Firefox 12 released
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
The HTML doesn't appear when inspecting (no, that takes an extra click). The CSS appears in an extra vertical sidebar taking up even more room on the screen. You can't add a Console button, but 3D View is worthy?
I love Firefox, but this it's just plain odd they didn't integrate Firebug into core.
I actually find the vertical CSS sidebar to be an excellent choice. CSS (and code in general) is an inherently vertical thing (short line length), whereas the number of rules displayed is maximized using a vertical panel. A console button would maybe be a good idea, but I only use the keyboard shortcuts, so I don't mind, this prevent reducing the visual clutter.
Firebug is a seriously old and not that sufficiently maintened code base, hence the choice to write new tools, more integrated with the browser.
Firebug is still actively maintained and continues to have new releases and improvements. Firebug 1.10 (currently in alpha), for example, is now restartless and has less impact on page performance.
1) The Firebug team had their own priorities, development timeframes, and goals, and wasn't interested in being integrated in the core, exactly.
2) The Firebug code is .... not easy to work with. Actually trying to make any sort of significant changes to it without introducing some serious problems is pretty hard.
It's not a big deal and I can continue to use Firebug, but the UI decisions still baffle me. Safari and Chrome display the HTML (which 90% of the time is what I'm after to begin with anyways) upon inspection with the CSS on the side. Being able to turn these off would be fine by me, but don't make me opt in every single time. Also, having the Console and other browser inspections would really take it to the next level.
Functionality notwithstanding, I really like the look and feel of it.
That's a small tweak and shouldn't diminish the overall awesomeness that is the rest of the devtools. I actually agree with you, but have found them extremely fast and usable overall.
Also, Firefox 13 (which enters beta this week) has a bunch of nice improvements including remembering whether the HTML and Style panels are open.
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/03/firefox-aurora-13-developer...
We're iterating at a decent pace on these tools, so keep watching. The JavaScript debugger is coming to Aurora soon and it's shaping up quite nicely. The work behind that is going to be a big win for both the new debugger UI in Firefox and ultimately for Firebug as well.
I like that it takes less screen space by default, given that most of my usage is just selecting and analysing the CSS. It's great on a Macbook air.
This pref has been available in Firefox for a long time, but I believe it wasn't enabled because people who don't restart their browser often would not get security updates in a timely manner.
I never understand this argument.
All we have now is two different fast-moving targets, both with a track record of introducing breaking changes. IME this just results in a significantly higher number of customers complaining to our customer support team (not Mozilla's or Google's) that our web pages/embedded UIs don't work properly any more.
I have yet to be convinced that this obsession with releasing every six weeks really gets useful features out there in a way that benefits most users anyway. As far as I can tell, about 99% of the developers using those features are people writing tech demos for the browser makers and/or trendy web design blogs. Much of the content on those sites doesn't even work on both Gecko and WebKit at the same time, never mind IE. Meanwhile, real sites still have to cope with a majority of visitors who don't have the latest shiny new features.
In any case, a lot of those features frankly aren't all that beneficial anyway compared to basic things like not freezing the entire browser UI because one tab is taking a while to load. That is something Firefox still can't do even though it's several years after every other major browser had it, and the apologists are getting awfully boring now.
Umm, isn't that what the 6-week-automatic-update cycle that you're arguing against is intended to address?
In this case, as far as I can see, the only new "feature" they've shipped is actually to do with the update process itself, and it's a change that is pretty controversial at that. In fact, quite a few recent updates to Firefox (and Thunderbird for that matter) haven't really had much substance at all. Not exactly a great argument in favour of the need for such rapid updates.
A lot of that tech is of more interest for app-like pages rather than classical web sites, but then you start running into portability issues: not every browser has a fast cycle, and those that do aren't necessarily including the same features at the same pace. That means everyone needs to code a fallback approach anyway unless it's acceptable for their product to support only specific browsers. Once you start down that path, the core functionality is probably there for your users even if you don't then reimplement it a second time or add enhancements using the new technologies.
> That means everyone needs to code a fallback approach anyway unless it's acceptable for their product to support only specific browsers.
This has been and always will be true until 100% of the web uses the same browser. I'm not sure what the point of stating it is, or how a rapid-release schedule makes it worse. It doesn't.
Security updates.
This is part of the problem with the fast update cycle: People are now conflating security updates (which should be out there ASAP and should make no functional changes at all) with functionality updates (which are never necessary unless you want to visit a site that uses a new feature or to use some change in the UI, have a much higher risk of unintentionally or intentionally breaking stuff that used to work, and certainly don't need to happen 8-9 times every year in any case).
