Slashdot Mirror
Firefox 4 Beta 1 Shines On HTML5
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner takes a first look at Firefox 4 Beta 1 and sees several noteworthy HTML5 integrations that bring Firefox 4 'that much closer to taking over everything on the desktop.' Beyond the Chrome-like UI, Firefox 4 adds several new features that 'open up new opportunities for AJAX and JavaScript programmers to add more razzle-dazzle and catch up with Adobe Flash, Adobe AIR, Microsoft Silverlight, and other plug-ins,' Wayner writes. 'Firefox 4 also adds an implementation of the Websockets API, a tool for enabling the browser and the server to pass data back and forth as needed, making it unnecessary for the browser to keep asking the server if there's anything new to report.'"
He's living in a cloud if he thinks it's going to ``take over everything on the desktop.''
::grumble grumble:: Memory leak
::grumble grumble:: Bloated
::grumble grumble:: Not nearly as good as it once was
::grumble grumble:: Most development money comes from Google
::grumble grumble:: Not as good as Gecko/Opera/Safari/Chrome/etc
Living With a Nerd
Firefox needs to have better built in support for Ironkey, smartcards and security tokens. So we can once and for all switch away from passwords.
If Firefox actually supports security tokens, it's not very intuitive.
At any rate, lets all change the standards again, so all those old computers that can't run anything later than Firefox 2 have to be shipped off to some foreign dump where they leak poisonous chemicals in to the drinking water.
It's the American way.
Living With a Nerd
Yes, lets all live in 1999, so that you can continue to use your shitfest of a computer.
Mozilla and Google have got this one WRONG:
Merging the address and search fields is a big drawback. It further confuses people about what a URL is, and it encourages them and others (esp. advertisers) to give directions to web sites as if the keywords == addresses. (Hey, like AOL!)
If this trend continues, we'll have shenanigans and lawsuits claiming that "squatters" are using keywords on their pages that "belong to us". It will open another "IP" can of worms.
Encouraging people to rely on keywords also opens them up to phishing big time. It's like having them clean their teeth with their enema: Very semantically dirty!
"Tools" -> "Options" -> "Advanced" -> "Encryption" -> "Security Devices".
oh noes a fast moving industry is moving fast once again. whatever shall we do.
Great, more client side slow down.
No, not trolling, i just long for the old days where the processing was done on the server side, and all you needed was a tiny client.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If nothing proves that the Internet is primarily used by furries, it's that most of the Web called for the blood of Gates for getting his icky human cooties all over their desktop and it wasn't 'just' a browser, as it should be.
But that mythical 'fire' fox? Feel free to yiff all over my entire desktop. What a great idea!
Firefox needs to have better built in support for Ironkey, smartcards and security tokens. So we can once and for all switch away from passwords.
If Firefox actually supports security tokens, it's not very intuitive.
Well, it does.
I love this country as much as the next patriotic guy...and love means being able to view things honestly. Face it: as a country, we throw out a MASSIVE amount of stuff.
Come on, mods: if you can't be honest about yourself, what can you be honest about? Shut off Olbermann and Beck, accept what our country is, and just deal with it. Seriously.
Living With a Nerd
As a javascript developer I'd simply like to applaud this addition from the HTML5 spec. Simulating the effect with Web Workers wasn't cutting it.
Where genius and insanity become confused true wisdom is found
My 1939 Studebaker can't keep up with the speed of traffic on interstate highways so everyone else should have to slow down.
It does, you just need a library for working with your token, and of course that token has to work at the driver level with your OS, but yea in general it works pretty well, certificates can be stored on the device and they can be retrieved from it when a specific website requests authentication.
Prepare your PC for razzle-dazzle!!
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
You mean "Edit" -> "Preferences" -> "Advanced" -> "Encryption" -> "Security Devices".
No, he doesn't. He means what he said, regardless of the fact that *nix firefox has a different menu layout.
I love this country as much as the next patriotic guy...and love means being able to view things honestly.
