Firefox 4 Web Demos: Web O' Wonder

An anonymous reader writes "Similarly to Google with Chrome Experiments and Microsoft with Internet Explorer Test Drive, Mozilla has developed an HTML5 demo site to showcase the latest features supported by Firefox 4. Mozilla's Paul Roget writes, 'Firefox 4 is almost here, and comes with a huge list of awesome features for web developers. In order to illustrate all these new technical features, we put together several Web demos. You'll see a couple of demos released every week until the final version of Firefox 4. You can see the first 3 demos online now on our brand new demo web site: Web O' Wonder. Unlike certain other HTML5 demo sites, Mozilla's site works in any browser that supports the features used in the demo."

Comments

Re:slashdotted

[drinkypoo]

I'm using it right now, and so far the demos are working in my daily from the PPA...

shitty website

[buchner.johannes]

slow, clunky and doesn't work in my browser*

* what the average user might say

Re:shitty website

[buchner.johannes]

OTOH the websites make it pretty clear that you should download their browser ...

Re:shitty website

[BigDXLT]

You know, it pisses me off that these sites make snarky "Download an up to date browser" comments. I mean, if I was running IE 6 or FF2 or some shit, yeah, but when I'm using the latest, bleeding edge of another browser I basically get told I'm using a piece of crap? I mean come on, this elitist asshole shit has to stop, especially on a site that claims to be open to all to try. Why not word it:"currently only browser X and Y has these features" and leave it at that?

Sorry, but it rubbed me the wrong way.

Re:shitty website

[theaveng]

Google's HTML5 demo site (from last summer) was no different. I tried multiple browsers, even Chrome, and it still kept telling me to upgrade.

Re:shitty website

[Anne Honime]

when I'm using the latest, bleeding edge of another browser I basically get told I'm using a piece of crap?

If you're thinking about the one I'm thinking, the answer is definitely YES, It's an old fashioned steamy pile of shit, face it and be a man about it. Wishful thinking and head burying in the sand won't change this. Neither will shouting while pounding with your little pink fists on your keyboard like a baby being weaned.

Re:shitty website

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm also useing the latest version of Netscape and the website doesn't even render properly.

What an experience!

[Provos]

I clicked on the link to the Web O' Wonder in Firefox 4 beta 12 on fedora 14... it crashed immediately.

Are they attempting to say that Firefox 4 hearkens back to memories of windows 98?

Re:What an experience!

[multipartmixed]

Please turn on the crash reporter and repro!!

Re:What an experience!

[gullevek]

Well, Linux, what do you expect? Working experience? Worked all very well here with FF4 Beta 12 in OS X.

Re:What an experience!

[Teun]

Hmm, works fine for me in Kubuntu with the Firefox4.0 daily build.

And a very nice demo it is!

Re:What an experience!

[BZ]

Did it ask you to submit a crash report? If so, can you please post the incident ID here? I'll make sure it gets looked into!

Re:What an experience!

[Random Destruction]

Crashes here too on ubuntu 11.04 alpha. I don't see an incident ID anywhere, but here's what it did tell me:

Add-ons: {d10d0bf8-f5b5-c8b4-a8b2-2b9879e08c5d}:1.3.3,{e4a8a97b-f2ed-450b-b12d-ee082ba24781}:0.9.1,betterfacebook@mattkruse.com:5.300,{987311C6-B504-4aa2-90BF-60CC49808D42}:2.2,{D4DD63FA-01E4-46a7-B6B1-EDAB7D6AD389}:0.9.7.2,firegestures@xuldev.org:1.6.1,testpilot@labs.mozilla.com:1.0.6,{972ce4c6-7e08-4474-a285-3208198ce6fd}:4.0b12
BuildID: 20110227020049
CrashTime: 1299277082
EMCheckCompatibility: true
Email: xxxx
FramePoisonBase: 7ffffffff0dea000
FramePoisonSize: 4096
InstallTime: 1299093973
ProductName: Firefox
SecondsSinceLastCrash: 59
StartupTime: 1299277038
Theme: classic/1.0
Throttleable: 1
URL: https://demos.mozilla.org/
Vendor: Mozilla
Version: 4.0b12
This report also contains technical information about the state of the application when it crashed.

Re:What an experience!

[BZ]

You can get the incident ID by loading about:crashes in the browser; this should give you a list of incident IDs, with links to the crash data for them. Either the IDs or the URIs they link to would be great. Thank you!

Works on Mozilla SeaMonkey 2.1 (beta)

[theaveng]

Looks a lot like a flash site.
:-(

Re:Works on Mozilla SeaMonkey 2.1 (beta)

[xMrFishx]

That good then?

Re:Works on Mozilla SeaMonkey 2.1 (beta)

[Kjella]

Looks a lot like a flash site. :-(

That good then?

Hard to say, if only someone could invent simple figurative expressions to go with the text we might know the writer's feeling on the subject. That's way too complicated to ever happen though.

Re:Works on Mozilla SeaMonkey 2.1 (beta)

[PReDiToR]

I hate the idea of a "~" sarcasm mark as much as the next guy, but it seems that the post you were being sarcastic to might have benefitted from one to point out that it too was being funny.

