theyarecomingforyou Posted May 26, 2009 Share Posted May 26, 2009 Would be nice for mozilla to implement this natively... The development ecosystem for Firefox is terribly inefficient. Chrome has implemented a native Aero theme that takes advantage of transparency but it's not even on the cards for Firefox. That's without even mentioning the poor standards support, to which Mozilla is now losing to Chrome / Safari and Opera. Firefox became popular because Microsoft was dragging its heels with regards to standards support and security but now it's Firefox that's in that same position. As soon as Google implements proper extension support for Chrome then I'll stop using Firefox. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ATLien_0 Posted May 26, 2009 Share Posted May 26, 2009 it seems to me the firefox might be loosing their edge. Don't get me wrong love firefox and use it everyday. A couple of years ago everyone switched to firefox because that was the safer choice for browsers. Now however IE is more secure and other browsers are integrating better into the system. Firefox is slowly getting there. I hope to see better integration into Windows 7 soon, it shouldn't be that much extra work for them to do unless it has to do with them supporting Windows, Linux and OSX Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rakeshishere Posted May 26, 2009 Author Share Posted May 26, 2009 Any idea on when are they planning to release the final version of Firefox 3.5 ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
code.kliu.org Posted May 27, 2009 Share Posted May 27, 2009 (edited) The development ecosystem for Firefox is terribly inefficient. Chrome has implemented a native Aero theme that takes advantage of transparency but it's not even on the cards for Firefox. That's without even mentioning the poor standards support, to which Mozilla is now losing to Chrome / Safari and Opera. Firefox became popular because Microsoft was dragging its heels with regards to standards support and security but now it's Firefox that's in that same position. As soon as Google implements proper extension support for Chrome then I'll stop using Firefox. First, passing Acid3 is not the same as having standards support. Even the person who designed it (Hixie) acknowledges that. Acid3 covers only a very, very small part of the "standards". It's almost like saying that passing some online quiz that someone whipped up is a good indicator of your intelligence. For example, WebKit implements just enough SVG animation to pass the acid tests, which means that it implements virtually nothing (and it's implementation is actually broken--but hey, it passes the particular aspects of SVG animation that the test covered), whereas Gecko's implementation is far, far ahead of WebKit's. There was even one case where WebKit got an extra point on Acid3 by basically cheating on one of the font tests--they actually checked in code to look for that particular font used by that test and handle it differently. Acid1 was actually useful. Much of the failures in Acid2 were about weird edge cases and handling of errors and invalid code that will rarely, if ever, appear on the Web. Acid3 is, well, it's nothing more than an opportunity for Opera and WebKit to engage in grandstanding showmanship. In terms of standards support, Gecko is farther along in some areas and behind in some areas. If you look at the next generation of web standards, such as HTML5 and SVG, Gecko is actually the clear frontrunner. As for Aero, remind me again, where is Google's Mac build? Their Linux build? Their BeOS build? Their Solaris build? Their OS/2 build? What do you mean they don't exist? *gasp* Mozilla was designed from Day 1 to be cross platform. That does mean that OS-specific things come slower, and that's the trade-off. Also, Gecko is a full-blown platform. You can use XUL+JS to build Firefox. Thunderbird. SeaMonkey. Songbird. Etc. There are a gazillion extensions and addons that do anything from radically altering the browser's UI to changing the behavior of webpages. Can Chrome do that? Can Opera do that? No, because they are not bona fide platforms in the way that Gecko is. Yes, this does mean that implementing something like Aero glass properly is trickier. But it also means that there is more flexibility in the platform. Once again, a trade-off. If you put tight limits and controls on your browser's UI (e.g., AFAIK, the Chrome addons will never be able to do the kinds of things that Firefox addons do--Chrome addons will not amount to much more than Greasemonkey scripts), then yea, it's gonna be easier to do UI changes. Once again, a trade-off. Finally, with respect to the speed of the changes, Firefox and IE are encumbered by large user bases and the need to be extremely careful about not breaking things. This is why major changes are limited to only the early stages of each release cycle. WebKit and Opera have the luxury of not having to worry nearly as about their existing user base (anyone remember the days of Phoenix and Firebird? Those were quick, rapidfire releases b/c Moz had the luxury of a small user base back then). BTW, Aero glass support was added to 3.1 many months ago, and any theme author or addon maker can make use of it, no Glasser necessary. But glass is not going to make its way into the default theme