Er, I don't think this is an issue of whether or not you're "patriotic enough." I think you're overlooking that a lot of other countries also through stuff out, like Great Britain. And in China, they throw it out, it just gets thrown out in their country next to their cities. When you snidely comment "It's the American way" you kind of omit that it's also the way of many other countries.
So one of the big problems is that we try to treat garbage and pollution from a capitalistic perspective. We may give countries or pay to have countries take our garbage under the understanding that it's being recycled. But more often than not it is just dumped or the precious metals are harvested in very environmentally damaging ways. And this is a problem with a world wide capitalism similar to how the mafia ruined parts of New Jersey with illegal dumping of NYC's garbage. It's corruption. China shows that a corrupt socialist system exhibits the same environmental problems on their local level. And when we feed that corruption and turn a blind eye then, yes, it is also our problem.
Face it: as a country, we throw out a MASSIVE amount of stuff.
This is true. It's also true that stuff we buy (from both inside our country and from the outside) are designed to be disposable. Your toaster breaks. Do you A) bring it to the repairman down the street and pay $50 to get it repaired by a skilled technician or B) go to Wal-Mart and buy your next $12 toaster? If we do A we're stupid and cannot manage our money. If we do B then you're criticizing us and calling it the American way. So what's an average citizen to do?
Come on, mods: if you can't be honest about yourself, what can you be honest about? Shut off Olbermann and Beck, accept what our country is, and just deal with it. Seriously.
Do you think it's the moderators that desire this situation? That want this situation? Do you think it's Olbermann and Beck that promote this situation? The entire world is part of the problem. The fact that everyone on Earth consumes products and produces waste that will be around longer than their flesh is a potential problem as our population increases. This happens in every country, not just the United States. Your criticisms are strangely specific. Jon Stewart supports this just as much as Glenn Beck. It is a universal problem of pollution and disposal yet you turn it into an American responsibility. Why is that?
Do you really think that if Americans stopped doing it, the problem would magically disappear because the disposal of the electronics in Japan goes through some magical Fern Gully process?
Sorry to go to such an offtopic response but I cannot understand why this blame is placed on Americans. As to the topic of HTML 5 affecting this pollution, attacking some standard far down the chain does not make nearly as much sense as instituting government regulations to make computers more recyclable without hindering them too much. If you perceive what you say to be "the American way" to be a problem than it's obvious our current system has not adapted to regulate itself.
My work here is dung.
Something like 83% of Moz's funding comes from Google. There's nothing much to suggest that Moz is ready for the day when Google pulls the plug.
Interestingly, Firefox compares poorly to other browsers when it comes to heavy rendering in "canvas". Here's a demo I made that allows measuring the speed of rendering in FPS (frames per second).
http://dionyziz.kamibu.com/3d/heli/
Chrome 6: 31 FPS
Opera 10.60: 46 FPS
Safari 5.0: 25 FPS; visually poor results
Internet Explorer 9: 19 FPS
Firefox 4.0 Beta 1: 19 FPS
My original post ("The American Way") was intended as a joke...a true joke, but still just a joke. That being said, given the -1 mod it reached, I figured I offended someone...so I figured I would be a dick, because you should never be offended when someone states the truth. "The American Way" doesn't mean no one else does it, it simply means that we do it. In no way did I mean or imply otherwise.
For the record, I wouldn't have bought a $12 toaster in the first place...that's one of the reasons why it broke ;-)
Living With a Nerd
Browsers are designed and implemented to display documents, not to be as interactive as normal desktop apps, sure we try to cross that bridge with all the tricks and yet the browsers are just too slow for using as good desktop apps. They render and re-render to get the layout right the way the designers wanted it, but while recalculating all of those layouts and all of the elements that come in later, scripts that execute after the html is parsed and dom is created and css are applied and then re-rendering it to fit things right yet again.... browsers are just not good for replacing desktop apps. So that's where java applets come in (I guess for some it's flash/silverlight...)
You can't handle the truth.
Firefox fully supports PKCS#11 as it always has. Pretty much any PKCS#11 module can be used and there are tons of them for just about every security device in existence.
