Exiting new Firefox feature in the latest nightly build
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They've been working on it for 8 years. This should be awesome.
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I have no idea how that's supposed to work.
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Where is it exiting to?
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@El_Heffe said:
Exiting
Exiting? So it's about to land (after 8 years) and yet it's exiting at the same time? I suppose that's how it goes with software; one person wastes ages creating a useless feature, and in the very build that it is supposed to make its début, it gets pulled. C'est la vie.@toth said:Where is it exiting to?
Damn ninjas!
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I thought it was going to be the web-history-leaks-through-:visited bug.
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- I think they're talking about cloning objects, or changing an object's parent, or something. I don't know for certain because I couldn't be arsed to read past the first 3 comments.
- It's "exciting" not "exiting", unless we're talking about what the half-decent software developers at Mozilla are doing.
- Further to the previous point, HOW FUCKING LONG DOES IT TAKE TO RELEASE FIREFOX 4 BETA 7? SSL via an NTLM proxy has been completely broken since beta 5 which came out like 2 months ago. (And no, I'm not going to use a nightly build because I barely trust Mozilla not to fuck up my bookmarks at the best of time.)
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@moog said:
people can read your memories
Sounds good to me. Perhaps I can use that to read my own memory and work out all the things I forget. Like people's names. And faces. And that meeting I was supposed to be at. And where I left the keys. Seriously, if I don't see it written down, I won't remember, so this feature should become standard in all software.
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@The_Assimilator said:
SSL via an NTLM proxy has been completely broken since beta 5 which came out like 2 months ago. (And no, I'm not going to use a nightly build because I barely trust Mozilla not to fuck up my bookmarks at the best of time.)
Well, why are you even using a beta then?
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@El_Heffe said:
They've been working on it for 8 years.
8 years? They've implemented it in 3 months! Geniouses!
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Actually, Comment #3 in the list makes the meaning of 'brain transplant' reasonably clear:
"a very limited brain transplant (switch handlers) between the outer window (proxy) and the wrapper (proxy)."
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@Spectre said:
@El_Heffe said:
They've been working on it for 8 years.
8 years? They've implemented it in 3 months! Geniouses!
Yes. Pure genious. I am looking forward to a brain transplant. Maybe then I'll remember how to spell "exciting".
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@moog said:
I thought it was going to be the web-history-leaks-through-:visited bug.
That's not a bug. That's an oversight in the spec. Firefox could hack the functionality of :visited, but then they'd technically be the buggy one.
Off-topic: I was reading a great article the other day, about how a lot of things that web devs perceive as bugs in IE8 are actually faithful to the spec, and Mozilla, WebKit, get the spec wrong. Simply because Microsoft isn't part of the browser "cabal." (WebKit: "How is this HTML4 feature supposed to work?" "Just do what Mozilla does." Mozilla: "How is that HTML5 feature supposed to work?" "Just do what WebKit does.") Microsoft's independent implementation of the W3C specs is actually a good thing, and the closest it gets to actual real-world testing, but they're going to get roasted over the flames for IE9 not following the HTML5 spec the same way the cabal does, even if they're equally accurate. There's no justice.
Note that the HTML5 spec is supposed to be "final" once it gets two complete independent implementations. The problem is that if the two implementations are in the cabal, it doesn't really prove anything about the spec because the cabal browsers are all just borrowing from each other.
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@blakeyrat said:
I was reading a great article the other day, about how a lot of things that web devs perceive as bugs in IE8 are actually faithful to the spec,
What's the article?
I ask professionally. I expect to find a blow-by-blow, which will help me in my work.
Currently, I find that there's basically nothing at all that I write that IE8 does differently from the cabal. I write shit for FFX (because firebug is best tool evar), then when I got to test the rest, I pre-emptively put IE in 7-mode because I've come to expect IE8 to work the same.
There have been very, very, very rare edge cases in the past two years where my stuff had a bug in Chrome/Safari that looked fine in FFX and IE8. Both of them were related to the wrapping behaviour of/around floating elements and easily fixed.
...
Oh, I lie: the third one was related to Sarafi 3-'s nonstandard and Mac's smooth antialiasing, causing a 1-pixel difference in final glyph height for some text. This was when we still used a Mac Mini to test Safari.
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@blakeyrat said:
Microsoft's independent implementation of the W3C specs is actually a good thing, and the closest it gets to actual real-world testing, but they're going to get roasted over the flames for IE9 not following the HTML5 spec the same way the cabal does, even if they're equally accurate. There's no justice.
Justice may be hard to come by, but reputation is not. There's a reason IE is always assumed to be wrong when it disagrees with the vast browser-implementation conspiracy.
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@dhromed said:
Currently, I find that there's basically nothing at all that I write that IE8 does differently from the cabal. I write shit for FFX (because firebug is best tool evar), then when I got to test the rest, I pre-emptively put IE in 7-mode because I've come to expect IE8 to work the same.
