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.'"

Comments

Peter Wayner

[tyrione]

He's living in a cloud if he thinks it's going to ``take over everything on the desktop.''

Re:Peter Wayner

[Anonymous Coward]

I left a cloud on your mom's desktop last night.

Re:Peter Wayner

[jemtallon]

hey-oh!

Re:Peter Wayner

[Monkeedude1212]

Famous last words.

Well no... okay okay okay... I see what you're saying, there's no way Firefox could possibly take over EVERYTHING on the desktop, there are many things that operate outside of applications.

However, for what most people use a computer for, a web browser does most of it. Email? Who here has an email address and check it using their favourite browser. I know I've got a hotmail and a gmail. Surfing the web? Thats a given. Aside from games, what do most people do on computers? Word processing, spreadsheets, there is some work-y kind of stuff. But more and more stuff is being moved to the cloud (for better or worse, its happening). Eventually, it might reach a point where its standard to have your documents backed up online in a service like Google Docs, and then before you know it your word processor is an Addon or plugin bundled into Firefox.

Firefox has that flexibility in it that allows for more customization, which is one of the areas Internet Explorer lacks most (I'll compare it to IE since IE has a lot of market share). It also has that community behind it, in a way that
1)That there are a lot of people who use it, just for the sake of not being stuck to IE
2)There are a lot of people who develop for it, just because its the most popular alternative out there
3) There are a lot of people who use it, and provide useful feedback to those who develop for it.

All in all, even if you don't always like the course Firefox takes (some people complain its getty bogged down), its at least in the most healthy environment imaginable to change. IE, being in that tough spot of "All these businesses use Internet Explorer, we better not screw up" doesn't have the ability to try things out as much as Firefox does.

So - all in all, don't be surprised if the browser thats best suited for new standards (if Firefox beats IE at HTML5) ends up gaining a lot of momentum in this technological shift we're seeing lately.

Re:Peter Wayner

[Hatta]

Because the hypertext transfer protocol was designed to transfer hypertext documents. It was not designed to be a remote application protocol.

Re:Peter Wayner

[Requiem18th]

I'd argue that MathML and SVG have a very proper place as components of a Hypertext Document, I don't know why are you talking about XPath.

Re:Peter Wayner

[holloway]

Because the hypertext transfer protocol was designed to transfer hypertext documents. It was not designed to be a remote application protocol.

Irrelevant. If it can be evolved to work well enough for people then it is suitable. The Type-III Secretory Gland evolved into the Bacterium Flagellum without any design, but it happened to work well enough to survive and so it did.

Design helps cause effects but it doesn't prevent useful side-effects.

Re:Peter Wayner

[Requiem18th]

But what's the point of installing a word editor as a pluging? Just install OpenOffice.org already, it will do more and run faster than anything firefox can offer(, yes it's Java but firefox is *Javascript* which is slower still).

The beauty of web apps is noth that they can be installed as plugins but that they are accessible from any platform with a browser. From your PC to your phone to your gaming console, to your plane sit, to your toilet, if you live in Japan.

Any web-enabled machine becomes your desktop with just a login.

If an application requires you to install it as a firefox pluging, how are you going to use it in your car's gps?

Re:Peter Wayner

[icebraining]

or uses it as a tool to push people to .NET instead

.NET in the browser only with Silverlight, and that already had normal sockets.

Re:Peter Wayner

[icebraining]

yes it's Java

Where does this myth come from? Most of OOo is written in C++, and even many parts written in Java are compiled to machine-code using GCJ. The only parts of OOo that require a JRE (Java interpreter/JIT compiler) are:
        * the media player on Unix-like systems
        * all document wizards in Writer
        * accessibility tools
        * Report Autopilot
        * JDBC driver support
        * HSQL database engine (used in OpenOffice.org Base)
        * XSLT filters
        * BeanShell, the NetBeans scripting language and the Java UNO bridge
        * export filters to the Aportis.doc (.pdb) format for the Palm OS or Pocket Word (.psw) format for the Pocket PC
        * export filter to LaTeX
        * export filter to MediaWiki's wikitext

Have I missed any?

