"The Firefox web browser has come a long way since the project was announced as a fork from the open-sourced Mozilla project. Version 1.0 was released in 2004 and quickly won critical acclaim for its speed, compatibility with web standards, and features. In a couple of years, Firefox managed to reach a milestone that its predecessor never quite reached: hitting 10 percent market share worldwide. Version 2 of the browser recently hit RC2, but the team is already making plans for 3.0. The Mozilla organization has set up a feature brainstorming web site that allows everyone to enter their favorite wish lists for the open source browser."
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Member since:
2005-06-30
Don't get carried away on adding features.
Above all I prefer speed and responsiveness.
With the exception of the ocasional "WHY didn't anything think of this before" must include features, I think most focus should be on speed and stability while most "someone will probably use it" features should be left to extentions.
Feature creep is bad, mkay?
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-11-13
With the exception of the ocasional "WHY didn't anything think of this before" must include features, I think most focus should be on speed and stability while most "someone will probably use it" features should be left to extentions.
Why does this need to be left to extensions? I'd love to see adblock, mouse gestures, and a few others added to the browser. But make them MODULAR, so they're off by default and won't get loaded unless you turn them on. This shouldn't affect speed, and allows those of us who want these features to simply turn them on in the options instead of having to download seperate extensions for them. The people who don't use these features would never notice they're not there.
But yes, I agree ... it needs speed. And it also needs to be slimmed down quite a bit in size. Opera has most of the features found in Firefox extensions right of the box, and it's STILL smaller than Firefox.
As for stability, it seems more stable to me than Opera, which crashes quite frequently for me.
Member since:2006-01-16
Member since:
2005-10-12
I'm hoping that the Firefox team doesn't get locked into a feature-for-feature war with IE. I'd add one more characteristic to what Jody already said... speed, responsiveness AND lower memory requirements. I only have OSNews.com up right now, and Firefox is taking 110 megs of RAM. Maybe smarter image caching?
Wasn't the point of Firefox to lower memory consumption and increase speed over the Mozilla suite?
Member since:2005-07-06
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2006-02-01
A tenner says that very shortly, a certain gentleman who isn't Lady Penelope's driver will turn up and announce that rather than adding features, the Firefox devs should fix some of the "many serious security holes" in their browser, and tell everyone to use Opera/IE instead.
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2006-06-01
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Member since:2005-07-06
Yep, http://cairographics.org.
There would have to be a windows port since Firefox is multi-platform. I am not sure about Cairo's performance though, but it is bound to improve.
Member since:2005-07-06
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2006-09-14
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2005-10-31
Member since:2005-06-30
Who needs to fork? How about an optional command line "-debian" flag to start the application so instead of Firefox, it already says AssWeasel and the default FireFox graphic is replaced with the open soars one where the Weasel is himping the earth (http://www.geekzone.co.nz/blogimage/juha/iceweasel.jpg)
Keep your eyes peeled for the QT version (Kweasel) too. To ensure it is extra speedy it will be kluged into Konqueror as an added feature.
Member since:
2005-07-12
and by fix, I mean make it ACTUALLY standards compliant, remove the memory leak 'feature' (amazing how other browsers lack said feature), put the download manager in it's own thread so it doesn't hang the entire browser waiting on servers, and actually resolve ALL the existing bugzilla entries BEFORE tacking on new shit...
But then, that's not 'flashy' so of course nobody wants to actually work on that - the same problem plaguing most every other bit of software out there - as I'm fond of saying, if my 86 year old grandmother can figure it out, you are ****** done with the UI and features, so quit ****** with it and actually FIX the damned thing.
Member since:2005-10-13
I mean make it ACTUALLY standards compliant
It's close enough for me - as long as IE is so much worse it really doesn't matter that much. It's good enough that you can get stuff working on Opera/Gecko/KHTML without much trouble. They should keep working on this, of course, but I wouldn't say this is a high priority.
remove the memory leak 'feature'
You can turn off the feature, although it isn't easy. Also, it isn't a memory leak, Firefox just doesn't seem to use the cache very efficiently.
put the download manager in it's own thread so it doesn't hang the entire browser waiting on servers
The download manager is by far the worst part of Firefox and needs tons of fixes, not just putting it in it's own thread.
resolve ALL the existing bugzilla entries BEFORE tacking on new shit...
