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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."
save users a heap of bandwidth and build the entire Internet into the browser. Mozilla: the only browser that doesn't need a 'net connection! It'd have around the same amount of bloat.
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.
circumnavigate California
It's time to make firefox fork.
so those that care about speed, can avoid the bloat
Weird you should say that. Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 is the fastest Firefox browser yet. The Places feature saves me tons of time by not having to manually go through hundreds of bookmarks. I have far fewer memory leaks then past versions. I can customize Firefox to be as simple or as complex as I wish.
While Mozilla maybe adding features, it sure isn't looking like bloat to me.
IE7 is a steaming pile of crap, but it is better then IE6's steaming pile of crap and vomit.
They want to make Ask Jeeves all over again in the url bar?
Don't search keywords do this better, and in a more controlled way? I set up a google maps search keyword of "map", then I know what happens when I type "map address". Similarly with other keyword constructs. Keywords let me build on the browser's functionality in predictable ways. Ask Jeeves? Remains to be seen.
(Although I am given to understand it is the FBI's premiere tool to search for terrorists.)
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
If you want small and light, Firefox may no longer be the browser for you. All it need is an embedded emacs mode (with e-Javascript macros), and it would be a complete operating system. I don't think that's really a bad thing. As long as you don't go overboard with extensions it still fits on an EEE.
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"?
Another Firefox Version, and more bloat is added to this "clean and lean" version of the Mozilla browser...
You are correct in your fear of bloating ... for you and I. But I was trying to explain the fine details of Google Fu to one of my friends the other day about using the site & inurl options and the minus operator. They were completely lost. It originated when they were trying to find an old website they used to visit but only knew certain details about it.
But for the average joe, this may be a blessing. I do hope they keep a light version for users who don't want this. But I would almost bet they will be rolling them out with all having it and making it something you have to disable. Oh well.
Meanwhile, I see each version of Internet Explorer really better than the other.
Then use it.
use natural language
comment story positive
example show
search +5 funny
We need a branch is all. Gecko is still a good rendering engine, and the XUL platform has such fantastic things as Flashblock, Firebug, and Link Widgits, none of which could I live without. (Even Firebug, while ostensibly a developer tool, is fantastic for finding my way through obnoxious pages.
IE on the other hand, is just shoddy coding, and remained at least a year and a half out of date last I saw. I'll have to try the new IE8 beta at some point, but from when I looked at it last time, I'd rather be using Dillo for most things.
Didn't she make films with John Holmes?
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Not to belittle this development, but the majority of web users get confused about old and simple features such as bookmarking.
Isn't introducing this sophisticated interface a bit too much? It's great if you're used to bash or similar stuff, but unless this thing really works with natural language (it doesn't) then it's just a glorified command prompt.
on releasing a version that WORKS before we think of the version after. A novel idea. Mozilla's been promising to fix a bunch of bugs in 3.1 that 3.0 broke which worked just fine in 2. I might believe them after they release a final version of 3.1 if it works as promised. Otherwise, I've lost all respect for the quality FireFox usually delivered (with the exception of the damn memory issues).
Honestly, I'm just waiting for Google Chrome on Linux at this point.
Compared to IE, I'd rather use a DILDO for most things.
Will it finally include rotated/sideways text for column headers? Even IE had this feature for ages.
ctrl+l -> 'stop being slow'
You can already do that with keywords. I have keywords set up as follows:
- g -- searches google for
- gi -- google image searches for
- w -- alias for en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
- map -- searches google maps for
- y -- searches youtube for
There are more, but I'll spare you at this point. These addons + vimperator == happy boy.
I still find myself hammering gg when I'm at other people's houses wondering why firefox isn't going to the top of the page, though.
Needles to say, natural language is tough to be handled by software.
I wonder how well it will deal with innuendo. Torn between puritan society and practical usage, what will prevail?
Or, will I get travel directions or will I be forwarded to a pr0n site to suit my state of excitement?
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
The bloat needs to be absolutely removed but the functions, features, bells and whistles need to be modularized so that they are available if wanted. People will want them. For me, one of the most compelling features of Firefox is the addons. The enormous collection of addons available keep Firefox interesting and some of them are actually very useful.
In Soviet Russia, themes include *you*!
Oh, wait. Themes, not memes. My bad.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Compared to IE, I'd rather use a DILLO for most things.
There, fixed it for you
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Why does everyone insist on including features that depend on web sites that may, or may not, be available in the future? Ok, if you somehow are able to code these things yourself (I fail to see the value in the natural language thing), but to hard code it to specific URLs to apps that can change at the whim of their creators? DUMB.
