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Mozilla's Nightingale: Why Firefox Still Matters
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla could be heading into an open confrontation with its rivals Google, Apple and Microsoft as browsers evolve into platforms. Mozilla's director of Firefox engineering John Nightingale gave some insight on the past, present, and future of Mozilla and outlined why Firefox still matters. While Mozilla is accused of copying features from other browsers, the company says the opposite is the case. Nightingale says that a future Firefox will give a user much more control over what he does on the Internet and that Mozilla plans on competing with the ideal of an open web against siloed environments."
Chrome may have a nice interface and be a bit faster than Firefox's rendering engine, but if Firefox failed as a project I'd miss its Emacs-like extensibility (something all other browsers lack).
Firefox matters because it's once again the only open source browser that goes by standards instead of doing whatever they want. Chrome was there for a long time, but now immediately when they started to gain some market share Google decided to do what Microsoft did in the 90's and start implementing their own features and not documenting them good enough for others to implement. Then they went on and created websites that only work with Chrome. I have no idea why and when Google started acting like the new douche bag in town, but it's finally happening. And things were going so well for web designers now that Microsoft picked up their act and made IE9 standards compliant and HTML5 capable..
Google+ vs. Facebook, and why Google+ will fail
Isnt what ALL browsers did up to this point ? why any idiot dares criticize any browser outfit for this ?
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It is also usually the only browser many learning management systems like Angel support other than Internet Explorer ..
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
I don't need my web browser to be a full platform. I need it to be a web browser. I wish these guys would figure that out.
It's Open Source. Unimportant to the apathetic, however it is a factor which will become more important as corporations increase their role in governments.
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Chrome may have a nice interface and be a bit faster than Firefox's rendering engine,but if Firefox failed as a project I'd miss its Emacs-like extensibility (something all other browsers lack).
-1 Flamebait - emacs vs. vi. :)
However, I have to tip my hat for cleverly bringing up emacs in an article about browsers. Or, wait, is emacs a browser now? Wouldn't surprise me in the least.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
...is to make a version of Firefox that is essentially a fat client for web applications.
Think client server architecture, but the client is generic and provides complete access to the OS GUI API, robust security and complete control of the app.
No more alphabet soup of languages, syntax and extensions to provide a real GUI interface. They could even leverage AJAX to eliminate the fucking PostBacks.
Of course it will all end up in some standards committee, get raped by Microsoft and finally killed as everyone rewrites the apps yet again to support I.E. 23.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Now you know what it feels like to try to choose a Linux distro.
Like it or not, too many choices is bad.
Noscript is the #1 feature why I'm using Firefox. I suspect a lot of medium to advanced users desire its functionality.
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All in the name of inflating the ego of some developers who are in a testosterone-enabled development war with other browser developers.
..when it gets rid of all the bloat. If the Mozilla foundation isn't willing to streamline the Firefox codebase they should release a stripped-down no frills version. They can call it something like Phoenix or Firebird to distinguish it from Firefox.
"What kind of music do pirates listen to?" -Paul Maud'dib
"Yeeeaaarrrrr n' Bee!!" -Stilgar, Leader of Sietch Tabr
The closest thing you can get to NoScript on Chrome is NotScripts. And I'm sorry but that sucks ass by comparison.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Try UZBL. It's rendering engine is based on WebKit, and all other features are provided by scripts. You can customize it in any way you want.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
In Firefox 4/5, you can still turn off tabs on top and turn on the menubar and get something that looks a lot like 3.6. I think the most you'd have to do to return the Firefox 3.6 interface to any future version of Firefox is to install a theme.
stolen idea after idea from Opera. Tabs
Tabs were first in Firefox (through an extension). Opera copied the idea from the extension. Pot. Kettle.
> If Google pulls out in favor of Chrome, you have to
> ask what will happen.
You can ask... or you could look up the answers.
The 2010 data is not out yet, but the 2009 numbers are at http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/documents/mf-2009-audited-financial-statement.pdf which means you don't have to worry about citing 2006 numbers.
As of 2009, Mozilla had $120 million in net assets. Expenses in 2009 were $61 million. Revenues were $104 million. They were hiring as fast as they could find good people, and earning more money than they could spend. They had 2 years worth of operating costs in the bank. All of this is public data, as it is for any other nonprofit.
