Places Feature Cut From Firefox 2

segphault writes "Apparently, the new bookmark and history system (called 'Places') scheduled for inclusion in Firefox 2 has been removed from the roadmap and disabled in the builds. An article at Ars Technica discusses some of the implications: 'Since Firefox 2 (and all alpha builds from here on out) will use the conventional bookmark system, those of you that have been using Firefox 2 alphas (the Gecko 1.8 branch) will have to export your bookmarks to HTML in order to preserve them. As a Firefox user and a software developer, I am personally very disappointed with the removal of this innovative feature.'" Update: 05/01 01:16 GMT by Z : Ars link updated.

Re:Hey, Mozilla pulled a Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is Microsoft charges you for the feature whether or not it is included (and, if included, whether or not it even works).

Firefox has the wrong focus

[Theovon]

Just like Microsoft, Firefox developers have gotten stuck on the feature-creep treadmill. Instead of fixing incessant crashes and debilitating memory leaks, they add more whiz-bang features to compete with the "enemy". Instead of adding features to make their browser more robust and responsive, they add more crap to make it bigger, slower, and buggier.

Firefox is no longer about doing the right thing. It's now all about one-upping Microsoft at their own stupid game, and the users are suffering for it. Open Source developers, apparently, are no more ammune to this competition attitude than the proprietary vendors. There is no longer anything special about Firefox. What's more, they suffer from the syndrome many open source projects suffer from, which is that they prefer to work on the "interesting" bits, rather than spending time adding some polish to make things work WELL.

yes, but

[fuentes]

Disappointing, yes, but this is what makes excellence in software. They recognized the problems, realized the time it would take to fix, and decided on a "better safe than sorry" approach. This will make the eventual release of "places" that much better!

Disappointing but not unusual

[erroneus]

When a new major release is pending and a feature is pulled from the release, you have to believe there's a really good reason for it.

Some people have compared this to features removed from Vista. Really bad analogy. The motivation behind the two projects are very very different. And so far, this is but one project.

From a rough understanding of these situations, you just have to assume that it wouldn't be made 'good enough' for the next release and keep it on schedule. There might be some differences of opinion about which is more important -- the quality of the release if it is on time, and the timliness of the release with all of the intended features. I don't have any particular leaning in this instance. However, I am rather happy with the Firefox that I run now, so I'm in no hurry to upgrade to Firefox 2.

I think perhaps it would be interesting to simply put it to a vote and let the community decide. Which is more important: The inclusion of this feature or a release made on schedule.

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[Xelrach]

Doesn't the fact that "Places" was delayed show that they _are_ focused on polish?

Not just Firefox

[houstonbofh]

I remember a time when Linux and Mozilla on an older system would breathe new life into it. Retired business systems would be a safer and snappy web surfer for "Less Technical" relatives. No more. Try a new full featured distribution (The kind you could expect a non-tech to use) on old hardware, and it is as slow as XP. Good thing MS is coming out with a slower operating system to lower the bar for the OSS advocates.

Re:Differentiation

[CCFreak2K]

I don't want to start a flame war, but maybe there's more going on under the hood than at first glance. For example, imagine a Windows 2000 Professional box and a Windows XP Professional box with the regular Windows Classic theme. They both look a little different, and they both act pretty much the same, but they're quite different.

Maybe a better example for the /. crowd would have been Linux and *BSD with X/KDE one each, heh.

Why do the 2.0 release?

[mccoma]

I guess I am a little confused what the rush is. Can't they just hold the release until they get this feature correct? It is not like they are selling a product and need the churn to make revenue.

Welcome to Software Engineering

[DigitlDud]

You start with 1000 awesome features, and end up implementing 2.

Date-driven development

[Bogtha]

From the announcement [google.com]:

As we have been preparing for the FF2 Alpha2 on May 9 it has become increasingly clear that we do not have time to complete an implementation of places that lives up to our standards of user experience and quality.

From Ben Goodger's weblog [mozillazine.org]:

Firefox has never been about date driven development (within reason). The changes with Places should not be seen as a change in this sentiment.

So which is it? You can hardly drop a feature to meet your release date target while still claiming that you aren't driven by release dates.

I've felt for a while that Firefox's development has suffered and taken a back seat to marketing, and every so often, something like this happens to reinforce that belief. When faced with the choice between finishing a feature and releasing on a certain day, I believe most other open-source projects would choose to finish the feature. Whatever happened to "release it when it's ready"?