because there are concerns about compatibility (You're basically going to have a transparent surface--how is that going to affect the various addons that modify that part of the UI?) and layout (Using the glass properly means that some elements need to be moved and shifted around and the menu possibly hidden--are they going to make this change for all platforms or just for Vista? How will users react to such a change--even something as simple as unifying the back/forward buttons sparked a huge debate with strong voices for and against...) Edited May 27, 2009 by kliu0x52 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Panda X Posted May 27, 2009 Share Posted May 27, 2009 First, passing Acid3 is not the same as having standards support. Even the person who designed it (Hixie) acknowledges that. Acid3 covers only a very, very small part of the "standards". It's almost like saying that passing some online quiz that someone whipped up is a good indicator of your intelligence. For example, WebKit implements just enough SVG animation to pass the acid tests, which means that it implements virtually nothing (and it's implementation is actually broken--but hey, it passes the particular aspects of SVG animation that the test covered), whereas Gecko's implementation is far, far ahead of WebKit's. There was even one case where WebKit got an extra point on Acid3 by basically cheating on one of the font tests--they actually checked in code to look for that particular font used by that test and handle it differently. Acid1 was actually useful. Much of the failures in Acid2 were about weird edge cases and handling of errors and invalid code that will rarely, if ever, appear on the Web. Acid3 is, well, it's nothing more than an opportunity for Opera and WebKit to engage in grandstanding showmanship.In terms of standards support, Gecko is farther along in some areas and behind in some areas. If you look at the next generation of web standards, such as HTML5 and SVG, Gecko is actually the clear frontrunner. As for Aero, remind me again, where is Google's Mac build? Their Linux build? Their BeOS build? Their Solaris build? Their OS/2 build? What do you mean they don't exist? *gasp* Mozilla was designed from Day 1 to be cross platform. That does mean that OS-specific things come slower, and that's the trade-off. Also, Gecko is a full-blown platform. You can use XUL+JS to build Firefox. Thunderbird. SeaMonkey. Songbird. Etc. There are a gazillion extensions and addons that do anything from radically altering the browser's UI to changing the behavior of webpages. Can Chrome do that? Can Opera do that? No, because they are not bona fide platforms in the way that Gecko is. Yes, this does mean that implementing something like Aero glass properly is trickier. But it also means that there is more flexibility in the platform. Once again, a trade-off. If you put tight limits and controls on your browser's UI (e.g., AFAIK, the Chrome addons will never be able to do the kinds of things that Firefox addons do--Chrome addons will not amount to much more than Greasemonkey scripts), then yea, it's gonna be easier to do UI changes. Once again, a trade-off. Finally, with respect to the speed of the changes, Firefox and IE are encumbered by large user bases and the need to be extremely careful about not breaking things. This is why major changes are limited to only the early stages of each release cycle. WebKit and Opera have the luxury of not having to worry nearly as about their existing user base (anyone remember the days of Phoenix and Firebird? Those were quick, rapidfire releases b/c Moz had the luxury of a small user base back then). BTW, Aero glass support was added to 3.1 many months ago, and any theme author or addon maker can make use of it, no Glasser necessary. But glass is not going to make its way into the default theme because there are concerns about compatibility (You're basically going to have a transparent surface--how is that going to affect the various addons that modify that part of the UI?) and layout (Using the glass properly means that some elements need to be moved and shifted around and the menu possibly hidden--are they going to make this change for all platforms or just for Vista? How will users react to such a change--even something as simple as unifying the back/forward buttons sparked a huge debate with strong voices for and against...) You don't need to move anything to add glass. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Calum Veteran Posted May 27, 2009 Veteran Share Posted May 27, 2009 First, passing Acid3 is not the same as having standards support. Even the person who designed it (Hixie) acknowledges that. Acid3 covers only a very, very small part of the "standards". It's almost like saying that passing some online quiz that someone whipped up is a good indicator of your intelligence. For example, WebKit implements just enough SVG animation to pass the acid tests, which means that it implements virtually nothing (and it's implementation is actually broken--but hey, it passes the particular aspects of SVG animation that the test covered), whereas Gecko's implementation is far, far ahead of WebKit's. There was even one case where WebKit got an extra point on Acid3 by basically cheating on one of the font tests--they actually checked in code to look for that