"It was that bad then?" as opposed to "Is that bad then?"

However, I'm merely being pedantic; your interpretation may have been the one the author was attempting to convey.

Re:Works on Mozilla SeaMonkey 2.1 (beta)

[theaveng]

No I hate flash sites. So damn slow and baroque (gaudy). Like IMDb.com, although they have improved some.

Also works on Opera 11

Re:Works on Mozilla SeaMonkey 2.1 (beta)

[Anonymous Coward]

Turn off style, enjoy the advantages of HTML.

Re:Works on Mozilla SeaMonkey 2.1 (beta)

[Kagetsuki]

Well Flash has all the features of HTML5 and more AND it plays the same in every browser as long as you have a plugin ... and you still hate it ... Face it everyone; HTML5 is fixing problems that shouldn't have existed 10 years ago - and it is doing it so poorly and vaguely not even browser makers know what's going on. Divs, positioning, layering, browser specific CSS, tables inside tables inside tables, endless debugging and cross checking. Web design is a disgusting mess and the standards are so vague that nobody knows how to actually implement anything properly. On the other hand I've seen designers build gorgeous Flash sites with animation and effects and video and audio in just a few hours - the same would be nearly impossible in HTML5, would take significantly more development time, and wouldn't display the same in any browser or even different versions of the same browser.

Re:Works on Mozilla SeaMonkey 2.1 (beta)

[Lennie]

Actually, HTML5 is trying to fix a lot of those problems.

For example, it has a complete specification how to parse valid and invalid HTML.

Re:Works on Mozilla SeaMonkey 2.1 (beta)

[Haedrian]

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikibooks/en/wiki/Lojban/Attitudinals

Re:Works on Mozilla SeaMonkey 2.1 (beta)

[ThePromenader]

I was in agreement with you until around a year ago. I've developed a ~lot~ in flash over the years and, although I liked the ease of use (gui) and headache-less (all-browser-compatible) coding, I could never get it out of my head that flash was basically DHTML within a proprietary framework. Today, thanks to javascript libraries such as jQuery (that takes care of cross-browser issues by itself), it is becoming almost (but not quite) as easy to manipulate graphics and text as using flash. jQuery is already ahead of the css game in implementing 'cross-class' transitions ('morphing' an object from one style class to another) that will only be available in css3. And as soon as browsers begin to accept .svg as a format, things will ~really~ get rocking as far as cross-media-any-display-size graphics are concerned.

The future looks much brighter since IE (8) has become a better-behaved (rather than web-breaking) browser; I must say though, in looking at the 'Web o' Wonder' demo site, I was a bit dismayed at the 'browser-specific' features. I as a webmaster will be avoiding these (as I always have done), until they are accepted by all browsers as a standard feature (called through a standard syntax).

Re:Works on Mozilla SeaMonkey 2.1 (beta)

[Kagetsuki]

Ok, have you used CS5/Flash 10/AS3? Did you realize you can do theming within flash inside CSS files now? Have you ever done multilingual sites/localization? Have you ever built interfaces as SWC libraries and then used those in pure AS3? Ever dealt with binary data in AS3 vs JS? I've used jQuery, it doesn't come close to the features available in Flash/AS3 and you're either fooling yourself or just doing things that don't require the advanced features provided by Flash. You mention SVG - all those features are already available in Flash and have been for a long time. In fact one of the reasons Adobe acquired Macromedia in the first place is because they were trying to implement Flash-like features in SVG and found that instead of trying to play catchup and have to deal with messy script handling within SVG it was more logical to just buy Macromedia and make Flash their own format. Oh, and how about hardware accelerated 3D? It's in the Flash pipeline already and we're already seeing stable demos; just look up Project Molehill. Oh, but WebGL is coming you say? Molehill will use WebGL as a fullback in the future... when WebGL is actually released. It even translates instructions to GLES2.0 on Android so you can write one 3D application and deploy on destkop, browser, and mobile without any porting.

AS2 sucked, every player up till the later 9 series was terribly unstable, and the tools were expensive - Flash sucked and Adobe were arrogant jerks for charging so much for it. But now we have AS3, which beats the crap out of JS in everything from syntax to features to performance AND the compiler is cross platform and free. We have Flash 10 which is really stable (I have 3 flash applications running since this morning, 2 are in prisms, and an AIR application all on an Ubuntu 64 box). CS5 is still expensive as hell but my company has saved time and made much better products thanks to its features, and the designers and programmers love the integration, rich feature set, and ease of use. By the way, you can now run AIR applications on Android and even sell them like native packages - so you can develop an app that will run on every major OS, in the browser, or on your phone with the exact same code base and often the exact same binary - realistically you can't even do that in Java.

Say what?

[inpher]

"Unlike certain other HTML5 demo sites, Mozilla's site works in any browser that supports the features used in the demo."

What is that about? The "other demo site" also worked in any browser that supported the features used int the demo. Same difference.

Re:Say what?

[Haedrian]

Oh really?

http://www.apple.com/html5/

I get an error for all of them saying I need to download Safari to view them.

