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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."
I want an in-browser PDF viewer, because to me PDFs I find online are just an alternative to an HTML page with the same information. That's not what PDFs are supposed to be for, but many web developers use them as such.
A built-in viewer would likely load much faster than an external plugin, too. So why does anyone not want an in-browser PDF viewer?
Are they trying to drive me to Chrome? I don't want any of that crap.
They need to fix the massive memory leaks. I don't need any features. Spending a year making it more robust.
Right now with 4 simple tabs open(Win7-64), FF4 is consuming 650 MBs. I have to restart it every hour or two as it just keeps growing and growing.
It is my favorite browser for features, but the memory leaks are ridiculous (note the Windows build seems to leak more than Linux/Mac builds from what I read).
If FF5 adds a bunch of lame features and doesn't fix the fundamentals, I am gone.
PS: From the time I typed 650MB above till I previewed and ready to submit, FF4 memory usage as increased to 725 MB...
I don't, because it will either be an Adobe plugin, hence slow and a memory hog, or it will be written from scratch, hence not fully compatible and probably slow as well. Add to the mix all the potential security issues with active content in PDF documents. I disable all of it in Adobe Reader, now I'll have to disable it in Firefox as well.
PDFs should be treated like executables or archive files - saved to disk.
Other than that, I really don't understand why Firefox has to be aping Chrome instead of going its own way. What's wrong with the top-level menu that it had to be replaced with a single, hierarchical menu that's always harder to navigate? What was wrong with the well-established, intuitive tabbed interface metaphor, which Chrome managed to break so badly by disconnecting the tabs from their content?
And really, websites will be putting items on the tab context menus? Advertisers are already salivating. Good luck finding the "Close tab" command among fifty links to commercials.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
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.