Well, I've found one "buglike standard-compliancy" in IE8 myself. To be honest, it's not HTML5, it's Unicode. The U+200B zero-width space belongs to some character category (I don't remember the details) that, in short, specifies the word break should NOT happen if the ZWSP is put next to a "punctuation character" (yeah, seriously... what have you been smoking, Unicode authors?). IE8 honours that, so long links that had the U+200B insterted after each dot in the displayed value for wrapping did not wrap in IE8.
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8 years?
2010-07-19 till 2010-10-20 is 8 years fot You ?
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@spamcourt said:
8 years?
2010-07-19 till 2010-10-20 is 8 years fot You ?
Yeah, I had another tab open with a bug that started in 2002. I really need that brain transplant.
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@blakeyrat said:
Off-topic: I was reading a great article the other day, about how a lot of things that web devs perceive as bugs in IE8 are actually faithful to the spec, and Mozilla, WebKit, get the spec wrong. Simply because Microsoft isn't part of the browser "cabal." (WebKit: "How is this HTML4 feature supposed to work?" "Just do what Mozilla does." Mozilla: "How is that HTML5 feature supposed to work?" "Just do what WebKit does.") Microsoft's independent implementation of the W3C specs is actually a good thing, and the closest it gets to actual real-world testing, but they're going to get roasted over the flames for IE9 not following the HTML5 spec the same way the cabal does, even if they're equally accurate. There's no justice.
And yet, somehow...@[url]http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/01/w3c_html5_conformance_tests/[/url] said:Note that the HTML5 spec is supposed to be "final" once it gets two complete independent implementations. The problem is that if the two implementations are in the cabal, it doesn't really prove anything about the spec because the cabal browsers are all just borrowing from each other.
The Worldwide Web Consortium has released the results of its first HTML5 conformance tests, and according to this initial rundown, the browser that most closely adheres to the latest set of web standards is...Microsoft Internet Explorer 9.
The W3C tests — available here — put IE9 beta release 6 at the top of the HTML5 conformance table, followed by the Firefox 4 beta 6, Google Chrome 7, Opera 10.6, and Safari 5.0. The tests cover seven aspects of the spec: "attributes", "audio", "video", "canvas", "getElementsByClassName", "foreigncontent," and "xhtml5"
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@Zecc said:
[/quote]@blakeyrat said:
Off-topic: I was reading a great article the other day, about how a lot of things that web devs perceive as bugs in IE8 are actually faithful to the spec, and Mozilla, WebKit, get the spec wrong. Simply because Microsoft isn't part of the browser "cabal." (WebKit: "How is this HTML4 feature supposed to work?" "Just do what Mozilla does." Mozilla: "How is that HTML5 feature supposed to work?" "Just do what WebKit does.") Microsoft's independent implementation of the W3C specs is actually a good thing, and the closest it gets to actual real-world testing, but they're going to get roasted over the flames for IE9 not following the HTML5 spec the same way the cabal does, even if they're equally accurate. There's no justice.
And yet, somehow...[quote user="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/01/w3c_html5_conformance_tests/"] The Worldwide Web Consortium has released the results of its first HTML5 conformance tests, and according to this initial rundown, the browser that most closely adheres to the latest set of web standards is...Microsoft Internet Explorer 9.Note that the HTML5 spec is supposed to be "final" once it gets two complete independent implementations. The problem is that if the two implementations are in the cabal, it doesn't really prove anything about the spec because the cabal browsers are all just borrowing from each other.
The W3C tests — available here — put IE9 beta release 6 at the top of the HTML5 conformance table, followed by the Firefox 4 beta 6, Google Chrome 7, Opera 10.6, and Safari 5.0. The tests cover seven aspects of the spec: "attributes", "audio", "video", "canvas", "getElementsByClassName", "foreigncontent," and "xhtml5"Yeah, isn't it hilarious? See the teeth-gnashing on Slashdot: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/11/02/1851255 The amount of contorting and twisting required to get that community to somehow correlate "standards are good" with "Microsoft has best standard support" with "oh God we hate Microsoft and particularly IE", well, it's just hilarious to read. (I particularly liked this one: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1851100&cid=34104622 paraphrased: "if IE9 has good HTML5 support, it must have shitty HTML4 support!" and this one: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1851100&cid=34106074 "IE9 only passes the test because MS wrote a lot of the test-cases.")
*ahem*, anyway. I wasn't trying to give the impression that the W3C was biased against IE (although I firmly believe they used to be, I don't think they are anymore), or that the other browsers banding together in a code-sharing cabal meant that IE was always going to be behind standards-wise.
But you're right, this kind of invalidates my point... hrm.
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@Spectre said:
@The_Assimilator said:
SSL via an NTLM proxy has been completely broken since beta 5 which came out like 2 months ago. (And no, I'm not going to use a nightly build because I barely trust Mozilla not to fuck up my bookmarks at the best of time.)
Well, why are you even using a beta then?
