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Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 Released
ink writes "Mozilla has released the third beta for Firefox 3.1 (which may become Firefox 3.5). This beta includes the new location bar, Mozilla's new JavaScript engine Tracemonkey, new HTML5 features and many other enhancements. It looks the same on the surface, but there are many changes under the hood."
How pretty much everything we do uses JSON and until now there has been no love from the browser.
My question is, will all these new JavaScript goodies (both in Firefox and in IE8) get rolled into jQuery? That way if jQuery sees the browser can do JSON serialization, or timeouts on XHttpRequests, it will use the native stuff instead of emulating the behavior?
I'm gonna have to play with the VIDEO thing. The big problem such a new feature will have is codec support. Nobody is gonna transcode their streaming content to use this thing when they can just use flash player. That and I really dont want "normal people" trying to find codecs on google--most of the hits for "$AWESOME_CODEC" are usually just spyware installers.
...It looks the same on the surface, but there are many changes under the hood."...
Will Joe Public be in position to notice them? The new engine might be indeed faster but I wonder whether an ordinary user will see a difference.
What's the new location bar? Is it something like the old location bar, aka the UnAwesomeBar? I'm pretty much sick to death of the awesomeness of the present location bar, what with Slashdot being listed as "Server 500: Internal Error" in the dropdown because about 4 months ago I got a 500 error message?
More importantly, have the Firefox devs realised that downloads can fail yet? Or does it still report downloads as successful if they are interrupted before they reach Content-Length bytes, or how about reporting as successful because they successfully downloaded a 404 error page? Supporting incomplete standards and reimplementing an already existing feature is all well and good, but reaching version "3.5" of a web browser without having the most rudimentary capability of detecting a failed download is nothing short of obscene.
I thought Firefox was going to be implementing the same type of preemptive threading and memory protection that Chrome and, I think, IE 8 have?
So far the latest FF beta all seem horribly slow with multiple pages. The more tabs the worse the overall performance.
Also, the latest FF betas still have the awful performance rot where overall performance degrades over time as you continue to open and close tabs.
After using Chrome for a while it is hard to keep using FF when I've been able to keep Chrome open for a couple weeks and it still feels as lightning quick as it was when first started up.
I know there is a tendency among some people to think of version numbers as decimal, since they use decimal points. I know I did when I was younger.
It's kind of annoying when major projects make this mistake though. It leads to all sorts of confusion when people see results like version 3.1.150 being after 3.1.50 and don't know why that's the case (".5 is more than .15!", which in the case of the Firefox release mentioned in TFS would be accurate, but in the case of properly-numbered software wouldn't), or other people truncate 3.1.50 to 3.1.5.
I wish major projects at least would use the traditional "increment by one" method. If it can be done for the X-Men 2.1 DVD (after nerds no doubt complained about the "X-Men 1.5" DVD), it can be done for Firefox et al too :).
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Everyone remembers FF devs flaming people in those FF memory leak stories from a few years ago. The anger comes from the fact they know they have a huge problem with the way FF is architected. Lashing out is a very common reaction from developers who are aware of some fundamental problem with their code that they know would require massive amounts of work they are unable or unwilling to fix.
The FF devs got away with it because they were compared to the horrible mess that IE was back then. Now IE has really gotten its shit together now with it great leaps forward with javascript performance, threading, and memory protection.
With Chrome and its incredibly clean and modern code base and extensions soon to arrive and the Linux version rapidly maturing, the only reason to keep using FF will be misplaced lingering fanboyism from the "IE sucks! I use FF so I'm cool" days.
Finally..finally!
Now I think I an transcode my snapshot video footage into a format that I don't have to worry about for ...at next 5-10 years.
Only when Google decides to shoot its revenue foot and release adblock, I might consider Chrome.
Firefox by itself - I'd be grateful if they scaled back. Do you remember the origin? There was this bloated hog called Mozilla Suite, and there was this little-known neglected wild branch called Phoenix, which was meant to be the Mozilla engine with a minimalistic, customizable frontend - cut on all the bloat.
And suddenly people switched en masse to the small, lean "just a browser" thingy while the monstrosity died.
Now Firefox becomes the new monstrosity full of bloat. It really needs another "phoenix branch" - something that will take all the lean mean backend stuff and do away with "awesome bars", "intelligent bookmarks" and all this cruft people don't give a shit about, and move it ALL to extensions, from which you'd take what you like while not being encumbered by all the rest.
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Since I don't have a subscription to one of the browser market stat vendors, and Google removed their browser stats in 2004, I don't know the answer to this question. But I doubt you do either. I can't prove that it's a significant number. But you can't prove that it's only a vocal minority of cranks either.
But we do know that:
1) There was a LOT of complaining about the AwesomeBar when it came out;
2) User experience can make a huge difference in market share (see, Apple)
3) At least some people have stuck with 2.0 because of it;
4) At least some people have switched to Opera because of it.
But the best proof we have that it's not just a small number of cranks? The fact that Mozilla decided to expend effort to allow people to go back to the old location bar in Firefox 3.5. If this were only important to a very small number of people, they would not have bothered. I'm sure they have lots of other code to write over at Mozilla. But they chose to dedicate resources and time to fix this. We may not have the statistics at our fingertips, I'm sure that Mozilla does track browser usage very closely, and knows exactly how their upgrade rates compared to previous upgrades.
So you can question my arguments, and I can question yours. But I think Mozilla's actions speak loudest of all.