I don’t know why, but I find it very hard to get too excited about numbers. I know that version numbers are important from a marketing perspective, and I like the fact that people are using our browser, but I’ve never really cared very much about the numbers people slap on software. That being said, people seem to find them important, so I’ll talk about version numbers.
Firefox 1.5 was essentially a maintenance release to clean up issues from 1.0. With 1.5, we made some pretty good improvements in terms of speed and stability, and Mac support has vastly improved. Software update is a big deal, especially for security purposes, and hopefully will make mistakes a little less painful. In short, it’s a good solid release that includes some nice, and mostly hidden, improvements over 1.0.
The thing with 1.5 is that there really is nothing to be excited about from a user perspective. It’s faster. It’s more stable. They came up with this weird-sounding XPCNativeWrappers thing. None of these features are going to make someone instant-message all their friends and say, “You’ve got to try Firefox 1.5. It’s awesome!”
So what’s next? In my book, this is an extremely important question. Internet Explorer 7 is set for release in January. Expectations are set so low that the product need only not crash on startup for the press to pronounce it as “Microsoft’s Firefox Killer.” Firefox 2.0 is Mozilla’s chance to innovate, to do what Microsoft refuses to do.
With Firefox, we stripped all the cruft out of Mozilla and created a simple, refined UI. That was great for 1.0, and it barely fits the bill for 1.5. For 2.0, that’s not going to cut it. In the crude words of Kathy Sierra and the Creating Passionate Users Gang, the question we need to be asking ourselves: how can we help our users kick ass?
Right now, we help our users by generally being easy to use and staying out of their way. We’re stable, we block popups, and avoid doing not-nice things like infecting our users with spyware and viruses. It’s time for Firefox to take a more active sense of how to help its users. When Firefox 2.0 comes out, people should be sending those instant messages: “You’ve got to use Firefox. Check out what it just did for me.”
There are some very cool ideas floating out on the horizon about revamping Bookmarks and History into Places and finally fixing feed handling. I hope that these things happen and quickly. Firefox 2.0 cannot be about multi-locale installers, customizable toolbars, or fixing Extension Manager. These are not features that make users excited. If we cannot innovate, we are dead. Plain and simple.
It’s a very exciting time for Firefox. Tonight is a night for celebrating, but then, we have work to do.
Update: Beltzner is right, I should have linked to the Firefox 2.0 Planning Wiki. Come on in and check it out.
Posted by zach at November 29, 2005 5:30 PMWe always have work to do. I'd encourage everyone to join us for Firefox2 pre-planning over on the wiki.
Also, while it's true that this release wasn't focused entirely on end-user feature enhancements, it does have a lot for users. Tab reordering alone makes it worthwhile, and the automatic updates is an incredible bonus IMO. Not sexy innovations, but neccessary steps to getting things into shape.
The new product roadmap calls for Firefox2 to be mostly front end focused. Places and RSS are definitely on the list, as are some other things (look at the wiki above!) that focus on the theme of helping the user manage the huge amounts of information that flow through the browser.
Finally, I'm happy that people are innovating. I'm happy for Firefox's role in that regard. If it turns out the IE7 out-innovates us, then it will be for the good of the user. And our ante will be upped and we'll have to return the favour.
But yes, let's get to work.
Posted by: beltzner on November 29, 2005 7:49 PMMalarky! SVG is an amazing development. Compoud documents will change the web.
Posted by: Anon on November 29, 2005 8:12 PMSVG in and of itself is not a end user feature. Also, until that other browser with 80%+ market share supports it, SVG will have limited mass appeal IMHO.
Couldn't agree with you more Zach. Not only is 1.5 really 1.1 (though you don't like version numbers), it's relatively boring. I've been using nightlies for a while so I've had a fair amount of time to test 1.5 out.
The best end-user feature is the faster back/forward. That's it. The new Options panel is a joke. Nobody cares about an Options panel, in fact most ppl would rather have stuck with the panel they were familiar with, I imagine. This was a 'feature' done because a certain developer wanted to do it because that developer didn't like working with the old code.
Finally getting updates working smoothly is nothing to write home about. It should have been done properly in the first place. For a piece of software that was release in November 2004, especially a browser, software update should have been one of the first elements built and perfected. It's not exactly a revolutionary concept. Now we also have to go to two separate places to get our updates, the Help menu and the Extensions panel. Before it was just one.
