Firefox 3 Plans and IE8 Speculation 274
ReadWriteWeb writes "Information about the next versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer suggest that the two biggest browsers are heading in different directions. Mozilla has published a wiki page detailing its plans for the next version of Firefox, codenamed 'Gran Paradiso'. Among the mandatory requirements listed for FF3 are improving the add-on experience, providing an extensible bookmarks back-end platform, adding more support for web services "to act as content handlers" — all of which show that Firefox wants to be an independent information broker rather than a simple HTML renderer in its next version. Also in the works is Microsoft's IE8. According to ActiveWin.com, a Microsoft official at CES told them that work has already begun for IE 8 and it may be released as a final product 'within 18-24 months'. Looking ahead, it's obvious that IE will continue to hook into the advanced functionality that Vista offers."
That old saying about SMPT (Score:3, Funny)
Re:That old saying about SMPT (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That old saying about SMPT (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
What's up with the code names, anyway? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why are they using code names?
I can understand how it could be necessary for things like the original Mac and Windows 95. But why for yet-another-version of an established product?
As I see it, either they might as well call it "the upcoming Firefox v3", or they should not (want to) discuss it publicly at all.
Or is it just to keep Marketing occupied with something harmless?
Re:What's up with the code names, anyway? (Score:5, Informative)
For the same reason Windows Vista used to be called by the codename 'Longhorn' or that Ubuntu 6.10 is referred to by the codename 'Edgy Eft'. Because when they start working on the release, they don't know what they will end up calling it. "FF3" could just as easily end up being FF2.5 instead of FF3 if they don't end up with all the features that they wanted.
Re: (Score:2)
For the same reason Windows Vista used to be called by the codename 'Longhorn' or that Ubuntu 6.10 is referred to by the codename 'Edgy Eft'. Because when they start working on the release, they don't know what they will end up calling it. "FF3" could just as easily end up being FF2.5 instead of FF3 if they don't end up with all the features that they wanted.
Yes and no. They ought to have a pretty clear picture of wether they are aiming for a an upgrade (minor version bump), a full resease (major version bump), or a new product altogether (new trade name). Yes, I realize that these are big projects, but they are (suuposed to) adhere to a roadmap. By the time you get to selecting which features to include, you'll know what order of vorsion bump you're aiming for. Or not. :-p
MS Longhorn: Sure, they need a trade name to stick on the box, and think Windows 2100 ai
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I see both of your points though, it isn't very necessary but what if they don't end up calling it anything close to Firefox 3.0. What if they decide to go with a new naming convention by the time the release comes around? They could end up calling it Firefox Revolutions or Firefox Reloaded or... wait - those are Matrix movie names =\.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason is because code names are cool and they want to call it a really cool code name.
KFG
Re:What's up with the code names, anyway? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:What's up with the code names, anyway? (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't confuse news from third-party sources with news from the developers. The people that wrote this article are not on the team. Mozilla simply doesn't keep their development plans a secret. (They created a publicly accessible wiki.)
Re:What's up with the code names, anyway? (Score:4, Insightful)
It also makes it clear that it's not for public consumption. If you called it "Firefox 3 Alpha 1" you'd have tons of Firefox fanboys rushing to download the "latest" version of their favorite browser. Firefox versions that don't carry the "Firefox" name aren't ready for prime time; labeling them differently sends that message.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What's up with the code names, anyway? (Score:5, Informative)
Not even because it's fun. Try reading the Mozilla forums sometime.
The browsers are given development codenames to SIGNIFICANTLY differentiate the development nightly/alpha/beta releases from the blessed official version releases. They don't want Grandpa Joe Sixpack coming along to download this "FoxFire thingy" he heard his kids talk about and accidently wind up with Firefox 3.0 Alpha 1, (which may or may not work as advertised because, well, it's an alpha) when he's obviously not interested in a development release.
Another reason is that it's less confusing and ambiguous, especially when you have multiple versions of Firefox. It's easy to get confused about which feature went into which product when you have "Firefox 1.0", "Firefox 1.5", "Firefox 2.0", "Firefox 3.0" and so forth. At least from a developer perspective, there's more uniqueness to "Phoenix", "Deer Park", "Bon Echo", and "Gran Paradiso" releases from the associated mental imagery.
But keeping them distinct and less noticable from the end user perspective is the most important reason.
Re: (Score:2)
I can't speak for the Mozilla people, but in my company when we have an internal codename for a project, it has been chosen so as to be something which marketing would never use to describe it.
