Today, Mozilla released the fourth beta of Firefox 4.0. After a period of what I would call stagnation, the Mozilla team are back on track with delivering interesting UI concepts. They were sensible enough to copy Chrome's excellent tabs-on-top UI, but have now also added something called Panorama, a new and very interesting way of managing your open tabs.
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Member since:2010-08-25
Member since:2008-10-23
Actually there are several people working at Mozilla and even more working on Firefox.
If you look at the changelog you will realize that this feature is one among tons of other features, including bug fixing, accessibility improvements, standard compliance, performance improvements and a ton of other non-sexy changes.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?resolution=FIXED,VERIFIED&c...
This feature is osnews worthy because it is visual and everybody like sexy interfaces.
Member since:2005-11-10
Member since:2005-07-12
Can I assume that was a indirect reference to the little flamewar related to the new bullshit stance on 915?
Or as I call it (and said on bugzilla) "How about before you start implementing specifications that aren't even out of draft you finish off specifications that have been recommendations for over a decade?"
Welcome to the reality of open source -- if it's not flashy or trendy, and a coder can't toot their own horn over it, and it's not quite big enough for people to give money to set a bounty on it, don't plan on it EVER being fixed.
Which of course is how TWELVE YEAR OLD entries like bugzilla 915 are shuffled around with half assed status changes, until we get the current "Who gives a ****" status of "irrelevant"
So not only is firefux the same fat slow unstable pig it's always been, they've now pretty much said they could give a shit about the existing finalized standards and instead only care about specs not even out of draft... in other words crap like CSS3 and HTML5 which nobody has ANY ***** BUSINESS USING ON PRODUCTION WEBSITES.
After all, that's what DRAFT means! I swear, it's IE 5 all over again.
Edited 2010-08-26 03:14 UTC
Member since:2005-07-06
Some bugs are expensive to fix with regards to time, with little obvious gains. How should they balance developer time between that and implementing HTML5?
Some CSS features are behind (like overflow: ellipsis), but I understand their rational in bug comments…
Did anyone using Chrome bitch this much about missing MathML support before it appeared? No… I think you’re being rather harsh on Mozilla. They’ve got people playing in the interface as well as all the developers they had previously working on Gecko.
Member since:2005-11-10
As DeathShadow said above, in open source nobody wants to do the grunt work. There’s a reason why IE has the only full implementation of CSS 2.1, they paid their developers to the do it. A broken implementation is worthless and negatively effects everybody—100% complete, or not at all. Microsoft saw the importance of getting CSS2.1 done-and-dusted before working on HTML5. How am I supposed to have faith in Mozilla to implement HTML5 when they can’t even finish a ten year old job?
I can’t count the number of websites where #915 would have made a *big* difference to me, but Mozilla call it irrelevant because it’s old and unused *BECAUSE THEY MADE IT RARE AND UNUSED BY NOT IMPLEMENTING IT*. A self-fulfilling arsehole weasel get out—don’t implement something so developers can’t demonstrate practical uses, and then claim the feature isn’t needed anyway anymore and nobody will miss it.
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Member since:
2005-11-10
How about they fix those 10 year old CSS bugs instead of piling in more bloat and bling.
Mozilla have lost the plot. The Firefox brand has become more important to them than actual users.