Until Firefox 4, I'd never encountered beta software that had some of its fundamental functionality be completely broken. It's a fucking web browser; if it can't browse the web, it's useless. Beta software is supposed to be feature-complete with potentially some small, non-show-stopping bugs... Mozilla's "beta" is more like an alpha because every new build adds new features and breaks at least one existing one. Why they didn't just add Aero support to a 3.x release I don't know.
TL;DR Mozilla are doing an excellent job of flushing the Firefox brand down the toilet by forgoing QA and testing in favour of MOAR FEATURES.
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Does anyone except /.ers have a reason to use Firefox? I'm continually surprised that people on this site would go near it, since you'd think that people on TDWTF are actual geeks, not just wannabes.
I have to admit, I don't have a lot of experience with FF except removing it from people's PCs so they will work again, but from what I've seen, it's buggy as hell, slow, unusable compared to other modern browsers, and tends to break other things for no apparent reason. Apart from being a badge of honour for M$-hating teens, is there anything it does better than other browsers?
All the discussion about standards-compliance is pointless, really. IE is the de facto standard, and will be as long as it has more market-share than all other browsers put together. If you're writing W3C-compliant code that doesn't work on IE, you're doing it wrong unless you have a very specific, IE-hating target audience. If ever there's a conflict between different browsers - that is, something will only work in one or the other - IE will win out because there are far more people using it.
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@davedavenotdavemaybedave said:
Does anyone except /.ers have a reason to use Firefox? I'm continually surprised that people on this site would go near it, since you'd think that people on TDWTF are actual geeks, not just wannabes.
I have to admit, I don't have a lot of experience with FF except removing it from people's PCs so they will work again, but from what I've seen, it's buggy as hell, slow, unusable compared to other modern browsers, and tends to break other things for no apparent reason. Apart from being a badge of honour for M$-hating teens, is there anything it does better than other browsers?
All the discussion about standards-compliance is pointless, really. IE is the de facto standard, and will be as long as it has more market-share than all other browsers put together. If you're writing W3C-compliant code that doesn't work on IE, you're doing it wrong unless you have a very specific, IE-hating target audience. If ever there's a conflict between different browsers - that is, something will only work in one or the other - IE will win out because there are far more people using it.
Before Chrome I used it, despite its memory gluttony. Once I started trying Chrome, I pretty much stopped using FF except for web development, which I used for Firebug/Web Developer Toolbar. But Chrome's web dev facilities are getting better and better, and I'm using FF less and less.
I suppose I could have started using, say, Opera or Safari instead of FF way back then, but you tend to get accustomed to your software pretty easily and I just ended up with FF.
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@toth said:
I pretty much stopped using FF except for web development, which I used for Firebug/Web Developer Toolbar.
Undoubtedly Firebug is a superior implementation, but I want to say in fair credit that IE had DOM Toolbar long before Firebug existed. (I also switched to Firebug when it got mature, but people act like IE never had any dev tools at all-- which is sad, because it means some of those people were developing IE sites without using DOM Toolbar!)
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@blakeyrat said:
@toth said:
I pretty much stopped using FF except for web development, which I used for Firebug/Web Developer Toolbar.
Undoubtedly Firebug is a superior implementation, but I want to say in fair credit that IE had DOM Toolbar long before Firebug existed. (I also switched to Firebug when it got mature, but people act like IE never had any dev tools at all-- which is sad, because it means some of those people were developing IE sites without using DOM Toolbar!)
Sure, IE HAD such a thing. It just sucked donkey balls.
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@toth said:
Sure, IE HAD such a thing. It just sucked donkey balls.
As long as you know it had it, I'm happy. I'm just sick of people acting like Firefox invented the concept.
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@blakeyrat said:
@toth said:
Sure, IE HAD such a thing. It just sucked donkey balls.
As long as you know it had it, I'm happy. I'm just sick of people acting like Firefox invented the concept.
They may not have invented the concept (wait, is Firebug even produced by Mozilla? I thought it was third-party...), but they made it usable and yes, even fun. When I've tried to use IE's solution (pre-IE8, that is--IE8's developer tools are significantly better), I generally threw up my hands in frustration and ended up doing without it.
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@davedavenotdavemaybedave said:
Does anyone except /.ers have a reason to use Firefox?
Personally I use it as I have a particular fondness for some of the addons and the memory issues don't cause me issues. The other things I either don't notice or don't mind. But if some of those addons I like move to Chrome then I would switch.
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@davedavenotdavemaybedave said:
Does anyone except /.ers have a reason to use Firefox? I'm continually surprised that people on this site would go near it, since you'd think that people on TDWTF are actual geeks, not just wannabes.
IE has horrible JScript implementation. Many sites, for example, MSDN blogs use scripts. If you go to http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing, IE7 freezes for a few seconds while loading it, or any article. I encountered many other sites with same slow performance problem. Because of that, I have to use FF, even though I'm not a fan of it.
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@davedavenotdavemaybedave said:
Does anyone except /.ers have a reason to use Firefox? I'm continually surprised that people on this site would go near it. I don't have a lot of experience with FF except removing it from people's PCs so they will work again, but from what I've seen, it's buggy as hell, slow, unusable compared to other modern browsers, and tends to break other things for no apparent reason.