That way, you can have something to refer to it, it may not be ob
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Meaning of the name (Score:2)
The Gran Paradiso [wikipedia.org] is the tallest peak of the Graian Alps at over 4,000 metres, and gives the name to Italy's oldest National Park [parks.it] (1856). And by the way, "Gran Paradiso" is a masculine name, so it does definitely not fit a woman.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Because it's just more interesting that way. The code name doesn't really mean anything and there is no reason they can't call it "Firefox 3". But that's kinda boring. I gather the Mozilla team has a good sense of humor and like to keep their project fun, whether they have to invent the fun via funny code names or not.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember hearing that one of the previous firefox code names was "The Ocho", even though the release had nothing to do with
features (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:features (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I like firefox because it added tabs and simplified the web browser interface (its options screens seem so straightforward and easy to navigate compared to IE's internet options). I think that improving the way extensions are handled would be a good g
Re:features (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:features (Score:5, Insightful)
It's hard to relate to your statement since you provided no concrete arguments or examples. In fact, it sounds as if you were implying that the sheer fact that there's a new release and therefore new stuff coming up means that the application is getting bloated. Perhaps they should halt the development, so not to introduce more bloat, huh?
Re: (Score:2)
What makes you think so? If you look at it closely, Firefox sticks to its assumptions. The new features are either supplementing or replacing previous ones, like the improved bookmarks system, or are mostly about streamlining the already existing usage paths.
TABBED BROWSING is what makes me think so. Don't need it. Don't want it. Never wanted it. Don't like it. Didn't ask for it. I find tabs incredibly annoying-- more often than not I find that tabs have opened in the background that I didn't ask f
Re: (Score:2)
A 1G vsize for one...
PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE
332 firefox-bi 1.5% 9:47:18 20 535 1014 140M 40.9M 163M 957M
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Large caches can remain in RAM and the only reason not to keep them there would be if you wanted to ensure persistence across sessions or you were running out of virtual address space. Otherwise the operating system should really be doing it's job in swapping out unused portions of memory to disk on your behalf.
That's not to say that a program can't take some consideration in its allocation
What Bloat? (Score:3, Insightful)
Other than that it's improving the functionality and usability of things that already exist, or building a simple framework that will let other systems (extensions or webservices) provide additional features like microformats and id
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You are confusing a broker with a client (and webservices with
Re: (Score:2)
No. Chances are, he really doesn't give a damn one way or another. Chances are, even, that he never even noticed.
So who cares?
There are two types of people on Slashdot- those who are slavishly devoted to Open Source and Free Software and those who want to get work done. I would even go so far as to argue that in a vast majority of
Re: (Score:2, Redundant)
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2324/ [mozilla.org] works for me.
Sticking with FF (Score:4, Interesting)
Firefox 2 has ben extremely stable except with a few quirks, which stems from my computer being slow as hell. I look forward to what Firefox 3 bring to the table.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, thank goodness for that.
IE8? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The parent's joke is at the expense of Microsoft because it took them 5 bloody years to get from IE6 to IE7. Mozilla and Opera managed quite a few major releases in that time, probably because they are actually focused on making their browsers better, and aren't just developing because they feel they have to in order to maintain a slipping market dominance.
Re: (Score:2)
Internet Explorer 8 (Score:5, Insightful)
Does that include the ability to only run on Vista?
Re: (Score:2)
That's probably a safe bet. Windows XP would actually be out of "mainstream support" today (more than 5 years from release [microsoft.com]) if Vista hadn't been delayed. Microsoft decided a year ago to extend support for XP indefinitely. Now that Vista's out, WinXP is the new Win2k. It seem likely that XP will drop into "extended support" (i.e. security fixes only, and only for XP Pro) sometime during the "18-24 month" timeframe cited for IE8
Detachable tabs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
On a similar vein (Score:5, Insightful)
All this seems to point to vertical desktop space being overutilized and horizontal desktop space being underutilized. So why force tabs into vertical space? Give me the option to put them on the side(s).
Re: (Score:2)
Mod parent up. Last year, I got a 1920x1080 display at home and work, and the most jarring thing was reading webpages, because they're all very tall [wikipedia.org] and relatively narrow (most are designed for something closer to 1024 pixels wide). The trend these days is for larger monitors, so that ultimately means excess horizontal space, regardless if your display is 4:3 or 16:9/10.
Ultimately, HTML should may solve the problem by making it possible to automatically add extra columns to fill the width [w3.org] like newspaper
Re:On a similar vein (Score:4, Informative)
http://users.blueprintit.co.uk/~dave/web/firefox/
Yes, isn't officially on addons.mozilla.org, but this addon has been out there for a while.
You can always inspect the code if you want.
Looking forward to Bookmarks improvements! (Score:4, Interesting)
How it was in Mozilla was actually better than Firefox now, the context menu in the app/toolbar menus were so good you'd hardly ever need to use "Manage Bookmarks".
Anyway, people are allegedly no longer using bookmarks in favour of tag clouds and what-have-you
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
I predict for IE 8... (Score:5, Funny)
It worked last time
IE8 and Vista Integration (Score:3, Funny)
I wonder if... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I wonder if... (Score:4, Informative)
Mod Parent Up!