[Pojut]

::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

Re:Have I missed any?

[silverkniveshotmail.]

::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

Plugins?

Re:Have I missed any?

[KiloByte]

Plugins?

Why do you refer to Flash in plural?

Re:Have I missed any?

[Anonymous Coward]

::grumble grumble:: Not as good as Gecko/Opera/Safari/Chrome/etc

Gecko is the rendering engine of Firefox.

Re:Have I missed any?

[Pojut]

That's a weird way to spell "woosh"...

Re:Have I missed any?

[blair1q]

Both of which can be disabled using about:config settings.

Re:Have I missed any?

[lennier]

And you should see what happens when he has to harvest his Farmville.

Re:Have I missed any?

[icebraining]

You don't need about:config for the Tabs on top config:

"To disable the tabs from the top position, click on the Firefox button on the top left corner. From the menu, click Customize-> Tabs on top. Uncheck the box against "Tabs on top"."

Firefox needs better support for security tokens.

[elucido]

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.

Re:Does what to HTML 5?

[Pojut]

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.

Re:Does what to HTML 5?

[beelsebob]

Yes, lets all live in 1999, so that you can continue to use your shitfest of a computer.

Its too bad the UI got messed up

[Burz]

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!

Re:Its too bad the UI got messed up

[blair1q]

well, no, actually, that's a good thing.

URIs have become cumbersome. Making the net content-addressable is a big efficiency measure.

You can still give out a key that will only map to you, and return a URI that is clearly you. Or at least as clearly as happens now when someone does a Google search.

But now you're not constrained to identifying yourself with some bogus fqdn with a limiting TLD stuck on it.

As for Phishing, banks have moved to authentication systems that use graphics on the page to tell you that the password-entry box you're looking at is legit. If you don't see your predetermined secret glyph, you don't enter your password. And the glyph isn't sent until your browser and the server are connected by SSL, so it can't be sniffed and hacked into a phishing site. And it isn't sent unless your browser already has a cookie identifying it as having been validated previously, using a secret-question protocol. If you deleted the cookie, you go through the secret-question routine again.

Short of adding more layers of such things, or using in-person pre-validated biometrics over secure links, you're not getting much more security than that on the internet. Using simple, recognizable URIs won't help you, and really, just invites social engineering based on URIs that look almost legit.

Re:Its too bad the UI got messed up

[sweatyboatman]

Your posts defines two distinct categories: URLs and Search Terms. Most people don't think about those things as separate ideas. They're just means of telling the internet to show a website.

The key distinction between a URL and a search term is that URLs are hard to remember and prone to typos. Search terms are far easier (and tend to be helpful even if you spell them wrong). why would I want to type in "http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/" when I can just type in "krugman" (or "krugrman") and get my daily Keynesian economic analysis that way.

For the browser, the URL and the search term are completely distinct. For an engineer or a software programmer, it's clear why they would have separate fields for entry of one or the other.

But for a user (even a technically savvy user) semantic cleanliness doesn't make any sense and causes more problems than benefits.

Re:Its too bad the UI got messed up

[Anonymous Coward]

All is good as long as I can disable search from the toolbar.

Re:Its too bad the UI got messed up

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, the method you described does almost nothing to stop phishing. Doing a man-in-the-middle on it is trivial, so really all it does it is require the phisher to handle each bank separately... which they probably have to do anyway in order to make their sites look the same. The only trip-off to the user would be an extra security question being asked, which no one will notice because banks randomly ask those security questions anyway.

Re:Its too bad the UI got messed up

[SatanicPuppy]

Yea, and it'll also reduce the incentive for people to squat and typo-squat domain names.

I'm frankly tired of all that crap: if ICANN wants to deal with the rampant squatting, I'll start supporting "address bar for addresses only" thinking. Until then, I'd rather google hijack me to a meaningful result than accidentally direct myself to some damn squatter site.