Are you posting from this universe? Its only two major issues currently (not counting the 4beta) are the cold startup times, and its memory lunacy. These are good reasons to avoid it. Everything else is good. It is not buggy. It is not slow (opening a new tab in IE takes a full second. Every other browser is instant.). I have no idea what you mean by "unusable". It does not break things.
So, provide specifics, please, or quit constructing an argument out of unproductive vaguaries.
I could detail some things that I think work so much better in FFX than the others, but it's 0:45 and let's just suffice that I'm investigating Chrome's addon collection to see if I can replicate the few must-have addons I have for FFX, because I do kind of like Chrome; it's just an objective matter of comparing features that makes it #2 after FFX for me.
I'm not happy with FFX beta-that-is-really-alpha. It's doing some things very very wrong, interface-wise.
I would try IE9 beta, but I'm stuck on the common issue of the installer going catatonic 30% in. Ugly icon, though.
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@dhromed said:
Are you posting from this universe? Its only two major issues currently (not counting the 4beta) are the cold startup times, and its memory lunacy. These are good reasons to avoid it. Everything else is good. It is not buggy. It is not slow (opening a new tab in IE takes a full second. Every other browser is instant.). I have no idea what you mean by "unusable". It does not break things.
Of course my FF had to crash about 10 seconds after I've read your post...
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@dhromed said:
@davedavenotdavemaybedave said:
Does anyone except /.ers have a reason to use Firefox? I'm continually surprised that people on this site would go near it. I don't have a lot of experience with FF except removing it from
people's PCs so they will work again, but from what I've seen, it's
buggy as hell, slow, unusable compared to other modern browsers, and
tends to break other things for no apparent reason.Are you posting from this universe? Its only two major issues currently (not counting the 4beta) are the cold startup times, and its memory lunacy. These are good reasons to avoid it. Everything else is good. It is not buggy. It is not slow (opening a new tab in IE takes a full second. Every other browser is instant.). I have no idea what you mean by "unusable". It does not break things.
So, provide specifics, please, or quit constructing an argument out of unproductive vaguaries.
I could detail some things that I think work so much better in FFX than the others, but it's 0:45 and let's just suffice that I'm investigating Chrome's addon collection to see if I can replicate the few must-have addons I have for FFX, because I do kind of like Chrome; it's just an objective matter of comparing features that makes it #2 after FFX for me.
I'm not happy with FFX beta-that-is-really-alpha. It's doing some things very very wrong, interface-wise.
I would try IE9 beta, but I'm stuck on the common issue of the installer going catatonic 30% in. Ugly icon, though.
You? Colour me surprised.
Let's start with unusable. The only benefit of Firefox's complicated and unwieldy interface is that you can feel clever for penetrating it to change whatever simple setting you wanted to change. Otherwise, it's a nightmare. If you're not a geek who enjoys puzzles, Firefox is quite literally unusable.
Which brings us onto the second problem: it just doesn't work. I don't know why, because I've never cared enough to find out. Numerous times, though, I've seen many Windows PCs with all kinds of strange problems that were fixed by uninstalling Firefox. Maybe it's selection bias, but I've never met a non-geek who used Firefox and didn't complain incessantly about it not working. I would hazard a guess that these problems are caused by a combination of the 'memory lunacy' and impenetrable, unfathomably complex options and settings that people who know just enough about IT to install Firefox will think they know how to fiddle with.
However, you've just dismissed my problems with FF. I asked for reasons to use it. Have you any?
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@davedavenotdavemaybedave said:
@dhromed said:
@davedavenotdavemaybedave said:
Does anyone except /.ers have a reason to use Firefox? I'm continually surprised that people on this site would go near it. I don't have a lot of experience with FF except removing it from
people's PCs so they will work again, but from what I've seen, it's
buggy as hell, slow, unusable compared to other modern browsers, and
tends to break other things for no apparent reason.Are you posting from this universe? Its only two major issues currently (not counting the 4beta) are the cold startup times, and its memory lunacy. These are good reasons to avoid it. Everything else is good. It is not buggy. It is not slow (opening a new tab in IE takes a full second. Every other browser is instant.). I have no idea what you mean by "unusable". It does not break things.
So, provide specifics, please, or quit constructing an argument out of unproductive vaguaries.
I could detail some things that I think work so much better in FFX than the others, but it's 0:45 and let's just suffice that I'm investigating Chrome's addon collection to see if I can replicate the few must-have addons I have for FFX, because I do kind of like Chrome; it's just an objective matter of comparing features that makes it #2 after FFX for me.
I'm not happy with FFX beta-that-is-really-alpha. It's doing some things very very wrong, interface-wise.
I would try IE9 beta, but I'm stuck on the common issue of the installer going catatonic 30% in. Ugly icon, though.
You? Colour me surprised.
