Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

asa, what is the userangent?

I have:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20060321 Firefox/2.0a1

Is this the official? I got it from tinderbox builds..

Asa, ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/bonecho/alpha1 is down, lots of motivated testers I believe. lol..

Perfect...

but release notes?
tomorrow?

http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/releases/2.0a1.html

Release Notes. Right now.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/bonecho/releases/2.0a1.html

this either.. http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/releases/2.0a1.html

I logged into Windows to install this since I don't really mind if those bits get damaged (I use Linux for everything except the sense of danger and intrigue ;)

Here are my first impressions and comments:

- tabs with close buttons; very nice and I like the way they disappear from all but the active one when you have ~8 tabs. There is still the problem of what happens when you have so many tabs (~33) that they begin to spill off the edge of the window, though admittedly this would be a very rare case for the average user; could the end of the row morph into a scroll arrow or something? (if not for 2.0, maybe for FF 3.0 :)

- SVG; contrast http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Svg.svg with http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/15/Svg.svg
Is this a problem with Firefox or with the SVG file?

- Acid2 Test; http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top
We're still not passing. From July:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/008505.html

"one of our Gecko experts [Robert O'Callahan] has posted in the comments saying "Asa, I think it's safe to promise that the next major Firefox release after 1.1 will pass Acid2 :-)" "

Will FF 2.0 pass Acid2 when its released?

- extensions; the Nightly Tester Tools http://users.blueprintit.co.uk/~dave/web/firefox/buildid/nightly.html seem to help quite a bit (about half of my extensions are working at this point because of it).

- stability; it didn't crash, nor did it even act flaky... this ride wasn't very scary, I want my money back ;) Seriously though, I'm glad I'm testing FF2a1 and not IE7b2p ;)

- stability; it didn't crash, nor did it even act flaky... this ride wasn't very scary, I want my money back ;) Seriously though, I'm glad I'm testing FF2a1 and not IE7b2p ;)

lol, i was the brave few who tested deerpark a1, oh boy was that a rush, lots of crashes, and all sorts of fun stuff, but about 7 builds later we have 1.5. this build got barked, but didn't bite, i started echo and it used my profile for 1.5 it just disabled extension :D, so this seems like smooth sailing to 2.0 since this is an alpha build and not much potholes, or endless hills to tumble over, since using it..

Update: I did something wrong with the NTT before; using it properly, I now have *almost all* of the extensions working =D Very nice indeed! ^_^

Limulus: The rendering engine of 2.0 will be the same as for 1.5 (gecko 1.8), in other words it won't pass. Gecko 1.9, which hopefully will pass (does it already?) will be in Firefox 3.0.

I'm testing it and it's going really better than I thought so. Didn't crash until now. But, when searching my Bookmarks, the search couldn't find any entry there, but just in "History".

Hey, it gave me permanent orange afro!

Wow, Firefox 2.0 is looking really boring so far. The final thing has just few tweaks to the UI along with the Places stuff (which is a fantastic experiment, but I wouldn't like to predict the results yet)? How come the project is so far behind?

I suppose at least Google's anti-spoofing thing will be integrated, but there doesn't seem to be much else to look forward to.

very, very stable

I force windows to open in new tabs, but in BE one opened
in a new window. This happens no matter which of the
options in "pref -> tabs -> open links that would..." used

Notice that the crypto algos are now defaulting to strong
SSL3 ciphers only - good.

Is there a pref for putting the "close tab" button BACK to
where is used to be? I think it's great for newbies, but the
other option of having a single close on the far right is a
much better "learned action" move - it's instinctive and
absolute ("MOVE TO FAR RIGHT, CLICK MOUSE", rather than
"find current tab, move mouse to it, move mouse to cross,
click cross")

Hello,
a few things about the new X in every Tab:
I used it in the past with an extension and had often the problem to focus the tab, but I clicked on the X and the tab closed. If you have more tabs opened the chance increase to catch up the X and not just focus the tab.
For the usability is it also harder to use the new X because it's always on a new possition. The "normal" on the right site has always the same position. The next thing is: You loos some space for the title in every tab cause of the new X.
On the other hand you can close the tab in every version with the middle mouse (under Unix you have to change your configuration).
Is there a way to turn this X in every tab off for the user?
Bye

@Daniel: there was a bug to add an option to turn off close buttons on tabs, but Ben Goodger said there wouldn't be an option. So wrote an extension called Tab No X (a play on Tab X) that puts the close buttons back the way they were. Get it on UMO.

to the people talking about acid2: 2.0 will not pass acid2 but it is slightly better than 1.5. 3.0 does not pass the acid2 test yet, but once cairo is up and running smoothly, it should. 3.0 is slated for release sometime in 2007, so we have lots of time to finish up. 3.0 does do a much better job at acid2 than 2.0 does. that's obvious.