Re:Its too bad the UI got messed up

[PhxBlue]

Grandma doesn't care what a URL is, only that she can get to the sites she needs. If Firefox 4 is intuitive to her, then it doesn't owe me any apology.

Re:Its too bad the UI got messed up

[Kaboom13]

Firefox started as the browser that wasn't for your grandma. It had rough edges, pages didn't always display properly, but it was fast and tabbed an light weight with an installer in the single digits. This is how it grew it's user base, Trying to shoehorn it into the browser for grandma is retarded (Chrome already is better for that, by a good margin). Fuck your grandma, I don't want to use the best browser for your grandma. Our requirements are completely different. I want Firefox to be the best browser for me. I want separate url and search fields because I know exactly what I am trying to accomplish. If I want to stick some search terms through google I will, if I want to go to slashdot.com instead of slashdot.org I had a specific reason. I want the url bar to make a best effort at turning what I entered into a working url with as little guessing as possible and run with it.

Let chrome be the browser for grandma, they have the resources and the marketing power behind them. Leave Firefox pure to the roots it came from, and focus on technical aspects. If people want to change the ui, the wonderful extension system lets them do just that.

Re:Its too bad the UI got messed up

[theswimmingbird]

Definitely. I love having them separate. Besides, even my netbook has a resolution of 1366x768. Who needs an address bar that's over a thousand pixels wide? I mean, really. So much of their efforts go into optimizing screen space usage, but I feel that a unified bar that's mostly blank really defeats this purpose.

Re:Its too bad the UI got messed up

[BZ]

> Merging the address and search fields is a big drawback

Of course Mozilla hasn't merged them. So I'm not sure what you think they got wrong.

Re:Its too bad the UI got messed up

[boxwood]

I think the opposite. DNS has gone to shit because of the squatters. To the point that its pretty much useless now.

And with all the phishing sites.... well we should be discouraging people from typing in $COMPANY_NAME.com to get information they need. They make one typo or if the site they want is under a TLD other than .com then at best they're going to be inconvenienced by loading up the wrong page, and at worst they've entered their banking logon into a phishing site.

Its far better for people to simply enter a reasonable approximation into a search bar and have a search engine give the site thats most likely what they wanted. Google is much more forgiving of typos than DNS.

And if you actually know the exact URL, then the functionality is still there for you to bypass the search engine and go directly there. I don't really see a downside.

Re:Its too bad the UI got messed up

[Phroggy]

You can't deny its convenience

Watch me.

I am posting this from Safari 4.1, which has two boxes at the top: an address bar, and a search bar. If I want to search Google, I use the search bar. If I want to revisit a page I've been to before, I use the address bar (Apple recently improved this feature in versions 4.1/5.0). Obviously if I want to enter a new URL, I also use the address bar.

Since I know what I'm trying to do (search my bookmarks and browser history, or search Google) I have no trouble choosing which field to use (and, for an additional hint, the former currently contains a URL while the latter says "Google" on it). When I type into the address bar, it auto-populates with a list of matches from my bookmarks and history, and is not cluttered by anything from Google. When I type into the search bar, it auto-populates with popular search terms from Google, which is a great feature that I really appreciate; these suggestions are not cluttered with search results from my bookmarks and history.

Safari's implementation is, therefore, more convenient than Firefox's.

Re:Firefox needs better support for security token

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

"Tools" -> "Options" -> "Advanced" -> "Encryption" -> "Security Devices".

Re:Does what to HTML 5?

[Pojut]

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.

Horray Websockets!

[DontLickJesus]

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.

Re:Horray Websockets!

[h4rr4r]

As a developer, sysadmin and end user I would like to tell you that HTTP is not for this there are other ports than 80 and the web browser is not a virtual machine.

Re:Horray Websockets!

[Anonymous Coward]

As a developer, sysadmin and end user I would like to tell you that HTTP is not for this there are other ports than 80 and the web browser is not a virtual machine.

