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

Re:Retarded

[kyrio]

"the simpler an interface looks, the faster it will seem". What a joke.

Sounds like speed holes

[Abstrackt]

Anyone remember that episode of the Simpsons? "These are speed holes. They make the car go faster."

Personally, I'd rather have the browser go faster than look faster.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[Rogerborg]

Personally, I'd rather have the browser go faster than look faster.

First, the article says "seem", not "look".

Second, are you sitting there with a stopwatch, shrieking "Ah hah! Caught you! I was happier because you seemed faster, but the evidence conclusively proves that I should instead be miserable. Miserable and angry."

If so, then you have enough time on your hands that browser speed isn't your top concern.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[je ne sais quoi]

You're missing his point. He'd prefer that Mozilla focus on making the browser actually faster, instead of focusing on making it seem faster. See the difference? One is reality, the other is an illusion, the equivalent of delaying startup of services on login to the user has a command prompt sooner, but then has to sit and wait for the cursor to stop spinning before he/she can do anything.

My personal opinion is that the new version looks like ass -- where's the menubar? Ribbon interfaces don't seem fast to me, they seem like an update to UI for the sake of updating things so people will buy the latest version. If this is the best that Mozilla can do, perhaps I'd better give Chrome a try after all.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[epiphani]

I'd settle for a windows 7 64-bit native build.

I'm not completely sure what exactly my problem is, but I updated to windows 7 64 bit on my desktop two weeks ago, and firefox crashes probably once every 20 minutes while using it.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[Abstrackt]

Personally, I'd rather have the browser go faster than look faster.

First, the article says "seem", not "look".

Actually, it says both: "...the simpler an interface looks, the faster it will seem...".

Second, are you sitting there with a stopwatch, shrieking "Ah hah! Caught you! I was happier because you seemed faster, but the evidence conclusively proves that I should instead be miserable. Miserable and angry."

If so, then you have enough time on your hands that browser speed isn't your top concern.

I wasn't planning to, but you make it sound fun. ;)

To rephrase my original point, I'd rather have the browser be faster than look/seem faster. I know it doesn't matter all that much much but it is important to me.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I'd rather have the browser go faster than look faster.

Right. Because, of course, the only thing they're working on is making the browser seem faster while actually being the same speed, or possibly even slower.

The fact that the presentation also discussed their plans to speed up the browser significantly means nothing. No, of course not. Focus on the one quote that was repeated in the summary.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[weszz]

mythbusters tried this with a golfball pattern, and got quite a bit BETTER gas mileage out of the car over the 1 mile course repeatedly. The downside would be that your car has hundreds of huge dimples on it... Wasn't faster, but it was more efficient.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[Sockatume]

A qualitatively "faster-feeling" browser and a quantitatively "faster-running" browser are not mutually exclusive. They are more likely to be utterly orthogonal.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[binarylarry]

The late 50's Pontiac Catalina's had holes drilled throughout the frame to reduce weight and thus increase the car's performance on the racing circuit. It was called a "swiss cheese frame."

Speed holes aren't a joke. ;)

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[wjousts]

Personally, I'd rather have the browser go faster than look faster.

Personally, I'd rather have a stable browser with useful features that I use than a browser that can render a page 0.1 second faster. I really don't understand this obsession over the speed of the browser.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[Millennium]

Because Firefox's long-standing responsiveness issues are rooted in deep architectural problems, and nobody from mozilla is willing to admit they f-ed up so badly they need to rethink the whole thing.

The folks doing deCOMtamination, as they call it, would like to have a word with you.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[OzRoy]

What is the difference? If it feels faster then isn't that what matters? You may have the best benchmarks out there, but if your application feels slow and bloated it will lose to the one that really is slower, but feels faster.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[datapharmer]

Thank you! I wish I had mod points. I am about to jump ship for chrome or safari. The only thing holding me back is the great plugins firefox offers (chrome is catching up) and the fact that chrome's UI is awful. If firefox goes the chrome route I know what I'll be using... (hint: it isn't firefox). I love firefox in general but as of late it has gotten worse every version. It has serious memory leaks and slowly grinds to a halt until I have to force quit it. The only other program I have on my mac that shows this same behavior is Microsoft Word, and now that Open office is catching up in the native mac app department I am making the transition there as well (I have always loved OO on windows and linux, but the mac version was crap in every way imaginable until recently).

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[damien_kane]

I think this is a case of YMMV
I've been running Win7 x64 for close to a year (beta => retail), and never had a case of FF crashing, except the odd time when a huge PDF is being loaded through the Foxit PDF plugin.

Perhaps it's one of your extensions that's causing the issue, and not the application itself.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[Scyber]

Personally, I'd rather have the browser go faster than look faster.

I'd rather have both. They aren't mutually exclusive.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[epiphani]

I run adblock, noscript and torbutton... I have a feeling its noscript at this point, but im not sure.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[jonadab]

Indeed.

I eventually gave in and downgraded to Firefox 2, when it became clear that certain data-loss and stability bugs in the 3.x series were not going to be fixed any time soon. Performance isn't as snappy, but I don't really care that much. I don't have to worry that I'm going to lose tabs if something goes wrong. That's worth a lot to me. And the UI is actually *better*. All the recent UI changes have been for the worse, as far as I'm concerned. In fact, the only thing I really miss from 2.x is text-shadow support, and that's an underlying Gecko improvement.

Now for 4.x they're talking about emulating Chrome, which I tried out briefly and found very much not to my liking, from a UI standpoint. I think the Firefox team have lost their way.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[cayenne8]

"My personal opinion is that the new version looks like ass -- where's the menubar? Ribbon interfaces don't seem fast to me..."

Oh No!!!

Please, tell me it isn't true...they're not going for the fscking ribbon thing like MS did when they fsck'ed up the office products??

I can't find shit on there anymore....

I hope, at least, the new FF will allow you to switch back to classic menu bars. I mean, SOMETIMES, they get the paradigm right nearly the first time....I've always thought they had it right with the menu bar system.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[spxero]

I tend to agree. On my wife's XP machine, Opera loads just as fast as Firefox, but loses out in the long run because the page is sitting on 22/23 items loaded and has yet to display anything. Firefox, on the other hand, displays everything as fast as it can, even though the progress bar at the bottom shows there is plenty more to be loaded. Technically they load almost equally, but I'd rather stare at a page being loaded/rendered than a blank white page.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[Hurricane78]

Well, to me it looks exactly like Microsoftitis. The disease where don’t come up with other ideas, but imitate others, always runing behind them, but by definition never catching up. And if you can’t imitate or only imitate it badly, you at least make it look like it does, and make it all shiny.

I hate to say it, but: It’s the point where a project has jumped the shark.
Because projects rarely get out of that endless catching up race again. And they forget about actually innovating and leading the way.
I hope the Firefox team can quickly recover. But I don’t put any money on it anymore.

Maybe someone comes up with some KHTML or Opera thing that can beat Firefox’s range of extensions. (And make no mistake: People don’t switch their browser, until ALL features that they use are available PLUS some more. Same thing happened with the Internet Explorer. The same thing is true with Linux. (But with Linux, I don’t want it, since then it wouldn’t be Linux anymore, but would have become what it hates.)

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[allcoolnameswheretak]

Your mind doesn't care about the laws of physics. It only cares about how it perceives them. While a splash screen will always increase the load time of any application, the user will perceive the application as being more responsive and faster to start than without the splash-feedback. To your imperfect, biological sensors and reasoning, that is all that matters.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[kbrosnan]

x64 builds for all tier one platforms (Windows, OS X, Linux) was specifically mentioned in the video.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[BZ]

The problem is that "go fater" is very subjective (not for benchmarks but for things like "snappy", "fast pageload", etc). Most users don't look at benchmarks. They just use whatever "feels faster"....

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[Millennium]

The point of the menubar is not to contain commonly-used options, but to contain both the common ones in a discoverable manner. Right-click menus and toolbars are best used solely for shortcuts to commonly-used options (which is why customizability of these things is nice, since definitions of 'commonly-used' differ). Ribbons lack the advantage of discoverability, which is what makes them a very bad step back UI-wise. Sure, they look cool, but they just don't do usability very well, and the trivial space savings of taking out the menubar tend to be gobbled right back up by MOAR BUTTONZ anyway.

To put it another way: menu bars function as an index, while well-designed toolbars and right-click menus function as bookmarks. Ribbons hybridize this in pretty much the worst possible way: bookmarking every option to the point where there is no sense in having bookmarked them in the first place, but without the index to make it discoverable.

Change is good. Gratuitous change usually isn't. Ribbons are an example of this: marketing-driven UI design created to wow the crowd with something New And Different, but without much if any actual reasoning behind it.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[ReneeJade]

Mine's doing this too. I'm a FF fan through and through but I'm finding it hard to hang on these days. Chrome is faster, uses far less memory (as became clear when I ran Firefox, Chrome and Opera on my housemates laptop with 512MB of RAM - Opera won but it has a Facebook bug so Chrome took the cake) and doesn't CRASH all the time under light load. If Chrome or Opera gave me the customization options that FF does I'd swap in a heartbeat.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[fast turtle]

More likely it's Adblock causing the problem. I've run a Firefox with Noscript only for the last 1.5 yr (Win7-64/RC>-Retail Win7-64) and have had no crashes due to any extensions. I have had crashes due to Plug-ins such as Flash/Quicktime/WMP but that's been endemic to the OS itself.

I personally gave up on Adblock since it was slowing FF down simply due to the number of blocks I had. After Entered most of them into the Hosts file, I was able to get rid of it and go discovered that NoScript configured to disable flash/silverlight and everything else worked as well if not better then the combo of Noscript/Ablock.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[DiLLeMaN]

AGAIN?!

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[heathen_01]

I'd rather have the browser be faster than look/seem faster.

I disagree, perception is reality. You seem to be saying that its best to be fast but have a screwed up UI that causes the user to perceive it to be slower, hence slowing down their actual interaction?

If it is actually significantly slower its going to be hard to make it look/seem faster.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[alfredos]

Perhaps the speed thing should be looked at with real-world metrics.

I use Safari because it's enough for me, it's decently supported and comes in the box. However, I find it tends to slow to a crawl past a certain point in number of tabs (JS being the usual suspect then).

My view on the speed issue is, I want a browser that scales up on number of simultaneously open web pages without compromising each other's responsiveness, much less overall system performance. If each page takes a second more or less in opening, I don't care; what I positively don't want is the rotating beach ball at any time.

Chrome's architecture seems rather nice in that regard, but I can't claim real world experience with it. Call me lazy if you want.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[Myopic]

I don't want to wade into a big argument, but I am absolutely confident that you are wrong. I am sure that you would rather it seem faster than be faster, if those are the only two choices.

Now, typically we assume that things that seem fast really ARE fast, but in our hypothetical here we are saying that for some reason that is not the case. So, if you use two browsers, and one seems faster, and fastness makes you happy, then you are happier with your perception of the seemingly faster browser. It would be nonsensical for you to then go on to do deep testing in order to verify the validity of your feelings.

Let me phrase it backwards. Assume for the argument that you are using a browser, and it seems really fricking slow. You aren't happy. It drags on and on, and you keep wondering what's taking so long.

Do you then look at a table of data showing that your perceptions are wrong, and that the browser is actually really fast, and change your perception about the browser? Of course not, that would be silly. Perhaps you would then pay attention differently, and that would change your perception, but a table of benchmarks isn't going to suffice.

Let's put it yet a different way: perception is reality, to you at least. The only way to convince you to change your mind about a browser is to change your perception, for instance by giving you benchmarks which expand your understanding. Without the benchmarks, how could you possibly know the difference between "fast" and "seems fast"?

Now in conclusion, I also want fast browsers, just like you. Nobody disputes that; we all want fast browsers. But "fast" is tantamount to "seems fast to the user". One way to make it seem fast to the user is to, you know, make it actually fast. You and I and everyone thinks this is a good way to achieve "seems fast". Another way is to show the user benchmarks of fastness. Another way is to, say, tweak the UI to make things "seem" fast.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[martas]

it's not an obsession. it may seem counterintuitive, but it's been shown that very small lags do, in fact, affect user experience, even if the user himself doesn't realize it. i don't know if 0.1 seconds would make a difference, but i'm fairly certain a number in the 0.5 range does. (can't find relevant citation at the moment)

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Chrome's interface is crap. I might use XP, but I turn all the candy bullshit themeing off. Then chrome comes on & forces me to use it again, as if I'm in Vista or something. It's fucking lame.

Linux / mac are horrible about using system colors. Windows used to be the ONLY OS that acutally got it right (well, mostly), but now they've managed to fuck that all up too in new versions.

So what does it mean?

Every OS sucks...

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Obviously they'll continue to work on actual performance it's not like they're doing badly in that department to begin with -- but perceived performance is almost as important. And a streamlined interface that "feels" fast will often be reported subjectively as faster than other interfaces (which actually *are* faster).

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[gbjbaanb]

Now for 4.x they're talking about emulating Chrome, which I tried out briefly and found very much not to my liking

Amen. If you want a Chrome UI, use Chrome.
I mean, what next, A Ribbon?

Its bad enough that they have a huge round back button, as if I can't figure out which one I need to use to go back a page -- just like IE.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

The menubar is probably hiding under the Alt key. That's something that's possible to do even now (in 3.6 Windows you can hide the menu bar if you want -- it will show when you press Alt; Linux build requires a plugin but does the same thing) and is helpful when you've limited vertical space. IE does something similar as well.

Speaking of Linux, I wonder if they're finally going to change the menu item locations to be the same across platforms... ("Preferences..." I'm looking at you!)

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[perryizgr8]

it could be due to an old profile. sometimes you have to uninstall ff completely and delete the profile folder, then reinstall. i had ff1 profile carried on to ff3 and it was very slow. fixed when i started anew.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[damien_kane]

Of those three, I run only adblock, without issue.
Sibling runs only NoScript, without issue.

Looking at the TorButton extension page, though, it seems there are a lot of bugs in it.
As well, by its very nature (instead of just altering the data feed from servers, like NoScript/Adblock, it actively modifies what FF is doing), I'd guess it could be TorButton.

Again, though, YMMV.
Perhaps there's some other underlying application screwing with things. Potentially not even related to FF.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[wjousts]

But I can't imagine that lags in rendering have more of an impact than, say, lags in downloading the page in the first place.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[wjousts]

I rather think that for 99% of the people in the world, the biggest impact on their internet experience is network speeds, not rendering speed.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[cp.tar]

Speaking of Linux, I wonder if they're finally going to change the menu item locations to be the same across platforms... ("Preferences..." I'm looking at you!)

There's nothing wrong here. Under Linux, you find Preferences under Edit. Under Windows, you find them under Tools. On a Mac, you find them under Firefox (or Cmd+,). The program needs to be consistent with the platform.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[cp.tar]

I now use a combination of Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Firefox for the general stuff, as I tend to have a million open tabs, sorted with Tree Style Tab (insert comparison with sliced bread here). Chrome I use for Flash content, and Safari out of habit for certain sites.

Firefox is getting too slow and annoying, but the extensions keep me stuck to it. Until there are stuff on other browsers like TST, a Chinese dictionary and all the other goodies I'm used to on Firefox, with Firefox I'll stay. But no longer, unless they improve.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[pizzach]

I hate to say it, but: It's the point where a project has jumped the shark.
Because projects rarely get out of that endless catching up race again. And they forget about actually innovating and leading the way.
I hope the Firefox team can quickly recover. But I don't put any money on it anymore.

Slow down there a bit friend. Everyone is currently in the Javascript speed race. Everyone is also currently in the simplify the interface faze. Everyone is also entering the hardware acceleration race. Everyone is in the add extensions support race. In short, everyone everybody is playing catch up with each other.

It was IE and now chrome that started this strange Windows interface shift. While the classic interface of Firefox has generally been popular, Firefox is now in danger of being the odd one instead of the one all the others are being judged by. The irony is that Firefox has just really started getting down making XUL emulate the native interfaces pretty well after....their long history of doing custom interfaces. Anyone remember "Modern"? Opera's custom interface hasn't caught on like wild fire either.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[Toonol]

This has been the way the Mozilla foundation has been going. It's been pretty clear since the introduction of the "awesomebar" that they are more concerned with hype and marketing than with usability, performance, and choice. This is just proceeding further down the path.

I'm still a Firefox user, but I'm no longer evangelical about it. It's lost it's purpose.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[spitzak]

I don't understand how "ribbons" are less discoverable than a menubar. Just click on all the ribbon titles and you see their entire contents, just like if you clicked on each menu title in a menu bar.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[Spewns]

Personally, I'd rather have the browser go faster than look faster.

Personally, I'd rather have a stable browser with useful features that I use than a browser that can render a page 0.1 second faster. I really don't understand this obsession over the speed of the browser.

Try a browser that isn't turd-slow and you'll understand. You're mistaken if you think it's about loading a page 0.1 seconds faster.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[Kazoo the Clown]

I gave up on Netscape because it turned into bloatware...

I gave up on Mozilla because it turned into bloatware...

I gave up on Firefox because it turned into bloatware...


See the pattern here? I'm done with these guys. It's clear they don't understand the "less is more" principle of design.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[Crazy_MYKL]

The awesome bar is all about usability and performance. It saves me a lot of time. And there is an extension to disable it.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[jonadab]

> Amen. If you want a Chrome UI, use Chrome.

Yeah. But I *don't* want Chrome.

Now, if they want to do perf improvements to try to equal Chrome's Javascript benchmark speeds or something, I have no objection. I don't *care*, but I don't object either.

But please don't emulate the Chrome UI. It sucks. Bad.

> I mean, what next, A Ribbon?

Please, no.

> Its bad enough that they have a huge round back button

The exact appearance of the back button actually isn't important to me. As long as the back button is in the right place (directly under the File menu, thank you very much) and *does* what it's supposed to do, I'm happy with it.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

I thought about that, but ... personally, I'd rather have an app behave consistently no matter what platform I'm on. If I'm running Firefox, I'm running FF -- not running FF/Windows or FF/Mac.

I understand the argument you're making- and I suspect you're right for most users (which is all that really counts here, of course). If you're not changing platforms frequently as a user then of course it's best to have the app consistent with other apps on that same platform.

Still - it's not like "Tools" is any kind of standard on Windows. I've seen Windows apps put preferences under View as well as under other locations (including File and Help... ).

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[cp.tar]

If you're not changing platforms frequently as a user then of course it's best to have the app consistent with other apps on that same platform.

Still - it's not like "Tools" is any kind of standard on Windows. I've seen Windows apps put preferences under View as well as under other locations (including File and Help... ).

Well, I do change platforms regularly, but this does not bother me. I also use different keyboard layouts on different platforms (Mac Croatian is QWERTY, while PC Croatian is QWERTZ, for one), but it takes very little time to adapt.

Now, if you want to bitch about the lack of standards under Windows, go right ahead; you won't get any opposition from me.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[ultranova]

I'm not completely sure what exactly my problem is, but I updated to windows 7 64 bit on my desktop two weeks ago, and firefox crashes probably once every 20 minutes while using it.

Check your plugins. I had this problem, which was apparently caused by either "Google Update", "Google Earth Plugin" or "Wacom Dynamic Link Library" (why the Hell does a pen tablet need a browser plugin anyway?) - dunno which, since I disabled them all, and the problem went away.

As programs become ever more complex, we really need to start making it easy to isolate their subsystems so they can recover from errors without crashing...

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[AmiMoJo]

It doesn't even make sense ergonomically or in terms of usability. I use tabs a lot and so it makes sense to have them closest to the main view area. I do a lot more clicking on them than I do typing stuff into the address bar (and yes, I use search shortcuts extensively).

The new layout also takes the current tab title out of the application window title. I use multiple windows to contain related tabs so having the current tab title there helps me select the right one on the task bar.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

That's a whole other topic. Unsurprising though - when you have a million developers making a million products, and no UI rules enforced at the OS level... it's bound to be a mess. Linux suffers the same problem. I get the impression that Mac may not though? Not sure if it's enforcement is at the OS level, or just really strongly worded suggestions....

H.264 support?

[elrous0]

First of all, am I the only one who hates Chrome's interface? But that's just window dressing, the real question is will it support H264/HTML5?

Re:H.264 support?

[betterunixthanunix]

Do you want to foot the bill for H264 royalties?

Re:H.264 support?

[delinear]

h.264 and HTML5 aren't synonymous - HTML5 just provides a video container, the browser vendor decides what codecs to allow, so it's entirely possible to fully support HTML5 yet still have no h.264 support.

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:H.264 support?

[GweeDo]

No. Well that was simple.

Re:H.264 support?

[Abcd1234]

Supporting H.264 doesn't mean FF has to actually ship the codec. Go learn about GStreamer and DirectShow, then rethink your silly argument.

Re:H.264 support?

[camcorder]

It would cost 3 cents now.

Re:H.264 support?

[delinear]

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?

