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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."
I'm using it right now, and so far the demos are working in my daily from the PPA...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
OTOH the websites make it pretty clear that you should download their browser ...
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
That good then?
Was quite enjoying the experience, then it crashed my firefox 4. Go figure.
Oh really?
http://www.apple.com/html5/
I get an error for all of them saying I need to download Safari to view them.
And why HTML, XHTML, XML, MIME is such a clusterfuck ...
http://diveintohtml5.org/past.html
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Please turn on the crash reporter and repro!!
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
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?
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
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.
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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
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
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
... 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.
Chrome uses Webkit. The site doesn't look for Webkit---it looks specifically for Safari.
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.
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.
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.
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.
New things are always on the horizon
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! ;-)
As a web developer, I can turn any one of the features for me into useful features for users.
When I reloaded Chrome, it came up without the tabs I'd been looking at.
Impressive.
Tech Public Policy stuff
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.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
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. :(
And to think, the original purpose forking Firefox from Netscape was to remove the bloat.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.