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Mozilla Firefox 3 Features Screencast
An anonymous reader points to a mention at MozillaZine of "a screencast by Mozilla developer Mike Beltzner, demonstrating some of the new features in Mozilla Firefox 3, which is due out very soon. Weighing in at under four minutes, the screencast gives a concise overview of why you should be excited about Firefox 3. Due to its visual nature, the screencast shows Firefox's features far more clearly than the many written previews that have been published. A picture really is worth a thousand words."
2%...really? You think only 2% of /. users have flash installed? Even if that is a hyperbole, it seems a bit extreme.
I have to say FireFox 3 has some features I can't believe have been missing up until this point. The awesome bar, looks awesome.
In fact, i find it amazing most areas of browsers haven't been "just searchable" like FireFox 3 is now, having seen how much sense this makes.
Good job guys, you're setting a high bar for the rest to follow (no doubt).
throw new NoSignatureException();
It's probably the software I use the most. And I'm not a web developer.
I'm not insane! My mother had me tested.
Wow, the summary is totally right for once - watching the screencast makes the features actually seem desirable.
/want/ to download FF3 and get to having some of those neat widgets.
Normally you just download the software and are sort of pleasantly surprised when you find a new feature, or similarly disappointed when there are none. In this case, it actually makes me
The Awesomebar can't hear you over the sound of how awesome it is.
The Firefox 2.0 history panel is damn near useless to me. It offers the convenient option to sort by date and site, but apparently one would never need to search within those results, because typing in the search box clears that filter.
Just like the sibling AC comment you are telling me that I need to change my behavior to adjust for what the FF team think is right. This is just like the Pidgin team telling the world that the behavior all have learned is wrong and the new way is the right way. It's the wrong way around - programs has to help the user optimize his or her work flow, while this is what they wanted with the feature, changing behavior means the user has to relearn everything from scratch - my way of doing it was fast, reliable and worked for me.
This is by no means a unique incident, someone comes up with some thing they think is nicer, but always forget that they have taught hordes of people to do it the other way - you have to leave in options for going "old school" rather than alienating your most devote supporters - and it shouldn't be buried somewhere in the internals of the system.
Oh and to the mods, get a life - I'm stating the facts as they are from my point of view, developers needs to keep users work flow in mind when adding features.
Don't get me wrong I love FF, but the added features has alienated me from it and too much bloating could lead to switching to others like Konquerer/Opera.
... I just type s and arrow down and slashdot would be the first link since its my most visited site with S in the beginning. If I wanted to go to sinfest I'd go si and arrow down - this behavior has to change with FF3, now the browser will popup the most visited site with S in it - and that isn't necessarily slashdot. I don't think it quite works like that, I thought it "learnt" from your choice (takes a while) now when I press S slashdot comes up, if I want splatterladder I use arrow-down - that's the same behaviour as you had before, perhaps a different number of arrow-downs? It seems that it tries to guess what I'm going to choose (based on most used, bookmarks, freshness?) and makes it come up first.I'll admit I didn't like it to start with either, but I've gotten used to it now.
Perhaps it's not as clever as I think, but it seems pretty efficient. The no-need-to-type-the-domain feature is hot for me too as my memory is very poor.
FWIW.
While I'm sure that there are about:config enteries that will fix all this stuff, I wonder if this sort of thing is really such a good idea.
I want to enter and address and have it fail if I mistype it.
I don't want want browser pulling up anything I didn't explicitly tell it to. I don't want an address bar that guesses anything. I don't want a browser to list links to "sugested" sites as I start typing anywhere.
It seems like more and more firefox wants to take control (and privacy) out of our hands. At least by default anyway.
Firefox has all kinds of ways already to send your input to some 3rd party website or "service" (usually google) to make "helpful sugestions" etc.
There's something very wrong with the idea of a browser connecting to a 3rd party to "guss" at what I wanted and then rendering whatever it finds there. It's not like googles "i feel lucky" search hasn't been used by malicious folks before.
Am I the only one who finds this sort of thing creepy?
Am I alone in wondering why we should have to modify about:config settings disable things like suggestions, keywords, fixup, browser.send_pings, autorefresh, etc after every fresh install just to get a browser that isn't taking me where *it* thinks I should go and tracking me while I'm there!
Well, I see your point. However, I think one can (and should) adjust behaviour--of course, not for the programmer's sake.
I mean this in the sense of Bram Molenaar (vim's main author) generic advise: 1) Detect inefficiency 2) Find a quicker way 3) Make it an habit. I think that advise is valuable and to the point.
In this case, changing behaviour doesn't mean learning *everything* from scratch. But: if you can't find a quicker way, then maybe it's fault of the program. The interface isn't accesible enough. In this sense, the way of doing it I pointed has a (from the usability point of view, severe) flaw: the user must open the Bookmarks Manager to set a keyword for the bookmark. It would be easier if such a thing were accesible from the "star button dialog". Actually, I'd prefer that to the tags thing there.
Everybody hopes transitions such as FF2 > FF3 should be as seamless as possible for the users, and programmers should try to make it happen. I've seen lots of people complain about FF3 about the point we are discussing, and of course there is a problem about that. So we agree on this.