Re:Say what?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is that about? The "other demo site" also worked in any browser that supported the features used int the demo.

Read the article linked to in the sentence. That will tell you what it's all about.

Re:Say what?

[inpher]

Maybe because Safari is the only browser that supports the -webkit-* features in that demo? Just because Mozilla is presenting the features in a more browser agnostic way does not mean that the "other demo site" has invalid claims to its features.

Re:Say what?

[Haedrian]

If that was the case, they wouldn't need to check the user-agent string and block it outright and would just let you try to load it ?

If you spoof the browser string it'll run. Almost all of it runs on Chrome (which uses webkit) I'm told, haven't tried it myself.

The invalid claim is simply that in order to support an open web, we've created these demos, but you can't see them unless you using this propriatry technology. And you have to use it because we make checks for it.

Re:Say what?

[inpher]

The open web specifically allows the use of CSS prefixes and user string matching. Damn you open web!

Re:Say what?

[Draek]

So what? the GP's point that it doesn't let just any browser that supports its features see it still stands.

Just admit you were wrong and stop this charade, alright?

Re:Say what?

[angus77]

Yeah, it doesn't even say to get n up-to-date browser. It comes right out and says you need Safari or you can't even click through to see the demo.

Re:Say what?

[angus77]

Chrome uses Webkit. The site doesn't look for Webkit---it looks specifically for Safari.

Re:Say what?

[froggymana]

Thats odd. I have to problem viewing those demos with the latest version of Chromium

Re:Say what?

[Haedrian]

I got an addon which spoofs the user-agent string and pretended I was viewing it on an iPhone, and guess what, it mostly worked. Some minor bugs but the ones I tried out on Firefox 4 pretty much worked. See, that's the open web in action.

However the one we're talking about is basically a safari advertisment, because lets face it, apple doesn't care about open standards. Apple cares about controlling everything itself - there are tons of proofs for this, I'm not going to bother listing all of them.

Blink

[Anonymous Coward]

Blink

My favorite is the giant red address bar

[Anonymous Coward]

My favorite bit about the site has to be the giant red address bar and the warning by my browser NOT to use the site, because they managed (somehow) to screw up their SSL settings.

But I guess fancy Flash-like crap beats out minor things like doing SSL correctly.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that Firefox 4 Beta erroneously suppresses the error. Maybe they should try testing this in other browsers. Seems something like not fucking up SSL would be more important than Flashy demos.

Re:My favorite is the giant red address bar

[icebraining]

They "did" SSL correctly. They just didn't encrypt all images, which makes sense in this case (in fact, using SSL at all is overkill for this page).

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that Firefox 4 Beta erroneously suppresses the error.

Uh, no. They treat it like a non-encrypted page, the same that Chrome and Opera do, and it's correct since the certificate is valid - so there's no suspicion of MITM - you simply can't rely on the HTTPS since some of the elements use HTTP.

Browsers treating this kind of pages as "potential threats" is bad, because it forces people to drop all SSL if they can't protect every single element of the page, when in reality they are not any less secure than an non-SSL page.

Re:My favorite is the giant red address bar

[icebraining]

suspicion != possibility.

Yes, it's possible the page is being MITM, but there's no reason to assume that. A broken certificate, on the other hand, is a reason to be suspicious.

Which is probably why Chrome in fact does flag the page broken, and I'd hope Opera does too.

Firefox 4, on the other hand, just happily goes on like nothing's wrong...

Firefox does not treat the page as safe. It treats the page as unencrypted, which is the right thing to do.

If you go to https://paypal.com/ you'll see that the URL bar has a green zone with Paypal's logo. Yet, in the Web O' Wonder there's no such green zone.
So yes, Firefox 4 does recognize that the page isn't safe.

What Firefox 4 does not do is stupidly treat it as less safe than any completely unencrypted page, because it's not.

Re:My favorite is the giant red address bar

[ledow]

Opera treats this as an "insecure" page but doesn't warn you. It just doesn't show it as "secure" (with yellow, green or anything else for the padlock icon).

It is, in effect, an "insecure" page because of that a single missing SSL element, which is correct, but not worth shouting about because you should be checking for the padlock before you eve TYPE anything sensitive in. And it's a completely worthless site to have SSL on, except to bump up the system requirements.

o.o

[Anonymous Coward]

Works just fine for me. FF4.0b12 (Win7 x64)

Ironic

[Haedrian]

Was quite enjoying the experience, then it crashed my firefox 4. Go figure.

Re:Ironic

[Anonymous Coward]

What part of "Firefox 4 Beta" you did not understand? I suspect it was beta. Do you know what that mean?

Re:Ironic

[nickd]

At least you got that far, in chrome on the mac it completely hard locked my machine. And again after a fresh restart. HTML5 demos, now fucking your machine harder than flash.

Re:Ironic

[Anonymous Coward]

Just buggers up from the outset in Firefox 3.6 and whilst I wouldn't expect it to work it's nice to see that one of the firms involved in setting the standard and / or the standard itself aren't capable of ensuring some form of graceful degradation, and of course, accessibility is right out the window.

