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

[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.

"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.

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

[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.

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..?

[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..?

[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..?

[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: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: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.

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: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?

[camcorder]

It would cost 3 cents now.

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:Got that right.

[gaspyy]

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

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

Re:H.264 support?

[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: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.

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: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: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.

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.

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: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:Retarded

[Hatta]

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

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!