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We’ll get on speed after 1.5 release?

Attention! Spoiler! Don’t click “more” until you’re sure that you want to read about the plans, which may not get into reality…

Guess what I’m talking about:

It’ll have JavaScript 2.0 support (packages, namespaces etc. – sweet ;)), it’ll have X3D support, XBL 2.0, non-rectangular windows support, support LOD, downloadable fonts, vertical text, Python support, huge XUL improvements, it’ll draw XUL with Cairo/Thebes, SMIL support…
Wait! There’s more tips:
No more bookmarks, Places( Scratch page) instead (or Tagging) using bayesian power, it’ll base on XulRunner, it’ll have session saver, bittorrent support, tutorial mode, VoiceML support, it’ll use improved Extension manager for searchplugins, plugins, extensions and themes, full MDI, full Acid 2 support…

Wait… what am I talking about? Humm…? Ah! The plans for Gecko 1.9 and Firefox 2.0… right! 🙂

If anyone thought that we’re slowing down, lack of new ideas, or that we are _just_another_browser_on_the_market_ waiting for super_hiper_ie7_with_tabs_ – he was wrong.

disclamer: I doubt it’ll all be there, and I’m sure that there will be things from outside of this list, but the plans are imho impressive, and I wanted to give you the smell of what’s on the grill…

28 replies on “We’ll get on speed after 1.5 release?”

Well, Szafranek, You’re a little “misinformed”:
1. There’s a bugrepord filled on that: bug: 122411
2. There’s extension available for Firefox: about:kitchensink

Gandalf, I just “jawdropped” on this list of features. It’s… it’s… OMFG! The Places concept is nice, and the Tagging even nicer! And the XUL and XBL2.0 – that will be reaaaaaaly niiiiice platform one can develop on (or for :)).

PaK: It’s not Tabber Browsing as a new feature, that page is about improvements to Tabbed Browsing planned for 3.0. Read about it – we’re going to change the way you think about tabs 😉

Forget about Python… where’s Ruby?!

With the advent of Ruby on Rails, having Ruby in the browser could be very, very useful (i.e. a secure version of DRb could communicate between the client and the server).

Ruby: one language to rule them all!

The number one thing I want to have in Firefox is a multithreaded UI; when the browser locks up until some tab loads makes me absolutely NUTS.

It all sounds nice and all… but I think most of them belong in extension space instead of being pre-packaged with the browser… otherwise we’d have another bloated application on our hands, ICQ style …

What the hell is with bittorrent support? Firefox is supposed to be a minimalist browser, for gods sake, not the Mozilla Suite (which you oh, so delightedly dropped support for).

How about fixing the goddamn bloat and the huge gaping memory leaks first? Or how about stabilizing the bloody extension API so I’m not greeted with a bunch of broken/disabled extensions each time I do a minor upgrade?

I’ll stick with Opera, thanks…

Disclaimer: I was a rabid Mozilla/Firefox user since the days of Mozilla 0.6, then went to Phoenix 0.2, through Firebird, all the way up to Firefox 1.5 beta. That’s when I finally got fed up with this bullshit.

non-rectangular windows support, isn’t that already possible with the transparent windows support that was added?

> Forget about Python… where’s Ruby?!

Where most fads of the day are — being a fad. More to the point, someone stepped up to write the python code; I don’t see anyone stepping up to make Ruby play nice.

Ruby is only a fad to those who haven’t tried it 😛

Seriously though, Ruby isn’t new nor is it a fad. It’s been around in Japan since 1992 and been quite popular, more recently it has begun gaining ground in the US and elsewhere. Most people dismiss it as new because they haven’t heard of it before DHH created Rails. While Ruby has become more popular due to the success of Rails, they are completely seperate entites, the only relationship being that Rails is *written* is Ruby. Ruby is very popular in the scientific community because it makes distributed apps so easy to write. NOAA uses distributed Ruby for hurracane simulations. Ruby *is* proven, and is here to stay. Don’t be too quick to ignore it.

/informational-rant

Actually, there has been a discussion on ruby-talk *this week* about Ruby/Mozilla integration. They’re starting with a revival of rbXPCOM, but more is coming. Keep your eyes peeled!

A few answers:
Jacob: once we’ll get to the state where were not bound to JS, adding another language will be much easier.

Zen: I’m pretty sure that MoCorp will decide wisely on what should go to browser, and what should became an extension.

Snuffkin: But we support FTP, right? And Bittorrent will be supported in the same way without new UI nor any bloat.

Mikolaj: Yes. Bookmarks are obsolate, deprecated, not used anymore. Bookmarks were good when you had 10 of them.
We need to find a better way to go, and we’re doing so.

Grnch: Extensions API is almost the same in Fx 1.0 and 1.5. You feel that it changed because our policy is to give extension author time to check his extension with new version before he’ll allow you to use it. The goal is to minimize the chance that an extension will break your build.
Of course we’re working on making this process faster.

Thomas: we’re very soon to archive this goal. We have a few (4?) separate bugs and 3 of them are fixed with REFLOW_BRANCH. I’m pretty sure that we will be ready before Fx 2.0.

I’d like to add another voice for more threading please. When I hit a pdf I always expect to be able to carry on what I’m doing in another tab (as I would if a page was slow to load) and I can’t.

Thanks for all the hard work.

Justin.

Well… I’ve got hundreds of Bookmarks and are very useful. In fact are certainly not obsolete and still in use.
Maybe I don’t understand this draft but IMHO this proposal certainly is not better way.

I found this proposal as very geeky and has few weak points:
– Automatic bookmarking. It smells like Microsoft’s slogan “Your browser knows better”.
– Meta tags. Most people don’t have time to describe properly their bookmarks, why they should bother to describe new kind of bookmarks?
– I don’t think that I’ll be able to store old style bookmarks. I’ve got dozens of bookmarks linking to single articles / photos / subsites, mostly not available to find via Google / MSN / Yahoo.

Did I misunderstood anything?

gandalf: thanks. marvelous news!

Integrated session saver will be a good feature, if it’s Opera-like easy to handle withoud extension-tricky knowledge.

What I miss is a separate feature to zoom webpages together with pictures. That would be helpful/nice in some cases. (Yes, I know, I am Opera-contaminated. 😉 )

here it comes, firefox tries to become all things to everyone. This is the problem with all software and why google reigns as champ. Small, simple to the point apps. Don’t try and jam everything all into one.
bye bye firefox 🙁

Bittorrent support: Hell yeah! Look at uTorrent, only 100k prog, and 4mb memory footprint, it can be done! I suggested a firefox plugin to the utorrent guys a few days ago….

Tag Browsing: That’s the best idea i’ve seen. I format often, just like many windows users, and bu-bye to all my bookmarks. A “.mac” server idea is a great idea for the tag info. Maybe something along the line for your email account info (not the actual email, just the contacts & server info).

bittorrent support woo! And opera sucks out loud. Non-standards-compliant-buggy-crapware.

You poor, ignorant person. Opera is probably the most standards compliant browser there is. As for bugs, never paid a visit to Bugzilla? LOL.

Bittorrent has already been announced and demoed in Opera. Once again, Firefox is just catching up. I wouldn’t be surprised if the new tabs ideas are all based on the way Opera works now. It has the best tabs support without having to resort to extensions.

I welcome any new attempt to sort out the mess of bookmarks though. So long as they aren’t tied to the web, so when the server goes down, you can’t access them.

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