You're clearly not on the edge of new experimental features or you wouldn't be making such a claim.
And I stand by my previous comment despite that.
How can you claim to use state-of-the-art features and not appreciate that those features will be more stable and more readily available than ever? And the cool new features being worked on are far, far, far more expansive, neat and "useful" (as you desire) than "css3" or "mobile devices". If you're really doing "state of the art" things, then you're probably using features that were added to Chrome and Gecko as part of one of the features that was enabled by the rapid release cycle with multiple versions and pipelines being worked on simultaneously.
Further, what breaking changes have you seen as a result of Firefox and Chrome's rapid development cycle. I mean, the features I'm discussing break regularly, but then again their specs are still in a very draft status and it's known that they will break. I can't say I've ever had a stable Javascript API or CSS rule just completely change when moving from Firefox 11 to 12 or whatever.
>"Much of the content on those sites doesn't even work on both Gecko and WebKit at the same time, never mind IE."
Honestly a lot of your claims seem to be exaggerated or I'm on a very different subset of the Internet than you.
Because they aren't more stable and readily available than ever.
Browser fragmentation is worse today than at any time in history, including the peak of the Netscape/Microsoft war. At any given time, you might have to implement a given bit of styling at least three or four times over, not because the browsers differ in their functionality, but just because they all do it with slightly different syntax.
That in turn is because the browsers frequently have slightly different ways of doing things first, even if someone then wins later, which of course means everyone else has to slightly change their behaviour to match whichever standard wins.
And that's before you even consider the standard refrain that "it's all beta, we can change the APIs at any time, this functionality shouldn't be relied on for production sites, yada yada".
And then you have to consider the bugs, of which there are many in bleeding edge features, not helped by the fact that the six week release cycle is demonstrably too fast for a reliable QA process for software of this complexity.
And even when you've taken care of all of that, you still have to consider the fallbacks for older versions of IE, graceful degradation for mobile devices with limited bandwidth, and so on.
Further, what breaking changes have you seen as a result of Firefox and Chrome's rapid development cycle. I mean, the features I'm discussing break regularly, but then again their specs are still in a very draft status and it's known that they will break. I can't say I've ever had a stable Javascript API or CSS rule just completely change when moving from Firefox 11 to 12 or whatever.
Lucky you. We're lucky if an update ships and we don't get someone finding a bug somewhere.
Right now, for example, Chrome has taken so many shortcuts to try to improve responsiveness that it's just plain broken when it comes to refreshing the page layout or even just repainting in timely fashion after a DOM or CSS change. That means even popular UI toolkits have trouble with basic things like displaying dialog-style content, an everyday task if you design browser-based UIs. And because it's not repainting properly in the first place, presumably because some internal events aren't invalidating some cached data they should be, there's no clear workaround nor any guarantee that you'll get the same breakage from one update to the next.
Another example for Chrome from a bit further back was the way they completely stuffed the drawing of rounded corners. And then stuffed it again, in a slightly different way, in the next update. And then stuffed it again, a different way again, the update after that.
Then there's the whole H.264 question. Is it supported or not? Officially it was going to be dropped quite a while ago. And then it wasn't. And then maybe it is, but actually on Windows it works anyway because of someone else's software.
Moving on to Firefox, when they pushed out the LTS release a few weeks ago, they included a bug that basically stuffed every site that used such obscure technologies as Flash and Java applets. That bug was known about several days before the update went out, but they pushed it anyway. Having established the scale of the screw-up, they then proceeded not to undo the update until they had a fix, which took several more days. On behalf of the customer support guys I work with who were flooded with complaints that our user interfaces had stopped working for about a fortnight, I'd like to thank the people at Mozilla for instituting such a robust and user-focussed QA process along with their rapid release cycle.
I could go on (and on, and on), but right there you have several real world examples of rapid releases pushing out fixes that broke fundamental, widely used technologies, both old and new.
Honestly a lot of your claims seem to be exaggerated or I'm on a very different subset of the Internet than you.
It's funny how often I hear that. And yet two minutes with Google searching for information about any of the bugs above will turn you up thousands of references. And I'm being kind here and not even picking on all the little details they keep breaking in more bleeding edge features, nor on all the irritation to end users rather than developers that both Mozilla and Google cause when they subtly change their UI around for no particular reason.