Let's start with unusable. The only benefit of Firefox's complicated and unwieldy interface is that you can feel clever for penetrating it to change whatever simple setting you wanted to change. Otherwise, it's a nightmare. If you're not a geek who enjoys puzzles, Firefox is quite literally unusable.
Which brings us onto the second problem: it just doesn't work. I don't know why, because I've never cared enough to find out. Numerous times, though, I've seen many Windows PCs with all kinds of strange problems that were fixed by uninstalling Firefox. Maybe it's selection bias, but I've never met a non-geek who used Firefox and didn't complain incessantly about it not working. I would hazard a guess that these problems are caused by a combination of the 'memory lunacy' and impenetrable, unfathomably complex options and settings that people who know just enough about IT to install Firefox will think they know how to fiddle with.
However, you've just dismissed my problems with FF. I asked for reasons to use it. Have you any?
Okay as someone with little IT experience (namely none in any industry sense) I can tell you exactly why the average teenager uses each browser (IE, Chrome, FF) and why dhromed is telling you to get FF. IE is the slower of three with longer startup times and IE7&8 were a pain on netbooks due to the the 2 inches of screen space consumed by toolbars that came preinstalled. But it's a browser to use to ensure compatibility. Firefox allows a larger amount of customized addons to extend what it can do. A lot of IT students have it for that reason. (I currently use it to download flash videos using an addon) It is normally faster than IE by a fair margin, but it can quickly become slow if too many addons are installed. This may also be the reason you see so many screwed installations (users installing everything they see can cause issues). Chrome is the fastest browser...normally, and has the lowest memory usage....sometimes. In some cases it can jump far ahead of the others but it normally has less bloat. However it is not know for being perfect as it is the youngest software browser of the three. However it is the best to use on smaller screens as it has the smallest gui. However it too can also have addons (though there is less choice that FF) and these can cause problems with speed as well.
SO that's why each is used:
IE: Typical, preinstalled, compatability, secure, etc
FF: Faster, more customisable so you can ruin it
Chrome: Fastest...sometimes, slightly customisable.
So in summation, each has it's own pros and cons and I use all three for different purposes but mainly use FF and Chrome for my general browsing as they work faster with less bloat. I hope that helps answer your question of why people think you should use FF instead of IE....
Actually, I am ignoring the main reason a lot of people my age install Firefox....Adblock. An addon designed to hide annoying flash adds, but I figured that wouldn't be a suitable reason for you.
I assume dhromed is telling you to get FF instead of IE as FF is NORMALLY (not always) a faster browser when it doesn't have a million addons.
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@davedavenotdavemaybedave said:
The only benefit of Firefox's complicated and unwieldy interface is that you can feel clever for penetrating it to change whatever simple setting you wanted to change. Otherwise, it's a nightmare. If you're not a geek who enjoys puzzles, Firefox is quite literally unusable.
My wife, who is as far away from being a "geek" as you can possibly get, uses Firefox quite well and has no problems. She also uses Firefox with no addons, which is the number one reason that people have problems with Firefox. Other than AdBlock and maybe a couple others, all of the Firefox addons are amateur junk of the worst sort.
Every once in a while I try the the latest versions of Chrome and Opera and yes they are fast. But speed by itself isn't very useful.. There are just too many missing features or features that aren't implemented well (AdBlock for Chrome I'm looking at you). Same with Internet Explorer -- it works reasonably well but it only takes a couple of minutes to be reminded just how much the Internet really sucks without AdBlock.
Unfortunately, Firefox 4 is headed down the path of massive feature creep and playing the Windows Vista/7 game of "let's change a whole bunch of stuff, just because."
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@davedavenotdavemaybedave said:
Firefox's complicated and unwieldy interface
It has a location bar, back/forward buttons, home, stop, a bookmark bar and a status bar.
So that makes it exactly the same as every browser since Mosaic. I don't really get what you're referring to.
Its menus also don't differ significantly from the other ones that have a menu. I don't particularly enjoy the minimalist menus of C and S because it's plagued by the same arbitrariness as the prefs dialogs that I detail below, but I suppose I could get used to them. FFX has a new take on all of that, which I haven't used intensively yet, so I can't comment.
If you're referring to the preferences dialog, you're closer to the mark, but I would like to remind you that there is no preference dialog of any browser that does it right because every single one has their own idea of what's a "logical"/useful grouping of prefs, and which aspects should be configurable.This holds true for FFX, Safari, Chrome, IE and Opera. They are all offenders in their own way. In fact, it holds true for every single piece of software. Every single one. All of them. No exceptions.
Some software has far too many options (Miranda IM), some, like Chrome, lets you change a bare minimum, and others (Paint.Net) has no preferences at all (which is really really bad). I do think FFX prefs need to be cleaned up and reorganized, but really, your adjectives are wholly unapplicable.