Why is everyone so eager to suddenly replace one proprietary format for another? I'm not saying that h.264 is the wrong choice, it certainly seems better than the competition right now, but just because the licensing group are playing nice at the moment, don't assume they will always play nice. Maybe the right choice is to stick with Flash a little longer to further development on an open source alternative and Mozilla have got it right. I guess time will tell as h.264 looks pretty inevitable now, I just hope we're not having similar discussions in a few years about how we're shackled with it as a format and the people behind it are screwing everyone.

Re:H.264 support?

[Scrameustache]

h.264 and HTML5 aren't synonymous - HTML5 just provides a video container, the browser vendor decides what codecs to allow, so it's entirely possible to fully support HTML5 yet still have no h.264 support.

It was also possible to sell fully functional VCRs that weren't VHS. But it wasn't easy finding content for them.

Re:H.264 support?

[Beorytis]

First of all, am I the only one who hates Chrome's interface?

No.

But that's just window dressing,

Not really. It's what's kept me on FF. I just couldn't get Chrome to do what I wanted. It was a bit too streamlined. If FF4 keeps the search bar intact and keyboard accessible, I'll keep it and deal with the rest.

the real question is will it support H264/HTML5?

... or at least: how will it support H.264. It seems like it will have to eventually.

Re:H.264 support?

[betterunixthanunix]

Actually, for most people, supporting H264 would mean that FF would have to ship the codec. Yes, I do actually deal with non-technical users on a regular basis, and the more steps they have to go through to get a video to play, the more likely they are to give up and use some other software. If it does not work out of the box, it might as well not work at all.

Re:H.264 support?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

First of all, am I the only one who hates Chrome's interface?

No. Most people hate it. However most graphics and UI designers, tech reporters and iThing owners love it because it is the latest and most shiniest flashing glitter ball that they must play with. These are the people who make and demand interface changes. These are the people who actually think that menu bars are a "waste of screen space". These are the people who think that putting tabs outside of the program window frame is either a useful or desired change. These are the people think that "minimalism"--giving the user less and less controls or options--constitutes a step forward at all costs.

Firefox's UI is fine. But because of these people, resources at Mozilla are being wasted on needless keeping up with the Jones at Google. Meanwhile actually needed features like speed, process separation and support for self signed certs are being sidelined while the team focuses on making the browser shiny.

Google is a steamroller, and is aiming to squash the other browsers flat. Firefox included. Lack of realistic leadership, as manifested in these proposals, will only ensure that Google succeeds where Microsoft has failed.

Re:H.264 support?

[Winckle]

My reasons for wanting to do so are:

1. Flash is a performance hog on platforms that aren't win32.
2. With H264 it will be easier to download youtube content for safekeeping.
3. H264 has hardware acceleration in a lot of portable devices.

Re:H.264 support?

[Goaway]

Because there is no other choice at the moment which stands a snowball's chance in hell of actually being used. You can support Theora as much as you want, but that just means content producers will keep using Flash, because that is what gives them the video quality they want.

Your choices are: Flash and h.264, or just h.264. The latter gives you the choice to sneak in Theora on the side for those who still want it. What sane person would pick the former choice?

Re:H.264 support?

[Yvan256]

The thing is, there is no such thing as "Flash Video" anymore. It's just a Flash interface to playback H.264 files anyway, so why bother with Flash at all for playing back video files?

Also, see the three reasons posted by Winckle.

Re:H.264 support?

[Kjella]

From the numbers a lot of people have posted, it would only cost about 3 cents per copy of Firefox.

Neither Firefox nor x264 could be used that way, the GPL requires an essentially limitless sub-licensing rights (technically it could be limited to GPL only software) and that's not part of the license. The closest you could have is a non-free plugin not based on x264, since flash is ok I guess that is too. The best solution would be to simply let the system codecs handle it, and if not fall back to flash. Win7, OS X has it native and most Linux users will install x264 anyway...

Re:H.264 support?

[datapharmer]

yes. I have tried using Ogg Theora. Until it is supported by hardware it is useless on the web. It doesn't even play back videos as well as those in flash containers (which stutter like crazy).

But here is an ingenious idea: let the browser use whatever video support the system has. Patents were never a problem for the img tag. GIF was patent encumbered, but it didn't stop it from being the de facto standard for crappy web animation in the 90s. The video and audio html5 arguments are nonsense. Let users use what the users already have!

Re:H.264 support?

[CaptnMArk]

Firefox can be used by 6+ billion people. Will you pay?

Re:H.264 support?

[datapharmer]

1. Because Flash doesn't work at all on many web enabled devices
2. Because Flash doesn't work well on the other devices that it does support
3. Because H.264 playback works well and most video cards have built in decoders (unlike Theora)
4. Why are we tying the video tag to any particular format at all? The image tag isn't tied to a particular image format...

Re:H.264 support?

[Abcd1234]

Actually, for most people, supporting H264 would mean that FF would have to ship the codec.

No, it wouldn't. Most modern OS's ship with a built-in codec. If the machine doesn't have the codec, Firefox can pop up a little message saying "Your machine doesn't have codec X installed. Please see your vendor for how to install it."

If it does not work out of the box, it might as well not work at all.

It *already* doesn't work at all. At least by linking to a generic rendering pipeline, it can work if people want it to.

Re:H.264 support?

[Abcd1234]

Maybe the right choice is to stick with Flash a little longer to further development on an open source alternative and Mozilla have got it right.

No, the right choice is to begin the transition ASAP, as that by itself is a pretty monumental task, and then if a better codec comes along, the browsers can just implement it, and the content providers can just use it (neither *wants* an expensive codec, but H.264 simply beats the hell out of any of the alternatives from a performance standpoint).

Re:H.264 support?

[betterunixthanunix]

So in the end, we are still going to pay for H264 royalties, but we'll do so through our OSes instead of Firefox?

For the record, my OS does not ship with H264 support.

Re:H.264 support?

[Draek]

Well, here it's much easier.

Re:H.264 support?

[Abcd1234]

What the hell are you arguing now? Frankly, I don't even know. You claimed Firefox can't support H.264 before someone would have to "foot the bill for royalties". I pointed out that you are, in fact, completely wrong.

Now you're just shifting the goalposts. So do you actually have a relevant point to make, or are you just trying to dance your way around the fact that you were wrong originally, and you're still wrong now?

Re:H.264 support?

[ThePhilips]

First of all, am I the only one who hates Chrome's interface?

No.

+1

Re:H.264 support?

[ZorinLynx]

Firefox can simply use the h.264 support provided by the operating system, then they have to pay nothing.

Apple supports h.264 through Quicktime.
Microsoft supports h.264 through Windows Media.
Linux distros support h.264 through a variety of methods, including Gstreamer.

In any event, once Mozilla does this, the royalties are no longer their responsibility. Everyone wins.

BUT NO ONE SEEMS TO REALIZE THIS. Grr.

Re:H.264 support?

[elrous0]

I had a friend using Chrome and one day he was at his networked printer and asked me to print out a webpage for him. I couldn't even figure out how to get Chrome to print. When I asked him, he admitted that he had memorized the hotkey combo for printing because he couldn't figure it out either. A default config where you can't even print without either reconfiguring the interface or hitting the right hotkey combo is a pretty piss-poor design, no matter how pretty it looks.

Re:H.264 support?

[elrous0]

Having to memorize keyboard shortcuts to do anything is for shit. That kind of crap went out in the 90's, along with command line interfaces and DOS. If your design is so minimalist that a user has to remember keyboard combos to do anything, then you've designed a shitty GUI, end of story.

Re:H.264 support?

[MBGMorden]

You're not the only one, but after a while, it becomes tolerable. Interface aside, Chrome as been the fastest browser for me on multiple platforms, and that was worth switching. After a week or two the interface became a non-issue.

Re:H.264 support?

[clone53421]

Then I guess it still wouldn’t work for you, but at least it could work for people whose OS has already paid the royalties to support it.

Re:H.264 support?

[Hurricane78]

Others have suggested that the Mozilla Foundation should just use the OS to playback video and stop complaining for nothing.

This.
Just bind to ffmpeg on Linux (which already includes H.264, and interestingly is in all the “completely open-source” package managers), to DirectShow on Windows, and to CoreVideo on MacOS X and be done with it. No trouble, no nothing. Completely 100% legal and working on Windows And MacOS X, and if ffmpeg gets sued, the influence on Mozilla is zero.
Plus, they get playback on ALL formats for free, allowing the site owner to choose what he prefers. Including Theora and other free codecs.

It’s a total no-brainer, but the Firefox team wants to get all evangelistic and completely irrational, making it a holy war.

Nobody is against preferring open codecs. We’re against removing freedom and choice over such childish shit, for no reason at all, based on a false dichotomy.
Being grown-ups they should be ashamed of themselves. Or at least call themselves politicians, and not developers. ;)

Re:H.264 support?

[John Hasler]

> Having to memorize keyboard shortcuts to do anything is for shit.

Not everyone finds learning a few keystrokes an insurmountable task.

Re:H.264 support?

[Hurricane78]

There is always the one guy who makes this exact comment. And my answer is always:
No shit Sherlock? ^^

We knew that already. The original poster obviously meant "HTML5 with H.264 support" when we said “...will it support H264/HTML5?”. (And yes, we are aware that H.264 with HTML4 is available right now, trough the <object> tag referencing a video file, but of course not as a first-class element.)

Re:H.264 support?

[Gerv]

You know, we at Mozilla have all these people working on this problem and amazingly enough, no-one thought of your idea of using the OS libraries yet! How dumb we suddenly all feel... Clearly, you have more brains than all of us put together.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2009/06/directshow_and.html

Gerv

Re:H.264 support?

[kbrosnan]

http://openvideo.dailymotion.com/ as well

Re:H.264 support?

[Yvan256]

It’s a total no-brainer, but the Firefox team wants to get all evangelistic and completely irrational, making it a holy war.

And it's a war they just can't win. There's too many valid options right now. Depending on your OS, you have a choice between Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, Opera and Firefox, to name only the major options.

It would be quite simple for Google to reduce the number of Firefox and Opera users. Simply remove "Flash playback" capability on YouTube. Chrome and Safari can already play H.264, and soon Internet Explorer will join them.

What will Firefox and Opera users do once that happens? Will they say "Please YouTube, add Theora to YouTube?" Hell no, they don't know and don't care how things work.

They'll say "Firefox/Opera is crap, it doesn't even support the new YouTube", just like people thought that the other browsers were crap when all the websites were made for IE6. They'll download Internet Explorer, Chrome or Safari and stop using Firefox/Opera.

Re:H.264 support?

[lehphyro]

The web should be freely accessible for everyone.

Re:H.264 support?

[Yvan256]

Actually, for most people, supporting H264 would mean that FF would have to ship the codec.

No it doesn't. Most people use either Windows or Mac OS X. Both of these OS ship with H.264 support.

Re:H.264 support?

[BlindRobin]

No you are not. I find it is too sparse and assumes too much. But then I also hate ipod controls and anything that takes more digit dexterity than an axe.

Re:H.264 support?

[clone53421]

“Should” and “is” are the difference between theory and practice. In theory, the website should implement something that is freely accessible to everyone. In practice, people want their OS and browser to work, and that means supporting whatever the website chose to implement.

Re:H.264 support?

[martas]

too streamlined? i'm not sure what that means. nothing i ever do with my browser takes more time/is harder in chrome than ff, and i have a lot more real estate in chrome without sacrificing functionality. how is your experience different?

Re:H.264 support?

[delinear]

Oh I don't disagree that Flash needs to die, this has been my standpoint for much of the last decade for numerous reasons (accessibility and indexability of sites even back before mobile devices and performance and security issues made it a hot topic). Nobody would be happier to see the back of it than me, for all the reasons you list and more, but the fact is that it's going to be around for a while yet anyway (there are too many people using browsers with zero HTML5 support), so it might be a good idea to reflect on what the best replacement is, from all perspectives, not just the "anything is better than this crap" perspective which assumes that nothing is potentially worse than this crap.

As for tying the tag to the format, I agree that theoretically it's easy to switch in another codec, but once most of the content on the web is using one format it will be a massive undertaking to switch. As you say, the image element isn't tied to any particular image format, but of the hundreds of image formats out there, how many does your browser support? and if it's more than 3, how many of those formats have widespread support/implementation on the web? My worry is we'll be tied to one codec just like we're tied to three image formats (actually, three is generous considering I still frequently have to struggle with IE6's lack of proper alpha transparency on .pngs even now), and at that point the H.264 licensing body can really turn the screws, if they so choose.

Re:H.264 support?

[JBrandonS]

4. Why are we tying the video tag to any particular format at all? The image tag isn't tied to a particular image format...

It makes perfect sense for all the web browser developers (or the main ones) to agree on the default video type for the 'video' tag. This way places like youtube only need to hold a single video, rather then 3 or 4 to cover each browser. This also means that your mom and pop will be able to pick up a book that will tell them just to use h264 rather then trying to explain to them that they will need to have 4 different versions of the same movie and a browser check. I do think they should add a 'video type="theroda"' However.

Re:H.264 support?

[silanea]

Having to memorize keyboard shortcuts to do anything is for shit. That kind of crap went out in the 90's, [...]

Oh, how good to know. Be sure to tell that to the millions of people who play video games more complex than minesweeper. They apparently haven't noticed.

Re:H.264 support?

[Wrath0fb0b]

Why is everyone so eager to suddenly replace one proprietary format for another?

H264 is not even close to proprietary. It is an open specification (actually an ISO standard[1]) that is entirely complete. You can even download an entirely open source implementation of the decoder[2] or the encoder[3], both of with are fully standards compliant and L/GPL licensed.

Now, the patent-license situation is not ideal, but it's worlds better than the situation with Flash, which is not an ISO standard (actually, actionscript is a bastardized javascript), of which there are no fully compliant open source implementations (sorry, Gnash really sucks, I wish it were good) and which is entirely under the control of Adobe, not the ISO.

IMO, we should be very eager to replace one proprietary system with a patent-encumbered open standard with opensource encoders/decoders. The best is not the enemy of the good -- and this is a hell of a good step in the right direction, even if it's a step from worse to merely bad.

[1] http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=50726 -- The full ISO144926-10 specification.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libavcodec, part of the FFMPEG project -- licensed under the LPGL.

[3] http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html, licensed under the GPL.

Re:H.264 support?

[Teckla]

First of all, am I the only one who hates Chrome's interface?

I like Chrome's UI. I like as little clutter as possible in all my GUI applications. I know some people that can ignore any amount of clutter and get to business, but some of us have trouble concentrating when there is a lot of clutter. I think that's one of the reasons Adblock Plus became so popular.

About the only thing I dislike about Chrome's UI is that when I tell my OS to tile my windows, Chrome's window doesn't get tiled.

Re:H.264 support?

[the_womble]

It is not exactly easy to find H264 content either.

It is quite possible that everyone will stick to FLV, because it will continue to be the most widely supported format. Its also possible, if less likely, that Google will be able to persuade everyone to install VP8 plugins by using Youtube to spread it. Its also possible (if still less likely) that Theora will gain enough steam to be a contender (everything except IE and Safari will support it out of the box, if those two groups can be persuaded to install the plugin)

Re:H.264 support?

[ZorinLynx]

Are you guys hiring? "having more brains than all of you put together" would probably make me a good job candidate. ;)

Seriously, though, thanks for explaining that. These are valid reasons for not using the OS to provide video. But either way there should be away to add additional codec support to Firefox without patching the main source and recompiling. A plugin would be nice; leave it up to the user rather than saying "No you can't do this."

Re:H.264 support?

[elrous0]

This is not a MMORPG or an expert system. It's a web browser. It's supposed to be one of the simplest pieces of software on a computer. If a new user can't start it up and figure pretty much everything out in about 5 minutes, it's a design fail.

Re:H.264 support?

[IamTheRealMike]

1) It's not "Flash" that's a performance hog, it's "lack of the right compositing APIs" that's the hog. Or did you not notice yet that Chrome and Safari are slower than Flash at rendering video with overlays?

2) What makes you think YouTube wants to make it easier to download their content

3) Flash uses h264 anyway so the hardware acceleration is somewhat moot. As long as the colorspace conversions can be accelerated the performance should be the same. Flashs problem is that MacOS and Linux haven't supported the right stuff very well. Actually it was only just added in an OS X point release. There's already a Flash plugin beta that uses these APIs and should perform much better.

Re:H.264 support?

[IamTheRealMike]

So pressing the button that looks like a piece of paper and then the "print" option wasn't clear?

Don't get me wrong, Chromes UI isn't perfect, but the only buttons it provides are back, forward, reload, star and then two "menu buttons". The meaning of the first four is clear to anyone who used a browser for a while. The meaning of the last two can be found simply by clicking on them.

Re:H.264 support?

[BikeHelmet]

You click on the menu button (right side of the screen - looks like a piece of letter paper), then pick "Print" from the drop-down list...

Informative? Honestly, have any of you even used Chrome? It took me 5 seconds to find that... There's only two menu buttons, so even if you read all the options, you're looking at 30 seconds before you stumble upon it.

Considering that most people are migrating away from IE, this is quite an improvement over 2 menu bars, a titlebar, 6 toolbars, an address and favourites bar... In IE I've seen half the screen get used by toolbars on desktop PCs. The way people click through installers, it quickly becomes unusable on netbooks - not enough vertical space.

Re:H.264 support?

[flibuste]

Hum...I sense some bad faith here...The Print function is located on the first of the only 2 buttons that the Chrome UI has besides the navigation ones. Granted it can take up to 30s to find it the first time. And the shortcut..The almighty and ubiquitous Ctrl-P....present in almost every application since the birth of operating systems that can handle a mouse and a printer.

I'm really trying but I don't see where the Chrome UI design failed in this matter.

Re:H.264 support?

[silanea]

If a new user can't start it up and figure pretty much everything out in about 5 minutes, it's a design fail.

The same goes for games. Having the option (!) of using shortcuts does not exclude the need for an accessible UI, and vice versa. We are not talking emacs level complexity here. Pressing ALT+D to jump into the location bar is hardly arcane magic. Using a traditional computer (as in "has a screen, a mouse and a keyboard") gives you two input devices readily at hand; it would be retarded to eliminate one of them simply because, uhm, well, using it takes about one minute of your precious time to glance over the shortcut list.

Since the advent of touch devices on the mass market and the future uptake that is to be expected I agree that many applications' UIs will have to evolve to accommodate different interaction paradigms. That does not mean, though, that what has served many of "us" very well since the invention of graphical UIs is suddenly bad. Keyboard shortcuts have their place. So does the command line. Different users follow different strategies and have different requirements.

Re:H.264 support?

[Beorytis]

It's a web browser. It's supposed to be one of the simplest pieces of software on a computer. If a new user can't start it up and figure pretty much everything out in about 5 minutes, it's a design fail.

And if an advanced user can't tweak it sufficiently so that the things they do repeatedly can be done in one or two keystrokes, then it's meant only for the new users... Thus my disappointment with Chrome.

Re:H.264 support?

[Beorytis]

Different users follow different strategies and have different requirements.

I've found that I'm not even aware of the strategies I follow until they're blocked.

Re:H.264 support?

[westlake]

From the numbers a lot of people have posted, it would only cost about 3 cents per copy of Firefox.

SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS

For (1) branded encoder and decoder products sold both to end users and on an OEM basis for incorporation into personal computers but not part of an operating system (a decoder, encoder, or product consisting of one decoder and one encoder = "unit"), royalties...per legal entity are:

0 - 100,000 units per year = no royalty (this threshold is available to one legal entity in an affiliated group);
US $0.20 per unit after first 100,000 units each year;
above 5 million units per year, royalty = US $0.10 per unit.

The maximum annual royalty ("cap") for an enterprise (commonly controlled legal entities) is...$5 million per year 2009-10.

_____

MPEG LA seems interested only in very large scale commercial deployment of H.264.

Local TV broadcasters serving more than 100,000 households. Subscription services like HBO with more than 100,000 subscribers.

Brand-name consumer products: the HDTV from LG or Samsung. The video game console from Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo.

It's not at all clear to me why - apart from ideological reasons - Mozilla couldn't negotiate a free-as-in-beer license for the codec for bare-bones non-commercial deployments of the Firefox browser.

No OEM or marketing tie-ins. No customization of the browser.

It wouldn't be the first time I have asked myself if Mozilla wouldn't benefit from a more arm's length relationship with Google.

Re:H.264 support?

[Beorytis]

Considering that most people are migrating away from IE, this is quite an improvement over 2 menu bars, a titlebar, 6 toolbars, an address and favourites bar...

Of course TFA is about how FF may become more chrome-like. I found FF 3 to be a good middle road between the austere Chrome and the Baroque IE.

Re:H.264 support?

[Late Adopter]

I couldn't even figure out how to get Chrome to print.

Seriously? Very first menu, then "Print..." You can also get it by right clicking the page.

Where did you want the print option to be?

Re:H.264 support?

[westlake]

I'm not saying that h.264 is the wrong choice, it certainly seems better than the competition right now, but just because the licensing group are playing nice at the moment, don't assume they will always play nice.

The fundamental problem here is the geek's obsession with the browser.