Just seems to confirm my view that HTML5 is a step back to the 90s in terms of quality of web development.

Re:Ironic

[Haedrian]

That they don't test their own websites to see whether it'll run on it? I would have hoped they'd start their bug hunting at home.

Re:Ironic

[Isaac Remuant]

It would probably be useful to report the crash and try to give as much information as possible about the settings when it did.

It IS a beta, after all and complaining doesn't do any good, you can be part of the solution by just sending some info.

Web Sockets in Firefox 4

[Trufagus]

What's the status of Web Sockets in Firefox 4?

I heard that there were concerns about whether the technology was mature enough, but it sounds like a very important web tech so I really hope it makes it.

If it doesn't get into Firefox 4 that takes all pressure off of MS to include it, and it will probably be years before it gets widely deployed.

Re:Web Sockets in Firefox 4

[Anonymous Coward]

There are security concerns with the rev-76 standard. It's disabled, but it can be re-enabled in about:config network.websocket.override-security-block.

Re:Web Sockets in Firefox 4

[fenix849]

WebSockets is currently supported in Firefox 4 and Opera, but disabled by default in both.

Re:Web Sockets in Firefox 4

[Anonymous Coward]

Disabled by default for security reasons

Re:Web Sockets in Firefox 4

[multipartmixed]

...because the specification has a significant security hole, IIUC

Re:Web Sockets in Firefox 4

[Aikar]

No, it does not. Some inexperienced "security researcher" posted an invalid PDF document placing the fault on WebSockets for a vulnerability in other software. And some Mozilla exec blindly skimmed the document and accepted it as fact and had websockets disabled. But in reality, there fault has absolutely nothing to do with WebSockets, and the fault CAN NOT be fixed in WebSockets. Mozillas suggestion to the problem simply removes the ability to use WebSockets as a vector for the attack, but the attack is still doable by every language on the internet that can create a TCP connection. In other words the exploit is doable on Flash or Java. WebSockets need to be re-enabled ASAP and Mozilla needs to apologize for blindly accepting a document without verifying its credibility. It seriously took me 15 minutes to read the document in full and fully understand the underlying vulnerability and realize it has absolutely nothing to do with WebSockets. Its sad an exec spent less time than that and set their browser back a few years on false grounds. Note: Google was smart and has not disabled WebSockets, maybe cause they RTFD

Re:Web Sockets in Firefox 4

[Lennie]

Do other software is:
Transparant caching proxies that do not properly implement HTTP.

Websites can silently inject fake data in the cache of such a proxy.

The reason for it being disabled is because Mozilla and atleast Opera wants to implement a version of the protocol which can not be abused this way.

Interesting link on the history of HTML5

[UnknownSoldier]

And why HTML, XHTML, XML, MIME is such a clusterfuck ...

http://diveintohtml5.org/past.html

Re:Interesting link on the history of HTML5

[TaoPhoenix]

That has a really weird font though, like a badly scanned book from 1910.

Re:Interesting link on the history of HTML5

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a good read on why the web sucks:

http://nothings.org/writing/websucks.html

Re:Interesting link on the history of HTML5

[Lennie]

Hey, do you know you can just leave out all the fancy stuff and only view the real content ? It is all interpreted you know and you can make the browser interpreted it as you like. You can make a lot of stuff just disappear.

For example with this addon:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/readability/

Re:Interesting link on the history of HTML5

[Anonymous Coward]

I use the PlainClothes extension for Google Chrome and didn't realise that until you mentioned it. The fonts are truly hideous.

Re:Interesting link on the history of HTML5

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a good read on why the Internet is shit:

http://www.internetisshit.org/

Re:Interesting link on the history of HTML5

[BigDXLT]

Not having the same font as every website since 1990 is kind of the point...

Re:Interesting link on the history of HTML5

[icebraining]

I bet that was written from his lawn.

The internet, like anything else, is subject to Sturgeon's Law. Starting over won't change this.

Re:Interesting link on the history of HTML5

[Wizel603]

Would you prefer comic sans perhaps?

Re:Interesting link on the history of HTML5

[Lennie]

Actually found out this was a better addon:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/reader/

Re:Interesting link on the history of HTML5

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting indeed. I've only really skimmed it, but it seems to go on about application/xml being the silver bullet for erroneous webpages then blames web developers for not using it (instead perfering to use XHTML syntax served as text/html). I have a differing opinion; maybe we don't use application/xml because it is not supported by crappy (but still used) versions of IE, so using it is suicidal?

Re:Interesting link on the history of HTML5

[mpol]

Thanks, that's a very informative read. It explains to me what xhtml is and is not (wrt mime-types), and why html5 is the way to go.

Re:Interesting link on the history of HTML5

[Anonymous Coward]

And why HTML, XHTML, XML, MIME is such a clusterfuck ...

Exactly. Standards and interoperability should be designed by one company and imposed on all. Every see how Flash sites fail? Thus, you should always do your entire website in Flash because it'll appear as you intended it to. Pixel perfect, if you desire.

Sure you still need some of this HTML crap to host your Flash site, but you can always design a different page for each browser.