@davedavenotdavemaybedave said:
Which brings us onto the second problem: it just doesn't work. Numerous times, I've seen many Windows PCs with all kinds of strange problems that were fixed by uninstalling Firefox. Maybe it's selection bias,
I'm definitely going to throw it on selection bias. A statistic: My mom has used FFX for quite some time without a hitch (because, I have to repeat, it works the same as every other browser), but I recommended Chrome to her when it gained traction because FFX's atrocious startup times are a bit too much for comfortable browsing on her computer.
@davedavenotdavemaybedave said:
impenetrable, unfathomably complex options and settings
Heh. Overreacting much? You're being vague again, but a little less so than your previous post, so we're getting there.
I'll analyze my love for Firefox later today. I will present it to this forum as a list of short concise, verifiable and reproducible things. One result may be that you shut your trap, another may be that people comment intelligently and result in me I switching browsers permanently.
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@El_Heffe said:
Unfortunately, Firefox 4 is headed down the path of massive feature creep and playing the Windows Vista/7 game of "let's change a whole bunch of stuff, just because."
It sure looks that way, but as with all UIs: you cannot comment until you've used it in its intended way in normal usage scenarios. Snap judgement is undesirable and leads to wrong conclusions.
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Reasons why I use Firefox:
- Laziness - it serves me alright most of the time, so why change? Even when it crashes, it remembers all the tabs, so it's ok.
- AdBlock
- Firebug
- ScrapBook
- I'm developing a Firefox addon for someone, so I need it anyway
Reasons why I don't use Chrome:
- Laziness - truth is, I'm used to Firefox, so changing to another browser would simply imply a habit impedance
- I prefer Download StatuBar in Firefox to its download bar
- Its developer tools are nice, but they're no Firebug
- Background updates that change stuff without warning (again, I'm using betas, so I may be getting the wrong impression because of that)
Reason why I don't use IE:
- IE4Linux? No, thank you.
Reason I don't use Opera:
- Laziness
- I have use it a bit actually, and although I like its download indicator in the address bar, I'd prefer it showed some kind of animation on the tabs that are still loading so I can see their status while on another tab
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LISTZZZ
I Love Firefox Because:
# its smooth scrolling via middle-drag and middle-click-move works well. The acceleration curve is very well-tuned.
In IE the curve is like a frickin' fifth-degree polynomial. At first there's nothing, and then you're at light speed. This is nonsense!
Testing conformed that they fixed the curves and total mouse interaction in the other browsers, so this point is no longer really a score for FFX.
# Opening tabs via middle-click is configurable (i.e. reversible).
I set FFX to open tabs in the foregorund because it makes more sense to me: I clicked it -> I want to go there. The case where I want to open a tab in the background is the exceptional one, and I use Shift+Middle for that.
#opening new tabs is instant
I only mention this because IE has always, in my experience across multiple computers and OS's, taken a full second or more. Chrome, Safari and Opera are also flawless in this respect.
#Closing a tab takes me to the tab I had before, rather than the one that's last in the list.
#The case of Many Tabs is solved well, with prevnext buttons, a smooth animation and a context menu in case things get really hairy (like when you're browsing TVtropes and you can't stop oh fuck I can't stop).
Opera and Chrome keep adding tabs until the visuals break. Uhu.
Safari makes a half-witted attempt with a context menu.
IE does a similar thing, but its arrows perform a kind of unpredictable pageup/down effect, and there's no animation. The context menu is good, though.
#All of them now support middle-click-close on a tab, which is good. FFX, however, allows you to configure the tab's close button to appear only on active tabs. I'm not sure why this common preference requires a trip to about:config.
#about:config. FFX does it, Opera does it too, and it provides a nice phalanx of advanced options for the advanced user. This is not for the normal user, but it is for me, and that's why I stick with FFX
#all them addons. Chrome is nicely arriving at this party with some stuff of its own, so I still need to research what's what.
#addons I can't do without:
* Firebug. It's the only inspector that gets it all right, where the others have apparent brainless fuckups. I could use a whole new post to detail what I need and love about firebug.
* Stylish. I am not content with how many pages look. For example, I commonly add font-family:cambria to the page combined with bigger zoom because I prefer bigger type with serif over fucking tiny Tahoma or arial, like for TDWTF and wikipedia. I perform several other subtle fixes like this, such as making quoteboxes grey so they stand out from post text, etc etc.
* Tabkit, which adds the insanely handy features of duplicating a tab; selecting text and opening all links within; selecting text and opening unlinked urls within. I don't use it for all that tab management stuff which I have no use for.
And that's it. I have one or two more addons, but they're not must-have.
#The location bar is more awesome than the awesomebars of the other browers. I usually need to type only a single char and the first result is the right one. It also allows multiple keywords, and doesn't require that an urlpart *begins* with your query, like IE.
#The ability to middle-click almost anything in the interface and having it open in a new tab. That includes things like context menus (View Image in new tab) and Back (put previous page in new tab)
#The ability to restore accidentally closed tabs. Chrome has it too, but FFX implementation is superior. Opera also uses a menu, Safari does it half-assed again with a single-shot Ctrl+Z, and IE has nothing.