If technology continues to progress at current exponential rates, eventually we will get to the point where most queries for factual information which doesn't change rapidly, like maps, routing, language and jargon definitions, encyclopedia articles, etc., will be able to be answered by a stored information cache which will be small compared to the technological capabilities which will then be current.
Barring industries which would be threatened managing to somehow block progress in this direction via legislation.
Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 is the fastest browser yet - that is what makes it so annoying when Mozilla team just discontinues or changes some feature in the name of...
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=456405 ... usability?
Or the fact that Firefox would rather open Nautilus than opening something *I* want -or- just showing me the information of where a file was downloaded.
Any why?
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=431521
Because Firefox is minimalistic, it would rather open Nautilus.
Nobody - NOBODY - uses Firefox for minimalism anymore. Even Opera is more minimalistic is than Firefox.
And IE7 is pile of crap how exactly? The reason it is so hated has got nothing to do with its usability, but with the fact that has shitty support for standards and that it is tied with the OS.
If the average joe can't use google's advances search, or read google's advanced search help, how are they going to make use of firefox's awesome search?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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.
If I type "map where is Chuck Norris?" is it able to find?
-- Simon said: Die!
Once Google chrome has adblock (I don't want to use the DNS based solution) and adds ability to password protect my passwords I will likely switch.
Chrome is just soooo much faster than Firefox. I don't know why as Chrome's Javascript engine isn't any significant difference in speed from Firefox 3.1b2
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
So, has it fixed bug 453964 yet? Or are the developers too busy with themes to bother?
Besides, the biggest speed-related problem with Firefox isn't actual speed, it's that the browser tends to block when loading Slashdot pages in another tab, for example. I wouldn't know if version 3 fixes this, since the bug mentioned makes it useless to me.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
...and turn this "feature" into an extension, so we who will _never_ need it, won't feel the bloat.
If you RTFA, you'll find out that Ubiquity is really just a fancy word for "client-side scripting." The "natural language-like interface" nonsense is really about how you invoke a script and enter the arguments. Someone has been parroting too many marketing buzzwords; by that logic Bash is a "natural language like" interface too.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Maybe if this is successful NLP will start to mean more to people than a way to pick up members of the opposite-sex.
"going straight to Firefox 4" Wow, THAT is a feature ! But I don't think it's enough, 4 is quite low. What I'm waiting for is Firefox 2009 !
I'm still sore about this especially given that the port has already been done in collaborative development by Nokia and Mozilla. Or have I missed something?
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.
Natural language? Natural for who?
Will we have to have versions for the West Coast, East Coast, down South...Ebonics?
I can see it now "Yo Yo Yo...show me the mother fuckin' U.I. site...Word!"
No, not Word. OpenOffice.org Writer. Microsoft has trademarked the word 'Word'.
Besides, Word doesn't work on all supported platforms, so it would be considered discrimination against AAVE speakers running Linux. Or BSD.
Ignore this signature. By order.
It's time that the Firefox CPU-hogging bug is fixed. (357 bugs!) The bug was less of a problem until version 3.0.4, but versions 3.0.5 and 3.0.6 are much worse.
If you can't visit Bugzilla from Slashdot, put this URL into another tab: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=CPU
It's also worth mentioning the 357 CPU-hogging bugs as an example of working on things that don't matter.
If you can't visit Bugzilla from Slashdot, put this URL into another tab: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=CPU
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.
Not to let Firefox off the hook, but the link in that bug loads a tag list, which the page writer geniusly decided to non-breaking space the entire thing. It's essentially treating almost 1 Mbyte of text as a single word 90,000 letters long (850,000 including font sizing tags). I replaced one of the non-breaking spaces with a normal space and the page loads instantly and type ahead search works perfect.
You can't necessarily blame Firefox every time a web designer makes a bad choice.
Shenanigans, Shenanigans !!!
Just opened Firefox 3.06 and Internet Explorer 7.0, both clean with no add-ons, and loaded google homepage into each one.
Hmm ...
firefox.exe = 21,628k Private Memory
iexplore.exe = 6,060k Private Memory
Hell, the number of people speaking English in the US is decreasing too these days.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I wonder how accurate the interpretation of natural language will be. Humans often get the actual message wrong can computers do better? I think not.
One of the problems with natural language is that it is often ambiguous. Natural languages, as spoken, were actually developed mostly by the peons not the rulers. The rulers would have liked a very precise language for their dealings with their underlings. The peons want their replies to be as vague as possible to avoid losing their head when they fail to meet the rulers specifications. For diplomatic relations, rulers too want as much vagueness as possible. Vagueness and ambiguity are thus built into natural language.