I read the wiki. It sounds like a kludge to accomplish what is really being done in HTML 5.
The first method sounds like the reason some pages I visit always show that the page is never done downloading. The server keeps the socket open as if it was going to still transmit data. At some point, this connection must timeout. The other 2 methods aren't adopted by all browsers, which is why we need HTML 5.
HTML 5 - To finally be able to to write something as simple as a chat program in HTML & JavaScript only without Polling.
So why not update the OS to something that will run the later firefox?
OS upgradees don't cost me anything.
seems to be ever decreasing in a constant spiral with each new version. Its already getting slow enough that I don't use it for certain websites (which are admittedly badly written). I play a web-based game a friend of mine has written. After issuing a few orders in it, Firefox just stops working. His HTML is likely crappy and his PHP doubly so, but there is no excuse for it, when I can open the same website up in Safari and it works fine. I want to use FF but I am being driven away from it by the decrepit speed it operates at much of the time.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
It is supposed to use Direct2D, just like IE9. I don't know if it does yet or if it is enabled by default, but that is one of the big features. If that is available (which means any Windows Vista or 7 system with WDDM 1.1 hardware) it be able to make sure of it. That should accelerate the heavy hitting rendering, as well as make for smoother scaling and text (at least if it also uses DirectWrite).
I haven't looked in to if it will use similar acceleration on other platforms, where available.
How the heck do you "catch up"? Its like saying adds Apple IIe support. Better written as Adds support for legacy plugins like Silverlight
The article doesn't say so but another one (http://digitizor.com/2010/06/30/review-of-firefox-4-0-beta-1-for-linux/) when googling the question reveals that Firefox 4.0 beta scores 97/100. This is less than perfect which is currently achieved by other browsers. I have to wonder what the issue is. While 97/100 is better than the 94/100 of the current version 3.6.6, I have to wonder why it hasn't targeted 100/100 for this release.
Perhaps someone in the know will have something interesting to reveal on the subject. Could it be that Mozilla's efforts are more honest while those who score 100/100 have merely been "studying for the test?" (In the past we have seen where graphics card drivers were optimized to score high on certain benchmark tests instead of scoring high in general. This is what I would call "studying for the test" instead of mastering the material.) In the case of MSIE, we understand Microsoft's motivation to remain "broken by design" but this doesn't apply to Firefox so their less than 100/100 defies explanation in my mind at the moment.
As much as I think eldavojohn is often the jerk, he's really right on this comment.
I just hope that we can nano-harvest the dumping grounds someday.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
so use something else, that's why web standards exist :)
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
this last change in the last version that has the flash and other plugins run in a separate plugin container which prevents firefox from crashing when any of these plugins (Especially flash) crashes, has set a lot of things right already. all you need to do now is to refresh the page to get the plugins rolling again.
Read radical news here
Ya know, 1999 wasn't all that bad for me. Dot com boom. making big bucks at an internet porn company, got married, had a nice car, nice house... yeah, I'll go back there.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Firewhat? Didn't that go the way of Netscape and the dodo bird?
He's talking about the hardware. Of course you can't effective browse the web on a 486. If you can't run firefox 2, then an upgrade was looooong overdue!
zosxavius photography
If the lessons of IE6 are anything to go by HTML5 won't really be relevant for about another 10 years, ie. when IE8 has faded into obscurity. I just started upgrading my CSS skills and the landscape is only now ready for phasing out IE6 support. With IE7 as the baseline most of CSS3 is irrelevant, never mind HTML5. Microsoft has a lot to answer for. Despite the insidious tentacles of their insipid monopoly they don't seem to have the ability to use it for good and impose browser upgrades, largely due to the way they encouraged companies to build IE(6)-only apps for so long.
Why would the developers only reduce the title bar size by half? It's like a landing strip: if you're going to go through the trouble of shaving some off, you might as well shave it all off.
Title: Still WAY behind Opera
Firefox4 is still a million miles beyond Opera...
Vocabulary fail.
