I’ve seen superlative after superlative concerning the release of Firefox 3.0, and in all honesty, it is making my stomach ache. Yes, Firefox 3.0 is a great release. It has a slicker interface (the UI on Vista looks quite pretty) and the use of native widgets in Linux is a very, very welcome addition. On top of that, it actually delivers what I was craving for the most from my favourite Windows web browser: much improved performance. But does Firefox 3.0 change the web, or alter the way we use the intertubes?To put it bluntly: I think not. Let’s first take a look at one of the over-the-top reviews that I’ve seen so far, one that really stood out to me because it almost made me loose my appetite for my can of Pringles (Sour Cream & Onion). This is what our friends over at eWeek had to say about firefox 3.0:
At first glance, it doesn’t look that different from previous versions of the browser. And while there are nice improvements from a usability standpoint, there’s nothing radically different for Web users.But appearances can be deceiving. And with its release today, Firefox 3 is poised to usher in a new phase of Web browsing that will change how Web applications are built and delivered, and even how most of us use and think of the Web.
The first bit is of course pretty much dead-on, as Firefox 3.0 looks pretty similar to any other browser out there. It is the second part that is rather over the top – change the we use and think of the web? I’ve been using the test releases of Firefox 3.0 for quite a while now, and I must say that, yes, I’m still pretty much browsing the same way I’ve been browsing for the past 10 years – only a little faster, but that’s a given since Firefox 2.0 was no speed demon.
According to the eWeek article, it are two things that supposedly “change the way we use and think of the web”. The most important one is the seamlessness of web applications. This may seem like something really fancy, but what it effectively means is that you can set a web email service such as Yahoo! mail as your browser’s default email client. Attentive readers will see the problem: this is not a system-wide setting, but a browser-wide setting. It only works in Firefox, so as soon as you encounter a mailto: link somewhere else, your operating system’s default email application will still launch. I don’t see how this is revolutionary – or in fact even special. I’d consider it annoying since it breaks concistency. One application opens Yahoo! mail when clicking on a mailto: link, but the other opens Mail.app.
The other big thing is the offline availability of web applications. This is indeed a great feature for those that rely on web applications (email applications come to mind, mostly), but sadly, websites have to manually implement support for this before it works.
The other new features are very welcome, but hardly revolutionary. Anti phishing protection, the love-it-or-hate-it Awesome Bar, location information and pause/resume functionality in the download window, increased annoyingness in the invalid certificate dialog, and so on – great new features, welcome improvements, and even some stuff that was long overdue anyway. However, this is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a revolutionary release. It’s an evolution of Firefox 2.0. Nothing more – but certainly, nothing less either.
My respect to the Mozilla Foundation for their excellent hyping marketing campaign surrounding the new release. They have done an excellent job at making everyone believe that Firefox 3.0 is the second coming of Christ himself, and that’s commendable. But let’s keep both feet on the ground here and respect Firefox 3.0 for what is actually is: a very good web browser, with an enticing feature set and greatly improved performance, and definitely, without a doubt, my browser of choice in Windows, BeOS, and Linux (I prefer Safari on Mac OS X). But revolutionary? No.
You can resume your normal browsing schedule now. Firefox 3.0 won’t mind.
I guess I must be the only person on earth who hasn’t upgraded to Firefox 3.0 then. Firefox 2 works perfectly well for me, and so do all the extensions I use. It will be a while before all the extensions work as well on 3. It’s only hype if you choose – choose – to get caught up in it all. Stay apart, run what you want how you want it. Then you keep a nice clear head. Yes, in a month or two I may upgrade, but there again, I may not. Besides, Opera 9.5 is pretty darn good and enough to be getting on with.
I haven’t upgraded either; I’m running Solaris, and Firefox 3.0 crashes with gmail if I have the flash plugin installed, it also crashes on numerous other websites. Opera, the whole browser freezes when I go to geekzone.co.nz forum – none of this is present on Firefox 2.0.14 (which I’m running now).
