Slashdot Mirror
Firefox 4 Beta 9 Out, Now With IndexedDB and Tabs On Titlebar
surveyork writes "''Mozilla today officially released Firefox 4 Beta 9 and it's a big improvement over previous betas and a parsec beyond the Firefox 3.6.x experience. At this stage, after months of development, Mozilla developers are clearly nearing the end of this development marathon.' After Firefox beta 9, a beta 10 and a single RC are scheduled (this road map can change, of course). The main features of Firefox beta 9 are IndexedDB and tabs on titlebar (just like Chrome and Opera). IndexedDB allows sites to store data on your computer (with your prior authorization). Tabs on titlebar is self-explanatory. Old-schoolers can always turn on the 'show menu bar' to get their familiar GUI back. Oh, and Fx beta 9 is fast and starts fast. Firefox beta 9 available here and in lots of official mirrors."
Does it have a status bar at the bottom?
If not, then it's still EPIC FAIL.
The more it copies Chrome, the less reason there is to use it, and more motivation to switch to Chrome instead.
I don't even use tabs at the top; I use tree-style tabs. Hopefully they'll still work.
In other news, I do like the status bar being visible. The primary reasons I don't use Chrome are the missing menu and status bars.
One thing that confuses me about tabs on top is that it implies that everything below the tab is associated with that tab. Ok, I get that part. I watched the video by Alex Faaborg and it makes sense.
But I therefore expect that if I rearrange any items below the tab, such as customizing the layout by adding or removing buttons or moving the home button to the right side, or resizing the size of the address bar versus the search bar, that those changes would be limited only to that tab and be sticky for that tab. That doesn't happen and visually it's confusing. All of those elements are grouped underneath the tab and when I switch tabs, the changes are there too. Huh? It's completely counter to what I was expecting and doesn't make sense. The only thing that changes from tab to tab is the text in the address bar.
I would think this would be very important due to the ability to save app tabs. I might want to save an app tab to a specific site and have the navigation toolbar customized a certain way just for that tab.
Note: I'm using beta8 and haven't upgraded yet so maybe this bug has been fixed.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
As long as Chrome lacks NoScript, there will continue to be a reason for Firefox. Fix that dealbreaker, and all of the rest is negotiable.
I'm using Firefox because I prefer it over Chrome and such. I don't want the layout changed every major release.
We are all God's parents.
Changing the default behavior is always bad. Always.
If that were true then you'd turn on the computer and get "C:\>" (or "$" as appropriate). Clearly absolutes are not so absolute.
What a complete and utter disconnection between summary and data, who the hell made this UI decision?
Seriously now, try to imagine a proper filing cabinet with the files containing the data, only the labels per file are 4" higher than each file, with stuff inbetween obfuscating and disconnecting the information?
Thank christ this stupid, stupid option is able to be disabled.
Furthermore, the status bar being on the address bar - ok I tried to like it, I tried not to be 'backwards' and old fasioned (as I am with classic UI in Windows) but I just can't do it, I like to see a huge, giant URL down the bottom - I want to see the full thing incase it contains something dodgy. I'm a tech, I need to know what I'm clicking - I find it an utterly stupid design decision.
Furthermore the performance is better but hardly sufficient, the performance is the only thing chrome has going for it in my opinion, sorry but I'm not going to bow down and love it just because it's googles product. Firefox has and continues to serve all I need in a browser, even then with a couple of addons ("tabs menu" - "tab mix plus" etc)
I will continue to adjust FF4, FF5, FF6 to look like FF3. (Oh and I'm not too old fasioned, the awesome bar is bloody incredible)
ALL firefox needs, the ONLY thing it needs in my opinion is speed, I have a quad core 64bit machine with 6gb of ram, I browse between 3 and 18 hours a day,.. I absoloutely don't care how much resources my browser takes, I just want the best performance possible, period.
Fuck copying Chrome, ugh - don't latch on to fads which are stupid but popular (see: white plugs on everything after the ipod, see: fucking glossy screens on laptops)
Not really true. There are tons of little detail differences that favor FF over chrome.
