Firefox 3.1 Alpha "Shiretoko" Released

Just as you were getting used to 3.0, those Mozilla guys have announced 3.1's Alpha release. FTA "Built on the pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.1 platform, Shiretoko includes a variety of new features. Called an 'early developer milestone,' the release includes bug fixes, improved Web standards support, Text API for the Canvas Element, support for border images and JavaScript query selectors, and improvements to the tab-switching function and the Smart Location Bar." You can download it if you dare.

Comments

Awesome bar disable?

[Richard_at_work]

Does it contain the ability to disable the 'Awesome Bar' completely?

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[Randle_Revar]

thankfully, no

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[Rik Sweeney]

Everyone! Over here quickly, and bring your camera! I found the one person who likes the Awesome bar!

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[Anonymous Coward]

The awesome bar works a bit like google pagerank, by creating associations between your partial input and the page you choose from the menu. If you write the initial letter of the desired URL and then click on the page you want to visit, it will (very) soon behave like the old URL bar.

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[hansamurai]

I actually love it, being able to type just an 's' to go to slashdot, or an 'x' to go to xkcd. But I know you're just trolling so whatever.

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[Verteiron]

I loathed the Awesomebar too. When I first started using it I would type "s" and it would list sites I only visited once, a year ago, because they had an "s" somewhere near the end of the URL, while sites with 's' near the beginning were listed much lower. This is obviously broken functionality, but I'm seeing less and less of that sort of thing the longer I use it. The longer you use it the better it gets; it has some kind of sorting algorithm that takes a while to get going properly. I have found typing a single word of the page title to relocate a page useful on occasion, and I now go for days at a time without cursing this unremovable feature.

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[negRo_slim]

I hope so, the Awesome bar was the only reason why I switched back to Firefox 2. I really don't understand how they could do something so wrong.

I thought the same thing, now I enjoy being able to access most of my sites with little more than a key press or two.

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[jd142]

Once I learned how to use it properly, I've grown to like it.

What do people hate about it? I'm genuinely curious.

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[ShieldW0lf]

I feel the same way. But it looks like they've made an effort:

If you prefer the results to always restrict to history and match only in the URL, you can go to about:config and change the corresponding preferences to nothing (edit the value and delete the special character). This way you can always be only searching your visited history and not worry about matching in the title.

The Javascript Query Selectors looks very interesting... I could really use that for unit testing.

The "border image" stuff has been a long time coming too... when I think of how many unnecessary nested tables I've had to build just because some suit wanted rounded corners of a certain color on everything, it makes me want to puke.

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[Fallingcow]

I could already do that in FF2. Awesomebar added nothing but annoyance.

But hey, that's what add-ons are for, right?

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[novafluxx]

No idea, I use to to navigate a lot faster than I did in FF2. I just start typing the name of something I have visited and it doesn't have to be the URL... I love it I think its awesome, but I guess having the option to disable it for those that want to disable it would be okay, as long as they don't complain about FF being "bloated."

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[Rik Sweeney]

Seriously, here goes:

I *hate* having to type stuff into the address bar. I only have about 20 entries in the browser history, but when I put FF3 on, most of those suddenly vanished and the only way I could get back to Slashdot was to type it in.

I don't want to type it in everytime I want to go there, why can't I just click on the fucking drop down arrow and look for it there, instead of typing in s.l.a.s until it finally comes up, then having to press the down arrow and hitting return. I could have found slashdot in 2 clicks and perhaps one scroll of the mousewheel.

I don't want to type in scummvm and get back 20 results of random pages containing the word scummvm but not a single one pointing to the main site.

In defence of the Awesome bar, I only used it for about an hour before dismissing it, but I reckon 1 hour is enough...

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[Hatta]

I've always been able to access most of my sites with little more than a key press or two. Hit 's' and slashdot.org is right there. The Awesome Bar pollutes the simplicity of the address bar with useless matches. If I really wanted to go to maps.google.com, I'd have started typing with an 'm' not an 's'.

The awesome bar is retarded.

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[Anonymous Coward]

That worked just fine in FF2. Now when I type s I get "eBay - New & used electronics, cars, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods & more at low prices". I bought something online recently. God only knows how long it will take their ridiculous 'frecency' algorithm to realize I only go to eBay once in a while. Nothing like unpredictable, unreliable behavior to make a feature suck. Thanks, awesomebar!

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[negRo_slim]

I've always been able to access most of my sites with little more than a key press or two. Hit 's' and slashdot.org is right there.