H.264 has rock-solid anchorage in professional production. In broadcasting. Cable and satellite distribution. Blu-Ray. CCTV [Industrial and Security Video, for example]

A casual search of Google Shopping returns 1600 hits for "H.264 WiFi Camera."

Home video.

The $125 HD "Flip" pocket camcorder. The $5,000 Sony Handycam.

Google Shopping returns 3600 hits for "H.264 Camcorder." In stores now.

The major stakeholders in H.264 are global industrial giants. Names like Fujitsu, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Siemens and Toshiba. AVC/H.264 Licensors

The 817 H.264 licensees include dozens - hundreds of names - which would be considered first-tier in their respective markets.

Many, many, of these enormously rich and influential companies are based in China, Japan and Korea. They have no reason to follow Mozilla's lead - or Google's.

Re:H.264 support?

[silanea]

That is what makes UI design so hard to get right. You have to shoot a bird that the one who wants it dead cannot describe any more closely than "it has wings, it is not an eagle and it may or may not carry an elephant". Which is precisely why one should not be so quick to dismiss an input method as archaic or "shit" when it is obviously helpful to many people. elrous0's attitude is exactly why Microsoft found itself on the receiving end of a shitstorm when they introduced the Ribbon interface in Office 2007 without retaining the old interface as an option: One size often does not fit all, no matter how well designed it is or how well it works in theory.

Re:H.264 support?

[jwhitener]

"No. Most people hate it."

I'm not sure what type of people you work with or are friends with, but everyone I know loves chromes UI.

IT department, server admins, check.
IT department, web developers, check.
IT department, programmers, check.
Family and Friends, check.

I really like the extra space the UI gives me by not having so many of its extensions in toolbar format. For instance, the web developer add-on in Firefox is a whole toolbar. Whereas the Pendule extension in Chrome is a button, that when clicked, exposes about 35 choices. I prefer that space savings.

One row of tabs, one row with the address and five buttons to the side of it (gwave,gmail,resolution test, pendule, jquery window) is pretty perfect for most day to day stuff I do.

To each their own.

Re:H.264 support?

[lennier]

+++!

This is the important point people don't seem to realise. It's not how much royalties cost, it's that you cannot legally require ANY royalties at all and be GPL compliant.

This is why Novell raised eyebrows with their Microsoft patent deal, remember? Because it's not legal.

If you want to kick the H.264 patent problem to the OS to keep it out of Firefox, fine - but now you've just caused a new problem in Linux GPL codebases, because it won't be legal to install H.264 there.

H.264 is only legal as non Open Source software. Which makes it a right nuisance, like binary driver blobs. It's not a good supportable way to go forward.

Re:H.264 support?

[lennier]

And Linux doesn't matter? Is this still Slashdot?

Re:H.264 support?

[selven]

All righty then, I'll stick with my "shit" keyboard shortcuts and be 3 times as productive while you're fumbling around trying to hit the "X" button to close your browser.

Re:H.264 support?

[Yvan256]

Linux users != most people

Re:H.264 support?

[Your.Master]

1) Is the implication here that Linux and OSX are inherently unable to display video performantly? I'm genuinely curious.
2) Why do I care if YouTube wants to make my life harder?
3) I think this is a point vs. Theora and other formats, and not against Flash. Remember, the GPP was talking about "replace one proprietary format for another", vs. going to an open source format, which does not have the install-base of hardware acceleration.

Re:H.264 support?

[Waccoon]

However most graphics and UI designers, tech reporters and iThing owners love it because it is the latest and most shiniest flashing glitter ball that they must play with.

Thank you.

One thing that really annoys me about Chrome is that it's so different from other apps on my machine. No matter how fancy the interface is (for better or for worse), I expect it to follow the UI guidelines for the OS. I hate the fact that Chrome has replaced drop-down menus with icons. It screws me up every time.

Plus, you have to respect people's right to choose. Not everybody needs the same thing, let alone wants it for emotional reasons. Using Chrome as a web developer is painful. Why can't I choose between having drop-down menus and having extra space? The Web Developer extension for Firefox gives me a whole toolbar to use for development that has clear icons for everything. Why can't I just move a button around where I want it? Why do I have to be forced to use a minimalist interface? It can't possibly be that hard to code.

The truth is, minimalism is often just an exercise in control. Sure, tell me it's for my own good and it makes things better, but I know very well that streamlining is just a way to tell me I should expect less. Concerning good interface design and computer companies, does this sound familiar?

Re:H.264 support?

[jesser]

Flash includes an H.264 decoder, so moving from Flash to plain H.264 would be an improvement. Whether we want "the perfect to be the enemy of the good" is up for debate, of course.

Flash and H.264 are also "proprietary" in different ways (closed-source vs open-source with patents). Do both kinds of "proprietary" have the same negative consequences?

Re:H.264 support?

[jesser]

Why are you using this argument to support H.264 rather than, say, Theora? Currently, more users have support for Theora than H.264 (in the HTML5 video tag), because Firefox's marketshare is twice that of Chrome and Safari combined.

Re:H.264 support?

[Pentium100]

Yes, menu bars are a waste of space. On my old laptop (486DX 50MHz,16MB RAM, 640x480 screen) the 20px menu bar takes massive 4% of screen height and must be eliminated. Maybe I should use Chrome on that laptop if it works under Windows 98.

Of course, my desktop PC has screen resolution of 1600x1200 (can go up to unimaginable 1920x1440), but I'm probably the only one who has such a a high resolution monitor. Most people probably use 640x480 or maybe 320x240...

So, how about an option to turn the menu bar on and leave it there? One thing I like about Opera is that I can customize the interface however I want. I usually make it similar (not identical though) to the interface of Opera 7.25 because that's the way I like it.

Re:H.264 support?

[dotancohen]

I couldn't even figure out how to get Chrome to print.

http://xkcd.com/627/

Re:H.264 support?

[Scrameustache]

Why are you using this argument to support H.264 rather than, say, Theora? Currently, more users have support for Theora than H.264 (in the HTML5 video tag), because Firefox's marketshare is twice that of Chrome and Safari combined.

'cause I've recently had teachers express their desire for everything to be in H.264, and it's pretty much the standard for media CREATION, so it will be the standard for playback as well.

It's an observation, not a ideological position.

Re:H.264 support?

[bill_mcgonigle]

It's a total no-brainer, but the Firefox team wants to get all evangelistic and completely irrational, making it a holy war.

It's a good hill to die on, but that's what they're going to do. Maybe somebody will fork.

The Firefox 4 plans really re-enforce this notion. The right people were saying the right things ten years ago, but MoFo management has forestalled all the hard problems until now it is too late. Google realized this a few years back - Firefox could have been in 2007 what Chromium is now.

Re:H.264 support?

[cffrost]

[...] support for self signed certs [...]

If you click the site's icon in the URL bar, you should be led to a dialog that allows you to add an exception (to accept that particular certificate then and thereafter).

Another method: Tools > Options > Advanced > Encryption > View Certificates > Servers > Add Exception...

I'm using Firefox 3.6.3; YMMV.

Re:H.264 support?

[badkarmadayaccount]

Meh. Just add a JS wrapper for OpenCL and a codec specifier in the tag. That way the licensing ball is entirely in the hands of the website.

Silent update

[Ant P.]

It won't be "silent" if it keeps that obnoxious behaviour it does now, where it interrupts you with a new version splash page. It's no less rude than a popup ad.

Re:Silent update

[Dog-Cow]

You also have no idea what the OP was talking about.

Finally surf the WWW with FFF

[thijsh]

Fire Fox Four, sounds like a cheesy name for a new Charlies-Angels-kinda-group... But seriously, the new browser looks good with some nice new technologies for web developers and hopefully some better speed for the users... For other waiting: we can expect the beta in June, and the RC in October with a release within a month, so FFF should land this fall.

Re:Finally surf the WWW with FFF

[chill]

You're probably thinking of "Fox Force Five", from Pulp Fiction

http://www.whysanity.net/monos/fox.html

Re:Finally surf the WWW with FFF

[Pojut]

Ketchup!

Re:Finally surf the WWW with FFF

[thijsh]

Oh man, that's fucked up! You ruined it... Now I'll have to wait until version 5 comes out to make that lame joke again.
I don't mean any disrespect, I just don't like people barking orders at me. ;)

Re:Finally surf the WWW with FFF

[Jake Griffin]

or Family Force Five... on second thought, they look nothing like Charlie's Angels... so maybe not...

Re:Finally surf the WWW with FFF

[ReneeJade]

Fire Fox Four, sounds like a cheesy name for a new Charlies-Angels-kinda-group... But seriously, the new browser looks good with some nice new technologies for web developers and hopefully some better speed for the users... For other waiting: we can expect the beta in June, and the RC in October with a release within a month, so FFF should land this fall.

And when Firefox VI comes out, we can surf the web with "For Fuck's Sake".

Re:Finally surf the WWW with FFF

[vlueboy]

My beef with firefox started around 2.0 when I realized that backward compatibility with extensions wasn't guaranteed. Extensions cannot be even downloaded when your browser is off by 0.0.1 from Mozilla's "safety" numbers, which happens if you are inadvertently updated --FF4 wants to push those updates more freely and break my setup overnight, if they continue to deny me the chance to define which extensions I can and cannot download --I'll continue to fake my browser string so I can download them, and Nightly Tester so I can "force the install." What bothers me on FF4 is that they're removing the menu bar, other sane browsers used by the geek-free mainstream, like Opera and Safari have been shy of that move.

Adblock can be somewhat emulated by with a 0.0.0.0 entries on your hostsfile, and plugins can be disabled if I don't feel like watching flash videos. Youtube has some HTML5 support anyway. I will check up on FF's Minefield beta only till FF 3.7 "gold" spawns from it. I currently benefit from the beta's speedier tab multiprocessing. When Safari or Opera start offering this FF beta benefit, I'm gone.

Re:Retarded

[Anonymous Coward]

at a magical and unbelievable price too!

"the faster it will seem" ?

[ifrag]

Seems faster? In my experience it has been more than "seems", Chrome actually is faster. The thing keeping me on Firefox is the various add-ons which I cannot get in Chrome. If Chrome were to get vertical tabs, that would go a long way towards making a switch.

It would be nice if Firefox did improve performance though. Would be a lot more significant than a trimmed down interface while the program runs just as slow.

Re:"the faster it will seem" ?

[Tx]

Yes, I'm a long term Firefox fan, and it's still my primary browser on most machines, but I was blown away by how much faster Chrome was on my netbook, and now there's adblock for Chrome, Firefox doesn't get a look in on that machine. And that is Firefox with only 2 or 3 add-ons to enhance small-screen use, not the 20 plus add-ons I use on the desktop. Resuming from sleep, Chrome is ready as soon as the wi-fi has reconnected, whereas Firefox seems to take maybe 30-40 seconds before I can use it, and sometimes goes into off-line mode, so I have to hit the menu to put it back in on-line mode before I can do anything. So "seems faster" is not good enough, I want "is faster" before I'd go back to Firefox on the netbook.

Re:"the faster it will seem" ?

[apostrophesemicolon]

The lack of noscript in chrome/chromium is a dealbreaker for me. Although I've heard some attempts at creating noscript-like features on Chrome, you can't possibly expect a browser by google to include googlead-blocking feature.

Also, I <HATE> the top location of tabs for two things; 1. You have to _look_ higher from the page you're currently browsing, as opposed to right above it, 2. You have to _click_ further up to switch between tabs. I know there's cmd+1/2/3 or ctrl+tab but sometimes it's faster to just drag n click.

Re:"the faster it will seem" ?

[Rary]

It would be nice if Firefox did improve performance though. Would be a lot more significant than a trimmed down interface while the program runs just as slow.

They're working on that. Unlike the summary, the actual presentation gives information about more than just "slimming down the UI to make it seem faster". Their first of three stated goals is "making Firefox super-duper fast". If you look at the slides here, the "fast" discussion starts at slide 23.

Re:"the faster it will seem" ?

[Goaway]

If moving your mouse pointer a few tens of pixels further is that noticeable a chore, you probably have your mouse speed set way too low.

Re:"the faster it will seem" ?

[emkyooess]

Finally, someone else who sees that tab placement as bad. I thought I was alone here. And what's up with hiding the menus? People actually DO use them.

Re:"the faster it will seem" ?

[D Ninja]

They do use them, but not as often as you might think. If you notice the trend in many applications (Office, Chrome, Firefox, and others) is to hide the menus. Menus take up screen real estate. Hiding them lets the REAL information (the web pages) be more visible and reduces scrolling of a web site. For how often people use menus, they are scrolling a lot more on web pages.

Re:"the faster it will seem" ?

[guidryp]

Seems faster? In my experience it has been more than "seems", Chrome actually is faster.

Chrome is faster in benchmarks, but that doesn't translate into a real world performance difference on typical web pages.

Every time there is a post about "OMG Chrome is so much faster", I say, show me the money, give me the links to visit that demonstrate this so I can put chrome and FF side by side and feel/see a difference. So far no one has responded.

Bear in mind that both browsers have kept improving, FF is faster now than when Chrome first showed up as the "OMG that is fast" browser. They both obliterate IE which most people still use.

Speed isn't really an issue(though faster launch would be nice), so FF remains my main browser because it is Much more configurable (about:config), it has more plugins and the plugins are of higher quality.

Re:"the faster it will seem" ?

[Freultwah]

No vertical tabs? Will that help you in any way?

Re:"the faster it will seem" ?

[elrous0]

That's fine, until you actually need to *use* something in the menu. Then you have to screw around forever trying to figure out how to do something that takes about two seconds with a standard menu bar. I'll put up with 50 pixels of "wasted" screen space to avoid that kind of hassle, thank you very much.

Re:"the faster it will seem" ?

[John Hasler]

> Their first of three stated goals is "making Firefox super-duper fast".

Eh. The speed of everything I do with Firefox is limited by either the bandwidth of my DSL service or the speed of the server (probably because I block all ads and most scripts). I don't give a damn about speed.

Re:"the faster it will seem" ?

[BikeHelmet]

Firefox is getting faster. Every single new version has performance improvements, in rendering and javascript.

I've got an old Athlon XP computer that has migrated from Firefox 1 all the way to Firefox 3.6. I assure you that it's improving with every release, even as I pile more and more extensions into it.

But Chrome is incredibly fast. The V8 JIT helps an unimaginable amount.

It's funny that 8 years ago, I had arguments with people over implementing a javascript JIT in a browser. Nobody believed it would work, making stupid arguments like "It'd take too long to compile the webpage.", or "There's no point. Web apps aren't going anywhere important."

Thank you Google for the HUGE ego boost you gave me. I'm a visionary! ;D

Re:"the faster it will seem" ?

[eiMichael]

The tabs make sense because the URL bar should be part of the tabbed area. The URL is likely different with each tab and therefore shouldn't be outside of them (you expect anything outside the selected tab to not be affected by switching tabs).

The bookmarks & options being inside the tabs is just a judgement call to allow for my following point. By having the tabs at the very top of the frame, and likely at the very top of the desktop, the tabs actually become easier to click. This is because you no longer have to stop your vertical movement as precisely when moving to click one of them.

Re:"the faster it will seem" ?

[Spacelem]

I can't speak for other people, but I recently bought a netbook and have been using F11 to view Firefox full screen, and not having the menus feels feels very restricting for some reason.

I also dislike tabs above menus and bookmarks - it just doesn't feel right with the tab UI that I'm used to, particularly considering how heavily I use them. I'm not normally that resistant to change, but this just grated immediately, and I hope there will be an option to choose between the two styles.

removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[Anita Coney]

Thank you! That is the most annoying part of Firefox. I hate when I open Firefox and it makes me wait while it updates, and then when it finally does open, it does so on a pointless tab that offers me absolutely no useful information and once again delays what I'm trying to do.

I don't like the secret/stealth update either. Here's a very simple idea:

First, install the update when I shut down the browser. You're not wasting my time then because I'm done using it. Second, don't give me a tab telling me what I already know. I know it was updated, I just fricken saw it updated. I'm not an idiot.

Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[Richard_at_work]

Why not ask, with four options? Do it now, do it at next startup, do it at next shutdown, don't do it.

It pisses me off that randomly my Firefox install will suddenly and without warning install an update when starting up. I have been caught out several times by that until I turned off automatic updates. In my view, automatic updates should be off by default, with a dialog during install asking if you want to turn them on.

Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[porcupine8]

First, install the update when I shut down the browser. You're not wasting my time then because I'm done using it.

Unless the whole reason you're shutting it down, as is often the case for me, is that FF has been running so long that it's become an enormous memory hog and you need to shut it down then restart it so your system will speed back up. Or you're shutting it down in order to shut down or reboot your entire computer. I agree with the previous commenter, just give us the choice.

Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[Anita Coney]

Good point, although Firefox runs pretty stable for me and I've been using it since it was named Phoenix. I guess I'm just lucky.

Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[Scrameustache]

Here's a very simple idea:

First, install the update when I shut down the browser. You're not wasting my time then because I'm done using it.

No, if I shut something off, I want it shut OFF. If I have renders to do, or whatever it is I wanted to do instead of use firefox, I do NOT want firefox to decide to stay open in the background, doing things.

Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[Lumpy]

No thanks.

Ok I gotta go, let's shut down and power down the laptop to pack up...

Firefox is updating .... I have to wait....
Windows now wants to update... I have to wait.....

no thanks. Update when I tell it to and NEVER do an automatic update.

Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[dancingmilk]

Auto updates should be on by default. If you want to run buggy out of date software then you can disable the updates on your own.

Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[Richard_at_work]

No, autoupdates should not be on by default - my installed software should not be changing itself without my explicit (not implicit) say so.

Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[hedwards]

If you're doing that, you're doing it wrong. What you should be doing is adding the following to about:config 'config.trim_on_minimize="true"' If you're still having trouble then it's almost certainly not Firefox. But didn't we settle the fact that Firefox performs better than the competition on memory utilization quite some time ago? I see people making these sorts of trollish remarks, but last time I checked the data didn't support the suggestion.

Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[pagaboy]

I don't like the secret/stealth update either.

That's fine - you're a geek. However, for my parents, I'm recommending they go for Chrome simply because of the update feature. Any kind of manual intervention in updating is going to throw them, but with Chrome, they're going to be up to date and relatively secure. Chrome's got it right for the vast majority of users and Mozilla would do well to go in the same direction.

Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[MBGMorden]

Yes, because it's going to be making huge strides when users who don't make arcane configuration changes are "doing it wrong" and will as a result suffer horrible performance. Firefox is a has been. People in the know are switching to Chrome or Safari. People who aren't are sticking to IE like they always have. Unless they get back on track, I seriously doubt Mozilla will still be a major player 5 years from now.

Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[dancingmilk]

Like I said, if you want to run out of date, potentially buggy software, that's on you. For the general user it makes a lot more sense to have auto updates enabled by default.

You are a power user, you can't expect software designers to design their apps to your ridiculous (and frankly IMHO stupid) expectations. For every one of you there are 30 Joe Average's using the browser. Joe Average needs those updates on.

Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[Hurricane78]

Why would you open Firefox more than once a day? Put it in autostart, and close it before shutting down (or use autostop if available).
To me any time between thinking of something, and entering it into a search engine it too much time.
I can only recommend the following:
1. Shortcut to activate the already running browser.
2. Ctrl-L
3. Input "g $yourQuery", <enter>*
4. ??? (wait)
5. Profit! :)

* I chose this instead of the separate search field, because switching between engines is extremely inefficient in there (stupidly page trough them with the cursor), and because I always switch services (dictionary, youtube, imdb, google images, etc), which is really fast with just typing the one or two letters for it.

Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[tepples]

Or you're shutting it down in order to shut down or reboot your entire computer.

And here's a typical snarky reply:

Instead of logging out, you can use fast user switching. Instead of shutting down the computer, you can put it on hibernate. Instead of restarting the computer for an update, you can apply the update and not restart. The operating system should be (and in the case of $my_favorite_OS, is) designed such that the vast majority of software updates do not require a restart at all, except perhaps for a kernel security update every couple months.

Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[silanea]

[...] Firefox is a has been. People in the know are switching to Chrome or Safari. [...]

Apparently I do not know anyone "in the know". Out of all people whose desktop I have seen up close not one is using anything but Firefox or IE. Not at university, not at work, not amongst friends and acquaintances. No matter whether they are power users, developers or technically challenged. Even the odd Opera has disappeared. I know more people who use Linux as their desktop OS than I know people who do not use Firefox.

Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[vlueboy]

People are at a loss when the latest forced update kills a bunch of their extensions. There is no way to undo the version change as a limited user. It's also a pain to download an old extension if you come to a friend's already updated PC. Waiting for extension devs to "update" the extensions is sometimes like waiting for Godot... risky business. Mozilla's addon site forces your browser to ignore extensions whose version number is below developer mandates, putting the onus on devs to constantly update version ID's in their extensions, and leaving us in the dust if the dev gets tired of this.

There is a benefit to running in Windows' limited rights mode: without a listening daemon with rights escalation, companies can't allow their executable to mae changes to my system. When I install Google Earth / Chrome, or Safari / iTunes, I always disable their auto-update daemons by running services.msc as an admin. Take advantage of this when Firefox joins the bandwagon.

Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[Teckla]

Unless the whole reason you're shutting it down, as is often the case for me, is that FF has been running so long that it's become an enormous memory hog and you need to shut it down then restart it so your system will speed back up. Or you're shutting it down in order to shut down or reboot your entire computer. I agree with the previous commenter, just give us the choice.

I'm hoping for a Google Chrome-like silent update feature myself.

I don't want to be distracted or delayed while starting up my browser, or while shutting down my browser, or at any other time, for that matter.

I want it to silently update itself in the background. Both for me, and my non-technical relatives and friends. I don't want them calling me because they're confused and worried about whether or not it's okay for Firefox to update itself.

Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[dancingmilk]

Extensions that don't get updated often are massive security holes waiting to happen. If the dev has stopped updating an extension, you should stop using it. Why would you continue to use software that can put your entire system at risk?

From my experience, if autoupdate kills an addon it generally wasn't a useful one anyway. The core addons that are needed to run a FF install (Adblock, NS, etc) are updated regularly. Everything else is just bells and whistles really. I'm not willing to risk my computers security for bells and whistles.

Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[FraGNeM]

As with most bits of Firefox, if there's some functionality missing or that you simply want to change, there's probably an add-on that provides it.

I use Update Notifier to manage browser/add-on updates. If Mozilla wants to natively add this functionality, I'd suggest that they follow this add-on's design.

It runs only when Firefox is open (because it's an add-on, of course), and it suppresses any "There are new updates! Want to install them before we open up the browser to do what you really wanted to do?" messages. It downloads and installs (based on your configuration) any new updates, and they go into effect once you restart the browser (which you can do whenever you want -- it doesn't prompt you).

Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[sjames]

Absolutely not on shutdown. Because if I'm closing my browser, it's likely that I'm shutting down the computer either because something's hung up (so I'm annoyed anyway and just want it over with) or I'm about to go somewhere (so I don't want to hang around keeping people waiting). Also, then if the update did something wrong, I won't see it until I've forgotten what I updated.

Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[forkazoo]

If you're doing that, you're doing it wrong. What you should be doing is adding the following to about:config 'config.trim_on_minimize="true"' If you're still having trouble then it's almost certainly not Firefox. But didn't we settle the fact that Firefox performs better than the competition on memory utilization quite some time ago? I see people making these sorts of trollish remarks, but last time I checked the data didn't support the suggestion.

That option doesn't even exist by default. You literally have to *add* the setting to the config.

It only applies to Windows.

And it effects swap behavior, not total amount of memory used.

If that's the best solution available... Sure, I'm doing it wrong. What exactly am I doing wrong? Trying to use it.

Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[Altus]

I think the middle ground of checking for updates automatically but prompting if its ok to install them is a good middle ground. Maybe with a checkbox in the dialog for "Install updates automatically in the future"

People should know that there is a new version, but updating their software wihtout so much as an OK might not be necessary.

Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[Tim C]

Thank you, that's exactly what I was going to say - apart from the occasional restart because Firefox is using 500MB+*, I generally shut it down when I shut down my PC, in which case I do not want to wait. I'd much rather wait at start up, than at shut down.

(* Yes yes I know it's all the fault of those eevil plugins; that's irrelevant however. Killing Firefox frees the RAM.)

Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[badkarmadayaccount]

That's a default setting. In about:config. With reason. Half the people with FF will turn them (autoupdate) off. Bad thing. If they know enough to get pissed off, they know enough to fix it themselves, like you. Get over it. I hate the default theme in XP too. And the GNOME default everybody (distros) keep pushing on me. I don't sit around and whine about it for no good reason.

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.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[AnonymousClown]

More screen real estate. With the small screened netbooks being all the rage, that menu bar does make a difference.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[delinear]

Hopefully, if they do remove the menu bar, they'll at least take a leaf from IE's book (yes, I never thought I'd be saying that again) and have a single Alt press pop the menu back up so I don't waste time hunting down little used options.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[chrb]

Is the menu bar really that useful? Apart from using it as a way to get to Preferences, I can't think of a single option that I use the Firefox menu bar for. Also, it takes up some screen area; on small screen devices it may be more optimal to drop the bar make the functions accessible from elsewhere.

Aint broke, don't fix it.

Maybe. On the other hand, Chrome has grabbed 20% market share in one year which is no small feat. There are reasons that people are switching to Chrome - allegedly quicker browsing and the user interface. It's worth experimenting with a similar approach in Firefox. Maybe it will work out, and maybe it won't, but if they don't try we will never know.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[je ne sais quoi]

On any random day, I use the the print button under the file menu, the "save page as", preferences, zoom, history, bookmarks, in the tools menu I use the preferences for add-ons I've got. Occasional use include the "open file" in the file menu, view page source in the edit menu, and the about tab in the help menu. So maybe you don't use the menu bar but I do, just about every day. Removing it would really, really, really piss me off.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[Draek]

On the other hand, Chrome has grabbed 20% market share in one year which is no small feat.

Source? even W3Schools.com which has been traditionally biased towards non-IE browsers only gives it ~13%.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[Hadlock]

I think you could be served better by a more robust right click menu. Most of those things you mentioned have been pushed to the right click menu on Chrome and Explorer.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[imakemusic]

Removing it would really, really, really piss me off.

Probably more than removing the "properties" dialog did. Grrr.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[Goaway]

No, I can't say I have. Maybe because I've been using Chrome all the time.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[Velorium]

Citation needed. I'll agree that Chrome has come along pretty quick, but even the highest estimate is just a hair under 9% for Chrome. Don't be going around spread false information.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[Velorium]

I suppose I should cite myself, yeah? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_table

Re:Menu Bar..?

[Inda]

Um, the menu bar is where I place all my bookmarklets. It seemed like the obvious place to put them. Don't take that away from me!

Re:Menu Bar..?

[armanox]

Keyboard shortcuts anyone?

Re:Menu Bar..?

[bunratty]

Chrome has grabbed 20% market share in one year which is no small feat

Chrome has grabbed about 7% share in one and a half years. It is an impressive feat, so there's no need to exaggerate.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[deniable]

Yes, the menu bar has View->Full Screen that does a better job on small screens.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[elrous0]

Oh fucking wonderful, now I have to memorize 20 keyboard shortcut combos because Mozilla thinks Chrome is awesome for saving 50 pixels of screen space.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[MBGMorden]

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

Not sure I necessarily like it either, but remember: text interfaces weren't broken when GUI's were introduced. Propeller aircraft weren't broken when jets were introduced. VHS wasn't broken when DVD's were introduced.

Sticking with something just because it gets the job done will eventually result in technological stagnation. You have to try some new things to see what works and what doesn't.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[clone53421]

No, dammit. Someone shoot this guy.

Options that are very specific to an object can be attached to that object’s right-click menu. The right-click menu for the page in Firefox is fine as it is. Mine already has a Reload Every option (added by my Tab Mix Plus addon, I think), View Page in Coral IE Tab, a DownloadHelper submenu, RefControl options for the site, and a ScreenGrab entry. Those are all options specific to the page that I’m viewing.

File, edit, and view are better served by keyboard shortcuts and/or mouse shortcuts (e.g. ctrl-scroll zoom).

History, bookmarks, preferences not specific to the page that I’m viewing, and help should not be cluttering up the right-click menu. Give me my menu bar and leave me alone.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[clone53421]

F11

Re:Menu Bar..?

[Iyonesco]

I use Bookmarks menu to access and organise my bookmarks. I use the history menu to open tabs I've recently closed or go back to websites I've recently visited. I use the tools menu to access options, addons and clear history. I use the file menu for print, work offline and occasionally import.

In answer to your question then, yes the menu bar is very useful. It provides rapid and structured access to a lot of functionality. When I use an application with a menu bar I can always find the functionality I'm looking for easily but in applications without a menu bar (Office 2007, Chrome etc) I can never find what I'm looking for.

Menu bars provide a consistent interface across all applications so even if you haven't used an application before you know where to find options and featurs. Removing it gives every application a custom interface, making it very hard to use unfamiliar applications. Put a Office 2003 user in front of Office 2007 or an IE6 user in front of IE7/8 and and they'll struggle to use the application. However if you get an Office 2003 user to use Open Office or an IE6 user to use Firefox they'll be able to adapt very quickly thanks to the consistent interface menu bars offer.

When Microsoft started the trend of removing menu bars with Vista and Office 2007 I believe their aim was not to improve the user experience but to lock users into their applications. An Office 2003 user can adapt rapidly to any other Office suite thanks to the similar interfaces, however if someone is only familiar with Office 2007 it will be very hard for them to adapt to other suits because Office 2007 has a completely custom interface that is inconsistent with all other applications. This way they're locked into MS Office and Microsoft wins again.

The removal of the menu bar is a travesty of interface design but it's a massive win for Microsoft and, bizarrely, organisations such as Mozilla seem happy to help them along.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[roju]

Easy solutions: cmd-p, cmd-s, cmd-,, cmd-+/-, cmd-h, cmd-b, you'll have to add your own, cmd-o, cmd-u, cmd-t about: enter
Only one that isn't quicker to do from the keyboard is addons, and at least in OSX you can just add your own binding for it in the keyboard preferences.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[BenFenner]

Firefox's best part trick is the UI's ability to be customized. All they need to do is keep it that way. I don't have a netbook but I too am very conscious of vertical real estate. I also love my menu bar. I use it all the time. Bookmarks are there, the print option is there, etc.

You can fit the menu bar, navigation buttons, address bar and search bar or even Google toolbar (don't ask) on one horizontal section saving tons of vertical space. See image:

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y113/benfenner/Firefoxmenubar.png?t=1273593698

As long as I can still control how things look I should be happy. Give me a ribbon I can't turn off or re-configure (MS) or tabs I can't move down (Chrome?) and I'm not a happy camper. Make it configurable.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[tokul]

on small screen devices

If you do use firefox, how big is your monitor? small screen devices can use Fennec or other browser specifically designed for their smaller screens. Hiding menu behind some fancy button does not improve usability. If user wants to use some option from menu, he or she will waste time searching for that option while clicking buttons.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[Jay L]

When Microsoft started the trend of removing menu bars with Vista and Office 2007 I believe their aim was not to improve the user experience but to lock users into their applications

No, their aim was to solve the problem that menu bar discoverability doesn't scale, to the point where the top 10 feature requests for Office were features that were already in Office.

See:

http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/tags/Why+the+New+UI_3F00_/default.aspx

Re:Menu Bar..?

[vlueboy]

More screen real estate. With the small screened netbooks being all the rage, that menu bar does make a difference.

You're right, but they're wrong in doing this. Netbooks are a very small percentage, and therefore niche. You DO NOT force a majority to conform to the minority problems, or we would all browse in 'mobile' versions of websites with no flash support.

What they need to do is offer two installers and leave us "majorities" alone. Or at least have an installer that chooses the right option. More work for them? Still didn't keep microsoft from selling 7 versions of Windows Vista, and doesn't keep Yahoo from having a "Classic" version, or countless other sites with graphics and text versions. Netbooks are hot, but I smell a fad more than a cost-cutting measure... an annoying standard as useful and disruptive as those windows programs that minimize to your windows tray as an icon when you tell them to exit, forcing you to always take an extra step to do your bidding.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[Teckla]

Is the menu bar really that useful? Apart from using it as a way to get to Preferences, I can't think of a single option that I use the Firefox menu bar for.

It pains me to say anything nice about IE, but I do like the feature that hides the menu bar, displaying it only when you press the Alt key.

All the advantages of a cleaner UI (no menu cluttering up the screen and taking up precious screen real estate), but all the advantages of a menu bar as well (just an Alt key press away).

Re:Menu Bar..?

[anaesthetica]

Ugh, thanks for reminding me how dogshit ugly the new commenting system is. When will CmdrTaco give up and return everyone to clean classic interface?

Re:Menu Bar..?

[anaesthetica]

Mozilla has used an extension called Test Pilot to study user behavior. One study focused on usage of the menu bar. The results show a kind of power law in menu item usage. This suggests that you can probably ditch most of the menu items, and provide alternative methods to access the top used functions. I think this is broadly what they are going for in the proposed 4.0 UI redesign.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[Idbar]

Then, what they should do, is to add a big icon that does a similar thing that F11 does. Well, perhaps leaving the tabs visible and allowing the people to type URLs over new tabs without the need of having the URL bar.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[chrb]

Good question. Techcrunch reported it at 20%. Ars gave it 17% here.

But your point is fairly made - measuring browser usage is difficult - some sites report Chrome usage as low as 6%. From what I see, many people are mixing browser usage, with Firefox for development and plugins, and Chromium for other sites.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[chrb]

citation.

Statistics on browser share are difficult, and these results are biased towards tech users. What I'm seeing from fellow developers at the moment is that most are mixing firefox (with firebug) for development, and chromium for actual browsing. I'm not saying that Chrome is particularly better than Firefox, but that there may be good reasons that people are using Chrome despite the serious disadvantage of it not having the great Firefox plugins, and Mozilla corp. would be acting reasonably to investigate why.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[chrb]

Correction: Techcrunch 20%

Re:Menu Bar..?

[chrb]

Fair enough, as I already said, the 20%ish figure came from tech oriented sites. Usage amongst the general population may be significantly lower.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[chrb]

Interesting that you cite mashable.com, since they actually say that Chrome share amongst their users was 14.8% two months ago.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[Admodieus]

Exactly right. Of course, most people don't realize this, and are content to bash Microsoft for purposely trying to make them unhappy and confused.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[k8to]

Let's see.

By default firefox comes with:

  - a menu bar
  - a title bar (required in most environments)
  - a url bar
  - a bookmark link bar
  - a tab bar
  - some random other toolbar

Of these, the most useful is the url bar (you can't access anything without this), followed by the tabs, and then the menu bar third.
Try deleting the bookmarks, and the random stupid buttons before taking away the menu.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[TedRiot]

so where can i get that for windows 7 or xp?

Re:Menu Bar..?

[xiong.chiamiov]

You can fit the menu bar, navigation buttons, address bar and search bar or even Google toolbar (don't ask) on one horizontal section saving tons of vertical space.

Install vimperator and you don't even need those any more. I have a bar for bookmarks and the command bar at the bottom (no UI window dressing, either, but that's due to my choice of window manager). It gives me a fantastic amount of space without distractions.

Please, please,

[SolitaryMan]

... takes a great deal of inspiration from Google Chrome.

Nooooooo!!!

Seriously, what is the point of having Firefox then? The fact that I need to open new tab in Chrome in order to access some bookmark pisses me off and pretty much makes bookmarks pointless.

Re:Please, please,

[drinkypoo]

Seriously, what is the point of having Firefox then? The fact that I need to open new tab in Chrome in order to access some bookmark pisses me off and pretty much makes bookmarks pointless.

RTFGSR (google search results, for "chrome bookmark menu" and quit your whining.

Re:Please, please,

[AnonymousClown]

Turn the bookmark toolbar on.

Re:Please, please,

[DavidR1991]

This behaviour greatly puzzled me on Chrome / Win32, because on OS X it still has a dedicated Bookmarks menu. Obviously this is because there is somewhere to actually put it on OS X (with the split between the window itself and the top bar) but it's still a strange inconsistency between platforms. I would have expected them to either all have a bookmarks menu, or all of them to lack a bookmark menu - not a mishmash.

Meh.

Re:Please, please,

[Chameleon Man]

What? Have you heard of the bookmark bar? To go to your favorites you don't HAVE to always use that default page that displays every time you create a new tab...I never do.

Re:Please, please,

[SolitaryMan]

I don't use it often enough to bother googling, because I only test our stuff on it, but thanks anyway.

Re:Please, please,

[drinkypoo]

I don't use it often enough to bother googling, because I only test our stuff on it, but thanks anyway.

You should try it. I find that it is dramatically faster than Firefox in every way. Unless you need an extension not available for chrome, or a plugin which doesn't work properly with it, it is definitely superior. For Windows there's SRWare Iron, but it's perpetually a little dated; for Linux and MacOS X there's Chromium. Unless, of course, you want to phone home with every click :p

Re:Please, please,

[RandomFactor]

Sadly, bookmarks in Chrome ARE pretty marginal usability wise anyway. Every time I try it Chrome the bookmarking is the single issue that drives me back to Firefox in short order. Currently it just sits there on my desktops as a handy alternative when Minefield chokes on the latest nightly build for some reason. They simply take too many clicks to navigate.

I want to retain the ability to see my bookmarks and ONE-CLICK through them to navigate (or some other minimal clicking around approach, a one key navigation would be even better). I have tried every bookmark addon that exists for Chrome (as of a couple of months ago) and nothing approaches the base bookmark functionality in IE and FF.

Re:Please, please,

[dancingmilk]

So wait let me get this straight. You don't use the browser because it lacks a feature, and you come to /. to complain about it. Someone tells you how to get around it, and you say "I don't use it often enough to bother googling" ...? Do you see whats wrong with this picture here?

Re:Please, please,

[Cley Faye]

There is inconsistency, but in chrome you just have to check a box to make the bookmarks always appear in windows and linux, so I guess the original complaint is somewhat invalid.

Re:Please, please,

[MathiasRav]

The bookmarks I need the most, I put on the bookmarks bar. The bookmarks I don't need as often, I name and access from the address bar (Enter title of bookmark, pick from suggestions), and to back up my bookmarks, it's Ctrl+shift+B, Tools -> Export Bookmarks. All I've ever needed.

Re:Please, please,

[CannonballHead]

Push cntrl-B. It slides the bookmark bar into view. And then it's quite easy to access those bookmarks. :)

Re:Please, please,

[vlueboy]

I don't use it often enough to bother googling, because I only test our stuff on it, but thanks anyway.

Exactly the problem: for us casual users, not finding the feature and not caring enough to look will just drive us away, because we already have 2 or 3 main browsers anyway. GP's "quit your whining" is the equivalent to RTFM. I don't RTFM when I buy a new car... I don't see a reason to keep a new car so blatantly different it makes me RTFM to use standard-but-hidden features. That's the problem with ribbons; you don't even know if the feature you're looking for is actually supported and just very, very well hidden. You quit in disgust.

Re:Please, please,

[SolitaryMan]

The wrong thing in this picture is that you assume that I don't use it because it lacks *this exact feature*.

I don't use it because it lack a bunch of other features: NoScript, CookieSafe. Xmarks also don't work for me (and yes, I don't bother to figure out why), haven't tried the port of firebug yet, but several extensions' fiasco don't give me much of a hope.

Plugin isolation

[Krneki]

As long as they manage to isolate Java and Adobe from crushing the whole damn thing it's good enough for me.

UI

[visualight]

Perhaps the most striking change to Firefox 4 is the user interface...

There's a shocker.

The faster it will seem?

[Yvan256]

Something UI designers have known for a long time is that the simpler an interface looks, the faster it will seem.

Just because an interface looks simple doesn't mean it looks faster. Who thinks like that? The "Speed holes" reference" above is quite right. Those UI designers either have been misquoted or are just complete fools.

What a simple interface means is that common tasks should be more obvious to do.

Don't give the users 100 options at once, especially things that only power-users use only once in a while. I'm not a fan of putting options in tabs and sub-menus, but sometimes it's the right thing to do.

Put the basic features at the beginning, the most obscure ones at the bottom. Put them in named groups such as "Basic", "Advanced" and "Expert" if necessary, so that non-technical users aren't afraid to mess with the basic ones, and advanced users don't waste time looking for what they need in the basic and advanced options.

Re:The faster it will seem?

[delinear]

Something UI designers have known for a long time is that the simpler an interface looks, the faster it will seem.

Just because an interface looks simple doesn't mean it looks faster. Who thinks like that? The "Speed holes" reference" above is quite right. Those UI designers either have been misquoted or are just complete fools.

What a simple interface means is that common tasks should be more obvious to do.

Don't give the users 100 options at once, especially things that only power-users use only once in a while. I'm not a fan of putting options in tabs and sub-menus, but sometimes it's the right thing to do.

Put the basic features at the beginning, the most obscure ones at the bottom. Put them in named groups such as "Basic", "Advanced" and "Expert" if necessary, so that non-technical users aren't afraid to mess with the basic ones, and advanced users don't waste time looking for what they need in the basic and advanced options.

I can only infer from their comment that what they actually mean is, for the regular user, a simple interface with as few options as possible will result in a faster experience (and they're right, if the user doesn't need to see all those menus, showing them will just add to confusion). What they skipped over is that there are a lot of power users of Firefox at the moment, who do need quick access to those menu items, and for them, removal will doubtless result in a slower, more frustrating user experience. The hidden message is, we're happy to frustrate our existing users to try and grab some market share. I can't say if that's a good or a bad thing (the more competition to IE the better, but as one of those existing users, I don't want my experience to become more frustrating).

Re:The faster it will seem?

[Yvan256]

Without context, it sounded like "browsing is faster because the UI is simpler".

Explained that way, however, it becomes obvious that "faster" is about the time it takes for a user to do something with the UI and it has nothing to do with browsing or rendering speed.

Re:The faster it will seem?