Re:Date-driven development

[Kjella]

So which is it? You can hardly drop a feature to meet your release date target while still claiming that you aren't driven by release dates.

I've felt for a while that Firefox's development has suffered and taken a back seat to marketing, and every so often, something like this happens to reinforce that belief. When faced with the choice between finishing a feature and releasing on a certain day, I believe most other open-source projects would choose to finish the feature. Whatever happened to "release it when it's ready"?

Well, that depends on how much it has slipped. If you want something that doesn't ship until it's "perfect", you're looking at Debian stable which take ages to get things out the door. I think applications should try to have a regular release schedule, but unlike commercial software: If it's not done, don't ship a buggy mess - push it back to next release. I don't mean that you should be completely fixed when it comes to dates (e.g. next Ubuntu release was pushed back 6 weeks) but don't let it grow stale. Yes, that will mean you have some lackluster releases, but ship it as you go along. From a marketing perspective I'm not sure if you should call it 2.0 or 1.6 but it is time for another release.

Re:Parent isn't shouldn't be marked redundant!

[KingJoshi]

Because marking a post 'redundant' is a punishment. That's the system that we have. A person trying to help out the community by providing a proper link shouldn't be punished and their comment doesn't need cleaning up. We do have to assume the intentions of people and that's why this post shouldn't be marked redundant (at the time they starting typing, the other 'redundant' post didn't exist). If it's rated high when a previous post does the job, then you can rate it 'overrated'. That follows the spirit of the rules, IMO.

Re:Differentiation

[Tearfang]

Feature differentiation is essential. I updated to 1.5 because of the built in ability to drag my tabs around. A little faster, more reliable and more secure is not enough it isn't worth the time and possibility of breaking all my extensions. Don't get me wrong speed, reliability and security are reasons to upgrade, but not right now. A new feature I want to use is compelling Now! A major release is something that everyone should want to upgrade to now, otherwise there is nothing really major about it.

Re:So what are we missing?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's still possible to do, just that there'd be a bit of extra software involved and that your homepage URL would read "http://localhost/bookmarks.cgi". And that it'd be a million times more useful.

Let me start by quoting...

[Biomechanical]

...My earlier comment on Digg when this story showed up there.

Personally I couldn't give two shits about _any_ browser getting "new and exciting!!!!" features right at the moment, and my reason is very simple,

They all fail at what they are supposed to do, first and foremost. Some fail utterly, and other fail a little bit, but they all _fail_.

There is not a single browser available for download at the moment that _fully_ supports the web standards laid down by the W3C, http://w3.org/ [w3.org] and developers who are working on Safari, Konqueror, Mozilla Firefox and Seamonkey, IE, Opera, Camino, and so on, all need to take a step back from their computers and say,

"Hey, how come we're adding new features to a program that isn't even standards-compliant?"

The continual lack of support for even the full subset of CSS 1 and 2.1 makes designing pages based on XHTML and CSS a frickin' pain in the arse.

If there was one browser, even just one, that was cross-platform and fully supported even just HTML, XHTML, CSS 1 and 2.1 (maybe even parts of 3), and was extensible to support such things as SVG and XVRML, then I would be using it in a damn shot, and then I'd _know_ that when a page failed to render properly, _I_ screwed up, not a bug in the browser.

Stop adding features guys, just follow the damn standards.

All I want, and I'm betting so do a great deal of other people who work with the web, is a browser that follows the standards for HTML, XHTML, CSS 1 & 2 (maybe even 3), Javascript, and DOM.

Extra features are nice, yes, but the top priority should be putting out a browser that follows the standards, first and foremost.

What good are extensions and themes and fancy bookmarking tools if the core program for seeing information on the web cannot render pages which have been correctly created?

Re:Let me start by quoting...

[cnettel]

To some degree, that tells something about the inherent problems in writing a spec years before someone has even designed, or written, code that would be able to support said spec. 2D layout is often mistaken to be an easy problem. It isn't. If you add some performance concerns, and any ability to render anything before the complete file, with all dependencies (CSS, images, ...) are loaded, it won't get easier.

On the other hand, what reasonably complex system is available in several standard-compliant implementations? There are deviations from even some of the fairly basic RFCs if we start looking at odd (or not so odd) cases. Some of them even make sense. Welcome to the life of writing code (even when it isn't Turing complete).