particular font used by that test and handle it differently. Acid1 was actually useful. Much of the failures in Acid2 were about weird edge cases and handling of errors and invalid code that will rarely, if ever, appear on the Web. Acid3 is, well, it's nothing more than an opportunity for Opera and WebKit to engage in grandstanding showmanship.In terms of standards support, Gecko is farther along in some areas and behind in some areas. If you look at the next generation of web standards, such as HTML5 and SVG, Gecko is actually the clear frontrunner. As for Aero, remind me again, where is Google's Mac build? Their Linux build? Their BeOS build? Their Solaris build? Their OS/2 build? What do you mean they don't exist? *gasp* Mozilla was designed from Day 1 to be cross platform. That does mean that OS-specific things come slower, and that's the trade-off. Also, Gecko is a full-blown platform. You can use XUL+JS to build Firefox. Thunderbird. SeaMonkey. Songbird. Etc. There are a gazillion extensions and addons that do anything from radically altering the browser's UI to changing the behavior of webpages. Can Chrome do that? Can Opera do that? No, because they are not bona fide platforms in the way that Gecko is. Yes, this does mean that implementing something like Aero glass properly is trickier. But it also means that there is more flexibility in the platform. Once again, a trade-off. If you put tight limits and controls on your browser's UI (e.g., AFAIK, the Chrome addons will never be able to do the kinds of things that Firefox addons do--Chrome addons will not amount to much more than Greasemonkey scripts), then yea, it's gonna be easier to do UI changes. Once again, a trade-off. Finally, with respect to the speed of the changes, Firefox and IE are encumbered by large user bases and the need to be extremely careful about not breaking things. This is why major changes are limited to only the early stages of each release cycle. WebKit and Opera have the luxury of not having to worry nearly as about their existing user base (anyone remember the days of Phoenix and Firebird? Those were quick, rapidfire releases b/c Moz had the luxury of a small user base back then). BTW, Aero glass support was added to 3.1 many months ago, and any theme author or addon maker can make use of it, no Glasser necessary. But glass is not going to make its way into the default theme because there are concerns about compatibility (You're basically going to have a transparent surface--how is that going to affect the various addons that modify that part of the UI?) and layout (Using the glass properly means that some elements need to be moved and shifted around and the menu possibly hidden--are they going to make this change for all platforms or just for Vista? How will users react to such a change--even something as simple as unifying the back/forward buttons sparked a huge debate with strong voices for and against...) You say all that, but Firefox still doesn't start up straight away for me when I open an instance - it takes ages. Chrome starts up straight away, the moment I start up a new instance. Firefox still uses a ridiculous amount of memory for me too which slows down my computer a lot. Chrome doesn't. Chrome has this nice little animation when you download a file - Firefox doesn't. Chrome has tabs in the title bar, within the glass, to save on space inside the browser's interface. Firefox doesn't, looks pretty ugly without glass turned on by default and doesn't have tabs in the titlebar - extensions and themes do not help achieve this is a good looking way. Now, obviously the performance issues are the main problems and those are what eventually made me decide to make the move to Chrome, but the last two are visual changes which keep me extremely satisfied when it comes to Chrome's current lack of customisation. Also, there are no extensions for Firefox which provide this functionality yet, and I don't see there being. I was very surprised when I decided to move to Chrome as I despise Google, so that's quite a testament to them - I hate them but I'll actually use their web browser because it's that good. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
code.kliu.org Posted May 27, 2009 Share Posted May 27, 2009 You don't need to move anything to add glass. IE only has back/forward, address bar, and search box in glass. The rest is non-glass or hidden. Having the whole toolbar and the menu bar be glass looks really tacky (not just my opinion, but the opinion of people at Mozilla in charge of the UI, and it would qualify as a misuse of Glass according to MS's own UI guidelines at MSDN). You can do it, and there's nothing to stop someone from making their own theme that uses the new built-in glass support in Fx3.1+ (so no need for a separate XPCOM component like in Glasser for Fx3), but glass done right is a lot more than blindly flipping a switch. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