This is why I use Safari. Despite the fact that Safari crashes routinely when one tab hangs up, at least I don't have to worry about the UI rearranging every time I restart.
Remember the days of Firefox launch parties? Honestly, a year release cycle feels quick.
Right now, for example, Chrome has taken so many shortcuts to try to improve responsiveness that it's just plain broken when it comes to refreshing the page layout or even just repainting in timely fashion after a DOM or CSS change. That means even popular UI toolkits have trouble with basic things like displaying dialog-style content, an everyday task if you design browser-based UIs. And because it's not repainting properly in the first place, presumably because some internal events aren't invalidating some cached data they should be, there's no clear workaround nor any guarantee that you'll get the same breakage from one update to the next.
This one sounds like a biggie. Do you have a reproducible test case to demonstrate this behaviour? I know it's time consuming, but you really should file bug reports for this type of stuff. I've filed a number over the years and they do get worked on and they do get fixed (sometimes a lot quicker than you'd imagine).
Are you building apps or websites? I can't imagine seeing the fundamentals of layout, box model etc breaking from one release to the next.
On the other hand if you're building applications that rely on vendor prefixes then I agree you do have to tread carefully.
Moving on to Firefox, when they pushed out the LTS release a few weeks ago, they included a bug that basically stuffed every site that used such obscure technologies as Flash and Java applets.
Software breaks life goes on. If i'd never personally shipped a line of code with a bug in it I might complain louder.
The pace of innovation is blistering. Just look at all the stuff that's come out recently websockets, webgl, flex-box, css columns, dnd, offline storage, css animation, audio, video, filreader, canvas the list goes on.
If you're building just another brochure website none of this will interest you. On the other hand life is sweet if you have the luxury of using these features. Sure they're sometimes broken. Sure we're all effectively beta testers. But everyone knows that.
If you mean the bugs I described, then no, I think all of them are genuine bugs.
There's no way to justify Chrome not redoing page layout or repainting properly after a DOM or CSS update. That's just sloppy, and it's a serious problem if you're writing app-style pages. Unfortunately, I don't have a self-contained, reproducible test case: we see this a lot using toolkits like jQuery UI when showing (or not) dialog boxes, but unfortunately it's a bit of a Heisenbug, or possibly several Heisenbugs. The general issue has been reported somewhat widely in Chrome-related blogs, though, and IIRC there were some issues already in their bug tracker that looked like they might be related. The latter led to some blog posts suggesting workarounds with JavaScript that might correct the CSS calculation errors in at least some of the cases. The issue has been there for several months, and still hits us from time to time.
The rounded corners problem I referred to was a rendering problem that made pages using the CSS3 rounded corners horribly ugly and which seemed to take several attempts to finally get right. (Of course there were browser prefixes and so on in this area as well for a time, but that's not what I was referring to.)
The H.264 issue is just a mess. The fact is that Chrome supported it, and then Google said after a future update they wouldn't support it any more. They were planning to push an update that outright removed functionality, and that functionality was in one of the few cutting edge areas that was really taking off at the time, too.
And Firefox screwing up support for the plug-ins was just poor quality checking before a release. There's no excuse for breaking something on that kind of scale, particularly when the bug was already in the tracker several days before the update was pushed out.
Sure they're sometimes broken. Sure we're all effectively beta testers. But everyone knows that.
No, they really don't. When my clients ask why the software they've paid me a lot of money to write for them has stopped working, with the result that their on-call guys are getting woken up in the middle of the night by someone on the far side of the world who can't use their very expensive equipment any more, the answer they are looking for is not "Well, you see, we use a Java applet in this product because when we started the project a few years ago HTML5 canvas didn't have the functionality, speed or portability we needed, and that Java applet requires that the user have a Java runtime installed on their system and a corresponding plug-in for their browser, and your customers are using Firefox as their browser, and Firefox pushes automatic updates, which in a stunning piece of incompetence your customers' system administrators have not disabled, so their key systems will apply the updates before anyone tests that nothing important breaks, and in one of those updates the Firefox developers kinda broke a bunch of things on pages that use applets, and that's why the users can't type text where they should be able to, and so it's really not our fault, but at least these bugs will probably get fixed in the next release and that probably won't be more than six weeks away, so for now your platinum support guys should tell your customers to just hang in there for some unknown length of time and then they'll be able to use that very expensive hardware again, and in any case I'm sure this won't in any way jeopardize that contract you were going to get to sell them another 250 units in a multi-million dollar deal next month." No, trust me, that's really not what paying clients want to hear at all.