SIG FAULT: Post index out of bounds.
You have just publicly humiliated yourself.
Mine does 'cause it has a 540 blown Chevy on alcohol.
Won't Bow.....Don't Know How
No, he doesn't. He means what he said, regardless of the fact that *nix firefox has a different menu layout.
Several different layouts, actually. My UNIX firefox has the prefs on the "Firefox" menu. (Mac OS X)
No, blair1g did.
I've never understood why "Preferences" would be in the Edit menu. I think the thought process is "You edit your preferences!", but that just makes no sense at all, given the rest of the entries in the Edit menu. This seems to be a common theme among most Linux (at least) applications, so I have to assume (quite optimistically, I admit) that there's some sort of explanation... Does anyone know?
If you want to test whether your favorite plugin will work at Firefox 4.0 b or not, do following: add new boolean entry at about:config named "extensions.checkCompatibility.4.0b" and set it to false. After that install your plugins and mostly they work just fine, if not nag to the plugin developer :)
I always thought it was either a GTK or GNOME guideline. KDE apps have 'configure' in the settings menu.
I've never understood why all the application controls are under the "File" menu.
Ah, true, I've been using almost exclusively GNOME for a while and forgot how KDE's menus work.
for some reason, firefox does not anti-alias text in custom fonts. for example, go to html5test.com. the score is very jaggy. the same font on chrome looks ultra smooth.
is this a firefox problem or is it just me and my horrible vista?
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
i thought they removed the menu bar? and there is a single orange button now? is that incorrect?
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
When IE9 is released, every PC, smartphone, and tablet will support HTML5/MPEG-4 out-of-the-box. Every set-top box and console game already supports MPEG-4, and they are all in the process of getting HTML5. The HTML5/MPEG-4 Web is the consumer Web and it is already here. The fact that Firefox can't support it means they are on borrowed time, getting by in the shadow of IE6-IE8.
Right now the Web is split in 2 layers: a modern HTML5/MPEG-4 layer that runs on non-PC and a legacy IE6/Flash layer that runs on PC. That is why PC users are incredulous that iPad can be used to surf the Web. They see Flash all over the place and don't understand that the same IE6/Flash page they are viewing appears as HTML5/MPEG-4 on iPad. IE9 will finish what Safari/Chrome for Windows started and bring the PC onto the modern Web. Essentially IE9 will mobilize the PC. Publishers are already chafing to drop the IE6/Flash legacy right now because it costs so much to maintain and they want to run just one modern website. People who only use a PC to access the Web (no smartphone, iPod, tablet, set-top, etc.) are rare right now and getting rarer every day.
If you think Firefox is going to survive the "mobilization" of the Web with didactic open source philosophy screeds and WebM/Ogg support, you are insane. WebM has only 2 practical purposes: drive Firefox users to Chrome and video publishers to YouTube. Standards are new to the Web ... HTML5 may be the first successful markup standard. But in audio video, standards are historically very successful. MPEG-4 is the 3rd successful audio video standard ... 4th if you count MP3, and 5th if you count CD-DA. There were unsuccessful ones years ago that spanked everyone in audio video so hard they learned their lesson. We got a taste of that recently when even the entire weight of Microsloth could not break the consumer audio video standards: VC-1 in Windows went nowhere, VC-1 in "HD-DVD" sold only 150,000 players. But they did pretty much kill the optical disc, which was at the end of its life anyway. MPEG-4 is an online CD/DVD. To audio video publishers, MPEG-4 is as important as CD/DVD. MPEG-4 is as important to audio video publishers as UTF-8 is to text publishers. And it's not something that's happening in the future, it happened already at the turn of the century. The incredibly slow, mind-numbing, reason-defying slowness of Microsoft has just hidden this from PC people. Consumer electronics is all MPEG-4 for many years now. MPEG-4 is what is on Blu-Ray, it's your Hulu stream, it's your Netflix stream, it's your iTunes+iPod, it's in your smartphone and your GPU.