Until Adobe/Firefox fix their problems, and Opera fix the fact that a whole browser can be frozen because of a script on a website – I’ll be stuck in 2.0 land for a while.
Heh, until last week my laptop was still running FF 1.5.
Your laptop will probably be a lot happier since Firefox 3 versus 1.5 uses a lot less memory, faster rendering too to benefit lower powered CPUs.
I’m going to have to disagree with this.
My experience is with OpenSolaris on a 650Mhz UltraSparc IIe laptop with 1GB of RAM. FF3 is slower to start, slower to render and much more sluggish to use than FF2. FF3 is actually pretty painful and frustrating. I uninstalled it 15 minutes after first loading it up and went back to FF2.
I’m guessing Cairo hasn’t been optimized for Sparc at all.
FF3 sucks. It screws around with my bookmarks all the time. Half the time, when I choose “bookmark all tabs” it says “OK!” and promptly doesn’t do it. And I don’t notice because I’ve already closed it out…
I just checked my primary OS’s repositories; no Firefox 3 package. Flash doesn’t work with version 2 anyhow so who’s to expect Adobe to have 64bit Flash plugins for version 3?
I’ll upgrade when it is in the repositories and there is a compelling reason. I’m actually thinking of downgrading to 32bit FF just so Flash will work and it’ll be the only thing that isn’t compiled against 64bit libraries on this box.
nspluginwrapper will do the trick for 64bit Firefox.
http://gwenole.beauchesne.info//en/projects/nspluginwrapper
Cheers, I’ll looking at that tonight.
Still a great release worth of the attention it’s geting.
I updated and noticed JavaScript is faster. Gmail loads quicker and the Google calendar interface is snappier. It also uses less memory than version 2 on Linux. Right now is using about 60 MB RAM.The native widget controls and the GTK theme pickup are very nice. It is what I always wanted Firefox to be be on Linux.
I still keep Seamonkey Mozilla around for checking mail but I think I keep it around for nostalgia. I rarely use the Seamonkey browser now that Firefox 3 runs so smoothly on Linux.
Edited 2008-06-20 23:44 UTC
Agreed it’s evolution, but almost all changes are really good.
Especially zooming now also scale pictures (like Opera)
and bookmarks and history are a bit smarter.
But let’s face it, it doesn’t matter, FF still has the magic of extensions, you can make it into anything you like.
Yeah… almost. Haven’t upgraded to final yet, but in the last RC I tried, multiple select (the feature I was most excited about) was complete ass. Go to Amazon and try to use multiple select (holding down the CTRL key) on some of the customer reviews to see what I’m talking about.
Oh, and for even more fun, try multi selct while using the mouse’s scroll wheel to scroll down the page.
Edited 2008-06-21 03:10 UTC
Frankly I’m sick of the “it has extensions, it can do anything attidute”. I only want mouse gestures, and Firefox doesn’t have an extension that actually works all the time (which is the whole purpose of mouse gestures).
No, I don’t want mouse gestures that use a ton of CPU, stops working in forms and stops working randomly.
Maybe the idea is good, but as long as the extensions aren’t checked for quality, it’s a bit annoying really.
And what “slick UI”? I can’t see it. On Windows I only see:
– Fade in, but not out(!) on tab buttons.
– Menu items aren’t the same size. Some are 17px, others are 20px.
– Moving the cursor quickly over a menu header makes it look hovered, enen when not until a timeout.
– If you open the menu with the keyboard while the cursor is over a menu item, you need to move the cursor 2 pixels to activate that menu. The correct is 1 pixel.
– They still can’t draw dotted rectangles around active controls without getting two dots beside each other (there should always be a space in between).
– They can’t draw the dotted rectangles in the correct size either. They should be around the text on checkbox controls, but they are much bigger. And mis-aligned.