That's a good way to never get anything accomplished. Half of the new features end up fixing old bugs anyway by removing that old code. There does tend to be a desire to work on new stuff rather than fixing bugs, but lets not go overboard the other direction.
Member since:
2005-07-23
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Member since:2006-01-12
Firefox doesn't use GTK as its toolkit. Otherwise it wouldn't be so portable. Firefox uses XUL, which "emulates" the native theme (more like employing the native theme engine to draw the widgets). So it is quite possible to make use of Qt's theme engine if there is enough interest.
Member since:
2006-02-10
The only time I was able to handle a bookmarks collection was when I was using Powermarks in Windows. Unfortunately 1) it's Windows only 2) doesn't support Firefox well 3) it's probably going out of buisness.
I don't like del.icio.us etc, I want to store my bookmarks locally (faster and private)
Example of how it worked: type "lin bl" and you find all linux blogs. (type-ahead, very fast). Or perhaps "osn" to go to osnews.com
If anyone knows of a decent cross platform, cross browser app for this kind of thing...
Edited 2006-10-17 09:06
Member since:2006-02-01
Member since:2006-02-10
I used Epiphany back in the day, but their idea of tags wasn't what I had in mind (at least the version I used). For example, you shouldn't have to create a category before you can assign a bookmark to it. It should be implicit.
Here's what I had in mind: when I want to go to osnews.com, I go to Firefox's URL field and type "osn". The recent history will come up with "http://www.osnews.com". Now, what if I could type "lin bl" as in my previous example, and come up with the result of a search in my tagged bookmarks? As for adding a bookmark, no clicking through choices should be required. Just type some words that describe the page.
Member since:2006-03-10
I'd just like the bookmarks system to be less bloody volatile. Granted, I've never yet lost bookmarks in a crash (am I just lucky?) but it sucks bottom that the bookmarks can't be manipulated externally on-the-fly, which in effect means live syncing is out the window.
Grudgingly, I have to say that IE boasts a much better approach to this; you can do what you like with its Favorites files while the browser is running, and the changes take immediate effect in the UI. I believe you can even have multiple machines sourcing the same Favorites folder with a bit of jiggerypokery.
Member since:2005-07-23
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2006-01-20
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2006-06-01
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2005-07-05
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2006-10-17
Firefox is a memory hog (I can push it up to 1.3 GB over a couple of days of use -- and it would consume more if I didn't use ulimit to set hard upper end limits). The problem isn't so much "memory leak" as it is "memory fragmentation" over time. This results lots of memory being allocated but not being productively used. The memory waste produces a large virtual memory space and causes lengthy searches during memory allocation & deallocation. This in turn results in extremely poor performance once paging ensues (this is when virtual memory size >= main memory size and the resident set size >=65% of main memory size).
Speed is an issue as well as it can take 10-20 minutes to restore a session (or exit) from Firefox when one is dealing with 50-100 windows (a few hundred tabs).
It does *NOT* handle memory allocation failures. If under Linux you limit the available virtual memory with ulimit or run out of swap space (ENOMEM) causing the C++ code to throw a "bad_alloc" exception and/or aborts (& core dumps). Highly annoying due to the amount of time it takes to restart it.
I agree with everyone suggesting they should quit adding features and focus on improving performance and reliability. Until then its a *toy* and not a product.
Member since:
2005-08-06
Maybe a troublesome feature that could be handled by plugins, but I think more attention should be put to anything related to Vector Graphics.
for instance, SVG plugin from ADobe in IE differs a lot from the Mozilla one, and I would appreciate a lot if SVG graphics could step forward. In difference of Flash and many other highly usable tools, SVG is simple, yet powerful for so many things.
Having it working perfect as a standard in Firefox/Gecko would perhaps make adoption easier for a lot of people?
Just my 2 cents...
Member since:
2005-11-21