It's a good thing that they're copying each others' best ideas; they're both still vastly different implementations, produced by very different teams, with different priorities, and will always have many differences.
We live, as we dream -- alone....
The status bar can be hidden with two mouse clicks. Were people really having so much trouble with the "View->Status bar" option that the devs needed to take matters into their own hands?
Worse, they knew it was controversial and was going to piss off a lot of people but they did it anyway.
No sig today...
With this version, it becomes apparent that the end of Firefox is coming.
It has a very strong bias towards Microsoft Windows, which they justify by saying that's where most of the market is. Virtually all recent features are only available on Microsoft Windows, some of which are even only available on Windows Vista or Seven.
As far as I'm concerned, Firefox has only seen regressions on Linux and Mac OS X since version 3.5. It's clearly become slower with each release, despite the announced performance improvements for Windows.
That bias is hurting them much more than they realize : they're alienating the open source community on Linux, which is where they originally came from, and all the cool and techies, the influential people, are either using Mac OS X or Linux. So if they stop using Firefox, how long before they relatives see that and try to copy them?
Also, the fact they only work on Windows is a demonstrator of their technical weakness. It seems Mozilla has now become an aggregation of marketing people and inane UI designers, with Q&A testers on top, instead of the coding gurus it used to be.
Good code is portable code. Good programming practices are to organize your code in such a way that you never have to write platform-specific code more than you have to, by isolating the strictly platform-specific parts. The fact that Firefox on Windows and on other platforms is so different is a testament that a significant design mistake was made somewhere.
Other platforms are not even prioritized for testing. That's also against good practices. The best way to find bugs is to make code run in separate environments, as the differences in those environments are what might trigger some otherwise rare code in the "main" environment.
What's that with using Direct2D for accelerated 2D rendering? All rendering is done by Cairo, which should be exploiting hardware acceleration. If Cairo cannot use Direct2D, it should be extended, rather than modifying Firefox itself to support Direct2D.
What happened to the projects of modernizing the Mozilla codebase, which is written in C with classes and macros crap? Brendan Eich, Mozilla's CTO, had ambitious projects to do that. He has had them for what, almost ten years now? It was due for Firefox 2. Why was that delayed? So that we could have personas and tabs on top instead?
Adobe, one of the world's greatest software companies, GAVE them a JIT virtual machine designed for Javascript (i.e. the hard part in getting a Javascript JIT compiler) FIVE years ago. They're still not using it in Firefox, which makes it the ONLY modern web browser lacking a Javascript JIT engine. With all the money they've got, they could have hired a couple of compiler engineers and created a new Javascript compiler from scratch that targeted that virtual machine in a couple of years at most. Google certainly didn't have any problem doing that plus the virtual machine in less than a year.
What's up with HTML5? They're clearly lagging behind Webkit and Opera, even though they were clearly at the front a couple of years ago.
Firefox has lost its appeal, is lagging behind, and is now desperately trying to copy Chrome so that it has new things to put in new releases. The highlight of releases are now useless gimmicks that are really regressions, instead of the major innovations they used to be in the past.
It is clear to me there is a real problem in leadership, with too much "rethinking the web experience" buzzing and not enough technology. Coders have deserted Gecko in favour of Webkit, since the codebase of the latter is much more modern, streamlined and nice to work with. They're losing all that made them what they were bit by bit.
The only thing holding Firefox together is that before it became popular and amassed a ton of money, which unfortunately killed it, it used to be high-quality open-source software, the state of the art of web technology. They lost that, and with that, their end is ineluctably coming.
>"which also lets you try it out right on your desktop without installing it and impacting your local Firefox install at all." Looks broken to me, says something about "Windows", whatever that is. OH! There is an assumption that everyone uses MS-Windows????
I disagree.
Turn your argument on its head: If the controls are above the tabs, that seems to imply that they apply to all tabs. Does that mean that if I click "reload", all tabs should be reloaded? If I enter a new URL, should all tabs go there, since the URL bar is outside the tabs as well?
I would argue that actually interacting with controls is far more important than rearranging them, so their placement should agree with the latter, not the former.