With the addition of canvas and now websockets... it is now.

Re:Sure...

[Khyber]

FireFox, IceWeasel, ThunderBird, Breezy Badger, Snow Leopard.

Just accept the entire technology industry is run by furries.

Re:new opportunities for AJAX

[blair1q]

Hmm. Have ten million users doing the same ten million calculations each on different data on the sever, or have the ten million users download their data and do the calculations on their own machine...which one will complete faster?

Server-side scripting is a massive bottleneck if the page has any complexity at all.

What you should be complaining about is the disastrous state of the code sent to the client side. Most of it is painfully bad.

Re:Firefox needs better support for security token

[blair1q]

You mean "Edit" -> "Preferences" -> "Advanced" -> "Encryption" -> "Security Devices".

Re:Firefox needs better support for security token

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he doesn't. He means what he said, regardless of the fact that *nix firefox has a different menu layout.

Firefox 4 didn't catch up in canvas speed

[dionyziz]

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

Re:desktop as a document?

[jsebrech]

You do realize that flash internally manages a display object hierarchy not unlike the DOM? There isn't much difference between writing apps in flex/flash and writing apps in javascript with something like ExtJS toolkit. All rich app frameworks I know, on any platform, use the HTML-like approach of having an element hierarchy and a set of layout rules that are constantly re-calculated.

HTML may be ill-suited to rich app development, but so is everything else. Win32 and X11 are both truly horrible API's, arguably much worse than HTML+JS+CSS, but combined they hold the majority share of native apps.

And by the way, the browsers of today are designed for rich applications. They have been for a few years now. Cars were originally designed to make it up to a brisk walking pace at best. Things change.

Re:desktop as a document?

[carrier lost]

Things change.

Heresy!

Re:Does what to HTML 5?

[Nethead]

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.

Re:Acid test still not 100/100?

[t0y]

The remaining tests target SVG font functionalities which are not being actively developed.
You can find a semi-official rationale for not implementing them here: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/06/not_implementin.html

Re:Acid test still not 100/100?

[surveyork]

I think you're right: Mozilla is mastering the material, not studying for the test. The only thing that really keeps them from getting 100/100 is the lack of implementation of some SVG stuff. See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119490 , specially the last 10 or so comments. However, Mozilla publicly stated that they wanted to fully implement SVG 1.1. http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/

Re:On Windows 7

[shutdown -p now]

It is supposed to use Direct2D, just like IE9. I don't know if it does yet or if it is enabled by default

FF 4 beta 1 does that, but it is not enabled by default. Here are the instructions on how to enable it.

Re:Acid test still not 100/100?

[BZ]

Those remaining 3 points are SVG Fonts.

Opera and Webkit implemented (very brokenly, in at least Opera's case) a small subset of SVG 1.1 Fonts; basicallu just enough to pass Acid 3. We don't particular want to do that small subset in Gecko, since it gives no benefits to authors or users over the existing downloadable font support (beyond the brownie points on Acid3). On the other hand, support for the full specification in a UA that also supports HTML is ... very difficult. SVG fonts are just not designed with integration with HTML in mind. Once you put an in a glyph, all sorts of issues arise (both in terms of the spec being underdefined and in terms of the behavior being very difficult to implement no matter what the spec said).

One of the previous commenters here linked to Robert O'Callahan's post about this, which covers the issues pretty well.

At this point, the SVG working group has decided that SVG Fonts will no longer be a core part of SVG but will be a separate specification, and that it might need some serious work if anyone is ever to implement it in full.

Re:I don't believe that

[psYchotic87]

At the risk of getting a few "whoosh" comments, let me explain this to you (and anyone else that doesn't know about websockets): your browser requests a websocket from the server, which responds with an address it can connect to. Once connected to this address, your browser and the remote server can exchange anything over a regular full-duplex TCP channel, effectively bypassing all the HTTP limitations. Look here for more information.