code.kliu.org Posted May 28, 2009 Share Posted May 28, 2009 Sorry, didn't see your post until now (since it was posted while I was typing my previous post) Firefox still uses a ridiculous amount of memory for me too which slows down my computer a lot. Chrome doesn't. I don't know how the most recent Chrome builds fare, but as of a few months ago, Chrome was "leaking" worse than Firefox, which is, ironically, what Chrome was trying to avoid. By using multiple processes, they can limit the extent of "leaking", but because of the way that Chrome reuses processes and groups tabs, once I started using 20+ tabs, there was so much process reusage that this mitigation in Chrome was basically rendered useless, thus offering a glimpse at Chrome's true memory usage patterns. Also, say "leak" with the quotes because a lot of Firefox's memory woes are not due to "leaking" in the traditional sense, but due to fragmentation (e.g., a single byte of memory still in-use can hold an entire 4K page alive, and with enough allocations and deallocations, memory for a tab might get scattered across countless different pages), and I'm pretty sure that the same is true of Chrome, IE, and other browsers, and a lot of it stems from the memory allocation and usage patterns of website JavaScript (with NoScript installed, my Firefox with 5 windows and 120+ open tabs eats only 350MB after a month of use). And as I noted, if Chrome is deprived of its throwaway process model (which gets rendered ineffective by process reuse and the grouping of multiple tabs per process once you have too many tabs open), Chrome actually fares much, much worse than Firefox (roughly about 50% more RAM despite having only half the tabs open). Of course, YMMV. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Calum Veteran Posted June 5, 2009 Veteran Share Posted June 5, 2009 Sorry, didn't see your post until now (since it was posted while I was typing my previous post)[...] Well, I'm worse for replying this late :D I do apologise for the late reply. I'd just like to thank you for the information, though, as I never knew that :) Chrome does seem snappier for me and starts up much quicker than Firefox, but I will definitely think about the technical aspects which you have made me aware of with that post :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ViperAFK Posted June 5, 2009 Share Posted June 5, 2009 Im using ff 3.5 beta 4 and it seems to have this by default, I am not using winfox: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Calum Veteran Posted June 5, 2009 Veteran Share Posted June 5, 2009 You guys don't get enough love! I appreciate all the hard work you do because the only coding I can do is some simple bash. If you want some one to test a 64 bit extention for you, just pm me and I will be happy to oblige. Thanks, that's very nice of you :) I'll keep that in mind. Although I do hope to get a 64bit computer soon enough :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rikfrombelgium Posted June 5, 2009 Share Posted June 5, 2009 Im using ff 3.5 beta 4 and it seems to have this by default, I am not using winfox: that's strange, I just installed it to because you said that and I've got nothing. Do I need to change settings or restart or something? thx Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Calum Veteran Posted June 5, 2009 Veteran Share Posted June 5, 2009 that's strange, I just installed it to because you said that and I've got nothing. Do I need to change settings or restart or something? thx I don't have it, either, so that's really odd. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest xiphi Posted June 5, 2009 Share Posted June 5, 2009 Im using ff 3.5 beta 4 and it seems to have this by default, I am not using winfox: Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 does not have Jump List support. You've probably removed winfox from your system but didn't kill the process or something to that effect. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ViperAFK Posted June 5, 2009 Share Posted June 5, 2009 No I tried winfox ages ago and completely deleted it and have restarted the computer since then ect... the process is not running. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Warboy Posted June 5, 2009 Share Posted June 5, 2009 maybe your running a nightly build of 3.5? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Death Proof Posted June 6, 2009 Share Posted June 6, 2009 doesnt work on my ff 3.5b4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ilike2burnthing Posted June 6, 2009 Share Posted June 6, 2009 Im using ff 3.5 beta 4 and it seems to have this by default, I am not using winfox: Please show a similar screen shot but also with task manager showing all running processes/applications. Also, your firefox taskbar icon shows 2 open applications, please close this other window if it is not winfox. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ViperAFK Posted June 6, 2009 Share Posted June 6, 2009 Please show a similar screen shot but also with task manager showing all running processes/applications. Also, your firefox taskbar icon shows 2 open applications, please close this other window if it is not winfox. im on a different pc right now. The other window is a ff window I opened, the process is not running I will show a ss later. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ilike2burnthing Posted June 8, 2009 Share Posted June 8, 2009 im on a different pc right now. The other window is a ff window I opened, the process is not running I will show a ss later. Later has gone and passed, any chance? Otherwise it was a fake. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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