Firefox 12 will finally have a New Tab Page and Home Tab
extremetech.com
extremetech.com
Then Chrome came out. It was rough around the edges, but Google released a new version every few months, and it quickly improved to the point where it was better than everything else. It represented a generational change in user interface paradigms and development cycle time.
So now Firefox has been forced to play catch-up to Chrome, much as IE had to play catch-up to Firefox. To be fair, this happened when Firefox abandoned the monolithic development cycle, but the UI changes represent the full acknowledgement of this.
I wonder where the next revolutionary browser will come from. My intuition is that it will be on the mobile side...
A presentation on it here: http://www.slideshare.net/BrendanEich/future-tense-7782010
Of course, students of history will remember what happened the last time that Mozilla/Netscape tried rewriting their browser engine: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
Hopefully things will go a bit more smoothly this time. :)
And of course this is all just research at this point, none of this might ever see an actual release.
Well it's not a universal rule to never scrap code. Sometimes the software is just so bad, so complicated, so wrong for the task that it must be scrapped. Large parts of Navigator, but also other things like OS 9 are examples. The original Mac OS was simply not cut out for an internet age -- like Windows 9x it couldn't be reworked to something current.
Even if Mozilla fails to keep their browser relevant, the investment is sure to pay off with a new widely respected system programming language. If you follow the reception of Rust virtually everybody seems impressed with the rationality and practicality of its design choices, explained and backed by solid engineering. Compared to the nearly universally panned golang (series of arbitrary decisions) or even Dart (decisions not backed by metrics), it's hard to imagine that Rust won't have a major impact on the industry -- that alone is worth scrapping the browser engine and rewriting from scratch.
I thought the mission of Mozilla was to ensure the web stays open. If their only lasting result in the end is to have produced the new standard systems programming language, that's an impressive feat.
But they'd also be a complete and utter failure.
99% of the time, some flash crap holds up my browser and all of FF freezes. Yet with Chrome, never happens.
That is the #1 feature that trumps everything for me, even though I think FF is superior to chrome in many ways including Firebug.
Plus they increased the timeout until it's recognised as crashed by about 10 times recently and it's absolutely awful now.
The long timeout is there so freaken' farmvile works. But the whole browser freezes.
Pushing the envelope in terms of interface is a really tricky thing to do. Each time you do it, there's a huge user outcry, and it does turn some users away or stops them from upgrading. I don't think the Firefox feature announced here will be much different.
People like things to stay the way the are used to. Unless there's a huge change and they can see how dropping their old habits all at once is somehow an advantage.
Gradually adopting improved versions of the most sensible Chrome features might sound like sound engineering, but due to these dynamics I really wonder if its a survivable strategy in the long run.
There were some UX mockups posted a while ago that looked far more ambitious. That's more like it.
It's true, yet I think it still needs to be done, even though I'm often among the complainers. The key is balance: advancing UI without forcing users that are looking for a solid consistent experience to beta test your UI ideas. Ubuntu is an example of a lot of really bold UI decisions, and I think they're too eager to force things on users. Ubuntu is in the tricky situation of making a product for "the hard-core" (Linux geeks) and "the noobs" (non-tech-savvy users wanting a free OS).
And the reason I like Firefox is because there's always a way to go back to the old behavior/UI without losing the benefits of the new underlying system. That is respectful to users, as opposed to the Chrome way where you take it or leave it at a corporation's whim.
I know Firefox has worked on their speed, and it may be I only notice a difference because I'm on a netbook, or because the Firefox versions of my extensions are more poorly written than their Chrome counterparts. But for whatever reason, Chrome feels faster to me--both in general, and also due to other nice touches like its ability to open PDFs without launching Acrobat.
The window-dressing is nice, but just as search quality is the most important thing in search engines, and auto-complete, instant search, etc. are mostly secondary, speed to render the site appropriately is the primary indicator of browser quality; new-tab windows and the like are nice-to-haves. As far as I can tell, Chrome is still winning on speed, and I hope Mozilla is devoting appropriate resources (read: 90%) to changing that.