#Text scaling. All except Safari use full zoom, which SUUUUUUUUUUUCKKSSSKSKS. It's remembered per domain, and about:config allows you to modify the scaling intervals. Since I read a lot on the web (forums, wikipedia, other documents), this is fundamentally important to me, in addition to Stylish for font fixes. If this changes in FFX4, I will have to jump through more hoops to enjoy the web again.
It's not all unicorns and rainbows, of course.A thing I miss in FFX is easy session mamagement. I would like to just click Save Session once, or something, and on next launch it restores my tabs. Right now it's ON or OFF, but I don't want to *always* save sessions. Contrast with my text-editor EditPlus, where always saving the open document state is something I've come to love.
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@dhromed said:
I have beening using Firefox 4 as my sole browser for two months now, so I feel I can comment on it. After quite a bit of tweaking I've got it to where it's usable and not all that terrible, but a standard installation is quite a bit of WTF. What started out as Firefox 3.7 suddenly morphed into Firefox 4 with a lot of "features" and UI changes of questionable value.@El_Heffe said:
Unfortunately, Firefox 4 is headed down the path of massive feature creep and playing the Windows Vista/7 game of "let's change a whole bunch of stuff, just because."
It sure looks that way, but as with all UIs: you cannot comment until you've used it in its intended way in normal usage scenarios. Snap judgement is undesirable and leads to wrong conclusions.
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@Zecc said:
Its developer tools are nice, but they're no Firebug
Ok, I use both on a daily basis, and I have to know: what is it you're doing in Firebug that you can't do in Chrome's dev tools? Because I've heard this, what, three times in this thread now and I'm at a loss.
I will say that Chrome's dev tools lack a cookie editor, but... hey so does Firebug! So no difference there. And Chrome's will at least list cookies and let you delete them one-by-one if you so desire.
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OK, I was drunk last night, and it sounds like I was trying to start a browser war, but in fact I was actually curious. I don't use add-ons, so I'd discounted them, but it sounds like that's a good reason to use FF if there's something you need. My experience of Firefox users is of people who know just enough about computers to have heard from /.ers that M$ SuXXxx!!!1111elebenty and FF is magical wonderstuff, so that kind of prejudices me against it.
I accept the point that all browsers basically work, so if you're using FF there's not much incentive to change.
One interesting thing that has struck me whilst thinking about this is that I use Chrome, but don't know why. I can't put my finger on why I haven't switched back to IE, given that Chrome annoys me in some ways, but there's a definite reason I can't quite put a name to at the moment.
On the slightly different subject of adblock and similar, am I alone in thinking it's not quite right to block ads? If that's how a site gets some money, should I be blocking them? Isn't that akin to saying that since you can smash a window and get in, it's fine to burgle a house?
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@Cad Delworth said:
The function that gets the handlers from the proxies should be called "Igor".Actually, Comment #3 in the list makes the meaning of 'brain transplant' reasonably clear:
"a very limited brain transplant (switch handlers) between the outer window (proxy) and the wrapper (proxy)."
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@davedavenotdavemaybedave said:
On the slightly different subject of adblock and similar, am I alone in thinking it's not quite right to block ads? If that's how a site gets some money, should I be blocking them? Isn't that akin to saying that since you can smash a window and get in, it's fine to burgle a house?
My main objection to AdBlocker is:
1) They sell it as a tool to get rid of annoying ads
2) It doesn't have any mode to actually work that way(Kind of like how Napster claimed their program existed to find new music you otherwise wouldn't be exposed to. Leading to the obvious question, "then why do you need to know the name of the artist or song before downloading it?" But... digress.)
If AdBlock whitelisted all sites, except those you specifically blacklist, I'd be fine with it. Instead, it blacklists all sites, and you have to whitelist the sites you want to see ads on, which is completely backwards.
For the record, I work with a lot of web advertising people, and none of them particularly seem to mind AdBlock. The bigger pain is people who constantly delete cookies, or switch browsers every day, or use Safari. Because those people screw up your analytics.
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@El_Heffe said:
My brother is also a complete non-geek and he'll only use firefox. Not sure where the UI complexity comment came from, it doesn't look siginicantly different from IE in terms of layout, and about:config is much friendlier to use than regedit when you need to do a configuarion option that that GUI doesn't support. Maybe he was using a copy with Vimperator installed?My wife, who is as far away from being a "geek" as you can possibly get, uses Firefox quite well and has no problems. She also uses Firefox with no addons, which is the number one reason that people have problems with Firefox. Other than AdBlock and maybe a couple others, all of the Firefox addons are amateur junk of the worst sort.
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I also use FF, mainly for reasons already given by Dhromed or others, but I would add one very important to me :
>>> keyword-based shortcuts for searches, directly in the address bar.
What's this guy's third film again ? (direct wikipedia search)
> wiki stanley kubrick
Music maestro ! (direct youtube search)
> you sexy sushi sex-appeal
Can't remember Christopher Lloyd's face... (direct google image search)
> img christopher lloyd
etc...
I couldn't forgo this and see the homepages of all these search sites eight times a day like before...
