/working on 100% of machines connected to the internet.
4. Zero administration. User doesn't have to do anything to get it working.
If you were to have another Application Client, you would need:
1. Damn good design and balance between various issues (performance, friendliness to user, ease of development, security, features, integration into OS, etc). And of course open standards. This can be achieved, but it's not easy. A lot of projects tried it and failed.
2. Popularity. It would have to be on >30% of machines out there. You would basically have to convince Microsoft to include it with Windows. And that is not going to happen, because it would threaten their office monopoly and other products.
3. Networking. You would have to convince millions of clueless network admins and security policy makers to allow another protocol on their network, especially in corporate networks. Not going to happen, and will impede your popularity a lot.
So writing applications for browsers is a really bad idea, but it is the best we have. If Microsoft didn't have a monopoly, and we could easily distribute another client to desktop/home machines, this might be less of an issue.
And practice shows that thin clients are a GOOD idea if you have clueless users. And most of the users are. You cannot trust users to administer their machines properly. Well designed server is more reliable than a malware ridden desktop machine. And it can backup files automatically, preserve user settings, work from different places, etc.
--Coder