– The menu is placed in a toolbar, and they forgot to remove the top border on the toolbar.
– Etc…
Only very small things, but when there are so many of them, the UI simply isn’t polished or slick.
FireGestures 1.1.2 works here without a hiccup or any noticeable CPU usage..
The entire point of extensions is to give anyone the power to extend the browser; there is no central authority to guarantee uniform quality. However you can use the Mozilla website to give feedback and find a general rating for each extension.
I was unable to reproduce any of the above problems but i’m working on Linux so that may explain the difference.
Well your experience is very different from mine, but the real gauge should be how it stacks up against the alternatives. Personally I have a hard time getting very excited about a browser in the first place, but generally i find FF3 to exceed expectations and perform better than any other browser. I even like the Awesome bar ;o)
Cheers.
firefox 3 has native look in windows ..windows xp looks different from windows vista so it has two look in windows ..
on the linux side, most people either use kde or gnome(i personally prefer fluxbox windows manager but all apps are kde) .. anyway, in the linux world ..there are two toolkits(among others) and firefox looks native on gtk based systems like gnome desktop environment and there is no change on kde side(i havent seen any so far)
saying firefox3 looks native on linux is almost an insult to kde users ..
how long will we have to wait before we get kde integration on firefox?
saying firefox3 looks native on linux is almost an insult to kde users ..
Time to lay off the coffee my friend. You seem stressed. I hear your pain though, since I used KDE way back when. I think the move by Fedora and Ubuntu to a more Gnome-centric focus gives Gnome a lot of weight.
Time to lay off the coffee my friend.
A KDE user? It’s the tea surely.
In what way? I don’t see anything new happening or anything major that’s going to make current Windows or OS X users look at it and think “Wow, I’ll have to try that”. Cut it any way you like but there just isn’t much happening, and it matters little that Fedora and Ubuntu have decided to use it.
“Must find… pretense for… self-righteous indignation!”
Oh, the drama.
It’s not native to Gnome either (unless patched), it’s native to GTK. Nitpicks aside, it mostly blends in well with the rest of a KDE desktop. The unification between several desktop standards is old news, and there are several ways to make GTK look exactly like Qt.
Of course, you may argue that it looks exactly like Qt, but doesn’t feel exactly like Qt, and I agree, but it’s a small price to pay. And you could also argue that it takes disk space, increases memory usage, blah, blah… The truth is, not enough people care, so it’s not going to change any time soon, if ever.
A Webkit KPart for Konqueror is in the works, now that’s gonna be nice.
My argument would be that it looks like crap in KDE with the same settings that FF2 looked OK with. I don’t really care much since I use firefox as a backup for when konqueror doesn’t render a page correctly, but the FF3 UI definitely looks bad on both linux boxen I have it installed on. Looks fine on windows XP where FF is my browser of choice, though.
Then install a GTK theme that looks good on KDE? There are plenty of them.
It isn’t the theme, it’s how tabs and menus render. I use qtcurve and everything else looks good if not great. Again, FF2 looked fine, FF3 looks ungood.
As an update, “minfield” looks great on my arch box, even using some native widgets by default.
Guess who’s responsible for that? 😉
Perhaps the best approach is to get gtk+ integration into KDE …
http://jaysonrowe.wordpress.com/2008/03/26/tip-gtk-apps-under-kde-4…
I think the trick is to use something called ‘qtcurve-gtk2’.
http://jaysonrowe.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/gtk.jpeg
Edited 2008-06-21 02:40 UTC
Cross your fingers and hope something comes out of this:
http://blog.vlad1.com/2008/05/06/well-isnt-that-qt/
i would say it looks “Nativ-er” on linux. wouldn’t you rather gtk widgets then motif or whatever it was before?
I think the reason Firefox choose to support GTK as native toolkit is because Firefox as a browser has a philosophy that more GNOME-like. (Keep it simple, and have more advanced extra functionality in plugins/extensions instead of built-in.) Not in the extreme degree that Epiphany does(it does very little out of the box) though.