Yes but when I hit 't' that gives me The pirate bay, youtube, myspace, slashdot, flickr, in that order. I'm sorry but that is convenient. And I'm sure I could hit a different key for better results, but I'm pretty happy being able to visit nearly all my sites with one key press and a click. You pair that up with proper RSS feeds and you're golden.

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[jomas1]

I don't know why you are being presented maps.google.com when you enter an "s". Personally I love this feature. Now if I want to go to the University of Houston's website I can start typing "Houston" rather than remember something conter-intuitive like https://www.ed2go.com/ (which is the UofH homepage)

For me Firefox is now bookmarking every site I visit and allowing me to search for these sites by keywords in the url or title of the webpage. This is much more useful than manually keeping a list of bookmarks that become useless as soon as there are too many to view without scrolling.

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[Randle_Revar]

The awesomebar learns, and if you use it for a while, the sites you use most will move up the list.

Anyway, if you had about 20 entries you used in the dropdown list, why not use bookmarks on the toolbar? Keep the titles short, and you can fit in a fair number, and a folder or two goes a long way. If sites have recognizable favicons, you could even remove the titles and fit in a lot more.

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[spinkham]

If you only have 20 places you want to go, that's what the bookmarks toolbar is for. It has a "most visited" dropdown by default, and room for at least 15 or so one click launches if you keen the names short.

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[MROD]

I'm sure that it's not really Slashdot he's talking about, merely using it as an example.

The drop-down menu history is VERY useful as a temporary set of bookmarks which you will only need for a short period (say a month) and don't want to litter your real bookmarks with.

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[Hatta]

For me Firefox is now bookmarking every site I visit

That's the problem. The awesome bar conflates two different and important functions, the address bar and bookmarks. If they had provided a smart bookmarks feature instead of ruining the address bar, no one would be complaining.

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[jomas1]

For me Firefox is now bookmarking every site I visit

That's the problem. The awesome bar conflates two different and important functions, the address bar and bookmarks. If they had provided a smart bookmarks feature instead of ruining the address bar, no one would be complaining.

Fair enough. You used bookmarks and so the awesomebar does not work for you. I have 5 bookmarks on my bookmark toolbar. I stopped manually keeping any more bookmarks than will fit on my toolbar because as soon as I have to keep a list of nested bookmarks I am unable to easily access most of them.

I started using del.icio.us a few years ago so that I would be able to manage my bookmarks better. Now I have 800+ bookmarks and can't really remember any of them without reviewing the tags I've applied over the years so del.icio.us is useless for day to day browsing as well.

The awesomebar has been a godsend for day to day browsing and allows me to not have to keep track of bookmarks and, more importantly, prevents me from having to repeatedly organize these bookmarks.

My kid has a myspace page and I hate myspace and am completely unable to navigate it. I do, however, make a point of checking up on his page from time to time but since I'd given up bookmarks the only way to do this using FF2 was to go to myspace.com and then search for his username (the search feature on myspace sucks btw and I often wasted time trying to find his page again). Now all I have to do is type his username in the address bar. This is extremely convenient and from what I've observed of other people as they surf the web much more intuitive than bookmarks.

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[Firehed]

As Firefox 3 includes a Smart Bookmarks feature (by that exact name, stuck automatically in your bookmarks bar), I'm honestly unsure whether you're trolling or just ignorant.

I love the awesome bar, but that comes largely in part because all of the URLs on my company's website and intranet haven't been nicely converted to pretty permalinks and I'm not a big fan of trying to remember KB article IDs and stupid crap like that. I just type the first few letters of the article name and it's in the list.

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you trolling? The awesomebar lives up to its name. Among all the other good stuff that came with 3, that one stands out and I wasn't expecting it to.

red pro -> programming.reddit.com
flix mem -> www.netflix.com/memberHome
s gmail -> https://gmail.com

It even pulls words out of the titles of pages I've visited, so I don't even have to remember the url.

As a web developer it makes my work easier as I can type in for example 'dev lookup 1445' and it will often pull up a url like www.longdevsitename.com/longblah/lookup.php?uid=1445, which often happens to be exactly what I was looking for. Firefox 2 doesn't even come close to this.

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[Hatta]

However, if you want to look at a Wikipedia article about Dashiell Hammett that you read last week, it makes a lot more sense to type "Dash" in the address bar than "wikip^H^H^H^H^Hen.wikipedia.org/Dash."