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@blakeyrat said:
what is it you're doing in Firebug that you can't do in Chrome's dev tools?
NOTE: I'm really sure Chromium's dev tools are borked on all my workstations (there's three) as I recall actually being able to do some of these things at one time.
- Edit the HTML/CSS live
- See JS errors
- See Ajax requests (when this did work Firefox's was better as it didn't require you to make a second identical request to see the results)
- Send a fresh AJAX request and get the results
- Overall the interface is cleaner IMO
When it did work I liked how I could look at a 50k LoC JS file and scroll through without performance hits (firefox chokes on this).
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@davedavenotdavemaybedave said:
OK, I was drunk last night
ARGUMENT FROM INTOXICATION!
I accept.
@davedavenotdavemaybedave said:
One interesting thing that has struck me whilst thinking about this is that I use Chrome, but don't know why. I can't put my finger on why I haven't switched back to IE, given that Chrome annoys me in some ways, but there's a definite reason I can't quite put a name to at the moment.
Well, most browsers have most of the features, but in IE is all.. not quite right. It's in the details and the specific list would contains dozens of little things.
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@Lingerance said:
- Edit the HTML/CSS live
- See JS errors
- See Ajax requests (when this did work Firefox's was better as it didn't require you to make a second identical request to see the results)
- Send a fresh AJAX request and get the results
- Overall the interface is cleaner IMO
Wait, I'm confused. These are things you can do in Firebug, right?
Because you can do all these in Firebug because I have done all of them in Firebug.
Also:
The overlay that displays box/padding/margin/etc is fucked in Chrome and excellent in FB. In Chrome, it's all the same colour, (but box is slightly darker), edges between pad/margin/border/box are denoted with a 2px border and betwene the 2px is the edge (what the fuck are you smoking, Chrome?), and bor/pad/mar is all the same color so you can't distinguish when an element has one or the other.
In FB, it's all borderless distinctly coloured blocks and it's actually useful.
It's in the details again, and FB is just better.
Not sure on the 50Kloc js file but fuck what are you doing with a 50Kloc js file? I don't even have main code that's 50Kloc, let alone supportive js scripts. Are you implementing SDSS?
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@toshir0 said:
I also use FF, mainly for reasons already given by Dhromed or others, but I would add one very important to me :
>>> keyword-based shortcuts for searches, directly in the address bar.
If you're into this sort of thing, you might look at the Firefox add-on Ubiquity from Mozilla Labs. It gives you a separate, keyboard-triggered command-line-type-thing that can run all manner of interesting commands like this — not just searching, but just about anything you could write a little JavaScript code to do.
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@Lingerance said:
Edit the HTML/CSS live
I don't do that, so.
@Lingerance said:
See JS errors
It does this. (One thing I miss from IE: show an alert when you encounter a JS error! Without alerts, there's no incentive to fix the "harmless" errors.)
@Lingerance said:
- See Ajax requests (when this did work Firefox's was better as it didn't require you to make a second identical request to see the results)
- Send a fresh AJAX request and get the results
I use Fiddler for that, since I'm not insane. (Seriously, Firebug? Use a HTTP Debugger for debugging HTTP.)
@Lingerance said:
Overall the interface is cleaner IMO
Uh...? 'Kaaaay...
Although I have noticed there's a couple of places in Chrome's dev tools where you should be able to copy and you can't. I've been annoyed by that in the past, but I haven't gone back to see if it's fixed in the newest build. And, IIRC, column resizing sometimes doesn't work right in table views, but again that was a few versions ago.
@Lingerance said:
When it did work I liked how I could look at a 50k LoC JS file and scroll through without performance hits (firefox chokes on this).
Christ man. You've shoving like a full MB at the browser all at once? The poor thing.
(Yes, I know, that's "the new hotness", and the first MMO made using the new HTML5 sockets and canvas is probably going to be three times that amount of code. Still.)
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@blakeyrat said:
@Lingerance said:
It's more useful to be able to actually see that shit as it's going on instead of having to do that seperately. Especially since I was debugging an application that was only accessable over HTTPS.- See Ajax requests (when this did work Firefox's was better as it didn't require you to make a second identical request to see the results)
- Send a fresh AJAX request and get the results
I use Fiddler for that, since I'm not insane. (Seriously, Firebug? Use a HTTP Debugger for debugging HTTP.)
@blakeyrat said:
Christ man. You've shoving like a full MB at the browser all at once? The poor thing.
Actually, that wasn't my fault. I had fixed it so it was down to less than 2k LoC. CCP's CTO saw no issue sending that massive mess of JS to every browser, and even less of an issue with how it was generated (shitty in-house template library).
@blakeyrat said:One thing I miss from IE: show an alert when you encounter a JS error! Without alerts, there's no incentive to fix the "harmless" errors.
Firebug gives you nice red text with "X errors" when an error happens, I much prefer that as I can see the full pile-up at once (how often does only one error happen to you?).
580128 - Implement brain transplants