[Draek]

Just because an interface looks simple doesn't mean it looks faster. Who thinks like that?

The same people who think a music file sounds 'better' when played a bit louder.

In other words, pretty much everybody lacking the technical knowledge to judge it on other merits.

Re:The faster it will seem?

[martas]

i think what they mean is that the overall user experience seems/is faster with simpler UI, which is IMHO undeniably true. no need to start picking on words here.

slides don't work in Gnash

[ciaran_o_riordan]

His slides (on "slide share") don't work for me, using Firefox and Gnash.

C'mon guys. Attention to detail with your open web!

Re:Retarded

[Anonymous Coward]

"the simpler an interface looks, the faster it will seem". What a joke.

For many average users, it's not a joke at all.

Personally, I don't care that much. As long as I can remove as many extra menus, bars, etc. as possible I'm happy- I like to run the most minimal menu bar setup possible.

What I would like to see happen, however, is for FF to stop allowing any installation, uninstallation, enabling, disabling, or other modification to the addons from ANY source other than the user. Any plugin or addon should be able to be removed as well.

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:Got that right.

[BZ]

Curious. What version of Firefox? And on which OS?

You may be interested in http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/2010/01/19/chromium-vs-minefield-cold-startup-performance-comparison/

Re:Got that right.

[Myopic]

Yep. I use Chrome on my netbook even though I think FF is a better browser. On an Acer AspireOne, FF is a drag.

Re:Got that right.

[MBGMorden]

Same here. I use Linux at home, and I often open lots of tabs. I typically will peruse a lot of news sites when I get home, and each article that I want to read I open into a new tab. When I've checked all news sites (and often have 30-40 tabs open), I'll proceed to read each article and close the tabs as I finish. It's a workflow that works will for me.

Firefox on Linux tends to fail miserably at this. There's a stutter and brief fraction of a second where the machine bogs down while it opens the new tab, and since I'm opening so many of them at once, it's particularly annoying.

Chrome on the other hand will just keep popping them up to the side effortlessly - no slowdowns whatsoever. It's those little things that make the difference between a browser feeling slick vs clunky. For my purposes, Chrome is just plain faster, and faster where it counts.

Re:Got that right.

[the_womble]

There are a lot of useful extensions for Firefox that I use in everyday browsing: Treee Styke Tabs, Its All Text, Add To Search Bar, etc.

Re:Got that right.

[amicusNYCL]

I'm using Firefox for development only and just because of Firebug

Here, here. I give Firefox some grief every now and then, and it's usually relegated to only a few tabs open to whatever I'm working on. But whoever thought up and implemented Firebug... that's a guy I can relate to. The native tools for Chrome, IE8, and Opera are all pretty good, but all of them lack at least one thing I consider a requirement (e.g., in IE8 I can't view the requests).

Re:Got that right.

[Bourdain]

out of curiosity, have you ever tried putting it on a small ram disk?

I've found on my older slower computer, it loads much faster that way (that being said, it does have the hassles of being on a volatile disk)

Re:Got that right.

[BlackCreek]

I looked at your link. He used no extensions. My problem with it is that Firefox constantly checks for extensions updates when I start it.

I don't know if that is the only reason why firefox starts so slowly on my machines, but firefox (at least on my computers) does start a LOT slower than chrome.

Speed is the only reason both me and my wife are now using chrome as our primary browser.

Re:Got that right.

[BZ]

> He used no extensions.

Right. He compared both browsers out of the box (the way most people actually use them, fwiw).

You can check whether the extensions are the issue by running Firefox in safe mode; I'd be interested in knowing how that affects the startup performance.

The other thing is that Taras was comparing development versions of both browsers. Firefox 3.6 has a bunch of startup improvements over 3.5, but even more have been made since then.

Re:Got that right.

[BlackCreek]

To be fair, I run the chrome nightly build (available as a ubuntu package).

I tried timing using % firefox -safe-mode

Firefox then opens a dialog asking me whether the safe options should be made permanent. Makes sense, but it doesn't help with benchmarking.

[...]

Do you know of any data showing how many extensions the average user uses? I am honestly curious to know. Last weekend while playing tech support for my mother-in-law, I discovered that she of all people had extensions enabled (color tabs).

Re:Got that right.

[KiloByte]

Uh? How come? Firefox is tremendously faster on any page that has lots of ads and other crap, while Chrome is only somewhat faster on clean pages.

All thanks to Adblock for Firefox actually blocking the junk from loading while its version for Chrome merely hides the crap.

Re:Got that right.

[BZ]

> To be fair, I run the chrome nightly build (available as a ubuntu package).

Ah. Well, ok. Comparing apples to oranges... ;)

> Do you know of any data showing how many extensions the average user uses?

Depends on how you define "average user". http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2009/08/11/how-many-firefox-users-use-add-ons/ says that somewhere between 33% and 53% of users had at least one extension installed. So the average user uses 0-1, is my guess.

Re:Got that right.

[BlackCreek]

> To be fair, I run the chrome nightly build (available as a ubuntu package).

Ah. Well, ok. Comparing apples to oranges... ;)

My wife does run only stable releases of both of them, and started running chrome exclusively on her XP nettop.

Notice that she was often using Explorer before that, as it started so much faster than Firefox (AFAICT due to MS preloading it).

Re:Got that right.

[BZ]

Yeah, I'm not saying older Firefox builds didn't start slowly. They did. We'll see how Fx4 does.

Re:Got that right.

[Kashgarinn]

Chrome can be as fast as a fly, and firefox can be slow as a turtle - as long as firefox has adblock, and chrome doesn't, I'll use firefox.

Thanks for nothing

[rudy_wayne]

the most striking change to Firefox 4 is the user interface, which takes a great deal of inspiration from Google Chrome.

Great. That means I will be staying with the current version of Firefox for a long time. I just tried Chrome a few days ago and the user interface totally sucks. What is is with these people who have to fuck up a good design just so they can make it different and justify a new version number.

Re:Thanks for nothing

[couchslug]

Don't forget about Opera. As Firefox and Chrome become bloated, there is an alternative.

Re:Thanks for nothing

[VGPowerlord]

Don't forget about Opera. As Firefox and Chrome become bloated, there is an alternative.

Having used Opera 10.53, I can see why "the user interface totally sucks" would make you think of Opera.

Re:Thanks for nothing

[bersl2]

I'm using the Vimperator extension and don't care what the UI looks like, you insensitive clod!

(Also, it's not as if Chrome is the only browser that pre-loads. IE pretty much does it, unless they changed that behavior as part of the "damn, now we actually do have to separate the browser from the OS" initiative.)

Re:Thanks for nothing

[BrandonJones]

I really don't get all the hate against Chrome's UI. I love it, as does nearly my entire office. It keeps the crap I don't care about out of my way and let's me see more of the crap I do care about (you know, the page?) And yes, it's stupidly fast. None of that condones Firefox just blindly lifting their interface, of course. But on the flip side of that coin there are far, far worse places to look for inspiration!

Re:Thanks for nothing

[moosesocks]

Out of curiosity, what didn't you like about Chrome? I found that it takes a bit of time to get used to, but ultimately has a few rather nice perks, with only a few minor drawbacks.

I like the minimalist window frame -- it makes good use of screen real estate, and tucks away elements that rarely (if ever) get used. I also understand the "floating" status bar, which is a great idea for casual users. However, I do miss having one-click access to Firebug (although Chrome's web developer tools are top-notch, and even better than Firebug in a few cases)

I'm also presuming that Firefox will continue its recent tradition of maintaining very different themes for Vista/7, XP, Mac, and Linux to match the UI paradigms of each OS.

Re:Thanks for nothing

[rudy_wayne]

Don't forget about Opera. As Firefox and Chrome become bloated, there is an alternative.

The problem isn't "bloat". I don't find Firefox or Chrome to be "bloated". You can have a small fast program with a really sucky user interface -- like Chrome for example. History in Chrome is useless -- it only shows the website, not the actual page you visited within the website, making search impossible. You have to run Chrome with a special command line switch to get a bookmark toolbar. Sorry, but bookmarks are a key essential feature of a browser. And the list goes on and on ....

I don't expect Chrome to be just like Firefox. I can handle different. I can't handle inferior. Speed isn't everything. Speed without function isn't very useful.

Re:Thanks for nothing

[Teknikal69]

I agree I hate the chrome UI myself and tend to use the menu bar quite a lot, after reading this I've disabled Firefox from being able to update in the future. I'd rather have a security risk with an old version than something that will annoy me to use.

Re:Thanks for nothing

[Fittysix]

FWIW it's extremely customizable. You can put the menu bar back, and bookmark bar, and put the tabs back on the bottom of the bar.
Also (as of the current plan...) it doesn't change your prefs, it keeps your pre-upgrade prefs on these things (except maybe the menu bar, since tbh menu bars are useless on a browser)

Re:Thanks for nothing

[craigevil]

The dumbing down of the Firefox has been an ongoing process. With every update Mozilla hides options that were in previous versions. Just like Ubuntu and Gnome, the simpler something is the easier it is for the so called "normal" people to use. God forbid you actually want to change the default options. Btw Google Chrome totally sucks, the UI is like something a child's browser would use. Every time I have it import my Firefox settings it stops loading pages. Pages load way faster in Firefox, they both start up in the same amount of time. Plus Chrome eats ram like a kid at Halloween.
There are no where near the amount of extensions for it that Firefox has. What Mozilla needs to do is leave the UI alone and work on fixing the known bugs and issues.

Re:Thanks for nothing

[halltk1983]

You have to run Chrome with a special command line switch to get a bookmark toolbar. Sorry, but bookmarks are a key essential feature of a browser.

Or... press Ctrl+B. Or go into the menu on the right and click "Always display bookmarks bar". But I'm sure that you thought of that, and the command switch was easier to remember.

Re:Thanks for nothing

[rliden]

The problem isn't "bloat". I don't find Firefox or Chrome to be "bloated". You can have a small fast program with a really sucky user interface -- like Chrome for example. History in Chrome is useless -- it only shows the website, not the actual page you visited within the website, making search impossible.

Odd, because as I look at my history tab I see all the websites I visited within the last day. Not only does it show the specific pages I visited I can search history and even find the search pages and terms I used for that search on the page.

You have to run Chrome with a special command line switch to get a bookmark toolbar. Sorry, but bookmarks are a key essential feature of a browser.

You don't have to run anything with a special switch to get your bookmarks, which support an automatic sync feature if you choose to enable it. The bookmarks bar is available by selecting "Always Show Bookmarks Bar" from the customize dropdown menu (the little wrench icon in the upper right hand corner), or you can just toggle it with Ctrl-B.

And the list goes on and on .... I don't expect Chrome to be just like Firefox. I can handle different. I can't handle inferior. Speed isn't everything. Speed without function isn't very useful.

I don't expect you to like a certain browser, but I do expect that you use and understand it before you make a bunch of off-base and erroneous statements.

Re:Thanks for nothing

[martas]

when you said you "tried" chrome, what exactly did you mean? if you mean that you opened it, saw that there was no immediately obvious counterpart to some ff feature that you frequently use, and concluded that chrome UI sucks, then i have good news for you - you probably just missed it. chrome ui is fairly intuitive, incredibly complete (if you have the patience to try to get used to it), and best of all leaves you a good 40-60px extra vertical space (or more), which is the main reason why i switched from ff to chrome recently.

Re:Thanks for nothing

[rabiddeity]

Fairly intuitive??? It took me about 20 minutes just to figure out where the fucking bookmarks were. The minimalist interface implied quite firmly that there was simply no bookmark functionality. Oh I have to hit Ctrl-B to show them? What the hell is this, emacs? How is that intuitive?

No real Adblock Plus. (The Chrome plugin doesn't actually block anything, just hides it. And no, I don't want to roll my own hosts file. It's a pain in the ass, and not nearly as versatile.) No CookieCuller. The tabs bar doesn't even scroll, it just makes existing tabs smaller and smaller as you add more. Unfortunately Google doesn't seem to care about fixing any of the things people have complained about.

Re:Thanks for nothing

[jesser]

Don't worry, we're planning to make many of the changes customizable. For example, you'll be able to put the tab bar above the address bar or below it. And we're not copying chrome pixel for pixel.

Video presentation.

[Anonymous Coward]

For those who don't want to rtfa, there's a video presentation on the director of firefox, Mike Beltzners blog: http://videos.mozilla.org/serv/air_mozilla/firefox4.ogg

Re:Still a Firefox user

[radicalskeptic]

But look at this from the other angle: the browser is not cutting edge, it is mature and stable.

On my aging Mac, I started out with Safari, then switched to Firefox when Safari started getting buggy as hell for no apparent reason. A couple months back I switched to Chrome just for kicks, but after a while started noticing it wasn't as stable or bug-free as Firefox (specifically, Flash would die and my Youtube vids would have to be restarted, also when I have lots of tabs open some pages appear to be blank even though they have loaded and are supposed to display content on them). So I switched back to good ol' Firefox. Sure, maybe it's not the fastest, the sleekest, or the most advanced browser on the planet, but it's damned reliable and eminently useable!

tabs on top

[rhendershot]

I used chrome for several days but went back to firefox because I hated having the tabs at the top.

Re:tabs on top

[Ant P.]

Firefox 3.7 already has tabs on top. Thankfully it's optional, and off by default.

Re:tabs on top

[Locklin]

Tabs on top makes sense. The URL bar and navigation buttons belong to a webpage. It makes no sense when changing a tab for things above *and* below it to change. Of course, if tabs were done properly in the window manager (like Fluxbox), tabs in web-browsers wouldn't be an issue.

Hundreds of tabs??

[Pigeon451]

My dual core with 2 GB memory slows down when I have 10-20 tabs open. Hopefully Firefox will address the memory issues before implementing this feature...

Re:Hundreds of tabs??

[cynyr]

they are not "memory issues" they are "features". I wish i was kidding, but both chrome and FF slowly take up more and more RAM and CPU time the longer they are open. It has to do with the whole saving your tab history so that you can "Reopen last closed tab". Most days i'd rather just use my history and be done with it.

Re:Hundreds of tabs??

[Thyamine]

I honestly would like to know who does this. I've heard a few users here post that they do similar things, but why? There's a point where it's simpler to have a bookmark like you said, not to mention the resources spent on all those tabs. And I don't care if you have 16Tb of memory, wasting resources like that would drive me nuts.

Re:Hundreds of tabs??

[bunratty]

All browsers slowly take up more memory, but Firefox seems to take up less memory than others.

Re:Hundreds of tabs??

[Hatta]

My single core with 1gb memory doesn't slow down when I have 100 tabs open. On XP even. My dual core linux box at home does fine too with 100s of tabs. So I don't know what your problem is.

Re:Hundreds of tabs??

[Hatta]

Why close a tab? Remember, memory that is not used is wasted. I use the tab bar as kind of a stack to keep track of what I've been doing. Need to switch tasks real quick? I'll push a new tab on the stack. When I'm done with that task, I close the tab and pop back to whatever it was I was doing before.

Bookmarks are too much hassle. You actually have to spend time deciding whether a page will be worthy of visiting again. I just end up bookmarking everything just in case, which is just as bad as having no bookmarks at all. When I pop back to a tab I was using, I'm in a much better position to decide whether I want to continue that task then when I interrupted it. Tasks always seem more important when you're leaving them than when you return for some reason.

I have tabs that have been open for over a month quite frequently. I might have half a dozen browser windows open, each with 150 tabs. I never experience any slowdown.

Re:Hundreds of tabs??

[bartok]

The reason FF progressively uses more memory is that the DOM is wrapped in XPCOM. Since XPCOM is reference counted, it cannot properly be garbage collected by the JS engine. Microsoft has the same approach for IE. Supposedly, one of the project gols for 4.0 is to remove XPCOM bindings for the DOM so that all garbage collection uses the same scheme. In theory, this should greatly reduce the memory bloat.

Re:Retarded

[delinear]

GP's point is that there are real performance gains that they could be making (Chrome doesn't just appear faster because of the interface, it is faster in benchmark tests), and while the UI is important, it's pretty telling that they're focusing on the UI changes rather than telling us about the fantastic performance gains they've made (kind of suggesting that they haven't).

stop messing wih the UI

[Anonymous Coward]

its hard enough to convince users that the internet isnt the blue E on their desktop and use Firefox instead.
keep changing the UI and sure as dammit they will be back using the blue E,
it may take us geeks a couple of minutes/hours to get used to a new UI but the average user it takes forever and they want familiarity they dont want to hunt for that buried option or find the new print button, hell some people dont even know what a home button is! and they absolutely hate having to throw away the knowledge gained on learning an applications UI just for it to change again

Tweak the default UI slowly, very slowly.

and for the record Chrome's UI sucks like Fisher Price (an example in gone too far in dumbing down)
eg. removing https:/// from the location bar after we (the security/it industry) have spent 25 years teaching people to look for it when signing into their bank/mail etc.
lets trash all that training and start again ? after all that business training is free right ?
and and people wonder why IE is standard in corporations ?

perhaps Mozilla should start working on aiding administrators (group policy options (have you seen IEs massive list?) /locking down functions/ automatic updates that are truly automatic and dont need user interaction etc)
instead of playing with fluff.

A.Dmin

Re:stop messing wih the UI

[Lumpy]

Step 1 - replace Firefox or Chrome icon with the blue E.

step 2 - set the new browser to default and remove all ability of the user to fire up IE for web browsing.

Step 3 - there is no step 3. if they ask, It's a new version of the "internet" and they need to get used to it.

Re:stop messing wih the UI

[deander2]

actually it only removes "http://". if you're on a secure site it still displays the "https://".

but i still agree it's a bad idea. :)

Re:stop messing wih the UI

[ap7]

You have not been taking a very close look at Google Chrome, have you? https is always shown. Plain old http is what is hidden.

Re:stop messing wih the UI

[fandingo]

I don't know what you're talking about with https://./ I just browsed over to my banking site, and https:/// is in the address. It's even green, and the little padlock is on the right side.
My university has an open wireless system that uses a self-signed cert for a logon page. Chrome throws up a big warning. https:/// is in red and is crossed out, not to mention the big warning on the page itself.
I'd say that Chrome's alerts about https:/// are perfectly fine.

Version 5.0.375.38

Re:stop messing wih the UI

[Myopic]

how sure is damnit?

Re:stop messing wih the UI

[juancnuno]

eg. removing https:/// from the location bar after we (the security/it industry) have spent 25 years teaching people to look for it when signing into their bank/mail etc.

Not that I'm down with the changes the Chrome guys made, but they only got rid of the http:. Not the https:.

Re:stop messing wih the UI

[don.g]

eg. removing https:/// [https] from the location bar after we (the security/it industry) have spent 25 years teaching people to look for it

Er, 25 years ago HTTP didn't exist. Let alone SSL.

Re:stop messing wih the UI

[badkarmadayaccount]

Step 3 - Install a IE theme.

Hundrerds of tabs?

[andy1307]

Seriously...if you have 100s of tabs open, you have ADD or you need to learn to let go of your tabs. Relax. Close them. They'll still be there when you wake up.

Re:Hundrerds of tabs?

[Scrameustache]

Seriously...if you have 100s of tabs open, you have ADD or you need to learn to let go of your tabs. Relax. Close them. They'll still be there when you wake up.

So will the ADD ;-(

Re:Hundrerds of tabs?

[Hadlock]

Have you considered submitting this cure for ADD to the AMA? Awards might be in order!

Re:Hundrerds of tabs?

[cshay]

I have 90,000 emails in my inbox too along with typically 150 open tabs. Relax, people use software in different ways. That's why there are preference pages.

Re:Hundrerds of tabs?

[BZ]

Or you use open tabs as your todo list.

Re:Hundrerds of tabs?

[izomiac]

You have hundreds of items on your to-do list? At that point it seems like you'd spend more time managing the list rather than completing the items on it. I personally open a new tab when I encounter something I'd like to read after the current page (e.g. a Google Reader news item), but I don't open so many it'd take an hour or more to get to it.

Re:Hundrerds of tabs?

[BZ]

> You have hundreds of items on your to-do list?

Effectively, yes. I get through a few dozen a day, but more pile on, of course.

Re:Hundrerds of tabs?

[dwarfsoft]

This is exactly what I do. I use different windows as different projects, and different tabs as different tasks within that project.

Also I tend to do research in the way of "Search google" then "Open up in new tabs anything that looks cool" then "Refine google search" and skim through the tabs while waiting. This tends to leave quite a few tabs open after a very short time. Once researching is done I close the window and continue in one of the others.

Mozilla Foundation is a U.S. company

[tepples]

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

Are you willing to foot the bill for the emigration of the entire Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation to one of these countries?

Re:Mozilla Foundation is a U.S. company

[sznupi]

Hm, one country making its companies less competitive...well, tough luck.

Re:Mozilla Foundation is a U.S. company

[Keeper Of Keys]

Surely they wouldn't need to physically decamp there, just re-incorporate themselves in that country (wherever you're talking about)?

Re:Mozilla Foundation is a U.S. company

[tepples]

Surely they wouldn't need to physically decamp there, just re-incorporate themselves in that country (wherever you're talking about)?