I think Opera is a lot closer to the KDE-philosophy. It has tons of stuff out-of-the-box. And of course: also uses the Qt-toolkit. With the exception of being open source… =/
Personally I don’t think KDE-people should complain too much about lacking stuff in their own toolkit, *alot* of commercial stuff is written in Qt. (Quite simple because Qt is probably a hell lot more effective to program in than GTK. Qt is more RAD-oriented, and it also have (good, no running in X11 or non-native widgets) mac support.) Skype for instance. (And Google Earth if my memory serves me right.)
In addition: how many DE uses Qt except KDE itself? (Correct me if I’m ignorant here!) Not alot fo my knowledge, but XFCE for instances uses GTK, and whenever I see a *box screenshot they’re usually running GTK-apps.
That being said, Firefox is open source. Nothing’s stopping anyone from creating a theme/extension/modification/whatever-it-takes to make Firefox have native KDE-widgets. That’s the beauty of OSS.
…the day when we all upgraded our browsers from version 2.0.14 to 3.0.0.
I never thought people could become that excited about a browser release. Comes to shows how boring the IT world has become.
Reminds me of this XKCD-comic.
http://xkcd.com/198/
I upgraded and all that and I think its pretty nice update. Last night I was surprised to see it being advertised on the Tokyo Yamanote metro line carriage monitors. FF must be popular in Japan
From what I’ve been told, it’s probably the most used browser over there…. dunno for sure, though.
I’m still using the Beta-5 that came with the recent version of Ubuntu. So far, no problems. Only had one crash when I had Flash videos loading on 6 different tabs.
The default fonts on Linux suck, though…. always the first thing I change.
Well… if you remember… Firefox 3.0 was actually meant to be Firefox 2.0… but due marketing, well…
Visuals… native look… well, everything is important in the end. but for me, Firefox 3 is the end of a long waiting for a not so crash and leaky release… and its also much faster…
It does still leaks after sometime and several tabs open… and still has jerky flash playback when opened for some hours… but still, the different in performance AND stability is SO big that Firefox became finally usable again (I had ditched it for Opera for a long time before 3.0’s betas.).
I’m very happy with the actual results (I mean, finally some real improvements), and I hope that FF3.1 mostly fixes these remaining leak issues and the jerk playback and interface freezes and slowing down after sometime opened. Also, the (very) high usage (and interference with other opened apps) of disk for the new DB system should be fixed too.
…In the end, WebKit “competition” is doing nice for gecko too…
The OSX skin looks *horrid*. The Windows skin looks good, but not as good as the old one IMO. Oh well.
The thing that stinks is, there’s no skin that either 1) looks like FF2 or 2) looks like FF3 Windows, that works on OSX/FF3. Go figure.
I also thought the ‘awesomebar’ changes weren’t so nice. At least provide an option to go back to the classic functionality!
I’m keeping FF2 until they discontinue support. Hopefully by then there’ll be better skins and a good way to revert the new ‘awesomebar’ functionality.
There are extensions to revert the awesome bar functionality.
Basically, I agree with the article. I’m not so much into Firefox 3, but I am into Gecko. This is a great Gecko release! Firefox 3 is, well, just another browser.
What the heck is wrong with the ‘awesome bar’ – this pathetic whining is becoming as bad as people who senselessly bash Windows Vista. I’ve used the ‘awesomebar’ and its nice to be able to quickly find the last topic I replied to in a given forum – some of us actually do like to have conversations rather than just firing off a random post to a given story then ignore all the follow up replies.
Is it actually possible for you to write a post without being insulting? Just because someone doesn’t like a certain new feature because it doesn’t work right, it doesn’t mean they’re pathetic.
The Awesome Bar simply doesn’t work right yet. It’s gotten a lot better during the test releases, but still, many times it simply gives the wrong search returns where the previous, old fashioned url-only thing would’ve done just fine. That’s a legitimate complaint I’m reading all over the web.