One company should control it all. After all ,the web was better then IE6 was the big dog and everyone designed for it, and nowadays it's Flash. None of the crap of wrong colors or not installed fonts or text running in places where it shouldn't.

Trying to get multiple people to work on a standard together results in a huge mess age each one has their own interests to pursue.

(Note: this post is satirical.)

Re:Interesting link on the history of HTML5

[UnknownSoldier]

That's another good link!

Cheers

Re:slashdotted

[theweatherelectric]

bad bad hits on the web-o-wonders.... its down baby.

It's working fine for me. It doesn't seem to be slashdotted.

Missing the point?

[darnkitten]

Unfortunately, from a standpoint of marketing to those who have not tried Firefox 4Beta, it doesn't work with Firefox 3.6.

Re:Missing the point?

[multipartmixed]

Let me get this straight.

You want a website which showcases new features in firefox 4 to work with firefox 3.6?

What would we be the point of THAT?

Re:Missing the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know multipart/mixed, perhaps to convince people to upgrade?

Wrong audience

[DerekLyons]

"Firefox 4 is almost here, and comes with a huge list of awesome features for web developers."

How about fewer features for web developers - and more for web users? Remember us? They guys who are the reason for all those web developers?

Re:Wrong audience

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean exactly by features for web users? That's what most web developers get paid for. Firefox is just a platform.

Re:Wrong audience

[Draek]

Those that get new features in every single release, you mean?

Seriously, if Firefox had stagnated like IE6 did for so many years I'd understand your concern, but as it stands...

Re:Wrong audience

[icebraining]

addons.mozilla.org and userscripts.org has a nice selection for such features.

Firefox is the base on which webpages and addons run.

Re:Wrong audience

[PReDiToR]

You mean all those features that Firefox set out to remove from SeaMonkey because it was too bloody bloated and develop a nice fast browser that just browsed and let you add your own bloatware to after they had made it good at what it did?

Wow, it's like people forget what Phoenix was forked for ...

Just stop adding crap to Firefox and tighten up the code, remove the bugs and have the rendering engine improve to keep pace with new developments in HTML (non)standards.
Or you could put an HTML editor, IRC and mail client in there and see how many people didn't know they actually wanted Netscape Navigator and accidentally downloaded Firefox lol

Re:Wrong audience

[Aikar]

... the new features for DEVELOPERS are so we developers can give more features to you USERS... You get better stuff when we get the features instead of you.

Re:Wrong audience

[Aikar]

You wouldn't want to get a new browser that still runs the same old kind of websites would you?

Re:Wrong audience

[HertzaHaeon]

As a web developer, I can turn any one of the features for me into useful features for users.

Re:Wrong audience

[Rockoon]

Seriously, if Firefox had stagnated like IE6 did for so many years

FF1 and FF2 most certainly did stagnate for years. They are still stagnant and will forever onwards be stagnant.

The last IE6 version was released in 2004, the first IE7 version was released in 2006. The correct argument to make is that IE6 was popular for so many years...

Damn IE6 for not having any successful competition for so many years (this is coming from a long-time Opera user.. so dont even try to claim that I am an IE fan-boy, like the guy in my signature was)

Re:Wrong audience

[Dog-Cow]

You are an idiot because you have taken a quote from Jobs out of context so you could use it as a troll.

The browser that was current on Mac OS in 1997 was IE 4/5 (IE 5 was available in the first release of Mac OS X, not sure if it was available in '97). IE on the Mac was indeed a good browser, compared to other browsers of the era. IE did not share any (signficant) code between the Windows and Mac OS versions, but even the Windows versions (4 and 5) were not bad. Certainly better than Netscape 4!

Re:Wrong audience

[Rockoon]

You are an idiot because you have taken a quote from Jobs out of context so you could use it as a troll.

How is it out of context? You realize that its my signature, right?Didn't I even say that it was my signature?

Don't these facts make YOU an idiot?

Re:slashdotted

[subk]

It's working fine for me. It doesn't seem to be slashdotted.

It's been years since I've seen a site truly slashdotted.

Graceful degradation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Until most people are using HTML5 compliant browsers, web site designers still need to support the older browsers. Is there any comprehensive coverage of this out there? There are plenty of good sources covering of graceful degradation where browsers don't support JavaScript (or block it). I'm interested in analogous material for HTML5.

- T

Re:Graceful degradation?

[icebraining]

The All-In-One Entirely-Not-Alphabetical No-Bullshit Guide to HTML5 Fallbacks

Re:Graceful degradation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which browsers are those? Lynx? IE8? Yeah, something to be concerned about.

Re:slashdotted

[rockfistus]

yeah daddio, i dig.

Firefox 3

[center2b]

I love Firefox 3 Firefox have idea but i not sure work!

about:mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

about:mozilla

Advertisers/Spammers will love Firefox 4

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the "Remixing Reality" demo, animated content can jump out of it's containing frame (watch the basketball). I could only watch the video of it, so I can say for certain this is true, but it certainly looks like it.

Re:Advertisers/Spammers will love Firefox 4

[Lennie]

Only difference is, the user can make the browser display the content in anyway they want it displayed.

