Submitted by Developers have proposed an out-of-the-world browsing experience for Mozilla Firefox 4. Here is a user who peeks into those features and gives us insight. Taragana.com looks at Mozilla initiatives that might make it into Firefox 4.
Top 3 Features of Mozilla Firefox 4
About The Author
Adam Scheinberg
Technology Executive • Web Developer • Father • Foodie • Music Snob • OS enthusiast
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How about letting me resize the bloody Bookmark This Page dialog?
As long as there’s no out-of-memory browsing experience, then I’m all for it. Firefox as it is now has accumulated some pretty serious performance issues in both time and space.
… ?
I’m using FF3 on a >10 y/o Dell laptop with 256MB RAM, MACH64 and a 10GB drive running CentOS 5.2 – and the browsing experience (as long as I reduce the number of heavily java-scripted sites) is OK. (And -FAAR- better than Firefox 2.x)
– Gilboa
Or what they could do is introduce a memory manager like Chromium so that we can be given the opportunity to identify the tabs or extensions that takes up the most memory and close them .. because one factor that many people over look is that Firefox its self may not be that actual culprit when hogging all that memory
Just give me the rest of CSS2.1 and multiple background-images, thanks.
“Internet browsers haven’t evolved much from the day IE was first started.”
The ability to adjust the font of the *address bar* would be good. Surely that can’t be difficult to implement….
We already have https, why not ftps and sftp? There is a plugin but I prefer the way Firefox handles ftp.
I stopped using FF when v3 came out – tired of the bloat and is it just me, or does v3 look eerily similar to IE7? I hate the way IE7 looks and at least to me, FF captured some of the look. Building Dillo when I get home and will use Opera for those sites I have to…
Too bad, because FF3 actually saw some marked improvements in memory usage compared to FF2.
Uhhh…I think thats just you, buddy. Granted I’m using FF3 on Linux and of course this new version takes on the local look and feel of the OS you’re using it on. Maybe its just the fact that its using native Windows stuff that gives you the inclination that its more Microsofty.
I used to use Dillo a lot, but I’m afraid its just not practical anymore with richer content being soooo much more common. It also hardly matters from a performance standpoint with hardware as cheap as it is and most modern browsers being pretty quick. Opera is a fine browser though, and I can’t knock you for choosing it, even though I prefer FF3 for mostly petty reasons myself.
“Too bad, because FF3 actually saw some marked improvements in memory usage compared to FF2.”
Yes, I have heard about the improvements but I don’t like the way it looks. Maybe I can skin it or something.
“Uhhh…I think thats just you, buddy. Granted I’m using FF3 on Linux and of course this new version takes on the local look and feel of the OS you’re using it on. Maybe its just the fact that its using native Windows stuff that gives you the inclination that its more Microsofty.”
I sit corrected – I was remembering the version on my gaming box, which is XP.
“I used to use Dillo a lot, but I’m afraid its just not practical anymore with richer content being soooo much more common. It also hardly matters from a performance standpoint with hardware as cheap as it is and most modern browsers being pretty quick. Opera is a fine browser though, and I can’t knock you for choosing it, even though I prefer FF3 for mostly petty reasons myself.”
I never need rich content – as a matter of fact, I hate rich content. I need text and graphics only, with a couple of exceptions: my banking site and some of the sites I pay bills at. Don’t get me wrong, rich content looks pretty, once, but gets in my way and makes things slow to a crawl. Flash is a huge offender, except when it’s used on YouTube…! Gotta have some entertainment every once in a while.
Getting ready to give Dillo a spin again, but I’ll need to keep Opera around for stuff Dillo won’t work with.
Then prepare to be left behind. But honestly I don’t believe you, it’s such a stupid statement in the first place.
Removed.
Edited 2008-11-07 02:09 UTC
Whats stupid about the statement?
All that crap just plain sucks if you are in a bandwidth limited situation and just want to read the news while waiting to load 1 or 2 mb of ‘rich’ content which is normally ads or leading right to them.
Drives me crazy on my cell – got to pay bandwidth and kill the battery at the same time to look at BS.
I would kill for a browser like Dillo on my cell.
All I want from my browser is something that lets me browse the web. Chrome does that very well, and then just gets out of my way. Everything that comes out of mozilla seems to suffer from this inevitable case of extreme feature creep.
This is especially ironic considering the history of Mozilla’s flagship Firefox, which started its live as a project to strip the old, monolithic Mozilla suite to its bare bones and extend a minimal web browser via plug-ins from there. Nowadays it seems that little of this original premise is left and we’re getting indeed into feature-creep territory (Geode or fancy tab switcher anyone?).
What I don’t understand: If Mozilla wants to have some of these features so badly in their default browser then why don’t they develop a set of officially supported plug-ins which are distributed and activated with the default install, but gives people who, don’t need this stuff, the chance to deactivate/remove them? Are the extension APIs not powerful enough for some of this stuff or would there be severe performance regression if it would be coded in JavaScript instead of C++? The tab switcher is the best example for this. AFAIK it will be pushed down our throats with Firefox 3.1 although it already exists as an extension today.
One wonders how long it will take until Firefox will be forked like the Mozilla of old to cut back the fat. If Chrome stays with the minimalistic approach and introduces a plug-in API than I’m finally sold.
Google had their browser sync stuff but that got dropped when FF3 came out (didn’t really work anyway). Then there is delicious, and now we have it from FireFox itself via weave. I just hope one of them will be around to stay and will actually work.
I have several computers at home plus the one I use at work. Also the one I use at work runs Linux and Windows inside of VMWare, so even at work I have “several” computers.
There is nothing really new here is there?
-The ability to see web pages on your desktop:
I believe microsoft tried that starting with windows 98, it was called active desktop. And as I recall it wasnt really all that successful.
-Icons to your web application: This can already be done, you can make a shortcut that opens a browser with a url quite easily.
-Shared bookmarks: This already exists to a certain extent too. But in this sense, by the time you got through setting up both browsers at work and home to synch with eachother, it would have been easier to just email the link to yourself.
Prism isn’t just an icon on the desktop, it is more like Google Gears.
Personally, I just love sending hundreds of mails back and forth to myself with the links I need at different times and different places. I mean, how could a shared bookmark store possible be simpler than that?
Another premise in this article too, downloading web applications to run them offline.
How would this work in any sense?
This would need to be able to download all of the source code on the back end, or any compiled dlls that may run the application, not to mention the runtime (php, asp.net, ruby on rails) required to use them. This definitely seems like it would be a problem. The security problems alone would make this a nightmare.
Also, name one web application that isnt database driven. Even if you had the entire web application running locally, it would still need to access the database that drives the application, therefore killing the ability to run the application offline.
One way or another, you need internet access anyway..
Edited 2008-11-06 14:02 UTC