So if trends continued in that revenue and expenses grew at the same percentage rate, and if you assume that Google is still 85% of their revenue stream (the data on that doesn't seem to be available), what would happen if Google pulled out is that Mozilla would have about 2.3 years to find funding sources to replace that revenue. Assuming they kept spending as much as they do now in the meantime instead of trying to stretch the money out.
On the other hand, you also have to wonder what the bottom line for Google would be from 20-30% of internet users not having Google as the default search engine anymore, say. And if that were a possibility, why Google would want to risk that.
Was I the only person who read the headline and briefly mistook "Mozilla's Nightingale" for the name of yet another project they were starting up?
I'm sure Bob Seamonkey and Jill Firefox can sympathise.
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It's a bit more complex than that, Opera sort of had tabs since about version 4 / 5 before Firefox started as a project (I don't think the Mozilla Suite had got to 1.0 either?), but seeing as it hadn't really been decided that the UI for tabs should be tabs, it presented tabs using a Windows taskbar style metaphor. The UI for "tabs" was adjusted to be tabs after a while, which was after a few other browsers started using tabs, but that was mostly a skin change, and not some major rewrite.
I guess the question about if Opera had tabs [first / early on / whatever] depends one quite how far tabs have to be to the final version that most browsers use nowadays. If you go for the idea of a single window containing multiple web pages switched between though a row of widgets, than Opera had them. However if the switcher had to specifically be a row of tabs at the top of the screen and not a row of buttons on the bottom, Opera didn't.
10 PRINT "LOOK AROUND YOU ";
20 GOTO 10
"A few clicks"? Here's the process i went through to get Firefox4+ looking like the old style Firefox i want. Note first of all that i'm not sure this list is complete, the last time i needed to use it i found that i'd missed a couple steps. I think i wrote them down at the time, but i can't be sure of that. Also, it's still not perfect. The status bar in particular is still a little wonky.
// Remove "Tab Groups" from tab list
View->Toolbars->
- Menu, Navigation
- Turn off Tabs on Top
Tools->Options
- General: Always ask me where to save
Add-Ons:
- Status-4-Evar 2011.07.20.21
- New Tabs at the End 1.0 (not always necessary? Why not?)
- Menu Editor 1.2.7
- Firefox 3 Theme for Firefox 4.0
- Switch to Tab No More 1.0
- Active Stop Button 1.4.9
- Back/forward dropmarker 1.0
- Remove New Tab Button 1.0
- Stylish 1.2
Right-click on toolbar->Customize
Move home/stop buttons (currently have to put stop before reload, or they'll merge)
Make sure "Icons" and "Use Small Icons" are selected
Stylish:
#menu_tabview,
#alltabs-popup-separator
{display: none !important; }
That's a bit more than "a few clicks" and enough that i think a "classic" version of Firefox would be justifiable. Not to mention the risk that at any future upgrade they could re-break one of these fixes, or break something entirely new, possibly in a way that can't be easily corrected with just "a few clicks."
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Tabs were first in Firefox (through an extension). Opera copied the idea from the extension. Pot. Kettle.
Damn kids these days.
In 1995 the Opera browser version 2 ("MultiTorg Opera") had a "multi-document interface" where you could view several pages at the same time in the same application window. Opera introduced tabs as we know them today in version 4, in June 2000. Several browsers I haven't heard of had tabs before then, starting in 1988 with a browser for browsing news (not a "web" browser). The Mozilla browser introduced tabs in Oct. 2001, and Phoenix (Firefox) a year later in Oct. 2002. Safari got them in 2003, and IE7 got them in 2006. You seem to think that tabs burst on the scene through a Firefox extension some time after Oct. 2002 when Phoenix got extension management. You, my friend, are wrong. Even the Mozilla browser had them before that. Hell, there was even a shell for IE that had tabs in 1997.
Here you go, fanboy, educate yourself.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Firefox is really the bees knees for web development....
firebug for javascript...
http://getfirebug.com/
and the poorly named web developer plugin for css make firefox a potent tool.
http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/