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Firefox 4 Beta 1 Released

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Re: Firefox 4 Beta 1 Released

#21

Post by natmaster »

EricBurnett wrote: post #18
natmaster wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you trolling? The three highlighted features are 'new addons manager,' webm support, and fixing the :visited privacy issue. NONE of these are in any released Chrome, although the early early preview of Chrome 6 has WebM support. Of the three UI elements highlighted, tabs on top is the only one in Chrome (or did I miss the Chrome button in some developer preview?).

From my view, the highest highlighted feature was the tabs, followed by the 3 you mention. I counted WebM as Chrome, given that it is Google's codec, but I'm not sure its in Chrome 5 either :(. Looking further down, I was thinking that WebSockets, Indexed DB, Crash Protection, and the key feature of JetPack (Add-Ons not requiring restart) were all pioneered by Chrome. That leaves The Web Console, which I have not yet…

Ok, if you want to know all the features, I think the best way is to read this: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/beta/technology, and then try it out to get a feel for all the UI changes.

According to wikipedia, Chrome 5 does not support WebM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrome_%28browser%29

WebSockets: Yay, you're finally right, Chrome did pioneer WebSockets. Sadly, it did not update its implementation to reflect the changes to the standard based on feedback from the numerous other browser vendors that actually implemented it but chose not to release it because of it volatility.

IndexedDB: Google was actually pushing for Web SQL Database, which got rejected. Learn more here: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/beyond-html5-database-apis-...

Crash Protection: IE8 was the first browser with this feature.

Jetpack: Ok, this one is important right? So for bonus points, let's look at the first jetpack release: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12025/version... (scroll the to bottom: May 20, 2009)

Now for Google's launch of their great extensions platform: http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/08/chrome-extensions-live/ (December 08, 2009). Darn, guess Google stole that one from Mozilla's playbook (and yet, still no powerful extensions :().

WebConsole: Everyone and their mom has been using Firebug since the dawn of time. Chrome wasn't even an inkling in Google's eye then.

HTML5: Firefox 4 is STILL the only browser to support HTML 5 parsing. Previous versions of course supported other features such as video and audio, but since you didn't go into details here, I'll leave it at that.

CSS3: No details again? Ok, well rounded corners has been in Firefox so long I can't even remember (1.5 or 2?). Lots of these features were around before Chrome existed. But no more for this since you only mentioned it in passing.

Call me a fool for taking the bait (http://xkcd.com/386/), but with all due respect please stop trolling, and learn about what you're talking about before you speak.

Re: Firefox 4 Beta 1 Released

#22

Post by natmaster »

luigi wrote: post #17

The big deal with Firefox 4 is support for Jetpack: https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com/ Like with Chrome, and more recently Safari, we can now write Firefox extensions using HTML/CSS/Javascript.

My obligatory http://xkcd.com/386/

Jetpack has been around since May 20, 2009 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12025/version...

What's new in Firefox 4 is that it is integrated instead of being an extension.

Re: Firefox 4 Beta 1 Released

#23

Post by thegyppo »

Beta is incredibly faster for me. Roughly takes around 1 sec to fire up, Chrome still "feels" faster & much more nimble.

It really feels like Mozilla is playing catch up now, trying to take things back to basics & fix some core issues (like startup times, plugins slowing things down, JS performance & so on).

Kudos to Google for giving the browser that once we all used something to aspire to.

Re: Firefox 4 Beta 1 Released

#24

Post by aboodman »

natmaster wrote: post #21
EricBurnett wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my view, the highest highlighted feature was the tabs, followed by the 3 you mention. I counted WebM as Chrome, given that it is Google's codec, but I'm not sure its in Chrome 5 either :(. Looking further down, I was thinking that WebSockets, Indexed DB, Crash Protection, and the key feature of JetPack (Add-Ons not requiring restart) were all pioneered by Chrome. That leaves The Web Console, which I have not yet…

Ok, if you want to know all the features, I think the best way is to read this: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/beta/technology , and then try it out to get a feel for all the UI changes. According to wikipedia, Chrome 5 does not support WebM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrome_%28browser%29 WebSockets: Yay, you're finally right, Chrome did pioneer WebSockets. Sadly, it did not update its implementation to refl…

You are comparing the first mass-market release of Chrome extensions with the first alpha release of Jetpack, which isn't fair. A better comparison would be the first dev channel release of Chrome with support for extensions. That was May 14 2009:

http://news.cnet.com/chrome-extensions-draw-near-but-advance...