....in short BonEcho is only for those that get Boners from Alpha's....i'd certainly not run it on Windows environments.....sure to do the very thing and shriek rap your HD and send it to never never land....

1.5.01 clean install with 80 extensions rocks so as only things from externals will get ripped into internals we'll wait for positive reviews coming thru that message great functioning novelties....meantime keep watching Opera 9....it zooms and has wonderful clean / complete looking interface....IE 7, put the index finger in any orifice imaginable ;>)

Replaced the "Go" menu with a "History" menu - amazing!

When is the $72m going to be given to extension developers who are the only ones who do anything useful?

Firefox first cloned IE attempting to gain market share by making the transition from IE as painless as possible.

Now it seems Firefox is copying IE in another way - by not developing anything worthwhile for months/years on end!

I especially love it how the History -> Search History option opens a floating window called PLACES!

For heaven's sake give me something to evangelise, please! I haven't had anything since November 2004!

Meanwhile real innovation is happening in the form of extensions like Scrapbook, Tab Mix Plus, Ablock Plus, Resize Search Box and Sage whilst crappy bugs like:

- the window closing but the process living on forever
- inability to 'Send Link' in Eudora
- lack of any common guidelines for extension access (my Tools menu almost reaches the floor under my desk).

@pd: if u havent had anything since nov 2004, that means you havent used firefox 1.5 which came out in nov 2005. 1.5 has a bunch of new stuff. 2.0a1 is exactly one month behind the original schedule, and it doesnt have many new features. howevery, its an alpha. its not feature complete. what development do u want? what do u want them to do? at some point u reach a place where youve included most of the features that you are going to include. i can't personally think of any new features that would be popular enough to include by default. more features are to come. and real development should be left up to extensions. besides, most of the work is going to into 3.0a1 with the complete rewrite of the rendering engine.

@I suppose at least Google's anti-spoofing thing will be integrated, but there doesn't seem to be much else to look forward to.

I'm not looking forward to it.. if you read this article http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/33839/ , (just try it yourself) i'll felt diferent about third party plugins, I never liked them anyways.. I hope there's an easy way to remove it.

Not to say the antispoofing plugin is a bad thing, just how it's done is a bad thing.

Three remarks:
- places gets a thumbs down from me. Don't like it and basically it will need one major redesign from the ground up for me to change that opinion.

- where's the feature development warranting a 2.0? It seems 1.5 plus some broken things minus some features I actually use.

- whatever happened to the notion of alpha being more or less feature complete? This must be absolutely the worst alpha I've seen from you guys. Any previous alphas (and all milestones from 0.4) from you ended up being my default browser and this: no way! What happened? I don't recall things ever being so obviously broken before other than in nightly builds.

Really if this is realy M1 of a whole series of milestones which eventually (like in half a year or so) result in a 2.0 beta then I stand corrected. However, my current understanding of the roadmap is that this pretty much it in terms of feature work. So, excuse the harsh tone and no hard feelings.

Some unsollicited advice: revert the places thing; plan a 1.6RC in four months and get rid of everything that gets in the way of that. Relabel 3.0 to the 2.0 it really is and move all of the more experimental stuff there, including the places stuff which will need many tries to get right. Re-adopt the milestone idea (bi-monthly) and plan at least 10 before doing another 2.0 alpha. Get the first one out before 1.6.

Grayson Mixon wrote: "i can't personally think of any new features that would be popular enough to include by default"

If I was running things, I would take the following extensions and incorporate them into Firefox:

Sessionsaver; all users would benefit if Firefox could restore itself after a crash. It is basically invisible unless there is a crash, but then does its magic :) 126 K, but well worth it IMHO.

Restart Firefox; it should be a greyed out button on the bottom of the Extensions window until changes have been made, when it should become available. Then you push it and it takes care of things (this should be harmonized with the functionality of Sessionsaver to restore your browser perfectly) 19K

Colorful Tabs; grey is dull and a single color makes finding an individual tab more difficult. The small amount of color added dramatically improves the functionality of tabs. And its pretty ;) Seriously though, it would make Firefox stand out from the competition as well... 9K

Slim Extension List; slims down extension entries and arranges them alphabetically; if the latter isn't done by default still, it should be; the former is just tidy (maybe have it so that it switches to this when there are enough entries?). 9K

Show Image; allows you to right click a broken image and try again; this was in Netscape (e.g. version 3), wasn't it? I think it should be in Firefox; even with broadband I still hit flaky servers and it comes in handy :) Invisible unless you have a broken image. 7K