It seems to be common to misuse FF as the FireFox abbreviation. Indeed, I can produce countless IRC logs of instances when users bash each other for using incorrect abbreviations.
Often, the FF acronym is associated with Final Fantasy, (FFVI was released in America as FFIII for anyone who doesn't get the reference).
For the record, the proper abbreviation is Fx [mozilla.org].
Re: (Score:2)
Rushing IE8 (Score:2, Funny)
Hole-y crap!
I'd be happy... (Score:2, Interesting)
Granted, this only really happens when I have 50 or so tabs open across a few windows, but that is fairly normal usage for me and boy is it annoying.
Yes, my ram's good. No, it doesn't matter if I have any extensions. No, nothing on the "yeah, this problem really doesn't exist, but if it did, you could try these steps to fix it" problem denial page.
The built in session restore feature is nice (as long as your connection can handle 2500 outbound connec
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Try it. You may be pleasantly surprised. You'll have less crashing *and* less CPU wasting flash ads running in the background.
Fit and Finish? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Are you using Safari 0.5 beta or something? I'm fairly certain Safari has had tabs since the beginning.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Information Broker = Your new corporate overlords (Score:2)
It seems to me that what we're about to witness is the steady creep of corporate interest into the browser.
Already, Mozilla makes millions from its partnership with Google (via the search box in the upper right).
As information broker, I think we're going to see pre-selective integration with applications and web services.
This is great for Amazon, Google, eBay, Yahoo!, etc.
So have we traded Microsof
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Information Broker = Your new corporate overlor (Score:2)
It's a lot like Opera's ability to highlight text on a page and send it to a
Re:Information Broker = Your new corporate overlor (Score:2)
I for one welcome our new information broker corporate overlords.
on a more serious note, it's open source. someone will fork it or write an extension that disables what you (they) don't like.
-1, Alarmist
Oh boy, here we go. (Score:2)
Yeah, it could be better - though officially supporting and easing the search for addons would be fine with me.
providing an extensible bookmarks back-end platform adding more support for web services "to act as content handlers" -- all of which show that Firefox wants to be an independent information broker rather than a simple HTML renderer in its next version.
Whoa, hey, time to get off this train. I understand this whole convergence thing, and sometimes it's good, but I'd
Re: (Score:2)
Hey presto, your wish has been granted [portableapps.com]. Have fun. :)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Hmm sounds like a spot-on description of the 'install procedure' of applications on OS X
extensible bookmarks back-end platform ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Can somebody translate this to English?
Re: (Score:2)
Put bookmarks (and history, etc.) in a lightweight database instead of a big long HTML file. This will make it possible for the user to store a lot more bookmarks before performance degrades, will make it easier to search, etc.
The end (Score:2)
And it's not as good as you'd hoped. Ajax applications aren't quite good enough for prime time, but there doesn't appear to be an
Re: (Score:2)
A hell of a lot of the contortions that designers go through would simply not be necessary if Internet Explorer supported CSS tabs and generated content, and Firefox supported display: inline-block.
Re: (Score:2)
Firefox and Opera have their niches and I suspect Opera's is bigger and thus will gradually steal marketshare away from both IE & Firefox.
The focus should be on the websites anyway. I still think Opera's configurability is a winner but maybe people don't mind having to fit in with programmers' bizarre ways of doing things.
Re: (Score:2)
That's not design bloat; that's creating a language that works the way the designers are used to working rather than forcing them to do it your way. What's left is an ungainly and unreliable combination of floats and explicit offsets
SQLite (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
FIX CSS ALREADY (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Just because browsers do not implement real DTD checking yet does not mean valid doctypes are meaningless. We call this feature "not adhering to the standard."
Syntax checkers, for example, do recognize DTDs.
multi-threaded UI yet? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's not a trivial problem to solve, because web pages assume a single-threaded execution model. therefore any two web pages that can access each other must run on the same thread. That's basically all web pages, given enablePrivilege.
And worse yet, the UI is effectively the same thing as a web page in Firefox (rendered by the same rendering engine, has a DOM, etc). So you get very similar constraints.
The initial design docs for Mozilla did call for one thread per toplevel window, but that someh
Bah. (Score:2, Insightful)
MS CypherSpeak (Score:2)
Where do I go to get back to "lean and mean"... (Score:2)
Re:Hope its better than FF2 (Score:4, Funny)
You are talking about Final Fantasy aren't you?
Curse you! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If Firefox starts supporting, say, hCard and hCalendar by making it possible to send the data to the Thunderbird address book or the calendar app of your choice, there's nothing to stop Opera, Apple, or indeed Microsoft from doing the same thing. Other browser developers don't have to reverse-engineer the featur
Re: (Score:2)
Re:CSS (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)