Hopefully more meaningful change will happen in the future like a simple text editor instead of textarea feature. This is a feature that will open up the web as a genuine publishing medium.
Posted by: pd on November 30, 2005 6:16 AMPersonly, I think the old options pannle is far cleaner and easier to navagate from a user perspective. ok the new one can fit in some more options, big deal, I mean persanly it just seems like a way for firefox to hide the fact that they are using tabs in tabs (nightmare ui).
OK so im being a bit too harsh, and it isnt that bad, infact it's ok, and the rest of 1.5 is graet. personaly i think svg surport is killer feature, but then again only because I use openclipart.org a lot ;-)
Posted by: tom on November 30, 2005 9:42 AM> Firefox 1.5 was essentially a maintenance release to clean up issues from 1.0.
Maybe in your little sandbox.... Plenty of other people did a fairly large amount of work in the year and a half between 1.7 and 1.8 branches, including implementation of a number of new features. You might have missed some (or most?) of them because they happened while Firefox 1.0 was still messing around on the aviary branch (which it was basically doing up until Gecko 1.8 was already in beta).
If you want to say this was a maintenance release of the UI, then sure. It was. Don't claim it was a maintenance release of the whole product, please
Posted by: Boris on November 30, 2005 11:44 AMBoris: My appologies. Gecko 1.8 does represent a substantial improvement in terms of speed, accuracy, and new features. What this blog entry is concerned with is user-visible features. Most users have no idea what does, and chances are good that they will never create any SVG content. New features in Gecko are important for the continued evolution of the web, but it's not something to get terribly excited about as an end-user nor is it something that most people consider when they choose a web browser.
Posted by: Zach Lipton on November 30, 2005 2:59 PMZach, I agree that as far as user-visible obvious stuff there's not as much in 1.5 as one could hope...
On that note, I would be very interested in suggestions for a way to make session history more useful on today's web -- the current setup just doesn't fly on something like gmail or google maps. For me, that's the #1 user feature I'd like to see in a browser.
Posted by: Boris on November 30, 2005 9:31 PMLet me just make one thing clear: 1.5 is not a joke. It represents a very real improvement over 1.0 and many months of hard work by many very talented people. The back/forward cache is a _huge_ improvement. Redoing Options needed to be done; there were actual UI improvements that needed to be made there. Software Update is extremely, extremely, extremely important. Yes it should have been done right before, but it's actually pretty hard to do well, especially when it has to work on three platforms and have a whole server architecture developed around it.
Yes we need to innovate for 2.0, but please don't think that 1.5 was a joke. It wasn't.
Posted by: Zach Lipton on December 2, 2005 1:13 PMYou've recently released 1.5 version of Firefox and now are already talking about a new version. Guys, you are working harder than i've thought! =)
Posted by: Ford on December 7, 2005 10:42 AMPersonly, I think the old options pannle is far cleaner and easier to navagate from a user perspective.
Posted by: Nick on December 8, 2005 11:42 AMwell i think firefox developers should start some more visible changes so that NORMAL PEOPLE CAN UNDERSTAND.
90 % of population doesn't know what SVG, CSS, or Acid Test is !!!!!!!!!!
How about some integrated network saving of bookmarks. Maybe with some help from google? Could you have a 'bookmark probider' as well as search providers? I hate having to add bookmarks on all the machines I use.
Posted by: Spud on December 19, 2005 1:17 PMSome improvements to the download manager would be nice. Maybe they could take some inspiration from Free Download Manager, minus the ads obviously.
Posted by: Andy on January 17, 2006 9:24 AMWell there has been some issues with 1.5 although it has been generally become more stable since the release. Increasingly hoggin more memory is something that proves to be a bane for people with slow system. whenever i fire up my taskbar firefox is there with about 70k usage and its expanding. It should provide some tool or utility to decomission those extensions for a while that we dont use so frequently or maybe provide for better stability if you increasingly add more plugins. For i have seen the session manager crashes like hell if you have more plugins.
What i think firefox needs to include in the future is be the perfect companion to your IMs maybe like implementing messenger support within your browser like gmail or maybe provide for chatting with the people on a website you are surfing on.
Plus i think it needs to have a more "flashy" interface like MAC OS has on its application or maybe something in the new vista aero theme coz right now despite the skins it does look a lil bland and static.
Posted by: Nabeel Khan on May 15, 2006 3:47 AM