So all the HTML5 standard markup support in the world doesn't matter if Mozilla can't play MPEG-4 standard audio video. The Web is not about PC's and I-T people anymore, it's about consumer electronics devices and consumers. It's not just text and graphics and whatever exotic nonstandard thing you want to embed or plug-in or download to show your techiness, it's the whole range of human expression in rigorously standardized formats that require zero I-T work to decode. The Web is now native HTML5 code, UTF-8 text, JPEG photos, PNG/SVG graphics, and MPEG-4 audio video. All W3C/ISO standard.
Perhaps the most foolish part is Mozilla says they don't want to pay MPEG-4 license fees, but those license fees could never amount to more than what they get from Google for just 10% of their user's searches. If they lose only 10% of the Firefox user base because those users can't see standard audio video, then their gambit has lost. They could be gaining users right now by pressing the MPEG-4 advantage over IE8, but they are missing that chance and handing those users to Safari and Chrome. When you consider that the vast majority of video that plays today in Firefox via Flash (the ultimate closed system) is MPEG-4 H.264, Mozilla is cutting off their nose to spite their face. They're making a mistake of historic proportions. We'll mark this as the beginning of the end for Firefox one day in the near future when writing its obituary.
Maybe you should do routine maintenance on your Studebaker?
"A new 164.3-cid six-cylinder engine was designed expressly for the lightweight Champion and made for sprightly performance and sparkling economy. It wasn't long before owners were bragging of 25-mpg economy and 80-mph top speed. In various forms, this durable L-head would be a staple at Studebaker through model year 1960.
Sparked by early reports of its miserly ways, the Champion topped 30,000 sales in its introductory year. Thousands of over-the-road salespeople took a real liking to this economical traveler, and Studebaker enjoyed its best year since 1928. "
http://www.howstuffworks.com/1939-studebaker-champion.htm
Granted, you don't want to run any vehicle at it's top speed all the time - but the Studebaker can be expected to run 65 to 70 mph, which means you can keep up with the flow of traffic almost everywhere.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
And there is talk of support for cross-domain comms and binary data - see hacks.mozilla.org. Who needs Microsoft (for poor security) when there are designs like this?
I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.
"Firefox 4 also adds an implementation of the Websockets API, a tool for enabling the browser and the server to pass data back and forth as needed, making it unnecessary for the browser to keep asking the server if there's anything new to report.'""
And how would the browser know? Magic? Telepathy? Of course the browser has to keep asking the server if there is something new!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
What's not to love about corections with typos in them!
Ok. So where do they go? They're not a "tool". Nor are they "help". You can view or edit them, but they're not document-specific. Let's face it, menu structures are fucked up all over in every OS, because they conform to entrenched user habits.
Top menu names should really be something like:
If you look at the structure right now, it's roughly:
They're all there, if messed up quite a bit. Rearrange them to make sense and people start complaining. Don't rearrange them and have people like you (and me) use above mapping. Which means preferences ought to be under File.
works good like a zylophoned frog on acid!
I believe this was originally a Mac OS standard, which made its way to the UNIX world when UNIX had no standard of its own. As for why, though, I have no idea.
On the Mac, the keyboard shortcut command-semicolon became a de-facto standard, adopted by a huge percentage of Mac applications, but never accepted by Apple. With the transition to Mac OS X, Apple took the opportunity to create a new application menu, move Preferences to there, and define a new official keyboard shortcut, command-comma. I have no idea why they changed the keyboard shortcut that everyone except them had standardized on.
But I digress. :-)
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Basel Convention
The United States are the only developed country that has not ratified the Basel Convention.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Ironically enough for you, perhaps, they're actually quite close now, because they look darn near identical (or they do on Windows anyway), what with their ridiculous menu button in the upper left and nearly identical tab widgets.
slows the browser down to a crawl sites like techdirt are almost unnavigatable and i end up using chrome for loads a sites but retin FF for some sites....
fix it or FF is dumped and im a guy who helped get netscape communicator out to the masses on a mirror when it went public
As long as chrome has terrible bookmark management... Firefox will be first choice for me
That's not really true. You can push events right now.
