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Firefox 5 Details: Sharing, Home Tab, PDF Viewer
An anonymous reader writes "Firefox 4 may be still new, but Firefox 5 is already being prepared by Mozilla. At least the UI features have been laid out by the Mozilla team — there are nine new features in total. There are some features that are replicating Chrome functionality (tab multi-select or an integrated PDF viewer that will also extend to other file formats), but there are completely new features such as tab web apps, an identity manager a home tab that replaces the home button as well as a social sharing feature that is integrated in the URL bar and enables users to post directly to their Facebook and Twitter pages."
Facebook? Twitter? Since when did Mozilla integrate commercial websites into their browser? Since integrating the Google search engine? Since AOL? This is why Netscape and Mozilla were originally kept separate. To keep the commercial bloat in the Netscape browser and allow the community to use Mozilla.
Too far.
The awesomebar drove me nuts, but I could get an addon to handle it. The PDF viewer I am unhappy with, but I will assume their team is competent enough to sandbox it correctly. But the first day I see a DoS or remote exploit against it, that browser is getting uninstalled for good.
If there's no way to disable the facebook and twitter plugins...it will never be installed to start with.
Oh Mozilla...you've become... netscape navigator or iexplorer/outlook.
Unless--anyone out there that can recommend an appropriately minimalistic fork of it?
Ok, seriously: why do so many people harp on the "awesomebar"? I'm beginning to think it's just a strawman for some strange repulsion to Firefox, brought on by something else entirely.
Always with the leak-accusations. I've had FF4 open all day on the same OS-version and it's consuming ~180MB acc. to Task Manager. Isn't it more likely that you're having a problem with some sort of plugin?
I have been reading about firefox leaks for years, yet I have never seen them. I have always thought it must be a problem with some configurations, or a myth/antifirefox propaganda.
I have a small content about PDFs. Note that I also think PDFs shouldn't be opened by the browser.
You do however state that PDFs are only useful for pre-press and printing. I am a physicist and I can tell you that LaTeX does wonders for my productivity. And PDFs are smaller than PostScript files. Usually, if I need to interact with someone, we send each other the LaTeX files, or LaTeX files and the corresponding PDF files. We read PDF, and we write LaTeX.
Note that I wouldn't recommend writing or reading a programming language manual in PDF form.
new sig
The backend work done for FF4 is good and much appreciated, but the it sounds like the team is resting on its laurels again: it thinks the work on the basics is done. Standards support is still not where it needs to be, yet they're working on fluff like site-specific browsers. It sounds like it's time for someone to go back to the basics again: just a browser in the core, with a good extension model for people to hack all these things into for people who actually want them.
Hi there, I'm a Firefox dev. I'd like to point out that we are not resting on anything ;) There are people working on frontend stuff like this article reported on, and there are people (like me) who work on platform/backend stuff. These are different people, so if some people are working on app tabs etc., that doesn't mean that they are working on that instead of platform stuff. Both stuff is being worked on, but for some reason frontend gets more press ;)
Just a few examples of things we are working on in the platform: A Type Inference engine for JavaScript to make it even faster; a new graphics library; a split-process model (this already shipped in mobile Firefox, should ship in desktop late this year), support for lots of new HTML5 features (on both desktop and mobile), improvements to JavaScript garbage collection, and of course lots of other improvements big and small.