If a company has a "nexus" on U.S. soil, it has to abide by U.S. patents.

User Issue

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Hopefully Firefox will address the memory issues before implementing this feature...

Firefox has no memory issues, what you're seeing is a user issue. Just as the Firefox Devs...

Sounds like.. progress bars.

[Tei]

Most progress bars on the world are there to make the wait more fun. Drawing the progress bar takes CPU, and probably some activities sould be done in a incremental way, to be progressbar friendly, where a bach apropach would be faster.
Most progress bars are not really needed, but make programs feel faster by making programs a bit slower but more fun.
Anything that make a program 0.1% slower but feel 20% more faster is better for everyone. Yea, any human.

Re:Sounds like.. progress bars.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

In that vein, it should probably be mentioned that many progress bars are purely for psychological effect.

The ones that just have a moving gradient, or a bar that zooms back and forth don't actually indicate progress at all, they just reassure the waiting human that the machine is working, rather than frozen, which apparently makes the wait seem shorter.

Also, outside of some fairly specific niche applications(and video encoding/transcoding, which may not count as 'niche' these days), most progress bars that would last long enough to be visible are probably not there to indicate the status of a CPU constrained process. Pretty much any computer that runs on single-phase current at 15 amps or less is ridiculously powerful in the CPU department, but has severely questionable I/O performance.

Re:Sounds like.. progress bars.

[Keeper Of Keys]

Progress bars are there to let you know something is happening, and indicate how long you can expect to wait, not to make it be/feel/seem faster/more fun.

Re:Sounds like.. progress bars.

[CastrTroy]

I hate those "progress" bars. To me, it's just frustrating, and makes it seem like things are actually going slower. Also up there in the annoyance category are "progress bars" which fill up many times, with no indication of how many times they will go back to 0.

Re:Sounds like.. progress bars.

[asdf7890]

Progress bars are there to let you know something is happening, and indicate how long you can expect to wait, not to make it be/feel/seem faster/more fun.

Not quite. Several studies have shown that they have the latter effect on most users.

Microsoft pulled a fast one with IE's progress bar to, successfully in many cases, con people into thinking IE was faster than the competition at downloading data (in circumstances where in fact the network was the main bottleneck and choice of browser made no difference). IE's progress bar can slowly nudge up to about 40% before the first byte of data has been received where other browsers will not have it move until data actually starts arriving. Back in the day, and still now when using slow high-latency connections, this made quite a difference to the way people who knew-no-better perceived the speed of IE.

If you have access to a web server you can test this easily: just make a script that returns nothing for 30 seconds then drops in a block of data, and request that script in IE and a selection of other browsers. Assuming the data returned is simple enough that there are no significant rendering performance differences to consider you'll see IE's progress bar claim to start receiving data almost immediately (but slowly) but they will all pick up the full response in the same amount of time.

MS are not the only ones to realize the power of nudging the users perception with a little on-screen deception - you'll find many other examples and similar techniques if you look closely enough at what programs are actually doing. The animated progress bars for file operations found in many OSs (certainly in Windows since Vista and recent Ubuntu builds), which flash or animate unnecessarily in the direction the bar is growing in, have been shown to distort the average person's impression of how fast things are actually happening, as another example.

Re:Sounds like.. progress bars.

[Myopic]

Hmmm. I sort of agree. I'd say that the only thing worse than a progress bar that doesn't show actual algorithmic progress, is a UI which executes a lengthy algorithm with no feedback at all. I'd rather know that the computer is at work, than wondering whether it is hung. But of course, better than either of those options is to have meaningful progress bars.

Re:Sounds like.. progress bars.

[redscare2k4]

Lol, I've even seen webapps using an animated gif as a progress bar :P

Re:Sounds like.. progress bars.

[perryizgr8]

its funny i know but i like fast changing text like "connecting to 8.8.8.8..." and "looking up host google.com" and "loading image 9 of 56 (243.6kbits/s)". it makes the wait seem even shorter. specially since i now know that many programs just keep incrementing the progress bar even if nothing is happening (like opera mobile). i keep worrying over if it is really working or not.
similarly i dont like the loading logo animation of win7, i would prefer to have hundreds of lines of text scrolling on the screen, telling me as each file/driver/program is loaded.

Re:Sounds like.. progress bars.

[daveime]

It's called AJAX mate, which is basically completely invisible to the user until the request response cycle has completed and the page has been updated.

So a lot of times, the poor user doesn't even know if he clicked on the right thing ... hence the animated gif.

Mice pointers have been doing the same thing for about 25 years, are you going to rip on those next ?

SIGKILL during shutdown might leave Firefox broken

[tepples]

First, install the update when I shut down the browser. You're not wasting my time then because I'm done using it.

When you shut down the browser, you could be shutting down your computer.* Firefox doesn't want a SIGKILL from sudo shutdown -h now to make the updater leave the system in an inconsistent state. So if startup is unacceptable and shutdown is unacceptable, the only remaining solution is to do so in the background while the browser is in use.

* Not everybody is as lucky as you are to have proper driver support for hibernation. And some people apply security patches to their operating system kernels every month or two.

Please focus on standards, speed and security ...

[schwit1]

Leave everything else to add-ons and plug-ins.

Re:Retarded

[Eraesr]

Aren't we discussing semantics here?
It's pretty obvious what the man means. An application with a simple user interface works much nicer than an application with a UI that's littered with ambiguously labeled buttons and hidden menus. If you have to click 4 times to get something done, an application will feel (seem/look/whatever) slow compared to when you can do that in one single click as well.

One thing I hope is that "silently updating in the background" doesn't mean there will be some sort of "Firefox updater.exe" service loaded in the background when I start up my PC. I hate it when applications do that.

Re:Still a Firefox user

[Vectormatic]

try chrome for just one day, it is awesome

i tried chrome as soon as the beta came out, and since then i have never switched back, firefox seems slow, clunky and has way too much interface clutter (well, to be fixed in 4.0 apperently) compared to chrome

and dont get me started on IE

Re:Retarded

[billcopc]

So instead of actually fixing the weird bottlenecks and sloppy code, they're just painting racing stripes and calling it a day.

Firefox is in dire need of a fork.

Gmail and Twitter their own permanent tabs

[FreakyGreenLeaky]

Provided I can delete these "permanent" tabs. If not, fuck off.

Re:Gmail and Twitter their own permanent tabs

[Adrian Lopez]

In addition to what you said, I hope TFA is merely giving examples of applications for which a "permanent tab" feature would be useful. If the feature where somehow tied specifically to Gmail and Twitter rather than the user's choice of applications, it would be a very unfortunate choice indeed by the Mozilla Foundation.

Re:Gmail and Twitter their own permanent tabs

[kbrosnan]

Essentially they are talking about uplifting FaviconizeTab into a core Feature.

Re:Gmail and Twitter their own permanent tabs

[Bieeanda]

Amen to that. If this is anything more than a session manager, or advertising the fact that you can open more than one tab as your home page, I'm probably going to be peeved.

Central Management Please!

[rAiNsT0rm]

I'd love to switch our companies users to FF but having no way to centrally manage/monitor and update is a complete killer. There's no way we can have users with 10 different versions and different issues, etc. It's a nightmare. Give me a cool central control panel and have each browser be able to be hooked into it and it would be amazing.

Re:Central Management Please!

[Lumpy]

you dont have that with IE now. so why must a change have features you dont already have?

I'd love to drive a ford instead of a chevy, but only if it has a 1500HP engine, 6 wheel drive, gets 90mpg at 200mph and I can turn a dial to change the paint color.

Re:Central Management Please!

[deniable]

If you're using AD/GPOs, try FrontMotion's Firefox. It's what we use, all centrally managed.

Re:Central Management Please!

[ZosX]

Uh...leave the autoupdate enabled on firefox?

Re:Central Management Please!

[rAiNsT0rm]

Way to think small dude! I mean if IE doesn't have it why make FF better in any way?... FFS. *facepalm*

Re:Central Management Please!

[rAiNsT0rm]

I hadn't known about that.. I will look into it when I get some time. Thanks!

Re:Central Management Please!

[rAiNsT0rm]

hehe, you must not work in IT. Disconnected users, tinkerers, and a million more reasons make this just about useless. In a perfect world, it would be that simple... if you find that world, please invite me.

Re:Central Management Please!

[Ant P.]

Give me a cool central control panel and have each browser be able to be hooked into it and it would be amazing.

It's called Landscape.

Re:Central Management Please!

[rAiNsT0rm]

Umm... I work in IT Ubuntu isn't the defacto standard of business.

Re:Central Management Please!

[halltk1983]

WSUS with group policy allows you to control the version of IE pretty easily. Something similar for Firefox would be nice.

Re:Central Management Please!

[rAiNsT0rm]

An .msi would be an extremely smart move and part way to where it needs to be!

Re:Central Management Please!

[FrankieBaby1986]

My school uses this: http://www.frontmotion.com/Firefox/fmfirefox.htm

From the page above:
Features
* Active Directory deployable and upgradeable.
* Active Directory management through Administrative Templates (*.adm).
* Desktop Icon similar to IE.
* Shell integration similar to IE.
* Set Default browser
* Macromedia Flash plug-in preinstalled
* Detect and upgrades non-MSI installs.
* Can upgrade 3rd party MSI's from patpaul/MIT, Webheat.co.uk, and ZettaServe.
* Able to properly perform uninstalls and restores system associations
* Enhanced functionality like disabled profile migration.

Final blow to Firefox

[acid06]

The only thing which keeps me from switching to Chrome is that Firefox still has a non-sucky UI (after some extensions such as LastTab).
If Firefox will look the same as Chrome, I'll just switch as Chrome is way faster.

They're just too eager to jump into the "me too" bandwagon and will lose market share because of it, by betraying their loyal users. They've done it once with the "awesome bar" and are doing it again now. No wonder its market share is currently stagnated.

Re:Final blow to Firefox

[clone53421]

I really think the “Awesome bar” was an improvement, as different as it was. Searching the full text of the title of the page, or anywhere deep inside the URL (rather than at the beginning) – without having to open a separate history interface – is incredibly handy. At first it bothered me that you couldn’t scroll past the first 10 results, but it turns out that typing a few more characters generally brings the site you’re looking for to the top, and once you’ve been there a few times it knows that you typed “s” and you’re probably going to Slashdot, so it’s right there at the top – whereas if I typed “c”, I want my /~user/comments page.

Re:Final blow to Firefox

[clone53421]

Whoops. I wasn’t done.

Contrast that to the Ribbon, which is no easier to actually use – once you know how – than menus were – once you knew how. It’s selling factor was that it’s easier to learn to use.

So everyone who already knew how to use the menus has to re-learn a new system, albeit one which is supposedly easier to learn than menus were. The easiest thing for them, however, would have been to not learn anything and continue using the system they already knew how to use. You force a bunch of people to re-learn something without making it any better. That’s wrong.

The Awesome Bar is actually better IMHO and that is why it was a slightly different situation... and it wasn’t even as difficult of a transition as the menu-to-ribbon switch. The Awesome Bar at least still functioned in most of the same respects that the address bar had traditionally done.

Re:Still a Firefox user

[sznupi]

Those blank tabs, from my experience (also on one older machine, not a lot of RAM, HDD readily audible when seeking), are typically due to OS almost completelly swapping out the process behind this specific tab. Takes a while to get it back / a side effect of Chrome architecture - it is fast as long as it has plenty of physical RAM, for the amount of tabs you open. If that's not true, the experience goes down the drain.

Re:Retarded

[dintlu]

It doesn't help that the linked article is terrible. A whole pile of performance updates are being made in addition to the UI changes:

JagerMonkey
HTML5 Parser off main thread
64 bit support
Startup timeline optimizations
Reduced I/O operations on main thread
JS threads and GC
DOM Performance improvements
Layers for compositing, scrolling

+

Graphics compositing with Layers
Hardware acceleration using Direct3D
Multitouch support
Aero Peek integration
OSX integration

I'd suggest reading the actual presentation for more information:
http://beltzner.ca/mike/2010/05/10/firefox-4-fast-powerful-and-empowering/

Re:Retarded

[pete-wilko]

Yes, because increasing user satisfaction shouldn't be an objective for a browser which is constantly trying to increase its market share...

Much like the story of people complaining about elevators taking too long to arrive, and the installation of mirrors stopped the complaints, this is much the same. If users perceive the browser to be faster, then that is just as important as it being faster from a user satisfaction point of view.

Re:Retarded

[DarkKnightRadick]

If you run Chrome you better check your system processes than.

Tips to make things seem faster

[DeanLearner]

1) Have your monitor shake and blow air in your face while opening a browser.
2) Add some motion blur when scrolling a page.
3) Lower your desk. Generally, the closer to the floor you are the faster it seems. I am using go karts as an example.
4) Make ALL youtube videos play at 2x speed except for videos about rival browsers, which shall be played at 0.5x.

Good

[Tromad]

Unlike the curmudgeons here I believe firefox has the worst UI of the popular browsers, and the mock-ups look like a nice improvement, even if it seems ripped from Opera. Surely you all have learned the keyboard commands for the common menu functions that are pretty much universal for every app? I say good riddance to the days of the menu bar, there is a reason nearly EVERYONE is abandoning it.

Re:Good

[clone53421]

View -> Toolbars -> Menu bar.

You’re welcome. Now I’ll be keeping it turned on, because I like it that way.

Re:Good

[Tromad]

It still makes it a hassle to get to the one useful feature: options. I use extensions to replace the menu bar with a button.

Re:Good

[clone53421]

Alt still makes it temporarily appear, and you might as well just go all the way: Alt-T, O.

Re:Still a Firefox user

[Goaway]

Try Chrome again. It is getting lots and lots of work, and is much more stable now than just a few months ago.

Re:Retarded

[iapetus]

If you don't understand the difference between perceived performance and actual raw performance, and how the former can frequently be more important than the latter, then I'm guessing you haven't had to deliver a complex user interface based product before.

Re:Still a Firefox user

[imakemusic]

try chrome for just one day, it is awesome

I did. It's ok.

I prefer firefox.

Re:Still a Firefox user

[bjourne]

Same here. Although Chrome has some horrible stability issues and other bugs. While the js engine is faster, gmail will only load once in about five tries for me. Same thing with google analytics and other javascript heavy pages; they run faster when they work but most of the time they plain don't work in Chrome. In FF, they load (slower) but without hickups. And then lots of sites crash the browser. Supposedly, Chrome's process separation should ensure that only one tab gets wrecked but that never ever works for me. Instead all chrome processes freezes and I have to kill them using a command line. Chrome will rock when it but for me it is still way unstable.

I don't care if it is faster just open faster

[Randall_Lind]

Out of all the browsers for Windows seems Firefox is the slowest when it comes to starting it. Once it is open I don't have a issue. I really hope they fix that one day.

Better auto-update

[characterZer0]

Why would the user have write access to the directory where the web browser is installed to even be able to auto-update?

Are people running their web browsers as Administrator or root?!

Re:Better auto-update

[raynet]

UAC takes care of the permissions problem. And I am sure there are similar mechanisms for other operating systems.

So how long on the fork?

[0racle]

How long on the fork of Firefox so that the Mozilla Foundation makes a light browser that is fast at what it does again and has another full and bloated client for those that don't want to browse too fast?

Hundreds of Tabs?

[ve3oat]

allowing power users running hundreds of tabs to quickly find the one they want

But isn't that what bookmarks are for?

Re:Hundreds of Tabs?

[Dog-Cow]

No.

Re:Hundreds of Tabs?

[delinear]

To expand on this one-word answer, they really are two different things. One lets you open a new page, the other lets you find a tab you've already opened - if you seriously have so many tabs open that you need a manager (and I quite often have in the region of 30-40 open), the last thing you want to do is use bookmarks to open more tabs with the same content. What I'd really like is some way to categorise tabs - I have much different requirements depending on which project I'm working on, or if I'm browsing for leisure/shopping, etc. It would be nice to say these 10 pages help me when working on project X, and these 7 on project Y, and these 12 on project Z, so let me assign a button to each group so I only have the relevant tabs running at any one time and can close the rest down without facing a nightmare when I need to restart them.

Re:Hundreds of Tabs?

[Jesus_666]

In case you aren't aware yet, the Firefox extensions "Tab Groups Manager" and "Tree Style Tabs" do this, in different ways. The names should say everything. Of course it wouldbe nice if Fx4 had native tab groups.

Re:Hundreds of Tabs?

[theun4gven]

What I'd really like is some way to categorise tabs

While not a complete solution, I find using a separate window for each category of tabs to be a nice workaround. Alt-tab or expose makes moving between them pretty simple.

Re:Hundreds of Tabs?

[cbciv]

It would be nice to say these 10 pages help me when working on project X, and these 7 on project Y, and these 12 on project Z, so let me assign a button to each group so I only have the relevant tabs running at any one time and can close the rest down without facing a nightmare when I need to restart them.

You can use the Session Manager add-on to do this by saving groups of tabs as named sessions. If you need multiple sets open at once, you can put each session into a separate window.

Re:Still a Firefox user

[radicalskeptic]

I actually have been using it up to and through the latest version 5 update. It is better before but I'm still getting the same bugs (albeit more rarely now).

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:hundreds of tabs

[CaptnMArk]

I tested 5000 tabs yesterday (opened month or two of history -> crash)

Re:Still a Firefox user

[radicalskeptic]

I figured as much, and I still use Chrome for light browsing, but as I said, my computer is aging and it does have to swap to disk frequently. :-/

Re:Still a Firefox user

[armanox]

I'd love to have a Quad G5 to replace my 800MHz G4.

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?"

Re:Retarded

[deniable]

4 will crash and burn. We need a successor to rise from the ashes. We could call it Phoenix.

Re:Still a Firefox user

[Goaway]

Well, there's your problem: The latest version 5 update is only on the dev channel. That's for cutting-edge testing, and is pretty much guaranteed to have bugs. You want to use a more conservative version if you want it to be stable and reliable.

(Also, as was pointed out, the blank tabs are probably a side effect of the split-process model. They just mean that content is being swapped in and they will appear in a little while. This is what happens instead of the entire browser freezing while they swap in.)

Re:Retarded

[NevarMore]

Much like the story of people complaining about elevators taking too long to arrive, and the installation of mirrors stopped the complaints

I'd like to read more about this, can you point me at a source?

I don't mind

[Yaotzin]

I rarely use the buttons or the menu since I've got the hotkeys firmly engraved into my mind, but if they take away my sidebars I'm going to get pissed. About this whole Chrome speed mishmosh, I recently did an extremely simple test of my own. I set the homepage to my google personalized homepage on both browsers and resized them so that they took up about half the screen each. After opening both browsers simultaneously it seemed that the start up was pretty close but Firefox loaded my homepage a lot faster. Why is that?

Re:Retarded

[think_nix]

So instead of actually fixing the weird bottlenecks and sloppy code, they're just painting racing stripes and calling it a day.

Firefox is in dire need of a fork.

I was asking myself the exact same question. Like up above if the Director of Firefox is saying crap like he did in TFA no wonder it is bloated and a resource hog.

I still dont see why gmail needs its own tab , facebook etc, all the crap I dont need or want. I mean if I want 'assigned' tabs I set them so at startup. I want a fast secure browsing experience Im sure that would be on the toplist of most users.

Also why does one project always have to 'copy' another ? What happened to innovation? new ideas? something that hasn't been done before?

Re:Still a Firefox user

[Steauengeglase]

Chrome in and of itself really hasn't won me over. I like the idea that every tab is a process and that if one page locks up the browser I can just kill that process, but that is kind of like buying a really fast speedboat because it has better fire extinguishers on board.

Re:hundreds of tabs

[deniable]

Someone was really thirsty.

Re:Retarded

[Hatta]

You've got to admit, lynx seems pretty fast these days.

Re:Retarded

[lorg]

"the simpler an interface looks, the faster it will seem"

Isn't this really the standard operating procedure? If you can't make it better/faster then atleast try and make it look good?

In general and not just applicable to some potential Firefox 4 design; A simple interface showing for what seems like forever will "seem" faster? I don't know, seems a bit far fetched. Say I saw an interface that appeared to be doing lots of things on the screen, be it little animated loading bars growing, zzz-clouds or whatever, then I might think that the system had a lot to do but it was working on and towards something. If I see a (near) blank screen doing nothing for more then a few seconds I'm inclined to think that something have crashed. I want (near) CONSTANT UPDATES!

With that in mind, I will prefer a simpler looking interface but I will not start to think time passes any faster or slower due to it.

Re:Still a Firefox user

[Hadlock]

I originally switched to Chrome on my netbook, due to the smaller header bar for the application (saves vertical space), used it for about a week and ended up downloading and using it on my desktop as well. FF does seem "clunky" now in comparison. The only major bug I run into with Chrome is where Flash will crash and nuke 10-15 tabs I have open.
 
Speaking of which, why the hell can I search any wordpress blog, vbb forum, the pirate bay etc from the URL bar in Chrome (by hitting tab), but you can't use that same functionality to search Google Maps or Gmail? As much as I use google maps google has yet to come up with a text hook to just search maps from inside the google bar.