Stop-or-Reload Button; I've pushed for this ever since I found out about it ;) Yes, its different from what most people know and no, that's not a bad thing in this case ;) It also looks nice. 6K

That's enough for now; incorporate 1 big extension (126 K) and 5 small ones (50K) to improve Firefox for the 2.0 release :)

Jillies said:
>whatever happened to the notion of alpha being more or less feature complete?

the roadmap specifically says that the alphas are not feature complete. betas are. alphas are not.

besides, nobody should expect anything from 2.0a1. like asa said, this think is pretty raw. anything can happen. don't expect anything to work like it should. to borrow some language from the 1.5 alphas, "this is a glorified nightly build".

People who are saying that nothing has changed for the good. Well one word. Stability. This is "only an alpha" but it is more stable than FF 1.5.

I don't like some of the "new" stuff though. The "places" (seriously why that name?) window should NOT be a window. It should be a tab. That would work better. The crosses on the tabs are fine. If anyone has noticed there are further tab improvements. It basically behaves like Opera now. That is when you close a tab you go back to tab you were in before that rather than the next one to the left/right.

please don't change the X from the far right !! don't bloat the UI ( a-la opera ) putting an X in every tab

orlando from argentina
( FF user since early 2004 )

No, IMHO places should not be in a tab. That would be confusing and would feel quirky. Tabs are for web content, nothing else. A sidebar perhaps. But there's really too much there for a sidebar.

Asa! Why is Firefox still being released with "Allow sites to set cookies -- Only for Originating website" not Enabled.. that is a privacy risk, and potential exploit.

What about Server Name Indication (SNI, Bug #116168)? Any chance of seeing that in 2.0 or will this be pushed back to 3.0 as well?

@omz: please read through the comments. its already been metioned that there is an extension called Tab No X on UMO that reverses the close buttons on tabs.

Grayson, I know what the roadmap says. I also know what previous alpha's looked like (including the deerpark previews). And my remark that I can't recall a alpha as bad as this is quite relevant. This thing needs a lot more fixing than any previous alpha/milestone build I've had on my machine before and I've seen pretty much all of them since 0.4. This doesn't look like it has had much attention. The last roadmap I've seen mentioned two alphas. Maybe that roadmap is obsolete already?

Samd mentions stability as a pro. The only reason that it is stable is because it is basically 1.5 with some minor modifications. The places experiment is the only major change so far and it isn't exactly getting good reviews so far. All potentially destabilizing stuff is going to be on trunk instead of the moz 1.8 branch.

Anyway, I'm sounding more negative than I want to sound. So I'll stop my whining now.

dude u can keep them with tabmix plus, theres even a standalone extension that does this.

@David Naylor: Confusing -- hmmm. Perhaps. But it would be MUCH neater I think. At least have "Show Places in a Tab" as an option. Or (as it will no doubt be) as an extension.

Cornelius, you're confused. Mozilla implements its own Networking stack. It doesn't rely on Microsoft's. It also implements its own rendering engine (layout, style system, content parsers, dom, gfx and widget, image handling, etc.,) not relying on Microsoft's. It also implements its own string code, not relying on Microsoft's. It also implements its own data stores, not relying on Microsoft's. It also implements its own toolkit and UI layer, not relying on Microsofts. It also implements its own simple editor, not relying on Microsoft's. It also implements its own JavaScript engine, not relying on Microsoft's. It also implements its own plug-in infrastructure, not relying on Microsoft's. It also implements its own COM solution, not relying on Microsoft's. It also implements its own installation mechanism, not relying on Microsoft's. It also implements its own crypto and PKI code, not relying on Microsoft's. It also implements its own component security system, not relying on Microsoft's. It also implements its own cookies and permissions code, not relying on Microsoft's. It also implements its own update system, not relying on Microsoft's.

(Starting to get the picture, Cornelius? See, at Mozilla, we build the entire browser. We're not some IE shell like Maxthon, relying on the rest of the Microsoft internet stack. So, it turns out that moving to Firefox *does* protect you from the security holes built into that Microsoft internet stack.)

- A

thanks Graysonomz, with my respect: every change in FF can potentially be reverted via extensions but this is not my point. I believe the X in each tab takes too much space (from the tab) and is a step back of the great FF *default* UI ( why not leave unchanged the X at right and bring this new feature through a configurable option or extension ? ). I like FF cause the application and the UI *is not bloated* and dont force me to put extensions on it to make it look and fill better, please keep that product differentation. By the way, thank you Aza and all the Mozilla community for this great browser.