The rounded corners problem I referred to was a rendering problem that made pages using the CSS3 rounded corners
Any test cases for this? It really is important to see a simple test case. I've never had any issues with either Chrome or FF with corners.
Sure h.264 is a mess. If it bothers you then don't use it. The fact is that Flash is still defacto standard for video, so for consumer facing pages that's probably what you should use.
Sounds like you're upset because you got burned by a recent issues with firefox. It's reasonable to expect such a big breaking change to be caught in their regression testing. Unfortunately it slipped through. The reality is that software has bugs. All software. Yours, and mine. Every product ever shipped has gone out the door with bugs. It's unpleasant, especially when you have no control over the fix.
Seems to me that a rapid release cycle actually works in your favour. Certainly better than the MS cycle where you can expect to have to live with bugs for 18month-2years between releases. Auto updating in particular is a boon for developers. If you look at the Chrome version stats, most people are on the latest stable build and this is mostly due to auto update.
Compare the difference between the graphs for IE and for Chrome under 'Version Adoption': http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/04/internet-explor...
Also, if you're developing an app which is actually used for 'multimillion $ deals' then why aren't you distributing it as an application inside of some kind of wrapper such as Qt? Sounds like deploying as a regular web app was a bad technical choice for you product.
For the Chrome/dialog bugs, if you search for things like "chrome bug repaint" you'll probably find quite a few similar issues.
For the rounded corners bugs, this looks relevant:
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=128
As far as video goes, Flash is not the de facto standard any more if you're working with mobile. Apple won that one. And H.264 is technically superior to the other useful formats for HTML5 video and the only format supported and/or supported with hardware acceleration on several platforms, so dropping it isn't much of an option.
Finally, on the subject of testing, it wasn't really me personally who got burned by the Firefox screw-up, it was one of my clients. Their technical people understand that there isn't much I can do about it, but that doesn't help their customer support people who have to deal with irate customers.
In any case, we actually recommend that their customers use IE rather than Firefox or Chrome these days, because for all its sins, it is a stable platform to build on and we can test against it with some confidence that end users will see similar behaviour for a useful period of time to come. No-one connected with this project likes rapid browser release cycles: not the developers, not the users, and certainly not the guys paying my invoices, who are on the wrong side of both.
Developers will be able to clean up their CSS more often (e.g. -webkit-border-radius, -moz-border-radius => border-radius). Sure, somethings will be only for developers at first but after a burn-in and Chrome/Firefox adoption, certain features and techniques will become mainstream. IE users will get the more "generic" page. Not a lot can be done about that.
Finally, let me add that it reduces testing for developers because now you only have to test on one version of Firefox. FF 3.6 is under %3 market share, and it was retired today.
As for the not freezing, that's a different unrelated issue. I've been running the Firefox and Chrome nightly's for a year and I'm pretty happy with both.
Yes, I agree it would be great if everyone converged on standards sooner. If we agree on the one true standard to create a linear-gradient, for example, then we shouldn't have to wait 2 years to get it implemented.
Btw, you are supporting all those Opera extensions too, right? :-(
Oh, if only that were true. The number of minor issues that Firefox and Chrome have broken in their rapid updates is vast. And they break major things occasionally too. Try looking at what happened to pages using Flash or Java applets in (ironically) the initial LTS release of Firefox a few weeks ago, for example, or consider the Chrome/H.264 fiasco.
Leaving aside the things they are breaking, there is also the issue of things they are not fixing. There are plenty of long-standing and widely applicable bugs in the rendering of existing but no longer trendy features in these browsers. I don't see how you can have this constant pressure to show progress and support for bleeding edge technologies without also squeezing out developer time that would be better spent fixing bugs that already affect many users today.
What exactly has lead you to this conclusion? As a professional web developer for a high volume website, I can't remember a single instance of Chrome breaking any html/css/javascript on our site between updates. That's not to say it doesn't happen, it just seems really rare and minor...
What kind of site do you develop that users are constantly complaining that things are breaking due to Chrome updates? I've never heard this be made as a sincere complaint before.
The case I was specifically thinking of in that case was the Firefox bug that broke Java applets a few weeks ago, and with them everyone's web apps that use the technology as part of their UI.
And the specific case you mention here is also something that could happen in a longer-term release; rapid-release lets you fix it faster.