Is it possible for people like you (and the other person) to reply without resorting to hyperbole? simply screaming something sucks and never explaining why it sucks (which is what the person whom I was originally reply to did) provides nothing in terms of insight into the possible problem the person is experiencing.
I’m sorry, but my so-called ‘abrupt’ and ‘insulting’ style pales in comparison to the intellectual pygmies who resort to hyperbole and emotional rhetoric in their posts. I’d sooner have someone who is rude, who makes a valid point than someone who whines about something and never explains what actually is deficient and in what way it is.
Edited 2008-06-21 06:24 UTC
kaiwai, with such deliberate use of rude and insulting language you are inexorably dumbing yourself down to the size of the apparent intellectual pygmies you are so readily keen to berate, if you’ll give the following any credit, that is:
‘There is a prior cultural achievement of language; language is not a detachable instrument of thought and communication.’
In short, language is thought. Don’t do yourself the disservice of using language that is not elevating, either of yourself or your audience.
Where’s the hyperbole in my post? I explained perfectly fine why I have issues with the awesome bar, and those issues are perfectly valid.
Instead of resorting to insults, you could’ve just asked “what are your issues with the awesome bar?” There’s absolutely no reason to resort to insults, and the next time, I will act accordingly.
Man, we’re gonna get bolted by the Pygmies now, for sure. I for one admire what the vertically challenged aboriginal populaces have accomplished, given their stature.
Back on Topic: FF3 is nice, I use it every day (at home).
Hey Kaiwai, did you ever buy that guy the Mac you were running off at the mouth about? I’ve asked you several times already, and you just refuse to answer the question. I’m curious, since you’re such a hot shot, did you buy him that Mac or not?
You may want to check out Aronnax’s GrApple themes on http://takebacktheweb.org/
I’m not a huge Safari fan, but I rather like the look of that GUI, when ported to a Firefox theme; you might find you like one of the 4 variants of it.
4 variants? Maybe on that site alone, but Dear Jeebus, on addons.mozilla.org there are little else! I swear on that site the OS X-aping themes seem to outnumber all the others put together.
I guess it’s a testament to the popularity of Apple’s UI, but I wish some of these obviously talented themers would branch-out a bit, so we could see more *original* theme designs to choose from.
/rant
There is practacly no difference in those “variants” and it makes it look like Safari which must have been designed by a masochist with its black print on dark gray theme. At least the default theme has some gradient.
Though I was disappointed to see that Mozilla Firefox’s UI hasn’t changed much (other than new icons).
Other than the new Back/Forward button which was borrowed from IE7, I wish they’d have borrowed some more of IE7’s UI changes. Like hiding the MenuBar. It only ends up wasting precious vertical screen space. And putting more an emphasis on the SideBar for favourites/feeds/history. This addition to IE7 is dynamite. And the NewTab button right next to the actual tabs. Tab operations should stick close to the actual tabs. Unlike Konqueror which both Tab buttons (new/close) are stuck at each end of the browser’s side which is annoying for widescreen users.
While feeling more like a under-the-hood release, Firefox 3.0 is a solid one. And I love the integrated cookie blocker. I just wish they’d go further and build an implementation like Konqueror were the user is asked to trust the site completely, only once or never.
For hiding the menubar, I’d recommend the Hide Menubar extension, which replicates the alt-menu behaviour of IE7: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4762
Personally, I run that and the Stylish extension with a userstyle that hides the personal bookmark bar until it’s mouse-overed, too; makes the whole thing take up a lot less space.
I haven’t tried it, but isn’t it possible to select firefox as the system wide mail client? Sure would be nice if that works.
Either way I think it’s a nice feature since this has always been one of the drawbacks of using webmail.
I have stuck with IE out of habit, but I think FF 3.0 will finally convert me. It seems to be very responsive, much more so than 2.x on my machine. Props to Mozilla!