And there's still the bug where right-clicking a link in Linux randomly performs one of the context menu actions without even bringing up the menu. Too lazy to look up the bug entry, but it's been there quite a while. Installing the mouse gestures extension fixes it (even when the extension is disabled) so I'd think they could track it down from that. SO annoying.
Typing 'map 10 Downing Street' of Firefox 3.0.5, leads you to the site http://www.aboutbritain.com/maps/10downingstreet-map.asp with a google map of the area.
I'd rather be using Dillo for most things.
I'd rather use a DILDO for most things.
I'd rather use a DILLO for most things.
I'd rather use a DILDO for most things.
Did I do this right?
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
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.
Given that 3.1 has an entirely new javascript engine if there is still a javascript memory leak in 3.2 then I would imagine that this would be a different bug and thus your comment is irrelevant to the story.
"such as typing 'map 10 Downing Street' to instantly see a Google map of that address"
Why is this new?
I've been doing this for years. In Firefox. Try it yourself.
* Make a bookmark to this URL: 'http://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s'
* Click the 'More' button
* Add a keyword of 'map'
* Type 'map 10 Downing Street' in the address bar.
* Shout for joy at your upgrade to Firefox 4 months ahead of schedule.
It's time to make firefox fork.
so those that care about speed, can avoid the bloat
Hopeless. Just stick with Opera.
How much of iexplore's memory is shared, though? I don't have a Windows box to check, but don't forget that IE uses a lot more memory that isn't shown in the "private memory" column because it loads up Windows shared libs (that it is the only program to actually use) that do a lot of the heavy lifting.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Welcome to Slashdot!
"But this one goes to 11!"
Huh?
Where is the DRM in Firefox?
This might be the dumbest troll ever, a successful troll has SOME basis in reality.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
I don't know what you call "modern", but I would say this is completely ridiculous and untrue. Especially given the enormous complexity of the modern web, Firefox is a utter marvel.
Strange - it doesn't lock up the whole browser for me. Did your rhetoric get stuck in 1999 or something, unable to make the Y2K transition?
It is snap and ridiculously snappy. Just for the sake of debating the other commentator I had to fire up Internet Explorer. Groan. Launching new tabs taking seconds.
They are capable of working on more than one thing. In fact it's a bit humorous seeing all of these whines given that they're also working on a massive JavaScript speedup, dramatically reduced memory fragmentation, more control over caching, and so on and so on.
But the Firefox critics will still continue to pretend to be fans while spouting laughably ridiculous complaints about the browser.
I've been using Ubiquity for some time now, and its not really all that stable, or fast, or great. In fact, the mapping features seem to have gotten worse from when I started using it. Either it won't find the proper location, won't show the map, or will just sit there going "What, you lookin' at me?" I could definitely see including something that isn't really even stable into something that is mostly stable would be a bad move on Mozilla's part.
And there's still the bug where right-clicking a link in Linux randomly performs one of the context menu actions without even bringing up the menu. Too lazy to look up the bug entry, but it's been there quite a while. Installing the mouse gestures extension fixes it (even when the extension is disabled) so I'd think they could track it down from that. SO annoying.
Thank you for pointing me to a work around this issue. I can't count the number of times I've wanted to throw my laptop because of this.
Voting them all out of office, now that's change I can believe in.
Having had a look at the site mentioned in the bug I'd say the problem is a combination of bad web design and you having a bad taste (and connection :) ).
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I've found the firefox clone Opera to be lacking in features. If they're going to copy Mozilla they could at least do it properly.
1. it's not a clone. It's been longer around than firefox.
2. the only features it's missing are adblock and noscript. Which are not firefox defaults.
While this is certainly idiotic, it also means that there's a serious bug in Firefox, possibly even more serious than I thought. After all, if you replace just one of the nbsp-entities with a normal space, you end up with two words both 45,000 letters long; hardly enough to make such a dramatic difference if the word length if the problem.
What happens if you feed Firefox a page with a single, short word? I don't have FF3 installed at the moment so I can't test.
True. I wouldn't blame Firefox if the page was rendered badly, or if it was slow to scroll, or slow to render. However, the problem is that Firefox locks up when loading or searching that page, and for a network-facing program to do that for any input is always a serious bug.
It's a bit like those SQL injection attacks that keep on popping up: sure, the user shouldn't input "drop table", but it's still a bug if the application obeys.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Correction, should be:
It's also worth mentioning the 357 CPU-hogging bugs as an example of avoiding working on things that matter.
IE7 is a steaming pile of crap, but it is better then IE6's steaming pile of crap and vomit.