Not being able to draw rounded corners properly is unique to "the kind of web work I do"? Yanking an entire video codec -- and probably the most popular one in the industry -- is unique to "the kind of web work I do"? Screwing up the browser if someone loads a page containing a Flash or Java applet is unique to "the kind of web work I do"?
I'm honestly not sure at this point what it is you think I do or why you think it's somehow unique. I'm drawing on several projects and more than one client I've worked with here, and just about the only thing they have in common is that they involve building a web app rather than just designing a static page. There must be many thousands if not millions of guys doing similar jobs, and I'm far from the only person to report any of the issues I mentioned.
And the specific case you mention here is also something that could happen in a longer-term release; rapid-release lets you fix it faster.
Except that if your rapid release cycle doesn't allow enough time for adequate QA then it is far more likely that you will ship broken code, and in the plug-in case the breakage was so severe that they pushed an out-of-band patch to correct it anyway. The rapid release cycle may well have contributed to causing the problem and certainly did nothing to help fix it in that case.
This one I just don't understand because, ostensibly, your argument is that you have to down-code for browsers that don't support new features yet, but this is a feature that rapid-release browsers support that others didn't for a long time... It's also a trivial rendering issue and doesn't break anything if not working.
Yes, the codec problem seems specific. Most web video is handled by Flash, not the browser itself. If you're using it, you're trying "cutting edge" stuff which I thought is what you were saying isn't important to have...
And the Flash/Java issue you mentioned happened in an "LTS" release, which means that it's specifically the version of Firefox that does (supposedly) get adequate QA before release because it's only updated about once a year, with the goal of it being more stable. So it seems this kind of thing is just as likely to happen either way.
> I'm far from the only person to report any of the issues I mentioned
I'm not saying these things didn't happen or weren't reported by others, I'm just saying that the things that apparently happen frequently for you due to rapid-release have almost no effect on the greater internet. It seems like you're saying it's something that's bad for everyone, when really it seems it's just pretty crappy for your situation. In reality, rapid release is by far a net positive.
I think you missed the "standards" part.
Complete list of changes: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/12.0/releasenotes/bugli...
The problem with the "hey, before we're going to let you use Firefox, we need to download a new version for you. Wait a few minutes" screen is that it stops you dead from being able to do whatever you opened the browser to do. It's jarring enough to make you avoid Firefox for anything except the times when you absolutely need to test something on it.
That means you use it less often, which means that opening it always puts you through that annoying process. Every Single Time you use Firefox.
So over the years, they've trained me that "Firefox == Pain". It'll take them a long time to train me back.
But I applaud them for finally trying.
I don't think it's a good thing to install that kind of loophole on your PC.
I happen to have written a similar service a couple of years ago for a very different purpose and let me tell you one thing: this is nothing less than a backdoor.
You run a program from the service and make sure it runs in the user's session. The problem is, how do you decide a program is "legit"?
You're going to tell me "you check against a digital signature". Except it doesn't work. You can only check parts of the binary, not the whole binary (as some content is unpredictable once it runs).
The other big problem - assuming they have a perfect gateway - is that a vulnerability in Firefox could become catastrophic as it could go through the service to run as a privileged user and wreak havoc.
I read this a few times, and I still don't get why you wouldn't check the whole binary. Care to elaborate?
2: You could exploit Google's update service as well. Do I see flurry exploits around it? Much much smaller code base. Much less complex tasks.
3: A digital signature signs the whole binary. Not parts of the binary. Do you know how this works? There's no such thing such as signing a partial binary.
> You can only check parts of the binary, not the whole binary
> some content is unpredictable once it runs
Using a service that uses authenticated connections and signed installs is similar to what Windows Update does, for the right reasons.
Best would be that Windows Update would be open to let any app hook into it for updates of course, but til then, that's as close as it gets.
Why is chrome bad? It at least can't lead to a system compromise.
Since Chrome is in the user area, guess what, anything compromising Chrome can overwrite Chrome itself. It can then prompt you with UAC or simply have a user space trojan. (heh, and it can't compromise Firefox if it's also installed)
An updater has a several magnitudes less code to audit (thousand, millions magnitudes?).
In Firefox's case, if Firefox is compromised, it cannot modify itself (heh, it can compromise Chrome if it's also installed)
In other words, the installation location doesn't really matter. If the process is breached, the user context is f#cked regardless.
[1]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Reviews/Firefox10/SilentUp....