Actually it feels like Mozilla guys are lost their programmers in favor of PR guys. They make great overhyped commercials and forget about browser itself. FF3 does not fill consistent, it is more like a bunch of features ripped from extensions and implemented as native code without thinking of how to make them live together in a nice way. And they don’t go forward, just repeat steps of other browsers. When did you see some feature in FF that would blow your mind? I don’t remember anything.
I think they should stop promoting browser and start working on it, start listening to users. And not only to FF users, but to users of other browsers. They should rethink what they do and how, sit down all together and think how to make a browser more usable, less relying on extensions and more powerfull for one thing – browsing!
As far as I can tell the developers has worked very hard on FF3. It’s much more optimized and has a smaller footprint. That in itself is a proof because such things require a lot of hard and (IMO) boring work.
It seems that you are expecting some kind of miracle, yet you have no idea of what that miracle is. You just want to get blown away. I wouldn’t expect a browser that has to be backwards compatible and stick to the standards to blow anyone away.
I prefer that they keep working on the core and leave the innovation to the addon developers.
In order to create something new that will blow people away it would probably be better to start over from scratch. And even then, it’s a hard thing to do.
Perf work is usually pretty exciting in my opinion. You can often get great results through a series of small tweaks. Sometimes, though, you find that you need to just start from scratch and reimplement everything below a particular interface. This tradeoff makes things interesting.
Contradiction in ideas there.
Mozilla has made the core browser better and faster.
The way that you make the browser more usable for the vast variety of users is … to rely on extensions for the fancy UI bits. That way one user who might like it this way … and another user who likes it some other (contradictory) way can both be satisfied.
I have not read the article at eweek but I guess the “revolution” was not in appearance or browsing, but in design of web application.
The revolution is in offline mode, Canvas to design pretty web interfaces or games, SQLite to store data locally and so one.
But to see the revolution you have to wait developpers have built applications that make profit of that. They can not do it before the browser – the platform – was in final version.
“But does Firefox 3.0 change the web, or alter the way we use the intertubes?”
But did change Mercedes-Benz 300SD (the first production car with turbo diesel type of engine) the highways or the way the people use the roads?
I’ve liked the upgrade for the most part: I’ll get to the list in a minute, but first a query:
@Thom, I haven’t tried it out (don’t use webmail much) but surely if you set Firefox as your default mailto: handler, then external mail calls would end up in the webapp too? Perhaps I’m wrong, but that’s what I’d expect…
Now, that list:
PRO
– Yes, it’s a bit faster. This is a big boon for my gf on her Celeron-700MHz system where every little counts.
– The new bookmarks implementation is nice: not as painful a “paradigm shift” (shoot me) as the hype suggested, and the scope for external access to this data while the browser is running is much improved. I’ve already started knocking up a webapp to display the bookmarks on my web server
– The filepicker is XUL once more, no more nasty GTK picker (see below)
CON
– Theme and extension upgrade is a bit of a minefield. No upgrade for Sage (RSS), now you need “Sage Too”? No DOM Inspector builtin, but standalone available? And at least one theme has been discontinued because of…
– The GTK integration. Yes this is a partisan argument, but there you are. I’ve tried, believe me I have, but I’ve yet to find a GTK theme that doesn’t make my eyes bleed. The gtk-engines-qt solution would be great, but it’s very unpolished at present and the results are usually a big mess. /rant
Revolution in browsing? Nope. But it has the feel of a solid major release, not just a cosmetic refresh timed to rob attention from IE. It’ll do.
firefox 3 is great release but…, there is many addon not (yet) compatible with this release.
“Frankly I’m sick of the “it has extensions, it can do anything attidute”. I only want mouse gestures, and Firefox doesn’t have an extension that actually works all the time (which is the whole purpose of mouse gestures).”