IE 8... crap, vomit, and jizz.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Roadmap_Scratchpad
That's the current roadmap. I went to mozilla.org, clicked "Developers" and then clicked "Roadmap" in the left-hand navigation bar. How long did you spend looking? I didn't think it was that hidden.
While I can certainly see the usefulness of people using this with voice commands, I'm not sure this is a generally usable feature. Hopefully the distros keep the extension as a separate download.
Does anyone remember Lotus HAL? They tried to do the exact same thing for spreadsheets. And while it had quite a bit of novelty (probably even useful given the insane menu tree of Lotus), I'm not sure it really did all that well. And many others have tried NLP (natural language processing) controlled apps in the 80's. But they were always more confusing to use than the (now) standard menu layouts.
Having said that, I recently was playing with a Mac, and I really like their approach. They have a little "find" sort of entry field that will just highlight or point you to the right help entries with whatever you type. Personally, I think that would be a better way to incorporate NLP.
That's nice. I've got a netbook. Where's the SODIMM socket?
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Speaking of IE7 being better than IE6...
Have you seen IE8 yet? It's actually pretty good. Well, except for the UI, but as a web content developer I don't really care about IE's browser UI. (It's not like I'm going to use IE on my primary workstation, which runs Debian stable.) I'm mainly interested in how well it renders standard HTML and CSS. And from what I've seen so far, it's WAY ahead of IE7. It looks like I won't have to maintain a separate "legacy" stylesheet just for IE any more, once I drop IE7 support. That'll be nice.
On the other hand, in terms of correctly rendering standard HTML and CSS, I haven't really seen any significant improvements in Firefox, over its entire history. I'm sure there've been some, but for the most part they seem to have been relatively low-profile things that my (admittedly, usually fairly simple) HTML and CSS didn't trigger.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
> If you want small and light, Firefox may no longer be the browser for you. All it need is an embedded emacs mode
It would probably be easier to clone Firefox *as* an Emacs major mode.
There are a couple of web browsers for Emacs already, of course, but they don't do nearly as good a job of rendering things as Gecko does. (Among other things, last I checked they didn't support images yet. Emacs only added image support fairly recently, in version 21 if I remember correctly, so not all of the software that runs in Emacs has quite caught up yet.) So it would be a fair amount of work to get anything up to the standards of what Firefox is.
But it would still probably be easier than trying to recreate Emacs within Firefox. Among other things, I don't think Firefox has good enough keyboard-input support primitives to really do everything that's needed, and XUL and Javascript *definitely* don't have the right data types (nor, for that matter, do C and C++), so you'd pretty much have to start from the ground floor, i.e., build a lisp interpreter first...
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
No, I think you need to make DILDO into a hyperlink.
Yes, I understood that all this is possible now (although I was thinking of open-licensed mapping info and I don't think we've gotten there yet). But it's not considered commonplace, at least with respect to Wikipedia snapshots. And don't forget it would just be a snapshot, those of us who use the edit histories to try to check dubious parts of articles would be out of luck.
We'll have to wait a bit before everyone takes it for granted that they mirror Wikipedia.
> Really, the Internet is just needed for updates, interaction with other humans
> (or at least their avatars/slashdot personalities), shopping, and porn.
I agree with all of that, except that (1) you forgot "access to current media content" and (2) it might be possible that most users wouldn't need a constant influx of new porn, they'd have enough in their static cache.
A list interpreter? That's easy. It's like, one line of code. As long as you pick the right language, and the right language is lisp ;)
JavaScript is pretty close though, being a real language with things like functional programming.
IE7 is a steaming pile of crap
I haven't used IE in a couple years, but yesterday I installed XP in a virtual machine and needed to download a few things. No need to install FF I though as I won't use this virtual machine for browsing the web... Well, in 1 minute and 4 web pages of use, it managed to crash twice. Way to go MS ! Guess why I just shifted my main desktop to Ubuntu ?
Non-Linux Penguins ?
That would be terribly witty if it weren't for the fact that most Netbooks do have a SODIMM socket. And anyways, the lowest common denominator doesn't dictate the market.
Enhance 224 to 176. Enhance, stop. Move in, stop. Pull out, track right, stop. Center in, pull back. Stop. Track 45 right. Stop. Center and stop. Enhance 34 to 36. Pan right and pull back. Stop. Enhance 34 to 46. Pull back. Wait a minute, go right, stop. Enhance 57 to 19. Track 45 left. Stop. Enhance 15 to 23. Give me a hard copy right there.
Isn't Firefox open-source? Tell 'em to put down their sauerkraut and croissants and contribute code for their language.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)