For example, like this:
https://www.readability.com/

Re:Advertisers/Spammers will love Firefox 4

[Lennie]

Actually found out this was a better addon:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/reader/

completely freezes on dev channel chrome/osx

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried to view the site 3 times on 2 different computers, and each time it has made the computer stop responding; no kernel panic or anything but i've needed to restart them. pretty shitty bug in chrome right there

Re:completely freezes on dev channel chrome/osx

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome devs are frantically trying to get GPU acceleration for Chrome so they can stay relevant (despite Chrome's multi-process design making this more difficult), but finding out that graphics drivers have tons of bugs and ways to crash the system. Chrome doesn't have a huge testing infrastructure built up over years like IE and Firefox do, so expect a lot of system crashes like this.

nice engine, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox 4 is atrocious to look at and use; if only they'd take the engine improvements and put them in a GUI that doesn't suck.

Re:nice engine, but

[Lennie]

You can make Firefox 4 look like Firefox 3 if that is what you want.

How about an actual feature that is missing

[Anonymous Coward]

An actual feature that every other major browser has.

Full text history search.

Every 10 or so tabs closed I would suddenly remember an important word I saw but I don't know where. It has become second nature to me to quickly do a Ctrl+H and search in opera. Google chrome (being google) also does this wonderfully. And the rest, they just leave it either to extensions or third-party program like spotlight or windows search. Yes I could be using a third party program, I could also use another browser that does the job neatly and succinctly displays the results in a handy sidebar.

While at that, it's probably a good idea turn something like the Find in All Tabs add-on a default feature. This applies to every browser. If there is one thing I love, it is the ability to search and filter. A file manager that can't quickly filter names in a directory (and forces me to use 'search') is as good as useless to me.

Is their URL bar faster?

[Snaller]

Otherwise I don't give a crap about stuff that will make life easier for the people who create mostly lame websites. The URL bar is slow as an evil year and would be wonderful if it was fast. But it isn't.

Re:Is their URL bar faster?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Everything is faster.

Re:Is their URL bar faster?

[multipartmixed]

Pretty much everything is faster. A good hunk of the UI is written in JS, and the JS engine got a significant speed boost this release.

When I highlight a URL in the AwesomeBar and hit a key, the time to display the drop-down box full of results is imperceptible on my machine.

Re:Is their URL bar faster?

[BZ]

For what it's worth, while the url bar is indeed a lot faster, that's not really related to the JS changes.

In fact, the new method jit isn't even enabled for chrome JS by default in Firefox yet. You can flip a pref to thus enable it.

Here's my HTML5 demo. Online photo/image editor.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.imagebot.com/

try drag and drop from desktop.
import image.
Add stickers/line/pen/rectangle/ellipse/etc...

Easy Logo creation (click logo button and click on canvas)

Cameron

Does it support this ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you CTRL+TAB away from a PDF document yet? No? Much progress has been made in browser utility and capability I see.

Re:Does it support this ...

[Garble Snarky]

I think this functionality has to be implemented in the plugin itself first, but yes, this missing feature has been aggravating me for ~10 years as well.

Re:Does it support this ...

[Lennie]

Then disable the damn PDF-plugin, problem solved (if you ask me).

It is safer too, because it won't automatically load the PDF in Acrobat/whatever.

Acrobat has many, many issues and will never be fixed. Even Adobe does not know how to even make a specification which is not ambiguous:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54XYqsf4JEY

just..

[maeda]

release that delayed.delayed thing already, the chrome mind block function will wear out soon..

WebGL performance/conformance

[UBfusion]

I ran 1-2 tests from the demos.mozilla.org site and they did not seem to work as intended (especially the Remixing Reality one). My guess was that maybe WebGL was not working properly on my system and I ran the webgl-conformance-tests suite found at https://cvs.khronos.org/svn/repos/registry/trunk/public/webgl/sdk/tests/webgl-conformance-tests.html. Results were 5389 of 5468 tests passed, 1 timed out. Same results with latest Minefield.

Now I'm a bit at loss: the above tests (the failure of which may or may not be related to the demo pages) may fail because of several reasons:

1. The WebGL implementation by FF4
2. The Javascript and Java implementation on my system
3. The OpenGL implementation (latest AMD Catalyst on HD4670)
4. The specific tests, or FF4, or WebGL, or OpenGL may be not fully amd64 compatible (running Win7 Pro x64)
5. Other OS and non-OS related issues.
6. A combination of the above

I'm not a 3D guru, but my guess is that a lot of people eager to experience the latest and greatest HTML5 bling won't know where to start troubleshooting. I wish Mozilla realises the problem and posts in that demo page:

a. specific prerequisites list (hardware, OS, programs, drivers, accessories etc) for properly running the demos
b. testing procedures to check if the above prerequisites are met
c. troubleshooting instructions (which may be based on a. & b. above).

I hope some of the above are implemented as soon as (or better, before) FF4 final is released. Otherwise I expect vicious browser/platform wars that won't do HTML5 development any good.

Re:WebGL performance/conformance

[Lennie]

WebGL is probably the hardest part to get right of all the specifications, because it so depends very much on other parts of the system.