Actually it makes more sense to just put "Dashiell Hammett" into the search bar. It makes no sense to put anything other than addresses into the address bar.

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[The End Of Days]

Because if the OP doesn't find the feature useful, then no one is allowed to either, dammit. Otherwise his worldview is shot because he'll be forced to confront the fact that he is not, in fact, the arbiter of taste for the population at large.

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[Rolgar]

If there are items you want to eliminate from the Awesome Bar results, scroll down and hit delete.

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[dashesy]

Having the choice to disable a such controversial feature is the freedom developers give to the end users. I wish they continue listening to the customers. How much I hate it when a supposedly "addon" features become sticky behaviors of an application. I often do not type the url bar. Google does a better job when I want to find a website

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[compro01]

You might try setting browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped in about:config to true. I believe that makes it do what you desire.

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[vux984]

although it has a painfully stupid name that makes me want to hate it already

That's really the -biggest- strike against it. The presumption that I or anyone else would think its awesome immediately triggers the hate response. If they'd simply called it 'enhanced address bar', made it optional but default, and described it as 'awesome' there wouldn't have been this massive resistance to it.

The reality is that its really good. I can reliably pull up a LOT more url's with a lot less effort. It is true that some of the mnemonics for urls that I was used to in FF2 don't work, and I've had to expand to 2 characters or 3. But after using it since release, 's' brings up slashdot first again. But what's even more interesting, is that the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th results are all also sites I frequent regularly, and FF3 has made it easier to get to them. I don't use bookmarks nearly as often now. One of my clients has a page listing its branch offices that I need to refer to frequently for contact information... i used to pull up their site and browse to the locations page, or use a bookmark... in FF3 i type 'loc' and its the first match. The next few matches are the list of locations for a couple of other businesses I've looked up recently... which is also useful.

I really have nothing negative to say about FF3's address bar.

To those people who are finding a couple of their most frequently used sites have moved 'down' the list, the benefits do outweigh the cost. Push through it, so that FF3 can learn or choose a new mnemonic for that url; it -is- worth the trouble.

Its pretty amusing really on some level. This is the sort of thing we routinely ridicule our less nerdy counterparts for... we mock them for their refusal to use a product called 'firefox' because it doesn't sound 'professional' like 'internet explorer'... we ridicule their inability and/or blind refusal to cope with even a slight deviation in user interface... we tell anecdotes about how we had to set Windows XP's theme to classic before our bosses could/would use it...because it was scary and different... or because it looked like 'candy' and they didn't want to use a childish OS.

And yet here we are... its comical to see how many of us 'enlightened' people are hung up on the feature name, or the fact that a couple keyboard shortcuts are working a bit differently. Aren't we the same people who are supposedly able to effortlessly transition from platform to platform, from distro to distro, able to pick up any pieces of electronics and figure it out. Last time I checked, we weren't known for buying a new phone and rejecting/hating it simply because the menu arrangement wasn't identical to the old one, or because it had to 'learn' our preferred autocompletions for text messaging all over again. People we mock and ridicule do that. How does it feel? :)

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[MooseMuffin]

Anything I've visited within the scope of my history is easily accessed via the address bar. Anything new I want to find is best accessed via the search bar. This is much the way its always been, except now the address bar is better at it. For me, it has completely supplanted bookmarks, as the sites I go to most often are shown by default, and any that don't make the cut are showing within 1 or 2 letters.

You seem very anti-awesomebar, as I was at first, but I'm curious if your complaint is more philosophical (I don't like the idea of it) or practical (it doesn't do what I want it to). Because I'm almost positive that you can get the awesome bar to act very much like the old bar if you continue to use it that way. If you hit 's' to get to slashdot often, slashdot will quickly become the first result when pressing s. If you like to hit 'so' to go to "someotherwebsite", that will quickly become your top 'so' result. The behavior of the awesomebar can be as predictable as your browsing habits.

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[Richard_at_work]

No it doesn't, all that setting does is remove from the results your bookmarks and links you have clicked on (I think) - it still searches the titles of pages you have entered the URL for.

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[nabsltd]

I didn't use Firefox 2, so I don't know the exact functionality, but I don't think it takes much to get the "Awesome Bar" like people seem to want (matches only at the beginning of URL, no match on titles).