Re:hundreds of tabs

[TheSunborn]

That was most likely an "out of memmory error" unless you run the 64 bit version, with something like 32GB ram

Re:Retarded

[halltk1983]

Chrome already did all that "innovation" stuff. There's nothing left to invent!

Wrong definition of "power users"

[Hurricane78]

allowing power users running hundreds of tabs to quickly find the one they want.

Sorry, that”s not “power using” but “being a messie who clutters things up”.
The same type of person whoses desk is full of paper sheets and his display borders are full of post-it notes.
In other words: No a very healty person, and not someone you would want to hire.

A power user would use TabMix Plus storable sessions and bookmark folders, plus TagSifter tagging.
Or even one writing his own extensions.

But I guess the guy who wrote it considers using any kind or CLI something only experts use...

Re:Wrong definition of "power users"

[Myopic]

I don't know if you are the kind of person who is swayed by science, but my understanding is that people who keep messy homes and desks and computers are (on average) smarter, faster workers, and can find things faster than tidy people.

Nevertheless, I myself am a tidy person, and I sure don't apologize for it. It's how I like to be; it's the behavior that comes out of my brain without me thinking about it.

Anyway, my closing anecdotes are: 1.) my sysadmin, who is exactly the kind of person who keeps dozens (not hundreds, that would be crazy) of tabs open all at once, monitoring all sorts of things on the network; and 2.) it seems the best programmers I know, who write complicated bug-free software faster than I ever could, produce code which to me looks like an electronic cat vomited into a computerized litter box. But hell, you run it and it works like a charm.

So for me, I don't judge the messy the same way you do.

Firefox openness

[linebackn]

While I like Firefox and also SeaMonkey just fine, I have always been a bit bothered by applications (and there are many of them) that take their time updating the screen or make the UI unresponsive. Look back at the original Mac running on a 8mhz 68k or Windows 1.0 running on an 8088. Menus, dialogs and such display almost instantly after a mouse click. Now we have multi-gigahertz CPUs with multiple cores and video cards that have such powerful GPUs you almost need a built in nuclear reactor to power them! What is the excuse for not being able to display a menu the very next video frame/refresh? If data is slowly tickling in over a network, why not display what you have the instant it comes in?

I remember running the first public Mozilla Suite builds on a Pentium 200 and how incredibly slow they were. I know there have really have been many speed improvements, but sometimes it feels like Mozilla just let the hardware get faster rather than addressing some of the core speed issues that Chrome is now putting them to shame on.

It looks like their solution to slow menus is to remove the menus? The standard way people have been interfacing with GUI applications since 1984? You people do know Chome is just trying to look like IE 7, which was trying to look like Safari, which actually does have menus just not attached to each browser window?

On the topic of video, I wish more people would provide direct downloadable links to video files so even if my browser doesn't know how to play a video, I can view it in an external player like VLC. And it seems like the only realistic answer for bundled in-browser video here is if Mozilla can negotiate some kind of special licensing agreement with the h.264 folks. Although I seriously think video should be implemented as some kind of plug-in that can be updated separately as the video-codec-of-the-day changes.

All that aside, it is interesting how open Mozilla appears to be in discussing their plains. Apple keeps their plans top secret with not a word uttered, Microsoft's plans are openly "leaked" so people feel naughty when a preview/beta , Oracle's plans are covered with legalese and subject to contract terms, Linux plans are written in some cryptic programming language or something. Well, it is just nice seeing somebody try to be open like this (even if they still wind up doing their own thing)

Re:Firefox openness

[daveime]

why not display what you have the instant it comes in

Because some dumbass decided that it was far better to take the M(arkup) out of HTML and bung it in some damn .css file, which at best loads parallel to the main document, but in reality usually a few seconds afterward.

NO, DON'T PUT POSITIONAL INFORMATION IN THE HTML, THAT'S VERBOTEN.

Much better to have a page full of div tags that don't know where the hell they should actually BE on the page until some separate file has loaded containing X,Y,Width & Height information.

And if the .css fails to load at least you have a page of left aligned text in 12 point Times New Roman, which means the content is still usable, right ? I bet you feel so much better that content and presentation are not mixed ?

Where was that F5 key again ?

Vertical UI components

[uofitorn]

What I would like to have is (the option, of course) Firefox UI elements somehow run vertically along the left side of the screen. Horizontal screen space is cheap these days with the ubiquity of wide screen displays. Vertical resolution, not so much anymore. However, the left to right text of the address bar, bookmarks, tabs, etc seems like an insurmountable barrier unless someone can come up with a good idea for representing that vertically.

Jumped The Shark?

[assertation]

Is it fair to ask if a software project has "jumped the shark" when they are copying innovations (instead of making innovations ) off of a competing piece of software?

Re:Jumped The Shark?

[Myopic]

Yeah sure, it's a fair question, but the fair answer is "no".

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU...

[clone53421]

Dialogue boxes - including those requesting geolocation or other data - will appear as bubbles specific to individual tabs, meaning you can continue to navigate around the browser without being locked down until you've answered.

FINALLY.

Never again will I be alert-bombed.

(I looked for an add-on to change script alerts, confirms, and prompts into something non-modal. I couldn’t find anything.)

Re:THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU...

[clone53421]

No, I don’t want someone to tell me that Opera already had that feature. It obviously wasn’t a selling point, but I did want it fixed.

Re:THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU...

[Ant P.]

Chrome's way of handling this is pretty clever. After the second alert box from a site, it gives you a "STFU" checkbox on the next ones.

Re:THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU...

[clone53421]

You call it clever, I call it ugly (i.e.: clippy. “It looks like this site is trying to alert-bomb you, can I help?”).

Make the alerts non-modal, and if you want to make a right-click option to disable script alerts from the site, that would be fine too.

Re:Retarded

[pete-wilko]

One of those stories that everyone takes credit for, but appears to have some basis in truth:

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1244-defining-the-problem-of-elevator-waiting-times

http://www3.sympatico.ca/karasik/GF_evolution_of_legend.html

http://www.shmula.com/384/on-queueing-and-elevator-mirrors

Getting the definitive source will be neigh on impossible, but those are rough pointers. Either way its illustrative of requirements engineering/user perceptions/problem analysis.

Re:Still a Firefox user

[sznupi]

In that case perhaps you should consider Opera; especially on older machines and/or with a lot of tabs it ends up noticeably snappier than the rest of the bunch.

That's probably one of the reasons why it's the number one browser in Ukraine (yes, significantly ahead of IE), with similar situation in Belarus from I've heard, and the number one "alternative" browser in Russia. Places where machines are, on average, what many would consider a bit "old" (I have a buddy from Dnepropetrovsk, a major city on the east of Ukraine - a PC at his home there was something in the style of Celeron Willamette or early Northwood, with 256MB...and from what he said it's relatively typical). Plus machines there often come...essentially without OS (yes, also laptops from major manufacturers - with things like "DOS2000" or useless Linux liveCD/installation without drivers or even without X functioning); usually set up with pirate copy of Windows by somebody who "knows computers" - those people often install "better" (given the circumstances) browser.

I figure that not abondoning perfectly fine older machine, using instead more appropriate software on it, is just, well, the responsible thing to do. And it's not much of a problem to quickly launch another browser if some sites really don't want to cooperate... (especially if Chrome can "turn them into apps")

Not So (Re:Retarded)

[EXTomar]

There is some real HMI theory behind this though. HMI studies show the less buttons and dynamic the interface the more people think and feel it is faster and more responsiveness even if nothing has changed at all. Give a user an interface with a lot of buttons or one with a few, the user perceives the one with less buttons even when the guts function at exactly the same speed.

They aren't trying to hide a problem but avoiding creating a false one. Gravitating towards a minimal interface also helps with mobile versions.

Re:Not So (Re:Retarded)

[delinear]

There is some real HMI theory behind this though. HMI studies show the less buttons and dynamic the interface the more people think and feel it is faster and more responsiveness even if nothing has changed at all. Give a user an interface with a lot of buttons or one with a few, the user perceives the one with less buttons even when the guts function at exactly the same speed.

They aren't trying to hide a problem but avoiding creating a false one. Gravitating towards a minimal interface also helps with mobile versions.

That all makes sense, but what people are pointing out is that it's not an either/or situation - they could do both - increase actual performance and perceived performance. The fact that their "super duper fast" update seems to be focused more on the latter suggests that they've pretty much given up on the former (since people have been complaining about performance since, what, version 1 now?) - note that Chrome manages to do both.

Why copy Chrome?

[kimvette]

I ask the Mozilla folks: why copy Chrome? If I wanted to run Chrome, I would run that instead. I run Firefox because it's firefox and has a GUI which provides a lot more functionality, and I install extensions to add to that functionality (firebug, web developer toolbar, adblock, tinyurl, colorzilla, cooliris, google toolbar, etc). I LIKE menu bars, and being able to turn features on and off, but having a basic toolbar, status bar, and menu bar enabled by default. I hate the current trend of dumbing down UIs and making them look like they were designed using Play-Doh (make that play-d'oh).

Want to know what you should work on instead? Sandboxing each tab, sandboxing plugins, decreasing memory utilization (with the realization that you can't do much about flash, quicktime, mplayer, etc. plugin memory utilization), fully multithreading the UI so one tab waiting for a message queue doesn't freeze the entire browser, and work on the javascript engine so it is on par with Chrome, etc.

Seriously. If all you do is reinvent Chrome, why bother? By offering a Chrome clone, any reason to run Firefox disappears.

Wish list

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what firefox needs most from my perspective:

- Multiprocess build: everything plugging away at one core isn't really ideal..
- Task manager: what page is hidden away in some inactive tab sucking up CPU due to javascript? (No, I don't want to run noscript.. I do have yesscript though). Also memory usages would be useful for some people.
- Why are pages in hidden tabs or on different desktops using CPU anyway? If it's not in front of me I don't really need it to run in most cases. Slashdot's pause functionality with firehose was a good thing.

Since I end up with maybe 8 virtual desktops with a workflow on each one in a firefox window there, if I want to do anything fun the browsing experience becomes pretty sluggish.. I pretty much have to fire up chrome if I want to use a JS heavy site/youtube/etc.. which can't be right.

I know a multiprocess build is underway, but waiting is frustrating and I see more and more people switching to chrome each day.

Re:Retarded

[wickedskaman]

It's true. Even after you have uninstalled Chrome the GoogleUpdate.exe process remains. Not to mention the Scheduled Task it silently installs if you are a Windows user. For average users, uninstalling Chrome completely is impossible.

Re:Retarded

[heathen_01]

I agree my CLI interface to the WWW is far superior than Firefox.

If you are copying an interface at least improve..

[guidryp]

To me the only thing I like about the Chrome interface is that you recover some vertical screen real estate.

The FF 4 mockup seems to have a much fatter blank area at the top. IMO they need to shrink this more, not enlarge it, if you are going to copy improve, don't degrade.

Re:Retarded

[Myopic]

I had never heard of that. I googled it and here's one link.

Netscape

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Firefox is a has been. People in the know are switching to Chrome or Safari. People who aren't are sticking to IE like they always have. Unless they get back on track, I seriously doubt Mozilla will still be a major player 5 years from now.

Firefox is the New Netscape! ;)

Re:Retarded

[Lord Byron II]

I understand your point, but the middle-mouse-click does exactly that - open in background tab.

No need to understand speed obsession...

[yet-another-lobbyist]

... it's just much more fun. I don't care why. No understanding required.

Quickly != Firefox

[Putr]

allowing power users running hundreds of tabs to quickly

Quickly? Hundreds of tabs? Are you SERIOUS?

Runing 20 tabs makes firefox run at snails pase and freeze everytime you click a button/tab. Just opening 5 links from google search will compleatly freeze firefox for ~20seconds
(I use firefox for it's live bookmarks function) (and yes 20 tabs run without problems in opera)

In 40 yrs, that's the 1st time I've seen "mooted"

[cshay]

...and I read a reasonable amount. Weird. Was the summary writer trying to educate people, or is he just a lawyer who doesn't realize it's an obscure word?

Power users with hundreds of tabs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly some kind of joke...

Before I switched to Chrome, I couldn't use more than 10 or so tabs without the memory usage going through the roof, and I'd need to restart. Show me someone using firefox with 100 tabs who isn't using a supercomputer.

Re:Power users with hundreds of tabs?

[laddiebuck]

Session Manager tells me I am currently running 889 tabs in 27 windows. I'll admit this is using just a shade under a GB of RAM, and that I browse mostly text sites and I run NoScript, and that it's noticeably not as fast as if I were to close this session and start a new one (which would be trivial in Session Manager, and I could even choose which windows/tabs to restore when reloading the session -- and that would restore all the indentation and read/unread states of my tabs in Tab Kit). But it's still pretty snappy. Also I'm running under Linux, but my memory is that Firefox on Windows always was snappier and used less memory than Firefox on Linux.

The fact is, no browser delivers me anywhere near the amount of power as Firefox does, and which I do appreciate. With Firefox I actually feel like I'm in control of browsing, whereas Opera and Safari and IE and Chrome and K-Meleon and Epiphany and Galeon and Konqueror and Elinks all leave me frustrated and somehow shackled.

Re:Power users with hundreds of tabs?

[slothman32]

What could you possibly use almost 900 tabs for?
If you use 100 for business then what could those be used for?
If you use 10 for programming then what could those be used for?

Every once in a while I get like 20 tab/windows.
That's only because I click a few links and look at them later in my browser session.

Re:Power users with hundreds of tabs?

[laddiebuck]

Very simple: that's how I research anything. These represent 27 things I haven't finished with (one of them is today's Slashdot stories). I tend to research things by kicking off a few searches or Wikipedia entries. Then when I come across something I need to look at, I middle-click it and it becomes an (indented vertical coloured) tab. This morning I was messing about with large KMZ files (many millions of Placemarks, KMZs of hundreds of megabytes) and was running into weird Google Earth bugs. There's probably 120 or so Python and Google Earth related random forum and blog posts. Once I'm finished debugging, I'll just close the window and finish with what I was doing there. There's one window with 326 tabs devoted to some interesting threads of reading that began with the Battle of Quiberon Bay but went as far afield as HMS Warspite, Admiral Cochrane, NAFTA, the Second Battle of El Alamein, the Fairey Swordfish, the Battle of Chillianwalla, the Marseillaise, Victor Hugo, and the Carl Gustav recoilless rifle. That's the idle pleasure window, as you can guess. I'll be closing that one any day now. :)

It's just really useful to me to be able to browse kind of like an outline or a mind map (not that I've ever used one of those) and not have to worry about back and forward and where I saw something. Tab Kit lets me track what I've read and haven't, and lets me see my browsing in a handy tree of tabs, branches of which I can collapse/expand. Session Manager lets me not worry about crashes, and lets me copy a session from profile to profile as I switch computers/OSes/versions. NoScript lets me do the same with YouTube, because I block Flash until I click on it. And there are a handful of other useful extensions I have installed, mostly for finer control (cookie export, cookie swap, firebug, greasemonkey).

Re:No, let the OS vendors do it

[delinear]

On Linux (etc.) they could require that you download and install ffmpeg on your own time. That way, if ffmpeg gets sued out of existence, it's no skin of Mozilla's nose.

And if ffmpeg does get sued it, what, effectively kills Linux on the desktop?

How about making it faster?

[kbg]

I am very disappointed that Mozilla is only interested in changing the user interface for new versions. Current Firefox is very slow and is getting slower in every new version. They should focus on making it blindingly fast before even considering more UI changes. The start up times for Firefox are excruciatingly slow, for some stupid reason Firefox seems to enumerate all the files in your temp directory! The user interface is also very slow on slow networks, the concept of threads seems to be an alien concept to the developers.

That is a really good idea.

[elucido]

Consider most people pay $10 for an album or CD. How hard would it be for Firefox to charge $5 for a version of Firefox which supports extra features?

The Slashdot site even has this mechanism of funding. It would work if it were done in an Itunes way and if people could pay via Google's payment system.

Firefox needs better scaling for fonts.

[elucido]

I'm in high resolution mode and I'm still having problems with the font DPI. They need to make it so that the fonts look good regardless of the monitor resolution. It should automatically adapt. How hard is it to make an intelligent font mechanism for Compiz/Xwin/Windows7?

I have 100 open tabs, don't discriminate.

[elucido]

I have ADD and would love to be able to search through 100 tabs.

I would prefer if they made the search intelligent enough to predict which tabs I'll go to, and use regular expressions so that I can program it to respond to words I highlight on a site.

So for example if I highlight a word with my mouse and I already have wikipedia open in another window, it should ask me if I want to search wikipedia in the window already open rather than asking me to open a new wikipedia window and search. Regular expressions and intelligent text.

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.

Don't Worry There Is Still Seamonkey

[HannethCom]

Firefox since the beginning for me has been a bad joke. Things like trying to remove the inline auto-complete make it so that I have to click more to get to what I want. I get repetitive strain injury every once in a while and I found with Firefox it got worse. Fortunately for those of us who value our hands there is Seamonkey, an easy, feature rich interface that allows us to do what we want.

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.

Re:No mention of Chrome's best feature?

[xtracto]

Ah! yes... I have been looking for something like that in Firefox for *ages*. Mores specifically a task manager for extensions; to see which extensions eat the most memory.

What really sucks is that according to the summary it seems Firefox 4 will continue the sucky trend of adding and adding more "features" to the base Firefox binary.

I am a "power user" (usually have 4 or 5 windows open across several virtual desktops, some of them with 40 tabs) and I use the TreeStyle tab extension without any problem.
OTOH I do not care about any of the listed "features", I just want firefox to be faster and to consume less darn memory!

They have to make it more functional not "faster".

[elucido]

The goal should be to allow the individual to take in and interpret as much information as possible with minimal clutter. One of the best new features browsers have added is the ability to highlight text and click "Search for What a joke.", the problem is they don't expand on any of this. They want us to use web apps but they don't provide anything to allow us to take input from one website and send it to another without opening up a bunch of useless Windows.

If I want to email you through gmail I should be able to click an icon next to your sn, this Window should instantly allow me to send this post to your gmail or whatever. It should be much better integrated. We should be able to also search more than just "Google", for "What a Joke", but it should allow the individual to search any application on their computer or on the internet that they select. I should be able to search for "What a Joke" on several sites search bars and the results should appear on one page.

Why is this so difficult? It's adding the features of regular expressions to the browser experience. That is the next level, and if it can be made intelligent and the AI can predict the context, even better.

Re:Retarded

[R.Mo_Robert]

4 will crash and burn. We need a successor to rise from the ashes. We could call it Phoenix.

Alas, that name is already taken. Maybe we could call it Firebird instead!

Re:Still a Firefox user

[bzipitidoo]

Seamonkey integrates the URL bar with the search bar. There's probably a plugin for Firefox that does the same thing.

This is what I do to save real estate. 2 addons and several tweaks of Firefox options:

• Compact Menu 2 addon (default setting of hide the Menu Bar)
• Pimpoflage addon (default setting, which is autohide the Status Bar)
• check View->Toolbars->Customize...->Use Small Icons
• uncheck View->Toolbars->Bookmarks Toolbar
• uncheck Edit->Preferences->Tabs->Always Show the Tab Bar

And I'm currently using Openbox window manager, which has an "undecorate" feature to hide the title bar. If I'm feeling especially hungry for more room, I'll take another stab at finding out how to make the scroll bars narrower. (Haven't yet figured out how to do that in Openbox.) I tried just having the Status Bar off, but it does have useful info. Pimpoflage can also autohide the Navigation Bar. It's not perfect-- can easily enter a loop condition in which mouse pointer hovers over a link which causes the Status Bar to unhide, which shifts the web page so the mouse pointer is no longer hovering over that link, which then causes the Status Bar to hide, shifting the link back under the pointer, etc. I tried an autohide plugin for the Menu Bar, but found the "Menu Button" idea works better for me.

From what I recall of a discussion of Firefox 3.7, much of the UI cleanup they're planning will make these addons unnecessary.

Oh, and of course, Ad Block.

A UI should be tweaked for function not appearance

[elucido]

When I have 100 tabs open I want to be able to have my browser intelligently send data between these tabs. If I have Google open and I highlight something I don't want another Google to have to open. I want a Google Icon which represents ALL the Google tabs much like the taskbar can group windows. All Google should be under Google, all Slashdot under Slashdot, all Youtube under Youtube, and these categories should all be independently searchable or searchable as a whole.

I should be able to search through all my Youtube or Slashdot tabs for any specific sentence contained within those tabs. I should be able to know which tab has been active, which tab is inactive. I should know which tab is consuming a lot of resources via blinking or whatever mechanism.

Features like these would save time because I wouldn't have to open the tasklist to kill the tabs which are consuming too much resources. I wouldn't have to scroll through inactive tabs to find the active tab. And if I want to search ALL my search engines for a phrase I should be able to search them all, I don't see why I can do this via Beagle or regular expressions in Linux but I cannot do this in Firefox???!

The main problem with Firefox is they aren't integrating with the systems they operate under and they aren't giving users features we ask for.

