Submitted by “If the Firefox browser were a car, it would be in the garage right now being souped up by an anxious group of gearheads. When Firefox 3.0 is released later this year, the open-source browser is likely to contain a host of new features, including offline support for Web applications and new bookmark and search features. Mozilla released the second alpha version of Firefox 3.0 earlier this month.”
The platform improvements in Firefox are very welcome. FF3 is Acid2 compliant, and has a much improved engine. However, I feel that Firefox begins to lag with UI. Both IE7 and Opera have a tab button on the interface by default, so that new users can discover tabbed-browsing. Both also sport reworked UI models that try to ditch the 15-year old browser layout. Firefox is yet to put a new tab button on the UI by default.
There is a lot of innovation being planned and thought out, like the idea for a new simplified location bar, http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2007/02/location_bar_p… but Mozilla always seem to be slow when it comes to making UI changes.
Truth to be told, I´ve never ever heard people complaining about the new tab button on FF.
They just drag the new tab button into the toolbar, or press CTRL + T. Seriously.
Seriously, regular people don’t know how to do that. The largest portion of Firefox users will never discover tab browsing. Every single geek fails to note this fact because they have precisely zero empathy for regular users.
So true!
Plus, one of the largest reasons I don’t use Safari is the lack of a new tab button. I have no interest in Cmd+T.
why yet another (default) button ?!
c-t or middle click on a link is so much friendlier. A new tab button would be like another ‘go’ button; I think only a very small minority of either firstime, uneducated or lazy people would need it. An utter waste of space. The logic of dumbing down the interface for the benefit of these users is akin to not using words in books because pictures are easier.
Everyone does market research: then IE introduces a tab button, Opera introduces a tab button, and Firefox includes an optional tab button, and you think that it’s dumbing it down. How incredibly pompous.
It really irks me dealing with people who believe that since they way they do it is sensible to them, everyone else should be forced to follow suit. THIS is why some free software packages are so hard to use, because there’s so much arrogance with some developers who insist their way is the sole right way. You enjoy Safari. I’ll enjoy using every single other browser, since they gives me what I prefer.
What about people using laptops with no middle click button?
I think the behaviour of having the tab bar showing by default with a new tab button is good for the simple reason that it introduces it to people unaware of it before. It’s easy to disable for people like me who don’t like the new tab button.
Truth to be told, I´ve never ever heard people complaining about the new tab button on FF.
It’s my son’s #1 complaint about Firefox.
New users can discover the tab functionality from the “New tab” entry in the file menu. Adding more buttons makes the GUI look more crowded.
Then there is the problem what such a button should look like. As a new user I would probably not have understood the function of the existing “new tab” just by looking at it, so it would need to be redesigned in a way that was easily understood and not mistaken for something else. That could be harder than you think as we have tabs and tab or folder like like things in other parts of the OS and browser.
IMHO, it is better to keep things clean and simple, most users will notice this functionality sooner or later anyway.
I can say I’m disappointed. It’s been a while I’ve been looking for Javascript 2.0 to become availlable commonly and it’s still far from reach. Javascript is the step needed to pass from Web 2.0 to 3.0, which will lay ground for full online application.
Man, I hope the whole web isn’t hinging on javascript! Let’s pick a better language to hinge on.
“Man, I hope the whole web isn’t hinging on javascript! Let’s pick a better language to hinge on.”
What’s wrong with Javascript?
Let’s pick a better language to hinge on
Such as?
How much have you used javascript? It can be quirky, but it’s also quite flexible and it’s really amazing what you can do with it.
Web 2.0 is just a brand for supposedly new ideas. HTML was invented for web 1.0; considering that we are still using HTML, I don’t think we’re on web 2.0 yet for real. All Javascript 2.0 will add is less hacking, tidier libraries and slightly smaller code. It won’t fundamentally change the www at all. HTML5/WebApps-Working Group/SVG might do that though.
I doubt it. HTML5 is also going to be backward compatible with HTML4. What it will introduce is Xforms 2, a more widely supported canvas tag, and several other minor new tags. I seriously think there will never be a major re-invention of a hypertext-based world wide web.
The next step is the introduction of a new language, maybe something like XUL, which can draw a chrome-like display on your screen. Until we can get to that level of application (much like ajax13.com does, in a less browser-specific way), we are in the same generation of web.
HTML5 is also going to be backward compatible with HTML4. What it will introduce is Xforms 2 […]
What you mean is called “Web Forms 2.0”, see
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-forms/current-work/
XForms is the specification of the W3C (which is not backwards compatible, see
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/
I just hope that Firefox fixes some of their developer documentation. For everything beyond core JavaScript features and things that are open standards, the documentation is appalling. About a year back, I was looking into using the Mozilla framework for writing a couple simple programs. I figured, what could be better, having access to the Gecko rendering engine, simple cross platform deployment, a themeable user interface via XUL (XML User interface Language).
Unfortunately, I kept having to dig into the source code just to figure out how to do what should be easy things. After about a week of pouring through Firefox’s source code, I just gave up.
If the Mozilla Foundation really wants Firefox to become an “application platform” they really have to put some serious effort into their documentation. They make how many million dollars a year, why not hire someone full time to fix the holes in their documentation and even publish an up to date e-book detailing how to write a full featured application with Firefox. All of the independently written material on this topic is obsolete almost to the point of being useless (it is almost all based on the original Mozilla Suite).
Its not going to happen. There is no html5, but the change from web 1.0 to web 2.0 could be viewed as the shift from html to xml, specifically xhtml.
There is no html5 […]
Just in case you didn’t know, the WHATWG calls its extensions to HTML 4.01 “HTML5”. (I don’t claim that it becomes anymore “official” just because they choose to call it HTML5.) See:
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-forms/current-work/#r-to-html5
(“1.4. Relationship to HTML5”)