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November 1, 2007
The story behind Firefox 3: Places
This is the first in what will hopefully be many posts talking about what we are up to in Firefox 3 and why we are doing what we are doing.
Why Places?
The drive behind places came from a number of different directions at once:
- People losing their kmarks has been one of the top support issues in Firefox for years.
We've already been using and contributing to sqlite for some time, so we decided to move bookmark and history storage to a well-used, open-source, database that implements full ACID compliant transaction model rather than a hodgepodge of custom ways to manage on-disk storage (I'm looking at you mork and RDF!). This means that it should be near impossible for you to lose bookmarks in FF3 from power outages, crashes or the like. But even if everything goes wrong there is a very handy automatic backup and restore feature built into the bookmarks organizer.
Lost bookmarks no more!
- Organizing your little piece of the web. Turns out there are a lot more sites on the web than in 1994 (news flash!) so organizing them with the standard files/folders bookmark metaphor just doesn't cut it. Places makes it easier to deal with huge numbers of bookmarks by adding one-click bookmarking, tagging, annotations, and intelligent searching through your history right in the url bar:
- Customization: Extension authors have done heroic things with the arcane bookmark API's in FF2 and below. Places brings a whole new set of capabilities from annotations to easily building sync services.
- Performance: Instead of just reading the entire contents of your history into memory on startup we have a full database engine with indexes, paging, and all sorts of knobs to turn. This means performance on many operations related to history (startup, viewing the history sidebar, coloring links you've visiting, etc) will be significantly better in Firefox 3 even after storing a much larger (and thus more useful) history range.
Check out the developer docs or ui plan for more info.
The team has spent nearly a year hammering out the infrastructure (this means it is solid) so like many things in Firefox 3 what you see in the UI will be just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we can do.
Posted by schrep at November 1, 2007 7:20 PM
Comments
I am getting more and more excited about 3.0. FF is definitely headed in the right direction.
Posted by: sam at November 2, 2007 5:08 AM
Sqlite passes ACID and Gecko 1.9 passes Acid2, that's like acid on acid, man! Far-out.
Posted by: skierpage at November 2, 2007 7:28 PM
I've been begging for a bookmark overhaul for a long time (a few years). Every person I've shown places to seems to love the concept. I think it's got great potential to bring bookmarking back to the web.
Posted by: Robert Accettura at November 3, 2007 5:39 PM
Having not tried any FF3 builds, does it still support the current way of doing bookmarks - in particular, being able to group them and open an entire group in one operation? Not having that (or equivalent functionality) would be a major regression for me...
Posted by: Simon at November 5, 2007 4:34 PM