[2]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=544442#c24
If a Firefox exploit drops an exe, it will never run with admin rights. It'd have to be coming from Mozilla and signed by Mozilla. Plus, it'd have to come from their servers, because you can't just drop the exe and have it installed, the updater only trust what it downloads on it's own.
Why the downvotes? As the other comment points out this is a really stupid security bit to nitpick as all of the alternatives are equally vulnerable in an equally contrivable scenario manner. One way or another privileges have to be granted. They can be granted in one place or another and have largely similar if not identical implications at the very least in terms of the net effect that can be had.
> A service per application to handle updates is not very good.
It's not like the service is continually running.
Especially when you have people used to writing user applications making secure services (this part isn't very relevant to browsers).
No, it's not. If Firefox is installed by a non-admin user, it should go into the user's directory. If it is installed by an admin, then it should ask if this is an OS-wide installation and only then drop it into %ProgramFiles%. Chrome got it absolutely right.
If you run an unzipped firefox from your desktop, it will not install the updater, because it CANNOT. There must be at least ONE UAC prompt ONCE. And that's where it's installed as admin, that's what UAC is there for.
You don't seem to understand how permissions work.
Firefox (or any other program for that matter) should be able to install itself when run by an under-privileged user. SHOULD. If it CANT, then its installer is designed incorrectly and its installation mechanics are wrong.
Consider a simple case when I am on a shared computer as a restricted user. In an Internet cafe or similar. I should be able to install, run and use Firefox. There's basically no technical reason why it will not be able to run under a restricted set of privileges. It has no drivers to install, it doesn't bind to privileges range of ports, it doesn't need to install a service. It should quietly go into C:\Users\dude\Program Files and make itself comfortable there.
Microsoft has a set of guidelines, in part covering where what should go. Some of these guidelines are simply retarded, they have always been. Their existence is not an excuse for not questioning them. If a developer insists on following them, it just doesn't speak much of a developer.
There are some benefits to installing critical apps like web browsers outside of the user's home directory. If a virus compromises the user account, it still can't touch the web browser's executable.
I did notice that something popped up on one of my computers, having triggered an alarm in one of my security tools. I automatically told it to block the installation, the same as I do for anything else that presumes to invite itself onto my system without first explaining what it does and asking my permission.
It does seem to have sneaked in on my work PC, but seems to have configured the service to run with manual startup only. So what exactly triggers this service, and what kind of security implications are there? In short, do I really want this (given that I really don't care about absurdly frequent updates unless there's a security alert that requires an immediate fix) or should I nuke it?
Wait for the download to finish, then click the "Apply Update" button and you will be updated to Firefox 12.
Past issues include antiviruses that crash Firefox because of their invasive monitoring. While ideally these things would be caught by QA or early adopter users, there's no way to test all possible combinations of software.
That said, wow, the OS X improvements are huge. Previously I could only force quit if I wanted to shut down to free memory or whatever, but now it closes normally. I'm also not seeing the same kind of memory usage, but it's early so I'm not sure how long that will last.
I was about to upgrade, but TST is by far my most important extension (and the number one reason I've never seriously considered switching to Chrome).
I'm the same way about switching to Chrome, by the way. I would love to but I just can't picture life without TST after so many years.
A big problem for Gecko which does not exist for WebKit is XUL extensions. If you think about it, XUL extensions must run in UI process (unlike Chrome extensions), but XUL extensions can also access web content which lives in web process. It is nearly impossible to make this 100% compatible...
The issue is that extensions expect to access web content synchronously, so you need synchronous IPC for perfect compatibility, but that causes your UI process to block on your web process.
Then if they do manage to do it (and do it right), well, I'd have been wrong :)
Edit: Apparently, not so. A pity.
Does anyone know when we will see them?
You can use it today on the Nightly builds from http://nightly.mozilla.org/ or in a few days on the Aurora channel: https://mozilla.org/firefox/aurora/
Lion-style scrollbars are still in progress: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=636564
You can test them on the UX branch: https://msujaws.wordpress.com/2012/03/15/mozillas-ux-nightly...
Why would you want that?
Use regular full-screen and put on a new space, you got the same thing except it's not a complete fuck up when using multiple screens.
Until FF fixes their extension compatibility, stops breaking plugins with each release, gets rid of version verification for all the popular plugins, and finds a more streamlined way (non-modal, ffs!) of prompting you to enable/disable extensions that are now broken or require more permissions, they'll still be playing catchup to Chrome's autoupdate procedure.
On the other hand, I'm still waiting for the Thunderbird team to fix this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=449299