That’s what’s keeping you from using FF? Have you ever heard of throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Of course, you could always go back to using IE and it’s extensions.
You mean… toolbars?
The author seems to have a problem with marketing. Most of the companies (and Mozilla is a company, too) are doing marketing. So, better deal with it.
DG
NO. Why should we just accept marketing blindly? If marketing is about exaggerations and manipulation, then any chance to criticize it should be taken advantage of. We need honest information, not marketing.
trechsol: What do you mean deal with it? and allow such ridiculous hyperbole to pass by without even questioning it?
The authors job is to sift through such marketing crap as this
I will think the basic software we have now and if it revolutionize:
– Windows XP
– Mac OS X
– Firefox 3
Windows XP brings the power of the NT kernel in the hands of desktop user. Automatically the user will have almost following advantages over Windows 98:
– stable UI, not freezing one
– faster in network traffic, high computing applications (one application that freeze taking all CPU in Windows 98 will make WinAmp to underperform)
– miss of a lot of restart scenarios (in the case of changing IP, installing programs, etc.)
– updated platform as a whole on matter of wizards, shell, internet explorer (6 at the moment), desktop theme
– rollback drivers and asks for certified drivers
Compared with Windows 98, anyway, it brings plenty of reasons to switch to XP but offers a not changed experience on matter of what it was: a double click Windows, a browser, with a DirectX and a Media Player.
OS X gives to user the same deep of changes in OS X, mainly:
– PDF based desktop
– Cocoa Objective-C framework
– Aqua user interface
– an improved desktop experience based on BSD foundation (Mach kernel)
– the dock
Did OS X makes a revolution on desktop? On matter of what it brings, excluding Aqua “theme”, and the dock, OS X brings almost no revolution on desktop. (I think you get the irony)
It changed the experience of using a Mac, based on a single desktop interface (namely HIG), with better wizards and with a sluggish but polished 3D desktop (genie effect), gives instantly another feedback that users wants and expect.
Firefox 3 brings in the link you pointed out three parts:
– UI side of view: desktop integration, polishing ALL of the wizards, like Add-On page or Download page
– infrastructure side of view: tuned for performance (using PGO) as much as twice in javascript, better look (using cairo, but losing the Windows 9x and Mac OS compatibility), memory leaks (with memory cycle collector – a complete garbage collector)
– web experience point of view: – offers better support for web standards (it eventually pass Acid 2), parts of HTML5, new base for extensions, offline support
So, for me is similar with a major (revolutionary) desktop OS release.
Does you expect to not have a have different feeling on the address bar, like introducing http://www.osnews.com? Yes, someone cares of how you introduce that data in every deep detail, and right now you have a better way to do so. As you spell something wrong, an embedded dictionary will point you out, if you zoom a page, it will work. So, for me it changes how you use the web, much more based on the fact that Firefox has a third of web browser users that use it regularly.
Do you want a lot of changes to change how you render Yahoo Mail page? No, nothing can be done, as much as no browser can change the past web pages, as OS X or Windows XP cannot take an old application and instantly changes the MessageBox dialog (or any user feedback dialog) into a notification dialog. They have to take advantage of Firefox 3 and for sure will start web applications to start using FF3 support.
Great job Mozilla!
FF3 looks like crap on KDE3 while FF2 has all fine. A huge KDE user base makes use gtk-qt engine but FF3 simple can’t get along with it.
Mozilla plain ignored KDE users this time.
Just to give you a demonstration of current drama who is using FF3 on KDE3 with gtk-qt engine enabled (polyester theme on KDE):
http://img113.imageshack.us/my.php?image=snapshot10hs5.png
Now, take a look on FF2, all fine with it under the same settings:
http://img522.imageshack.us/my.php?image=snapshot12fr6.png
I tried other themes as well, but gtk-qt are unable to fix the look and feel of FF3. The sole way to make it barely usable is disabling gtk-qt, with make every single GTK app on KDE looks alien unless you match the QT and GTK themes.
