Firefox 8 beta gets Twitter search straight from the browser
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Which is good, because being too dependent on your competitor (Chrome) for income could be tricky at some point.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/twitter-addre...
The beta 8 stuff just adds Twitter to the list of default search engines.
They started "winning" a few years ago because they got all the early adopter types. Then Chrome came and stole them away from them. Mozilla needs to add stuff to their browser that will make these early adopters come back.
And they really need to fix that whole compatibility issue with add-ons. I couldn't believe I couldn't use Ad-block in Firefox 7 because it wasn't compatible.
The developer is obviously at fault here, too. Firefox 7 has been available in some form for 2-3 months now, since just like Chrome, all their Firefox version go through a process of pre-alpha, alpha, beta, stable, and each one lasts about 6 weeks. So how come Ad-block is still not available for FF 7 then? Is the developer taking a long break or something?
But the fact that Firefox makes all add-ons incompatible by default without any modifications from the developer, is also unacceptable. Either get rid of the old add-on system completely and leave that mess behind, and fully support the new extension engine (the one similar to Chrome's), or make it work already! What's the point of an old add-on system if only 10% add-ons work when the new version launches?
Also they might need to reconsider their current design, too. I don't know what it is, but something seems off. Maybe it's their 2 column menu that seems weird to use to me, or maybe it's just because I've been using Chrome for a long time and FF is too different from it now. I don't know, but I think there's work to be done on the design.
And do we really need that small search box in the right? I think it clutters the bar. Being able to search on any browser using the TAB key after typing the site name is also something I love about Chrome.
I've used the two extensively, and the only thing (for my use case) that Chrome has over FF is interface speed. Here are a few things FF does really well over Chrome.
Low level extension access to the browser: This is the reason you don't have Noscript or HTTPS Everywhere in Chrome, it's also the reason mouse gestures are fundamentally broken on Google's browser. For example perform a gesture to open a new tab, then perform a gesture to close it. Oops, you can't, since extensions are disabled in certain types of pages on Chrome due to its security model.
Search as you type: You actually have to hit CTRL+F in Chrome to start finding stuff, versus just starting to type in FF.
Tab activity notifications: On FF, I can have Gmail, Reader, etc.. pinned as app tabs, and if they get updated with new items the tab gets highlighted. Chrome, for some strange reason doesn't do this and you have to keep opening the tabs to check for updates.
Search keywords: Much more straightforward to add in FF, just click on a search field and select "Add keyword for this search". Chrome automatically adds just about every search engine/form you come across to a huge list, which you then have to trawl in order to customize the one you want.
Bookmarks & History: Chrome's bookmark manager sucks big time, I guess Google wants you to search and not bookmark. FF has a half decent manager with tag support. The Wonderbar also works a lot better than the Omnibar when searching your history and bookmarks.
Tiddlywiki: This is the big one for me (although only tangentially Chrome's fault), I use tiddlywiki extensively and FF is the only working browser on non-Windows platforms.
So all of these annoyances in Chrome negate the gain I get from its speed by a large margin. Again, this is my particular use case, but I definitely get stuff done quicker in FF than in Chrome.
And by the way, the initial extension breakage is fixed on FF 7.0.1, which was just released.
Wouldn't search as you type be fundamentally broken on any website featuring keyboard shortcuts? (I'm not a Firefox user, so I don't know how that's handled).
Pinned tabs are highlighted in Chrome when they receive updates. The pulsing used to be very eye-catching, but for some reason they now reduced it to an almost unnoticeable searchlight-like effect from left to right over the tab chrome and favicon.
In Chrome you right click any search field and choose "Add as Search Engine", just like Firefox. It also picks up on any search that you've done automatically, so you can just tab-search from the URL bar as you're typing a site name that you haven't explicitly added a shortcut for.
At the end of the day, they're both very excellent browsers that have almost reached full feature parity with one another. I don't think either one is better, it's just a personal flavor and preference at this point that you can't qualify, equivalent to preferring Chocolate over Vanilla ice cream. In fact, users now have 5 competing, well-built and standards based browsers to choose from. The true winner of this browser "war" was the end-user, which is who should have won.
Chrome works about the same as FF for me, I don't see any difference. The only difference is FF's "quicksearch" can be brought up by pressing '/' which is quicker than "ctrl-f".
This is not true for addons hosted on addons.mozilla.org. Addons that are hosted on that site get their versions bumped automatically without any modifications from the developer.
"And do we really need that small search box in the right? I think it clutters the bar."
It can be removed.
[nil@tmbg ~/mozilla-central]$ grep -r duckduckgo . [nil@tmbg ~/mozilla-central]$
Furthermore, the list of the default / available plugins can be found here: http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/a896a9e237a0/brow....
If you have any information about the future of this, we would be really excited and interested to know, but we would appreciate a screenshot or a link to verify. I expect you have DuckDuckGo in your search list from before (thanks!) and the new installations are just picking up on that in the preferences directories generated upon install.
I'm sure they're getting a kick-back, but still.