First install the Hide Unvisited extension. Next, set "browser.urlbar.search.chunkSize = 0" in about:config. Last, add the following to your "userChrome.css" file:

.autocomplete-richlistitem spacer,.autocomplete-richlistitemlabel{display:none}
.ac-title description{font-size:11px!important}
.autocomplete-richlistitem{border:none!important}
.ac-title{margin:-4px 4px 0px 0px!important;display:none}
.ac-url{margin:-19px 0px 0px 20px!important}
.ac-url description{color:MenuText!important}
.ac-url description[selected="true"]{color:White!important}

Re:Awesome bar disable?

[Haeleth]

If they'd simply called it 'enhanced address bar', made it optional but default, and described it as 'awesome' there wouldn't have been this massive resistance to it.

They did. The feature in question is called the Smart Location Bar. "Awesomebar" is just a nickname.

Codename?

[MrNaz]

Is that a Japanese word, or a reference to Hobbits smoking pot?

woohoo!

[lucas teh geek]

it's only taken 6 years, but finally Firefox has the option to use the Mac OS X System specified proxy. here's hoping it actually works

Posting this from Shiretoko...

[Doug Neal]

The rendering seems faster (not that it was slow in 3.0.1). Still doesn't pass Acid3, though ;)

Hmm, not sure about this

[neokushan]

The build includes a new tab-switching behavior that will force some users to change their habits. In the current version of FIrefox, Control-Tab opens up the next browser tab. Shiretoko changes this behavior, opening up a "filmstrip view" of a user's most-recently visited tabs. Pressing Tab repeatedly while holding down the Control key cycles through the various Tabs in a filmstrip. Developers say the filmstrip addition is a step toward "increased visual navigation and content organization."(Users who simply want to advance to the next tab can use Control-Page Down instead of Control-Tab).

I, personally, do not use Ctrl+tab to switch between tabs in firefox but I do not like the idea of them changing this functionality. In various other programs I use that have tabs, from mIRC to Visual studio (no, sorry, I haven't switched to *nix yet), ctrl+tab is the natural choice to swap between open tabs/windows and I do occasionally use this command here. It just seems universally consistent between most applications and Mozilla has decided to move away from this unofficial standard.
Wouldn't it be better to give this new functionality a new shortcut key, such as the aforementioned ctrl+pgdn?
Even Microsoft created a new shortcut key combination for Flip3D in vista and left the old alt+tab command more or less in tact.

Re:Hmm, not sure about this

[D Ninja]

Additionally, with Ctrl+Tab (and not with Ctrl+PgDn) I can keep one hand on the keyboard and the other on my...mouse...um...for scrolling and stuff...um...

...you know...so I can browse and flip between pic...err...windows...err...

Crap.

Re:Canvas Element / API

[bunratty]

Canvas is part of HTML5, which was created by WHATWG. WHATWG is now part of the W3C, so canvas is a specification coming from the W3C. If you don't want canvas in web browsers, take it up with WHATWG and W3C, not Mozilla developers.

it almost ruined my relationship

[citylivin]

Well it goes through your history so if multiple people use the same pc, like say me for porn and my girlfriend for youtube, when she types "yo" a hundred porn sites pop up... She almost broke up with me and made me sware off of porn... FOREVER.

So I guess you could say Ive never been so upset at a feature as the awesome bar. I wish I could take the person that made it and torture them to death, then revive them and torture them again. I can no longer look at porn, on my own computer... *smashes screen*. My gf was respectfull enough not to ever go through my history, but hey! thanks firefox for autoupdate and change default behaviour! lets just PUSH ALL OF THE PORN at her! what a brilliant fucking feature!

The Numbers

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

For anyone curious how things compare, here are the numbers for Acid 3 compliance and sunspider javascript speed for Firefox and Safari on OS X on my laptop. For Acid 3, higher is better. For Sunspider, lower is better.

Firefox 3.0

• Acid 3 - 67/100
• Sunspider - 4330

Firefox 3.1 Alpha

• Acid 3 - 83/100
• Sunspider - 3426

Safari 3.1.2

• Acid 3 - 77/100
• Sunspider - 7516

Safari 3.1.2 with nightly Webkit

• Acid 3 - 98/100
• Sunspider - 2174

stop with the UI get some real features...

[johnjones]

so from the look of it the UI is a nice little play thing
its annoyed a lot of people

how many people would be annoyed if they actually supported SVG ?
or even SVG tiny ? (my phone has support why not mozilla...)

I know mozilla has some support but really support all of a standard or a section at least such as SVG tiny

GIVE ME decent GRAPHS please

regards

John Jones