Just use QtCurve. It’s a nice theme for both GTK+ and Qt.
I’m concerned with it’s standards improvements only.
not as good as webkit, but better then ie.
as a developer too though, the reason i use it is because of firebug. i dont know if i could do web work without it anymore, and don’t like to look back on the dark days before it
As someone else who enjoys WebKit it’s getting quite frustrating that not only is CSS 2.1 not consistently supported between IE, Firefox, Safari, Konqueror, Opera et.al, but that CSS3 and Javascript vary as well.
With HTML 5 and XHTML 2.0 arriving let’s hope they get at least HTML 5 used without all the custom tags that work only for this or that engineitis resolved.
The main reason I see WebKit becoming the leader is for the projects strive to clean up the lack of finished standards support and for making sensible solutions for HTML 5 and beyond. Not to mention the sheer toolkits now porting Webkit to hook into their various toolkits from wxWidgets, Qt, Cocoa, Win32 and GTK+ it just really is forcing Gecko and IE to improve in order to be at the forefront.
It should be a win/win for developers and consumers.
Although I’ve just gone over to Firefox because of this new release(from Opera), I must say that WebKit is really on the front og renderingengines.
That being said: Opera’s engine is very good as well, but Opera is neither open source and doesen’t intergrate very well with my GNOME-de.
Looking forward to WebKit-based Epiphany though! I think that could evolve into a real killer-app.
I’ve been using epiphany, iceweasel and konqueror much more, plus since opera 9.5 has been released on amd64 it’s allowed me to have one less use for the ia32 libs.
EVERY release of Firefox has been overhyped as the second coming – nothing new here.
… and as usual it’s just not that warranted. Missed 2/3rds of the milestones originally set on bugzilla? Check. Even missing bugs in the standards rendering that date back to gecko’s infancy as open source back in 1998? Check. (can’t fix or implement the full HTML4/CSS2 and they’ve had a decade… WOW.) – though at least now we have inline-block that almost works right, now if they could just finish off colgroup support.
Though I can say one good thing about this release – it’s the first time (including the 3.0 betas) that there’s a firefox release that doesn’t chew memory like a pig and hog the cpu to the point you end up having to kill it. Dunno what they did different between the last public beta and the release, but it TOOK LONG ENOUGH for them to get the damned thing stable – Since it’s been unusably unstable for me since 0.89 to the point I wouldn’t even have had it installed if I wasn’t a web developer. (and that’s regardless of OS or hardware, I could crash ANY gecko based browser in 20 minutes of ‘normal use’, even on machines where most people say it’s fine)
Edited 2008-06-22 18:40 UTC
i switch between ff3, iceweasel, epiphany, opera 9.5 (and IE7 at work).
none of these programs are exciting. the media attention of firefox over other browsers seems really strange to me.
as a fulltime windows user i was an avid fan of opera, but now i’m too lazy to try and get sound in 9.50 to work with flash in debian. ff3 doesn’t really feel like a 3.0 to me. and i use an xp vm for my uni website to upload assignments in IE.
i’ve found that the browser that is winning all my time lately is epiphany. simple and quick and i can get everything working with a lot less fuss.
i don’t want a media darling, just a browser. it’s almost like the next release of nautilus (let’s say a small bugfix release) in GNOME getting massive media fanfare. it’s a browser, not something that will make you special or stand out from the crowd.
it’s great that open source software is getting attention but this is one application out of the thousands that go by unnoticed by the majority of computer users every day.
Am I the only one who missed all the hype? What commercials? Maybe it’s because I avoid sites like eWeek like the plague?
Check your memory usage. Right now, on XP, it is using my 56MB memory with just one tab open…
And as always, default install have all security problems intact, I mean not clearing private data, cookies, still remembering all pw. Clearing private data and anti phishing must be default feature, so that majority of population will be safe. and at least it will be different from IE…