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Firefox 28 Release Notes

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Re: Firefox 28 Release Notes

#51

Super excited about better codec spread. What do they mean by volume control, though? We've been able to control the volume of HTML5 video/audio for a while now. Edit: here's a comparison of the audio UI between versions: https://mediacru.sh/2528762308f7 , looks butt-ugly imo

Not in default controls in Firefox. had it, though.

Re: Firefox 28 Release Notes

#52
post #20

Eagerly waiting to ditch Chrome & its forced notifications. Perhaps with Australis (Firefox 29), the UI would be at par. Edit : Chrome feels subtle, lighter & perceptually faster (specifically : tabs, scrollbars). Although after updating Firefox today, I can notice that there's improvement in Firefox.

One major (okay maybe not that major but an important factor in my decision) issue for me with Australis is the separate boxes for URLs and search. Every other browser merged them and I don't know of any reason to keep them separate - is there one?

You can do searches directly in the URL bar and it's not exactly the same, but if you want OmniBar-like behavior there's a plugin for that (when I used it, it worked well): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/omnibar/

What I like about Firefox (versus Chrome specifically) is that the AwesomeBar gives much better suggestions from your history, doing full-text searches in titles - within Chrome I can rarely find something in my history without opening the history view and seriously, most searches that I do are for things that I've already seen and it saves a lot of roundtrips to Google (hint, hint), plus searching for things you can barely remember on Google, which you end up doing in Chrome, is like searching for the metaphorical needle in a haystack.

Plus, as others said, I like it when the browser cares about my privacy. On Android on the other hand there's only a single bar due to a lack of space, but it asks you if you want to activate Google's search suggestions.

Re: Firefox 28 Release Notes

#53
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's admittedly a corner case, but I've searched phrases that contain URLs and have had them get treated as a URL rather than search phrase in Chrome. In that case, I just drop to google.com and issue the search from there.

If you prefix your query with a ? it will be sent to your default search provider instead.

Thanks for the tip. I was unaware. But of course, if I have to think about it, it's failed its primary function of pretending I shouldn't have to care :-P

Re: Firefox 28 Release Notes

#54
post #20

Eagerly waiting to ditch Chrome & its forced notifications. Perhaps with Australis (Firefox 29), the UI would be at par. Edit : Chrome feels subtle, lighter & perceptually faster (specifically : tabs, scrollbars). Although after updating Firefox today, I can notice that there's improvement in Firefox.

One major (okay maybe not that major but an important factor in my decision) issue for me with Australis is the separate boxes for URLs and search. Every other browser merged them and I don't know of any reason to keep them separate - is there one?

Like many others I have long since removed my search box. I also use keyword search [1]. If I want to search google I write "g hacker news", if I want to search Wikipedia it's "we thing", for stackoverflow it's "so great", and so on.

[1] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches

Re: Firefox 28 Release Notes

#56
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's admittedly a corner case, but I've searched phrases that contain URLs and have had them get treated as a URL rather than search phrase in Chrome. In that case, I just drop to google.com and issue the search from there.

ctrl-k works as "go to search box" in both browsers. For Chrome, that means focussing on the address bar and presetting it to "? ".

Nifty. That would certainly do the trick. Thanks!

Re: Firefox 28 Release Notes

#57
post #45
post #27

Firefox should allow you to type "45/3" in the address bar and be taken to Google with the calculation.

It does, when you prepend "google " in front of "45/3", which is in my opinion the best solution (I don't want to route all my URLs through google).

You can prepend it with just ? and it will go to your default search engine.

Re: Firefox 28 Release Notes

#58

Super excited about better codec spread. What do they mean by volume control, though? We've been able to control the volume of HTML5 video/audio for a while now. Edit: here's a comparison of the audio UI between versions: https://mediacru.sh/2528762308f7 , looks butt-ugly imo

There was no UI for it in the default browser controls for the element. Compare http://cs.iupui.edu/~aharris/n351/notes09/HTML5AudioDemo.htm... in Firefox 27 and Firefox 28, for example.

The relnote is presumably talking about https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=649490

Re: Firefox 28 Release Notes

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In regards to rendering performance, we have this internal app that's pushing a lot of points into timeline charts rendered with HighCharts. When all the datapoints are rendered, Chrome has a lot of latency but is still usable, whereas Firefox chokes. I see that in Australis it's much improved, but still less usable than Chrome. This is awkward since in general I find Firefox's performance to be on par with Chrome, s…

I've found Chrome's graphics performance in general to be better than Firefox's, specifically with regards to canvas and SVG. Not sure the reason, but my guess is just lack of optimization.

Chrome can make graphics calls in a separate thread, whereas I think Firefox still makes graphics calls on the main thread.
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