... which is slightly before the first Jetpack alpha which was May 20 2009.

In any case, the issues that both extension systems try to address have been well-known for some time. It isn't surprising that multiple people came up with similar ideas on how to fix them.

ninja edit: Got timelines mixed up first time 'round

Re: Firefox 4 Beta 1 Released

#25

Post by archangel_one »

Looks more "Windows 7"-like on here, in that there's more of that smudgy glass effect. Looks prettier when active I think, although when not the glass becomes more transparent and since there's so much of it, toolbars from applications underneath it seem to show through a lot, which creates a lot of visual noise. That's not entirely Firefox's fault, and it looks okay when it has focus, so it could be worse.

Seems faster to start, although it's disabled every addon I had before, so hardly a fair test.

In general it seems to be more like Chrome. Which I think is probably a good thing - if Chrome has demonstrated a better way to do things, I don't have a problem with Firefox following their lead.

Re: Firefox 4 Beta 1 Released

#26

Post by natmaster »

cryptoz wrote: post #5
tbrooks wrote: post #4

Noticeably faster that 3.6.6, except none of my extensions work. FF4b1 disabled: 1 Password, Delicious Bookmarks, Firebug, Greasemonkey, Google Toolbar, Stylish, YSlow and others...

Maybe it's just faster because none of your extensions are running? The ones you listed sound like they probably use lots of CPU time and memory, and if they are disabled I'm sure FF runs much faster / lighter.

I can't comment on how much the extensions might have affected things, but startup time was significantly improved: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Sprints/Startup_Time_Improv...

Re: Firefox 4 Beta 1 Released

#27

Post by natmaster »

aboodman wrote: post #24
natmaster wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, if you want to know all the features, I think the best way is to read this: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/beta/technology , and then try it out to get a feel for all the UI changes. According to wikipedia, Chrome 5 does not support WebM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrome_%28browser%29 WebSockets: Yay, you're finally right, Chrome did pioneer WebSockets. Sadly, it did not update its implementation to refl…

You are comparing the first mass-market release of Chrome extensions with the first alpha release of Jetpack, which isn't fair. A better comparison would be the first dev channel release of Chrome with support for extensions. That was May 14 2009: http://news.cnet.com/chrome-extensions-draw-near-but-advance... ... which is slightly before the first Jetpack alpha which was May 20 2009. In any case, the issues that bot…

Interesting catch. Reminds me of Mercurial and Git births (in that they both were independently created around the same time to solve the same problem).

Re: Firefox 4 Beta 1 Released

#28

Post by luigi »

natmaster wrote: post #22
luigi wrote: post #17

The big deal with Firefox 4 is support for Jetpack: https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com/ Like with Chrome, and more recently Safari, we can now write Firefox extensions using HTML/CSS/Javascript.

My obligatory http://xkcd.com/386/ Jetpack has been around since May 20, 2009 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12025/version... What's new in Firefox 4 is that it is integrated instead of being an extension.

That's what I meant by "support" for Jetpack. We as developers can comfortably build extensions for it, knowing that it'll have a broad user base.

I didn't say "introduction" of Jetpack.

Re: Firefox 4 Beta 1 Released

#29

Post by luigi »

whimsy wrote: post #20
luigi wrote: post #17

The big deal with Firefox 4 is support for Jetpack: https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com/ Like with Chrome, and more recently Safari, we can now write Firefox extensions using HTML/CSS/Javascript.

So Jetpack obsoletes GreaseMonkey?

Yes, though GreaseMonkey will always be available to those who choose to (know to) install it.

Re: Firefox 4 Beta 1 Released

#30

Post by aboodman »

luigi wrote: post #29
whimsy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Jetpack obsoletes GreaseMonkey?

Yes, though GreaseMonkey will always be available to those who choose to (know to) install it.

It's Greasemonkey, not GreaseMonkey.

Greasemonkey is a third-party extension. It wasn't created and isn't maintained by Mozilla, so it can't be officially obsoleted by Jetpack.

That said, if Jetpack supported transparently installing Greasemonkey scripts (the way Chrome does -- http://mashable.com/2010/02/01/google-chrome-greasemonkey-2/), it would effectively obsolete Greasemonkey because there'd be no need to install it.

Until then, there are 40k user scripts on userscripts.org that still need Greasemonkey installed in order to work: http://userscripts.org/.

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