The page was mostly for developers and knowledgable users I would guess.

But luckily WebGL is only a very small part of all the new stuff. IE9 will not support it, so that might be a reason people won't be using it much.

The specification has been made and people are doing testing because if you don't do that, the problems will not be found and fixed and it will never advance.

That doesn't mean that in a few years all platforms, systems, drivers you 'buy' in the shop can not support it and we can all start using it and maybe even Microsoft will release IE10 with support for it.

Too few baby jesuses!

[Anonymous Coward]

Need to add more baby jesuses, preferably dancing.

Crazy Flash-like shit is not content

[dirkdodgers]

Look, look with your special eyes:
https://demos.mozilla.org/en-US/#dashboard

I don't know what to do here. I don't even know what I'm looking at here. I move the mouse around the screen and things glow and whir and slide, but none of it makes any sense to my mind. HTML 5 apparently means "Hey now I can do that crazy shit I used to do with Flash, right in my HTML."

Yeah, and now instead of that crazy Flash shit being isolated to a little box of your page that I could disable, now your entire page is rendered a confusing mess of utter unusability to anyone over the age of 30.

When will web site designers learn that people don't come to their websites for their crazy Flash shit or really anything they do. They come to their web site for their CONTENT. Content doesn't mean what your web site designer does. Content means what's between the covers of a book. Content means a video. Content means user discussion boards.

Great technical browser implementation, guys. You're doing good work, but this crazy Flash-like shit shouldn't be the poster child for your work.

Re:Crazy Flash-like shit is not content

[Lennie]

Web site designers usually are users too and fully agree with you. But marketing seems to keep asking for it and I guess some people comply because they want to keep their job.

I think it is the job of browser vendors to make it easier for the user to remove/disable certain style types/elements so all that is left is the real content.

Like so:
https://www.readability.com/

I think Safari implements something like that as well ?

Re:Crazy Flash-like shit is not content

[Lennie]

Actually found out this was a better addon:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/reader/

Re:Crazy Flash-like shit is not content

[Ancantus]

Under 30 can hardly use the site ether, I got a headache after looking at that remixing reality one.

Re:Crazy Flash-like shit is not content

[Rizimar]

I think you're missing the point of what a demo is. This is to demonstrate the new features that HTML5 will enable for web developers. Just because the demo has spinning icons, scrolling bars, music, video, 3D, etc, all packed into a couple of pages, does not at all mean that this is how most future pages will look or behave. The point is that some of these features will be useful for different applications.

A couple of decades ago, the demoscene was making programs that didn't do anything but show 3D objects, image manipulations, and played music at times. I haven't heard of anyone complaining that "people don't use programs for crazy 3D shit or really anything like that". Those coders were showcasing what the machines were capable of and generated interest in computing.

And depending on your definition, this demo page is loaded with content. Not everything has to be pedantically categorized into a text file, an audio file, or a video to be considered content (for example, why don't you feel that book covers contain content?). On a website, content can be a game, a graphical demonstration, even an experience of the site itself, no matter if it sucks or not.

Frankly, I thought that the image tracking demo with the papers being pushed around on the table was pretty cool, and so did a lot of other people. That demo is good content.

Marquee

[syockit]

Marquee!

Re:Marquee

[Stooshie]

Marquee of blinking text

Worry

[maxwell demon]

The following does make me worry:

we dynamically set the cache size based on how much space is free on an end-user’s hard drive.

I hope they also check the quota. Not everyone is sitting at a single-user system, after all.

Re:Worry

[Teun]

The vast majority of users who's hard drive free space is going to be used up by the browsers cache should have cleaned out their disk long ago.

In this third millennium it's a non issue.

Re:Worry

[maxwell demon]

You don't know what quota is, right?
It doesn't help me if there are terabytes of memory on the disk if I'm not allowed to use them.

Re:Worry

[BZ]

I'm pretty sure that quota is not in fact checked yet. For one thing, I'm not sure there are reliable ways to check quotas in all cases (short of trying to write and failing)...

Re:Worry

[Teun]

Oh I know what a quota is, I have 500MB on the shell server.

Quotas are just disk space and my argument is as valid, when disk space gets cheaper quotas can be expanded.

Re:Worry

[maxwell demon]

That doesn't help if the browser calculates the available space from the total disk space instead of quota. If you have 500MB quota on a half-full 1TB disk and the browser figures that it can 1% of the free space as cache (1% is nothing, right?) then it will eventually eat up all your quota. It won't help you if the disk is less full, of course.

One thing I don't understand

[aaaaaaargh!]

On the website there is a showcase of the HTML5 capabilities of rendering 3D graphics in the browser. But, hey, I remember for sure that browsers had this ability in the nineties and already then nobody cared about it.

Another thing I don't understand is why there is a constant need for new standards...HTML3, XHTML, CSS, HTML4, HTML5, etc. etc. Why? To keep committees busy? To piss of browser and web developers? To make sure that overlay ads can be displayed in any browser?

I understand the benefits of XHTML over HTML. However, wouldn't it be wise at some point to just freeze the features and perhaps focus on the content instead?

