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New interesting features for Firefox 3
40hz:
I think you can question and criticize Firefox without being accused of bashing it. I've been a big proponent of Firefox since it came out. Unfortunately, Mozilla.org seems to have lost the "lean, fast & clean" mindset. I can't blame their coders - bells & whistles are a lot more fun to code than tweaking cache efficiencies or making rendering engines more resource efficient. This I know from my own coding experiences. But lately, Fox has been bugging me just enough that I did download Opera for when I actually do need all the bling. IMHO Opera seems to handle that cruft a bit better.
I guess I shouldn't complain since MozOrg does their voodoo for free. And a kot of what they do is really good. Still, I long for the days when Fox was less "real cool" and better able to stay out of its own way. :Thmbsup:
nontroppo:
The GUICLI, which we know well from Find and Run Robot is an interesting idea for a browser. Indeed the Opera team also think so, and there was an internal concept version last year which uses a CLI metaphor to interact with the browser.
Currently Firefox 3 is considerably fatter than Firefox 2, and runs much slower, but I expect that to improve through the beta cycle.
Lashiec: If you remove XUL, you remove the only thing Firefox / Mozilla has going for it! I really doubt you would see such a vibrant development community if extensions had to be coded in traditional languages. The idea of using web technology to power a web browser is elegant, and many more people can mix-and-mash their own extensions.
JohnFredC:
FireFox is OK, I guess, and I like its add-in model. But if the Mozilla team doesn't implement a full featured page-zoom a la Opera with "fit to width" (not the low rent zoom behavior of IE 7), then all the fancy Addin/GUI/keyboard functionality in the world won't matter to me.
Lashiec:
nontroppo, I know that but I really think that XUL is causing all these problems with memory management. Besides, if they used extensions requiring traditional languages, it wouldn't be much of a loss. Addons offer is one of my main gripes with Firefox, there are far too much of them, and some are overlapping with others. Perhaps if they did a more stringent control of quality regarding duplicated functionality and extension excellence (some of them are simply terrible), including memory leak testing (they coded an utility for that, no?), things will go for the better IMO. I like extensibility, but sometimes software go too far in that regard (just thinking in Winamp...). Bah, just very a personal pet peeve. I sincerely hope they fix those memory figures through the beta cycle. And I would like to meet some programmer at the Mozilla Foundation and ask him/her about my suspicions :D
JohnFredC, they implemented that in one of the latest nightlies. It's not like Opera for now, but they're tweaking the feature to be more like it.
nontroppo:
nontroppo, I know that but I really think that XUL is causing all these problems with memory management.-Lashiec (September 10, 2007, 08:55 PM)
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Oh, I think you are absolutely right :Thmbsup: But I think this is unavoidable — a flexible and low-entry extension system that doesn't need compiling will be fat and heavy resource-wise. Mozilla never has, and never will be "light", but if you can code XML+CSS+JS - you can do stuff in it no other browser can.
I wonder if the next-generation javascript engine, tamarin, will make a substansive difference to XUL, it certainly out-performs spidermonkey (existing engine) by a huge factor:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/
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