To end: this change hasn't been such a big deal for me, but only as I adapted my behaviour. But it seems natural now.
Umm you still have this.
If you went si, unless you have a ton of sites starting with si, it'll still find it that way. This isn't any different than other autocompletes.
Your difference between 1 and two letters is the same as anywhere else. Honestly, autocomplete tracks most used links too so what's your point? Your comment seems to contradict itself a little on what your problem with how the new awesomebar works, which is same as before in your case really. an AC who got a +4 put dead on your options.
Firefox 3 in my opinion is huge improvements all around.
why go to all of that effort to fix your problem when you can just complain about it on slashdot?
The vast majority of us love the new address bar, and yes, there is an extension that brings back the old behaviour (I have no idea as to the reliability of the extension as I don't use it, it took about 2 minutes with an open mind to get used to the new location bar and now everything is so much easier with it)
It's a shame developers always change behaviour without giving the option to change it back, there should be an option to revert every single user interface change ever made so that people who hate change can keep things exactly like they used to be while everybody else has to sift through a billion different options to change something important (such as the proxy settings). Or maybe those of you who hate change can just stick with IE5 on Windows 98.
For fuck's sake, it's not difficult to get used to the new location bar, and once you do I guaruntee you'll love it.
being vague is almost as cool as doing that other thing...
Yes, a seamless FF2 to FF3 is exactly what I'm looking for. Javascript is slooowww in FF2, so slow that I really can't go back because it's noticable. But with FF3 I'm stuck with this funky awesomebar, a screwy theme (for Vista/Server 08), and all sorts of weird changes like the new unified History/Bookmarks organizer. Why can't they just optimize the heck out of the existing codebase, implement new and faster technologies on the backend, and leave the interface alone? Come on, if people want all sorts of crazy URL tracking capabilities, maybe they should use a less lightweight browser like Seamonkey or Opera..
but it is learned behaviour - I don't look at the address bar, slashdot has been s and arrow down for the last 5-6 years for me in all browsers.
To me it is like someone deciding Dvorak should be the new defacto layout - suddenly I'm back having to look at what the computer is doing rather than expecting it to do as I want.
We need an extension that checks visited sites against netnanny and erases the naughty ones from the FF history.
But the code is all open source, so if lots of people side with you, I'm sure we'll see a new browser branch off from FF2 that backports all of the FF3 speed improvements.
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.
That address bar is brilliant.
:/
I've seen several complaints across the web about it and I simply do not know how.
I am the first person to complain when something changes un-necessarily (Windows Vista's explorer in classic mode is nothing short of an abortion, a filthy disgusting abortion and I mean every goddamned word of that, you'd be surprised how many little bugs are in it)
That being said, this firefox bar is virtually flawless, it seems to remember what I normally open based on what I type, how often I go there, how many times I hit the down arrow for another option etc.
As a hardcore keyboard user, I love it.
The only flaw is one of the benefits and that's how it hunt and pecks through your bookmarks.
If you share your machine and say you have bookmarks like 'tranny gets railed by 15 guys' it could be kind of bad if your co-worker jumps on your PC and starts typing in 'tran' for transmission or transformers in the address bar
Baring that though, it truely is gold.
Oh and it's genuinely and substantially faster.
Now just fix google browser sync, tabs menu and we're good to go.
Arguably the second description tells you more about the man (what's in a name?), but as a human being you're more satisfied by the first answer. That's just the way we work. A name gives us something around which to crystallize our knowledge and our memories. Analog information fades and blurs. Without a name, similar people blur together. Is there one cute divorced brunette with glasses in the professional services department, or two? Once you have names for them, you can start sorting out their characteristics into two individuals.
Usually when people refer to a site's URL, they mean its domain name. A domain name is even better than a human name, because they are unique and are usually carefully picked to be memorable and easy to spell. It took a while for people to figure out how to choose good domain names, but they do a good job these days. Often, when a website has a long official name that doesn't match its domain name, people find it more natural to use the domain name as the name they use in casual conversation.
Domain names are also absolutely essential to disambiguate between sites with similar content. If you give somebody ridiculous directions to a web site (like "gis kitten star trek indiana third row second column" or "delicious my tags linux radius second listed") then there's a good chance they'll end up on a different site, despite the apparent precision of the directions. You'd better give them part of the URL so they can distinguish between the really cool site you're trying to send them to and all the really lame sites with similar content.
Better yet, give them a name. Giving someone a long context-sensitive algorithm for finding a site, instead of giving them a URL, is like saying, "You should really watch this movie, that has Tom Hanks in it, but he's not the main character, and it's set in Miami, and there are all these drug dealers and a pastry chef...." Don't you just want to punch people like that? Don't be like that. Just say you'll send a link when you get a chance.
All in all, tags and search terms are essential fallbacks when you don't know the name of something, but everything is easier and more certain when you remember the name. Plus, names are essential when communicating with other people (who don't have the same context and memories as you) and when you aren't sure you can recognize what you're looking for or distinguish it from similar content.
Why would I need bookmarks? It's easier to type the first couple of letters and have the address come up. It also means I can see the most commonly visited parts of the site and go straight to them, you can't do that with bookmarks.