The problem with the model on the web is that most clients are behind some kind of firewall/router/.... So the client always has to initiate the communication, keeping a connection open for the server to respond. What you do with long-polling is simply asking for events, not responding at the server until any events actually show up. Voila, event pushing. For this to work through standard HTTP, the clients sends a standard GET or POST and get back a properly formatted HTTP response.
From a cursory glance on websockets.org, it appears that the only thing web sockets is changing is making it simpler to send plain strings rather than complete HTTP messages. This solves the potential problem that when you get a response at the client, the (logical) connection is closed, so there's a gap until the client's next GET request arrives at the server before it can get a new event. So there's a limit to how fast you can receive the events, at least without some kind of trickery.
Possibly, the web sockets API might also make some connection issue problems simpler, but otherwise it's really not a big deal for most people.
I think most web servers won't ever serve sub-second events anyway, they're simple going to die from the load with many clients. Of course, in internal apps, the situation can be different. At lot of the new stuff in HTML5 is about extending the capabilities so web tech can supplant more of the traditional desktop apps.
I have no idea why they changed the keyboard shortcut that everyone except them had standardized on.
Because it wasn't their way, and it's Steve's way or the highway. Seriously, I fucking guarantee you that it's a Steveism or similar. I'll bet a dollar and pay out the first citation that proves me wrong.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I came across a browser for the iPhone, that offers only a search entry, with no way of entering a URL without searching. Even links in a page went through the search engine! As a result, pages too obscure for the search engine, were inaccessible to this browser.
Where else would you put edit preferences?
I just checked Microsoft Word 2010, finally finding it in the File menu, even though it's not related to files at all.
We can pass out guns that fire bullets and guns that pop out little flags out that say, "bang". Why not mix them up? It is more convenient for people who want to buy products with triggers.
"Come on, mods: if you can't be honest about yourself, what can you be honest about? Shut off Olbermann and Beck, accept what our country is, and just deal with it. Seriously."
I don't accept where our country is going, any more than I would accept my girlfriend is sleeping with my best friend. Some things require a reaction, especially "where things are going" is a retrenchment in what our ancestors sought to leave behind.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
I was referring to recognizing the truth, rather than maintaining that America is the "best/most powerful/everyone should be like us" line of thinking.
Poorly worded, on my part...sorry about that.
Living With a Nerd
By the time Steve returned to the company in 1998, the command-semicolon shortcut was already a de-facto standard, which Apple was already ignoring. (Some Apple apps had no shortcut for Preferences, some had a random shortcut that wasn't consistent with anything.) However, it was under Steve's leadership that they came up with their own standard (that nobody else had ever used before).
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I think it is pretty terrible that the betas for Firefox 4 have all this brand-new CSS support for CSS3 but still FAILS at the Acid 3 test. Firefox is lagging in standards support, so we see the two most popular browsers, IE and Firefox, not supporting web standards, is it any surprise that the internet doesn't necessarily use them as well?
By the time Steve returned to the company in 1998, the command-semicolon shortcut was already a de-facto standard, which Apple was already ignoring. (Some Apple apps had no shortcut for Preferences, some had a random shortcut that wasn't consistent with anything.) However, it was under Steve's leadership that they came up with their own standard (that nobody else had ever used before).
New slogan... Apple, the NeXT ivory tower in the walled garden.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I will talk in regard to my own country, the UK to represent my point without any bias towards America.
If my country moves towards recycling and attempting to produce more serviceable electronics rather than consumer electronics, the localized impact will be less. Less waste will need to be disposed of in the UK. We'll adapt our processes and technologies to handle the unmaintainable produce from other countries that we inevitably import. It would reduce the number of landfill or incinerators needed to handle waste.
Just because it won't solve the world problem if UK (far from it) starts being more responsible for the waste it produces, doesn't mean we should not try. The local benefits will be worth it.
Pojut was not trolling. He's right.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
If Firefox 4b1's HTML5 support is shining, then Chrome's is blinding.