If this trend of turning my browser into a slow, clunky meta operating system continues, I will revenge myself by writing my own proprietary, slick binary web protocol, implement my own browser, and distribute it among friends. And others will likely do that, too. Goodbye HTML!

You have been warned! ;-)

Re:One thing I don't understand

[Lennie]

Actually, HTML5 is kind of a revolt against the ideas of XHTML.

XHTML specifies if their is a single mistake on the XML you should stop rendering and only display a warning, this is not acceptable for (read: useful to) the user.

So maybe XML is technically better, but HTML is more useable in practise.

The reason we are now getting all these new specs the W3C is because W3C wanted XML-syntax for HTML and all these 'innovations' got delayed.

Have a look at the longer story:

http://diveintohtml5.org/past.html#timeline

Re:One thing I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks, that's interesting information. I kind of disagree with what you say about XML. If the XHTML specs really say that rendering should be stopped once an error occurred,this is clearly an error in the specs. But of course that doesn't give you any to favor HTML over XML, the only change this requires is an addition to the specs saying "oh, and browsers may parse robustly and continue to render even after an error has occurred." (which is what they do anyway)

On a side note, my version of Firefox immediately crashes when I click the link you gave...

Re:One thing I don't understand

[Kjella]

Well, you could do that, but you'd lose the whole point of moving to xhtml that is well formatted and usable by any generic xml tool. Only browsers that implement all these hacks and quirks could parse it, because everything else would correctly complain that this isn't xml.

Re:One thing I don't understand

[Haedrian]

XML is strongly typed like that on purpose, since its used for MUCH MORE important stuff than just displaying websites (SOAP, interconnections between OO languages, Serilisation) - in that case, if there's a mistake in syntax, then it means that there's something wrong and you shouldn't be using it that way.

If we all switched to XML-based stuff for our websites, automated parsers would love it, but if you make a single mistake everything could break. In this case the robustness/laziness of HTML is far better than the strict syntax of XML.

Re:One thing I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

XHTML specifies if their is a single mistake on the XML you should stop rendering and only display a warning, this is not acceptable for (read: useful to) the user.

You mean to the developer, right? If they actually did their job and designed valid XHTML that would never be an issue for the user. It's just a markup language, bugs can't really "sneak past you", excepting browser incompatibilities.

Re:One thing I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

Do it! I'll use it, you betcha! But then when you get bought and sold 100 times in a femtosecond like everybody else, and you start streaming crap into your binary protocol, I'll go right back to where I was before and advise all my converts to do the same.

Re:One thing I don't understand

[BZ]

> Another thing I don't understand is why there is a
> constant need for new standards

Some of the new standards are web developers keep asking for new features. Part of this is an expanding set of use cases, and part is expanding demographics. Now some of these revisions are more substantive than others...

For example, HTML3 introduced the and tags because authors wanted those capabilities. HTML4 introduced and various other things. XHTML introduced an XML formulation of HTML. HTML5 introduces new types of form controls so you can write or whatnot instead of enforcing that in JS. CSS has been introducing various things ranging from more control over the way line-breaking happens for the text to vertical text (which is of no use to Western pages, but very desirable in some CJK pages).

On the other hand, some stands (large parts of HTML5, say) are about just standardizing de-facto behavior that was never described in a standard.

> Goodbye HTML!

Good luck, and hello network effects! ;)

Re:One thing I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

You need standards. If Microsoft can only partially follow them now, imagine if there were no standards. Truly a nightmare for every web developer out there.

Re:One thing I don't understand

[Lennie]

If you want to parse HTML as XML, just use HTMLTidy. I know it can create proper XHTML-document (thus XML) of pretty much any HTML4-document. I guess it can handle HTML5 too, but haven't tested it.

Re:Here's my HTML5 demo. Online photo/image editor

[gpuk]

That is very very cool!

Web-o-Wonder provided me with a unique experience

[alizard]

I checked it with Chrome 10-beta on Kubuntu 10.10. It crashed Chrome AND X, leaving me with a few seconds of black screen followed by a login prompt.

When I reloaded Chrome, it came up without the tabs I'd been looking at.

Impressive.

Huh? Firefox 4?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought Firefox 5 was released back in December?

+100 Informative

[Anonymous Coward]

Too right !

I think you're mistaking the website's target

[Isaac Remuant]

Do you think that the website is mainly intended for

A) The average user,
B) The web developer.
C) Extra answer to prevent claims of false dichotomies.

All I keep reading in /. is complain, complain, whine, complain, troll, complain....

We need more interesting debates and less quasi-youtube comments.

Re:Web-o-Wonder provided me with a unique experien

[BZ]

May I recommend filing a bug on your X package with Ubuntu, since it's clearly buggy?

Might want to file one on Chrome too, in case they want to work around the bugs, I suppose... This sort of thing is why Firefox is shipping with WebGL disabled on most Linux graphics setups. :(

Bloat

[Spazmania]

And to think, the original purpose forking Firefox from Netscape was to remove the bloat.

another site i use

[Anonymous Coward]

www.canvasdemos.com