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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.
Fear is the mind killer.
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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You're probably thinking of "Fox Force Five", from Pulp Fiction
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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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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
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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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.
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 ;-(
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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?"
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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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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.)
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Or you use open tabs as your todo list.
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