EDIT: as an aside, I know downvotes are somewhat amorphous on HN, and I shouldn't take them personally, but it bugs me that when I take some time to try to write a thoughtful (though admittedly critical) reaction to news, I get voted down to -1 (at least 5 downvotes) for my trouble. I've seen similar reactions frequently in other threads, and it saddens me that this is apparently now common HN behavior. This response is just not conducive to building a community. The responses here are great--if you think my comment is wrong, upvote those instead. Meanwhile, excuse me while I leave HN...
That aside foxit is way faster than Acrobat.
[1] http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-read...
It's mostly working already. I rarely ever find PDFs that it breaks with.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/Snappy https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/Features/IonMonkey
I work for Mozilla and I think that the only thing we are really losing on is the perception race. A frequent trend I hear on forums and comment threads is how slow Firefox is or how much it crashes. People seem to almost enjoy making the assessment that it is a universal constant. I know that it isn't a constant. Even though I have a profile that is many years old and has a dozen or so extensions installed, even though I have run prerelease versions for the last three years, I still generally have a stable and fast browsing experience. Even when compared to Chrome which I install clean and try out for a couple of weeks every few months. There have certainly been occasions that I have run into issues, but because I have been willing to give Firefox the benefit of doubt, I've dug into those issues and usually found something that was either a bad add-on, something bad I was doing, or a bad website to be the root cause.
We continue to strive to find ways to resolve these issues without having to rely on the user or the community to figure them out. That is just part of making a good product. But I know that the problems are not a universal constant that every user must deal with, or a reason to try to get everyone to move to a different browser.
One of the biggest projects my team (Metrics) has been working on lately is a way to enable people to easily measure the performance and stability of their own browser and compare it to the general population. If it turns up systemic problems, that is wonderful because with evidence, it is easier to fix those problems. If it turns out that a person with poor performance is obviously an extreme outlier to the typical performance, hopefully it will make it easier to change the conversation from "Firefox is slow for everyone and no one should use it" to "Firefox is slow for me and I would like help making that not be the case for both me and anyone else who ever ends up in my situation". This would be a paradigm shift that would obviously be great for Mozilla, but I think it would be great for Google or Microsoft or Apple if they chose to follow a similar strategy as well.
At the end of the day, many Mozillians do not hate Google Chrome because it is still pushing to make the web a better place. Maybe not in all the same ways we push, but every little bit is better than none of it.
And therein lies the root-cause of Firefox's perception problem. The average user doesn't care who's fault it is - all they know is it's broken or slow, and as Firefox surfaces those issues, it must be Firefox's fault. Chrome does a better job of shielding users from perceived browser problems.
My question, which I hope we will be able to answer better soon, is whether this is something that actually does happen to the average user or if it only happens to certain types of power users. Either way, we need to strive to do everything we can reasonably do to fix it, but I would be much happier to know whether I was in the outlier group of people who rarely experience problems or if the "average user" does not see those problems but we continue to talk about the problems as if they were the typical case.
Just as a side note- Mozilla has a cool project called pdf.js [1] which opens PDF docs in browser using HTML5 and javascript.
And on my system, Firefox is faster. Faster is such an inconsistent metric.
Don't get me wrong; it's nice that this feature exists. But, personally, I'll be disabling it immediately.
Good thing that like just about everything in Firefox, you can configure it to your needs when it lands. :)
Side note, for those interested of an overview of planned features in Firefox: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Features/Release_Tracking
I can't speak to the quality of it, however. I use ctrl+l for URLs and ctrl+k for search, and am so used to it I don't even notice (especially since Firefox's AwesomeBar tends to have better results for me than Chrome's OmniBar).
http://dactyl.sourceforge.net/pentadactyl/
Once you are used to it, in my opinion, it puts the other address bar goodies to a shame.