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

[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

[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: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: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:Have I missed any?

[Pojut]

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

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

[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

[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: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:Sure...

[Khyber]

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

Just accept the entire technology industry is run by furries.

Re:Have I missed any?

[blair1q]

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

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:Have I missed any?

[lennier]

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

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: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"."

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.