Agent based search

[elucido]

This is another feature they'll probably never implement. But it would be incredibly useful if while doing research you can set Firefox to search Google and open up sites which match the specific concepts/phrase/whatever you are looking for. If I want to learn all I can learn about a subject like the history of the automobile, I should be able to program Firefox to search every search engine for the terms "Automobile" and "History", then future program it to only go to certain results from specific reputable websites from the list I choose. I should also be able to program Firefox to search within those websites for specific phrases, quotes, or to highlight certain concepts I'm trying to learn more about.

Finally I should be able to highlight those quotes, save them into an Open Office web app, have all my quotes entered into he webapp in the MLA format. Why can't it happen?

Re:Retarded

[DarkKnightRadick]

That is something I do hate about programs. Unfortunately I need Chrome installed for website development purposes

Re:Retarded

[Dragonslicer]

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.

Why don't new tabs get focus when you click a link? Chances are you didn't want to have to move the mouse to the tab bar and click again to see the page that you just told the browser you want to see.

There isn't always a single correct answer, is there?

My main reason for preferring Chrome as of late..

[Hillview]

Firefox loads all windows and tabs into one process. If one crashes, they all crash.
Chrome separates each tab into its own process. If one crashes, one crashes.

When I'm using a browser, for work or play, I typically have anywhere from 15-40 tabs open split among a few windows. Then they get shoved to a second (or third, or fourth) desktop while I have my nose in monodevelop or geany. I don't want some random flash advertisement to crash everything I've opened if I happen to pull up a code reference page in a 41'st tab.

That's stability, imho.

Re:Retarded

[Jurily]

Why don't new tabs get focus when you click a link? Chances are you didn't want to have to move the mouse to the tab bar and click again to see the page that you just told the browser you want to see.

Same problem with the staring-at-a-blank-screen thing. And if your browsing habits are even remotely close to mine, 80% of the links you click are either in the middle of a sentence you want to continue reading, or one link out of many equally interesting. And I've certainly never seen a page with the layout "interesting content link boring content".

Great usability comes from eliminating all those minor annoyances that you don't even notice consciously, but add up in the long run.

Firefox is the most unstable program in common use

[Futurepower(R)]

"GP's point is that there are real performance gains that they could be making..."

Firefox is the most unstable program in common use. Every recent update has included fixes for instability, and there are many more sources of instability. THAT'S the performance gain needed most.

Somehow Firefox interacts with Windows XP with Service Pack 3 in such a way that it crashes Windows. Anyone fixing the Firefox instabilities will have bragging rights, and maybe job offers, because they will also discover the cause of the instability in Windows.

In contrast, I have never known Firefox instabilities to crash Linux. Linux just throws Firefox out of memory.

The instability in Firefox occurs especially when many windows and tabs are open, and Windows XP is hibernated or put in standby several times. Normally only people who do a lot of research have many windows and tabs open. However, the instabilities are indications of coding errors that need to be corrected. Also, those who do research should be served, also, and not just because they may be vocal and influential.

I haven't tested Firefox with Windows 7 yet, but will do that in the next month.

Another valuable performance fix would be to allow multiple instances of Firefox, so that a crash in one instance does not affect the others. Google's Chrome is designed that way.

Please don't give excuses. Crashes need to be fixed. Much of the reason for the popularity of Firefox is the availability of extensions. Logically, Mozilla cannot simultaneously recommend extensions that crash Firefox and blame the extensions for crashing Firefox.

Firefox crashes.

Crash Statistics.

Crash Reporting.

Re:Retarded

[Teckla]

One thing I hope is that "silently updating in the background" doesn't mean there will be some sort of "Firefox updater.exe" service loaded in the background when I start up my PC. I hate it when applications do that.

I love that Google Chrome has that feature, and would also love it if Mozilla Firefox got that feature.

As of late, I've become annoyed at all the hand holding and maintenance that applications require. I want things to Just Work, thank you very much.

When I do maintenance work on the computers of friends and relatives, I encourage them to try Google Chrome, and install it for them. Why Google Chrome? Well, besides the great security model, I know it'll keep itself silently updated.

There's no reason to burden non-technical users (and even technical users) with applications that needlessly involve the user in routine maintenance tasks (like updating).

That said, I hope Mozilla Firefox implements it as a default feature, but also as something that can be turned off as well, so that everyone can be happy.

Re:Retarded

[Jurily]

Aside from that, how often do you use the wheel to click on things? Honestly.

Re:Retarded

[Dragonslicer]

You missed my point, which was the line after what you quoted. You're talking about your browsing habits, but your browsing habits are not the final authority on useability. Other people may have a different opinion. One of the strengths of Firefox is that there are plenty of extensions that can make the browser work the way any given person wants it to.

Good point

[Sits]

I used to run Firefox 3.0 on Ubuntu 8.04 with an ext3 formatted partition on an EeePC 900 with a "1st gen" (read extremely slow writes) SSD. Start up time and general pauses were so agonising I had taken to making a script to copy the profile into RAM and run Firefox there. Chromium on that system was a dramatically faster.

Now having upgraded to Firefox 3.6.3 on Ubuntu 10.04 with an ext4 formatted partition Firefox is much faster. It's hard to tell if the difference is down to ext4 or Firefox but the situation is much improved.

Re:Firefox is the most unstable program in common

[WNight]

Firefox is the most unstable program in common use.

Somehow Firefox interacts with Windows XP with Service Pack 3 in such a way that it crashes Windows.

Well, if Windows can be crashed by a rogue program and as Microsoft points out, nobody uses Firefox, it would appear that Windows itself is actually simultaneously unstable and more common than Firefox. :P

multiple instances of Firefox, so that a crash in one instance does not affect the others. Google's Chrome is designed that way.

Yeah, that is the real solution. Flash *will* continue to crash, Adobe's goal is being ubiquitous not stable, and it's not the only buggy plugin, so Firefox needs to at most lose the one tab that crashed and carry on.

Re:Retarded

[loufoque]

Firefox went completely retarded when the main new features of their previous major release was.... stupid skins.
It seriously is time to consider switching to another browser. Firefox is a pile of obsolete code, led by marketers focused on Windows, and that is running slow and unstable. All the new decisions that are being made are horribly bad and it simply isn't driving innovation any more.

It's quite impressive, because Firefox is probably the open-source project that got the greatest amount of donations ever. But it looks like too much donation can easily kill a good open-source product.

webkit!!

[SQLz]

End the HMTL5 compatibility nightmare before it starts. All browsers should just move to webkit and then compete with the interface features.

Perhaps its usage is regional?

[Sits]

Perhaps you haven't come across it because its usage varies by geography/region/dialect? I'm sure in the UK people use "mooted" periodically - mooted turns up on the BBC site a bit.

Re:Perhaps its usage is regional?

[cshay]

Interesting. Thanks for that. I didn't consider that this might be more common in British english. (I'm American)

D'oh!

[GameboyRMH]

Of course by "via Internet Explorer" I mean "via Windows Update."

Re:Retarded

[God'sDuck]

Also why does one project always have to 'copy' another ? What happened to innovation? new ideas? something that hasn't been done before?

Good innovation should be copied. With 4-5 major players, an even innovation playing field on creativity means 80% of the new features will be developed by other players. That's just the ugliness of statistics.
 
So every browser generation necessarily comes out with 1-2 innovative features, and 4-10 "what other people came out with last generation." That might not be exciting, but that's much more useful progress than ignoring what other folks came up with and plowing on into creative obscurity.

Re:Retarded

[Rallion]

Er, I use middle click all the time, but why does it matter if you don't use it for anything else? I mean, I never hit the F8 key apart from accessing alternate Windows startup modes, but that does not constitute some kind of usability problem.

If some kind of convenient input is going mostly unused, and you have something your application needs to do often, then that unused input is a great candidate.

better programming environment...

[swframe]

I think Firefox and others should make a bigger effort to improve the browser programming environment. This means improving the javascript language to support strong typing and real classes/methods/inheritance. It means adding more UI controls to html so that it is easier to write applications. Reducing developer/QA costs means more time and money can be spent on application features. There is a big focus on making the javascript interpreter faster but more effort is needed to make javascript a better language. I don't think authors of Javascript understood that it would be used to build the complex web applications we see today. Most other languages (Java, C#, etc) and UI SDKs (Swing, SWT, MFC, Flash/Flex etc) are much more powerful. Html-5 is a good step. I don't think we really need innovation, we just need modernization to match capabilities we already have in other languages and UI SDKs.

Maybe they'll support MacOS X better

[Theovon]

The article mentions MacOS X. Unfortunately, Firefox is not a good browser to use on Apple notebooks under MacOS, because it actively prevents the machine from going to sleep if you leave it idle. It'll just drain your battery down. And compared to Safari, Firefox uses significantly more CPU load for exactly the same set of pages (I've tested this across a lot of different combinations). So Firefox will drain your battery faster.

What I like about Firefox is that it's a memory miser. Compared to everything else (that I've tried and according to various articles I've read), Firefox is much skimpier on memory usage. Its data structures are smaller to begin with, and it's better about releasing memory back to the OS. In theory, you should be able to have more documents open at the same time without hitting swap. The trouble is, each open document adds appreciably to the CPU load, which creates another limitation to the number of documents you WANT to have open, else you drain your battery too fast.

Firefox also has much better crash protection. Safari+Saft is acceptable but still problematic. I tend to use Firefox nightly builds, which crash slightly more often, but it's so good at restoring to the state you left, it almost doesn't matter. (Someone once pointed out that crash reliability is what prevents sleep, but this should not be true, because if you're not doing anything, there's no changed state that needs to be saved.)

Re:Retarded

[WNight]

There's no reason to burden non-technical users (and even technical users) with applications that needlessly involve the user in routine maintenance tasks (like updating).

There is as long as things break randomly every fifth update. If they ran tests on my plugins, maybe...

Unfortunately auto updaters, while *awesome* in theory, are far less thrilling in practice. It's rarely an auto-patcher which fixes high-level security fixes, it's usually a blanket update to the next version, in one big ball, like it or not. Rarely with any soft of rollback feature at all either.

Re:Retarded

[nyctopterus]

You know, the CLI might very well be one of the things that people feel is faster, but actually isn't. Do you have any studies to shoe that a CLI is faster for power users (by which I suspect you mean sysadmins and tinkerers mainly)? I am genuinely curious, because I often find myself pausing to remember a keyboard shortcut (or hitting the wrong one) for long enough that I could have used a mouse-driven menu to get what I want faster. I really do wonder what the best approach is.

Re:Retarded

[Teckla]

There's no reason to burden non-technical users (and even technical users) with applications that needlessly involve the user in routine maintenance tasks (like updating).

There is as long as things break randomly every fifth update. If they ran tests on my plugins, maybe...

I would definitely support being able to turn off silent updates. That way, technical users and power users can be sure their plug-ins will be compatible with newer versions before allowing the update. That being said, I think silent updates would be better for most average users.

Unfortunately auto updaters, while *awesome* in theory, are far less thrilling in practice.

I think this is largely because most software companies are too lazy to do it right.

Google Chrome's silent updater has been a huge hit with my non-technical relatives and friends. Less headaches, worries, and strange dialog boxes for them, less technical support phone calls for me.

Rarely with any soft of rollback feature at all either.

That's a good point, and for any critical software, a rollback feature would be a necessity.

Re:Retarded

[Imagix]

Chances are if I didn't want to follow the link I clicked on immediately, I would have right-clicked on the link and selected the Open in New Tab menu item. Since normally I want to actually follow a link that I click on, that's the action I want it to take.

Re:Retarded

[Late Adopter]

Graphics compositing with Layers
Hardware acceleration using Direct3D
Multitouch support
Aero Peek integration
OSX integration

But we can't use the base OS framework for video because that would introduce "platform-specific code".

Hey, you never know...

[John Pfeiffer]

...maybe they'll fix the whole 'Firefox is suddenly an unreliable and slow piece of crap' bug introduced over the last several updates... ...but I doubt it.

Now if only someone would make a Chrome plugin that provides full FF-like 'awesome bar' support. I love Chrome, but the address bar's history seems very selective, and it makes recalling the addresses for images I've uploaded to my site a total pain in the ass, whereas in Firefox it was damn near like having an eidetic memory.

Re:Retarded

[mgblst]

You are right, but this is a delicate act. You want to get new users, but you don't want to piss off the users you already have.

Re:Retarded

[zuperduperman]

I just got finished tweaking a product which was perceived as slow because the user interface flickered a lot. It was erasing background then repainting when various things updated. The fix just pushes the erase / repaint into an offscreen buffer and then copies the buffer to the screen at the end so there is no flicker. The amazing thing is that everyone now thinks the product is faster - but actually it's doing *more* work and is technically slower.

It is fascinating indeed how the psychology of this stuff plays out.

Re:Retarded

[WNight]

for any critical software

In an increasingly net-centric world, a browser is about as critical as it gets, especially as it's usually the update vector.

Fork it anyway

[Burz]

If 4.0 is going to cause further confusion by merging the address and search bars and removing security indicators, then forking may be the best tactic to help even typical users.

Re:Retarded

[Teckla]

In an increasingly net-centric world, a browser is about as critical as it gets, especially as it's usually the update vector.

Well, here's the thing. I gave it some more thought, I don't really buy the whole, "I want to be able to reject browser updates" argument, because half the time, a new browser update is being pushed out to plug a security hole. I can't imagine it's ever a good idea to continue browsing with a browser version with a known security hole.

Therefore, I think 99% of the time, it would be foolish not to take a browser update. That being the case, why wouldn't you want silent updates turned on? I guess you might want to know when your browser is being updated, or might not want services running in the background taking up memory, or something, but those generally seem like pretty weak reasons to me.

I guess I can kind of buy the argument that you might want to roll back your version if an update breaks your access to an important intranet site at work or something, but at work, you're likely being forced to use IE anyway (ugh), and probably also at the mercy of your IT department pushing out updates.

I don't believe that

[Burz]

Firefox is not a good browser to use on Apple notebooks under MacOS, because it actively prevents the machine from going to sleep if you leave it idle.

I've been using FF very extensively on my own Apple notebooks from Powerbooks running 10.3 to Macbooks running 10.6, and also setup and administer these machines for others, and I have never seen what you are describing.

Re:Retarded

[peipas]

Too derivative. We need something a little more clever; obscure. Firebird?

Re:Retarded

[laddiebuck]

Happens to be default if you middle-click, and always has been. I admit that before I knew about that browsing was more frustrating.

Re:Retarded

[Eraesr]

The problem I have with it is that my PC is littered with update services. Apple, Adobe, Google, AV software, Windows itself all have updater services running in the background. It simply takes up system resources.

Why is it a problem if a program updates itself in the background while it's running?

Re:Retarded

[TedRiot]

or ctrl+click for those who use touch pads that can't be middle clicked.

There's more to the UI than appearances...

[DaVince21]

'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.

I would much rather say that good, simple UI design actually makes the interface faster because, you know, it's faster to work with.

Plus there's a little bit less to render, I guess.

Re:Still a Firefox user

[TedRiot]

I tried it for a couple of weeks and I seriously tried to like it. However, I just couldn't live without the awesomebar, which was the main reason I switched back to FF.

I also didn't like how Chrome installed itself under my user profile instead of Program Files.

If it ain't broke...

[MicroMaus]

Sounds like Mozilla is taking Firefox down the same road that they took Thunderbird...and T3 is a steaming pile of crap. I wonder why Mozilla is busy trying to make their products look and act like other competing products. Looks like I'll be using the current version of Firefox and not upgrading; I am still using Thunderbird version 2.x. If I wanted to use Chrome, I'd use Chrome. Please don't keep screwing up a good thing. It's bad enough as it is that all of Mozilla's products are suffering from feature creep, but it's worse when they're just as bloated as other commercial software. --MM

Re:Retarded

[Teckla]

The problem I have with it is that my PC is littered with update services. Apple, Adobe, Google, AV software, Windows itself all have updater services running in the background. It simply takes up system resources.

Yeah, that does stink. There really should be OS support for this kind of thing, so that one update service can keep any number of applications updated.

Why is it a problem if a program updates itself in the background while it's running?

I have non-technical relatives and friends with some pretty old equipment, and low bandwidth Internet connections. It produces an inferior experience for them to try to browse the web while downloads are happening in the background. It also puts them briefly at risk, because they'll be using an outdated browser while the update downloads and installs (perhaps the update plugs a serious security hole). It would be nice if they had an updated browser before they started browsing.

As always, though, I would prefer if silent updates were an option you could disable, so that everyone would be best served the way they like.

Firefox as a generic XML rendering engine

[SgtChaireBourne]

While you're in there making changes, I have the following request: please set up Firefox as a generic XML reader.

You can pre-load XHTML, DocBook and OpenDocument schemas and pre-load one stylesheet for each. But allow other, user-specified style sheets to be used and other XML schemas or DTDs to be loaded by the user. Valid, well-formed XML allows that to be doable.

Firefox doesn't have to do more than render, but that will be of value.

Here's a few ideas....

[ckaminski]

1. when loading 200 tabs, stage load them in batches of 10 or 12. Don't try and load 200 tabs all at once and pummel my cable router. They'll still take the same amount of time to load.

2. when I have 200 tabs open, have a single thread that you force all AJAX queries to go down, and let me throttle it. Each tab with a javascript event timer is what is sucking down 20% of my CPU at firefox Idle. That needs to be contained.

3. For unused tabs - things that haven't been activated in a long time, unload, or make them static in some fashion - like a screen shot. Then reloads don't have to actually hit the network until the next time the tab is actually "viewed" by a human.

I use my firefox session as a steady-state representation of what I was working on. I love the fact I can open 150+ tabs, and manage them how i see fit.

Re:Retarded

[dotancohen]

If you have to click 4 times to get something done, an application will feel (seem/look/whatever) slow compared to when you can do that in one single click as well.

And yet, that's what the new design is.

For instance, instead of three buttons for the password manager:
[Save Password] [Don't Save] [Not Now] ...Firefox 4 has a dropdown menu, and the Save Password click-area is an order of magnitude larger (and right next to) the dropdown arrow.

Re:Retarded

[WNight]

Therefore, I think 99% of the time, it would be foolish not to take a browser update.

Not at all. Less than 1% matter to me. Do you read release notes on the security fixes that come along? Usually they involve options I'm not using, things I'm not doing, or can be mitigated by precautions I already take.

Unfortunately in most programs it's usually rolled into one big ball that I have to take.

I guess I can kind of buy the argument that you might want to roll back your version if an update breaks your access to an important intranet site at work

What a funny set of values. At work, I don't give a shit. If they give me IE and it breaks I can twiddle my thumbs on their dollar all day. At home, on my time, the browser is my tool, my window to the world. Downtime comes out of my budget.

If an update breaks Aardvark, or HaH/LoL it makes browsing SO painful.

I gave it some more thought, I don't really buy the whole, "I want to be able to reject browser updates" argument

You aren't a sysadmin are you? Or if you are, you're also responsible for cleaning up user problems...

It could be a good default, but it needs a way to be switched off.

Re:Firefox is the most unstable program in common

[Orbijx]

Firefox on Windows 7, 32-bit, is leading me to dabble in alternate browsers again.
It's actually getting to be so aggravating that I would actually consider reinstalling Internet Explorer.

I hibernate my system each day when I leave for work, simply because I'm gone for up to 12 hours a day. It makes no sense to leave a machine with a 300w power supply on for half a day when I can't use it. Important-to-me stuff that I can't have shut off was relegated to a 30w machine that sits in the living room.

After a couple of days of such behavior, Firefox has blimped up to 500 MB of memory in use, and I only have about 12 tabs open, usually to image intense pages, and not flash!

I tend to watch a couple of stupid vids here and there, watch someone draw through one of the streaming video sites, check email, and peruse a couple of sites with artistic communities of varying skill levels and styles. Other than that, I'm not doing much in the browser itself.

The fact that closing the browser takes minutes, instead of seconds, is already an annoyance. Reopening is just as bad, since it's reopening the tabs I had loaded earlier.

I don't have toolbars loaded. I only use a few plugins, of which the notorious Adobe Cra^WFlash is one (blip.fm, youtu.be need them for my usage).
My addons use is relatively minimal, compared to the number of addons there are.

Every few months, because it just drives me insane, I uninstall the current version of Firefox, nuke the profile, and just run a clean install. I get some speed back.
I run vacuumplaces extension regularly to try to keep it stable... but this is the most high maintenance, buggy piece of junk I've ever run.

Sadly, because of a few specific things I need that I haven't found out how to replicate in another browser, I'm stuck with Firefox.

(Give me a working alternative to DownThemAll!, and I might be able to survive.)

Vacuum Places Improved

[Futurepower(R)]

Thanks for the suggestion: Vacuum Places Improved. Soon I'll be trying it with Windows 7 64-bit.

Article: "Vacuum Places Improved" Speeds Up Firefox with a Click of Your Mouse

Article partly about "out-of-control memory use" in Firefox: Five Features We Want to See in Firefox.

Re:Retarded

[badkarmadayaccount]

Pyropterics? Raptor?