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Firefox 3.2 Plans Include Natural Language, Themes
Shrike82 writes "Mozilla have described plans for the next version of their popular web browser, Firefox. Mozilla's "Ubiquity project" is set to become a standard feature, allowing "users to type natural language phrases into the browser to perform certain tasks, such as typing 'map 10 Downing Street' to instantly see a Google map of that address, or 'share-on-delicious' to bookmark the site you're currently visiting on the social news site."
Also of interest is so-called "lightweight theming" allowing users to customise the browsers design more easily. The launch date is still somewhat unclear, and Mozilla are apparently unsure if version 3.2 will be released at all, apparently considering going straight to Firefox 4."
Sounds... shit.
Come on, Firefox was meant to be a lightweight extensible browser. I don't want more features. If they want to ship these features, they should be making extensions.
That's your example of natural language? Map as a transitive verb and a fairly specific reference? How about: "show me where the prime minister's house is on a map"?
Enough with the super-uber-awesome search crap. Give me an MSI (that I don't have to build myself), give me a way to push settings via group policy, and most of all give me a browser that I can centrally manage even half as easily as I can manage IE. Oh, and lemme just give some space here:
^ That's where you run-off-to-google-up-some-snark-for-my-reply folks can put your links to tools like FirefoxADM that haven't been touched in almost four years, or to frontmotion and their "give us a 150 bucks and we'll roll your MSI for you" service. Take this example; I want to change the homepage on 50 PC's, each with two or three different users. In IE it's a one-line group policy change. Firefox? roll up your sleves, you'll be there a while. Maybe push out a new prefs.js file into each user's profile. Maybe roll up a CCK custom XPI. Or just roll your own MSI and have it re-install the entire damned browser.
Until Chrome, Firefox, and Opera get over circle-jerking themselves about getting IE's sloppy seconds market share, there's not even enough motion to say that there's a even a "browser war" going on. I really hoped that Mozilla would take a decent swing at the enterprise market. Instead they're doing 110mph down the netscape road towards a bloated browser. Meanwhile, Chrome and Opera aren't doing much more than pulling on to the on-ramp of the same road, and touting how you'll go do the same path, only in style!
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
My local electronics store just had a sale - 2GB DIMMs or SODIMMs for $14.99. My processor's average utilization during its ontime sits somewhere between 0.1% and 0.0%.
The lame "bloat" complaints grow tired, and are generally the fallback of people who just want to hate on Firefox and it's their standard talking point. Firefox easily holds its own against Chrome and Safari, brutalizes Internet Explorer, with the only really "winner" of the bloat competition being Opera (but really, who uses Opera? Joking...I started my departure from IE with Opera, and loved the mouse gestures, but then Firefox won me over).
Which proves exactly what I said above. Internet Explorer is the piggiest pig pig of the bunch, not only consuming the most storage and memory resources, but dramatically more CPU resources for modern browsing.
Firefox is a great browser, and they should continue making it better, albeit perhaps having functionality "loadable" and optional so Luddites computing on their 486/33 (DX!) can save the tired whines.
As I sit here with a nix version of firefox that crashes pretty frequently and freezes when there is plenty of cpu time and memory available I can't help but wonder WTF DON'T THEY DON'T STOP WITH THE FEATURES BULLSHIT AND MAKE THIS DAMN THING RUN MORE RELIABLY. Sincerly, Someone who wants a reliable browser
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
Will be stored in an information cache?
You can already download a snapshot of wikipedia (which we all know is the end-all source of infinite, accurate information on all things worth knowing.) GPS units can hand you maps and routes for pretty much anywhere a typical person needs to go with a single DVD update. I don't know of a handy, portable dictionary/jargon download but given its size relative to the maps/wikipedia, there must be some out there. All we need is some more advanced diff-tools and we've got it all local all the time.
Really, the Internet is just needed for updates, interaction with other humans (or at least their avatars/slashdot personalities), shopping, and porn.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Isn't the key difference here minimality of UI vs minimality of feature set?
Meh, I'd rather keep Firefox lightweight and just use keywords.
When I type "map 10 Downing St" it already goes to a google map. Same with "fromhome 10 Downing St", it will give me directions from my house.
Natural language could work, but I'd rather have other, more search-focused companies do all the natural-speech algorithms, then just use Firefox as a sort-of-API via Keywords.
I don't get it with Firefox. They have (had) the goal of producing a lean and fast browser with additional functionality being provided by plugins which I think they have pretty much achieved. Personally, I think they have left out a whole host of features (such as ad blocking and quick dial for example) which should be in the core but I'll let them off because they are easy enough to add in. But including this sort of browser bling in the core is just nuts.
It's the age old problem though - you have to be seen to be doing something even if what you have is really good already. I'd actually rather they put their efforts into working harder with other browser manufacturers to make sure that pages rendered the same on every platform. While none of the alternative browsers on their own is much competition to IE if there was essentially zero cost in moving from one alternative to another there is real competition.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
it's just a glorified command prompt
I think that's sorta the point.
A commandline isn't inherently user-unfriendly. A commandline confuses the average user for a variety of reasons, which Ubiquity is trying to address. So I would say the point is to make a glorified command prompt. So glorified, in fact, that the average person can benefit from it.
For instance one of the things that makes a command prompt difficult for novice users is that they don't know what commands are available. As you type in Ubiquity, it shows you a preview of commands that might match. So you type 'email' and it lists that there is an 'email this person' command and a 'get last email' command and so on. Another thing that is scary about command prompts is that people worry about making mistakes. Ubiquity fixes this in a couple of ways. First of all, you can't do that much damage in a web browser. Secondly, Ubiquity shows you a realtime result of your typing. So if you type 'map washington' it shows a map of Washington DC... if you keep typing 'map washington seattle' it switches to show seattle. Ubiquity also tries to use actual words or phrases for the command syntax. So rather than remembering what the command to translate text is... you just type 'translate.'
There are a bunch of things that the Ubiquity team is trying to do to make the commandline more accessible. The interesting thing is that many of these changes are also a huge advantage for those of us who are already familiar with commandlines.
So, yes, Ubiquity is a glorified command prompt. And it's about time that someone put honest effort into bringing the power of text-command UI to the masses.
Natural language? Natural for who?
Will we have to have versions for the West Coast, East Coast, down South...Ebonics?
Wait, wasn't there some kind of rumour that a number of people worldwide didn't actually speak English ?
What's the status of that real language thingy in German, French, Italian, Croatian, Hindi... How does it work with characters from the depth of Unicode ?
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Strangely, my browsing consists of more than sitting on the Google homepage.
Open four tabs in each - digg, slashdot, thestar.com and cnn.com. Firefox comes into a pretty significant lead already, but now trying actually doing anything.
But you keep on benchmarking sitting in an essentially empty browser if that makes you feel special.
The ironic thing is that Firefox started as a stripped down fork of the existing Mozilla browser, because the latter was too bloated and feature-creeped.
For great justice.