Mozilla Reveals Firefox 4 Plans

Barence writes "Mozilla has given a breakdown of its plans for Firefox 4. Perhaps the most striking change to Firefox 4 is the user interface, which takes a great deal of inspiration from Google Chrome. 'Something UI designers have known for a long time is that the simpler an interface looks, the faster it will seem,' said director of Firefox Mike Beltzner during the presentation. Also mooted was the ability to give applications such as Gmail and Twitter their own permanent tabs for easy access, and the introduction of a 'switch to tab' button, allowing power users running hundreds of tabs to quickly find the one they want. Beltzner said Mozilla was also looking at replicating Chrome's tactic of silently updating the browser in the background, removing the annoying wait when Firefox first loads up."

Comments

Menu Bar..?

[bhunachchicken]

So that's gone MIA, then? What's the current obsession with removing menu bars, creating "ribbon" interfaces and taking away stuff that has served us well for over 20 years..?

Not sure I like the look of that new interface. Aint broke, don't fix it.

Got that right.

[AnonymousClown]

On my cheap laptop, there is a noticeable performance difference between FF and Chrome - Chrome is snappier and much less of a resource hog.

With the popularity of Netbooks, I see FF losing market share to Google because of the performance differences.

Re:Got that right.

[gaspyy]

"Noticeable" is an understatement. My primary machine is a P8600 dual-core laptop with 2Gb of RAM and firefox + 4 plugins take 5 times more to load than Chrome + 4 plugins. My workhorse is a quad-core Q8400 with 8 Gb RAM. There, Chrome loads instantly, whereas Firefox takes 2 seconds even with no plugins.

I'm using Firefox for development only and just because of Firebug (I know there's a Firebug lite for Chrome but it's not even close, like its Developer Tools).

Re:H.264 support?

[Yvan256]

From the numbers a lot of people have posted, it would only cost about 3 cents per copy of Firefox. Ask the users to pay the bill: "Do you want to still be able to view YouTube? Please donate 25 cents today!" It would fund Mozilla AND pay the H.264 royalties where it's needed.

Others have suggested that the Mozilla Foundation should just use the OS to playback video and stop complaining for nothing. H.264 has already won, it's already used everywhere. The more they fight, the longer Flash video will survive. Does Adobe pay Mozilla or what?

And some people live in countries where software patents are not even legal. Why should they pay anything?

Re:Retarded

[Jurily]

increasing user satisfaction

I'd suggest improving usability then. The shiny only works until you start to use it. You know, like how the CLI completely wipes the floor with any GUI when it comes to power users' needs.

Just for starters, why isn't "Open in background tab" the default when clicking a link? Chances are you didn't mean to watch a blank fucking screen while it's loading.

Re:Retarded

[GameboyRMH]

That might be a good idea. It looks like Firefox 4 is going to be a "chrome-ified" (or you could say "Apple-fied") "just make it work, I don't like thinking" browser, rather than the moddable and utilitarian browser it's been up to this point. Now seems like a good point to fork it to preserve the "geekiness" of 3.6.

I sure don't like the new "background updates" idea either (as a default, I'd be fine with it as an optional setting), if anything Firefox needs to bug me MORE about updates, like when Microsoft wants to sneak an addon into it via Internet Explorer. The next time I open Firefox, it should say "WARNING: This addon was installed without your express permission. Allow/Disable/Uninstall?"

Text highlight metaphor search must be improved.

[elucido]

An example, you highlight "Give me" and it asks (Search for Give Me). This feature should be expanded via plugins, regular expression, and AI so that if I have Google open in another tab it can search for it within the Google search tab already open. This would save browser resources and make it a lot easier to manage tabs. I always leave a tab open to Google, Wikipedia, Slashdot and YouTube. Why not let me highlight text and select which site I want the text to search from? Why not use keyboard shortcuts so that I can highlight the text and hit "g" and it searches Google, "y" and it searches Youtube, "w" and it searches Wikipedia, or "d" for the dictionary if I don't know the word. And the plugin interface should allow regular expressions and individual programmers to code new features.

This plugin/extension interface would revolutionize the browsing experience because it would increase the amount of information the user can work with and take in at any given time. This should be the goal of Firefox. To help increase the amount of information users can handle rather than trying to merely simplify he interface without any known practical enhancements.

The application tab idea is good. That has a good function. But I want that application tab to be connected to the text highlight function of the browser. And then something like the pipes function in linux should be used to allow the highlighted text to be manipulated any which way and or used as input for the software applications. I should be able to highlight text on your post and have it to into my word processor application or email application as a direct quote with source citation included. This way I don't have to worry about managing the sources.

And there are a million other improvements we could probably think of that they aren't or don't seem to be considering. I hope the Firefox4 team reads this post and considers adding these features.

No mention of Chrome's best feature?

[uxbn_kuribo]

The only thing--- and I mean ONLY thing--- I prefer about Chrome is its task manager. If a website's terrible code / flash movie / javascript is dragging my system to its knees, Chrome lets me shut down just that single swf. This is a terrific idea. However, on the balance, Firefox has far more user support, compatibility, and security.