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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."
"the simpler an interface looks, the faster it will seem". What a joke.
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.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
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?
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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.
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.
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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.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
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.
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Perhaps the most striking change to Firefox 4 is the user interface...
There's a shocker.
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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.
With the popularity of Netbooks, I see FF losing market share to Google because of the performance differences.
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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.
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
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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).
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
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.
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?
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.
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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.
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.
Provided I can delete these "permanent" tabs. If not, fuck off.
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.
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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/
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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?"
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4 will crash and burn. We need a successor to rise from the ashes. We could call it Phoenix.
You've got to admit, lynx seems pretty fast these days.
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"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.
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...
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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)
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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.
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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.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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.
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)
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?
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.
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.
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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!
R.Mo