Re:So what are we missing?

[WWWWolf]

Nothing, really, just that it's harder to parse. Just that now, you need to fire up your XML parser if you want to extract information out of it. In SQLite, you can bind to it and do a SELECT whatever FROM bookmarks WHERE ...; and don't need to parse anything. Just like all SQL queries.

Another thing is that there's a big handful of file formats used to store configuration data. Bookmarks XML isn't used in any other situation, and in addition to that the profile directory has various plain text formats, Mork, BerkleyDB, RDF, JavaScript...

I guess you need to file a feature request that asks bookmarks to be shown at startup... though I guess they will be thinking of that anyway =)

FIX THE DAMN MEMORY LEAKS ALREADY

[ameline]

Sorry for shouting, but I'd be happy if they did *nothing* but fix the memory leaks.

Memory leaks are unforgivable.

Re:Differentiation

[et764]

The close button'll be on the tabs, but that seems about the only user-visible improvement.

In my opinion that's not really an improvement. I prefer having the close button on the side like it is now, because that way it's always in the same place, instead of having to find which tab is active and then home in on a new place for the close button each time I have to close a tab.

Re:Differentiation

[misleb]

I wonder what else there is that a browser could do that couldn't (and possibly should) be accomplished with an extension or plugin. I'd like to see focus put into speed, memory footprint, and standards compliance like ACID2.

-matthew

Re:Not just Firefox

[misleb]

I remember a time when Linux and Mozilla on an older system would breathe new life into it. Retired business systems would be a safer and snappy web surfer for "Less Technical" relatives. No more. Try a new full featured distribution (The kind you could expect a non-tech to use) on old hardware, and it is as slow as XP.

Thing is, you can still build a system like you could back then. The only thing that has change is what "non-tech oriented" distributions have decided to include by default. You can still install WindowMaker (or my new fav, XFCE) and have that fast, light system again. So what exactly are you complaing about?

-matthew

MOD PARENT UP

[Trogre]

Putting close buttons in individual tabs is nothing but evil, wrong and stupid.

One mis-click on a tab (which is very common when managing a dozen or so tabs) and you've just closed an important page with no confirmation dialog.

See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=335453 [gnome.org] for the current gnome-terminal fiasco.

Just don't do it.

Re:Differentiation

[number11]

in order to convince users that updates are worthwhile you need visible differentiation.

I hate visible differentiation. It's disruptive. Especially change for the sake of change, I can live with it if it actually improves something. Once I've figured out how to do stuff, where the menus are, what the shortcuts are, maybe customize the toolbar a little to get the functions I actually use up there, I resent it when the developers mess with it just to say "hey, look at what we can do, aren't we cool!". Then I spend a few hours figuring out how to put as much as possible back to the arrangement it was in before.

Maybe I'm an anomaly. Or just an old fart. I rarely change the GUI from the default unless it's to make some feature easier to use. And if I do make those changes, I want them to carry over to the upgraded version. The only software I use skins with is where the default eyesore verges on unusable (for some reason, media players tend to fall into this camp). Just give me the improvements under the hood, please.

Re:Not just Firefox

[Dis*abstraction]

What?

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[man_of_mr_e]

I prefer the way IE7 does this, the X only shows up on the currently active tab. You have to activate another tab for the X to appear.

Re:Bad URL

[mabinogi]

if I have to stare at a blank page while my status bar says "waiting for google-analytics.com" then either I'm going to block google-analytics.com, or I'm just going to get fed up and stop visiting your site.

It really bugs me just how often I have to sit and wait for my browser to contact 5 different ad and stat sites when viewing some web sites - slashdot being one of the big offenders.

I have no problem with you providing (tasteful and discreet) ads, I have no problem with you collecting stats. I do have a problem with having to wait for that to happen, when I could be reading your site.

NO CLOSE ON TABS!

[MikeFM]

I hope the close button on tabs is an option because I hate that feature in browsers like Opera. Some other programs, like Azureus, do it that way too. It makes it to easy to accidently close a tab and it makes you keep moving your mouse to remove multiple tabs. In general it's just not a good UI choice. You make it slightly easier for newbies but make it harder for everyone who actually uses tabs.

If you want to copy a good idea from Opera instead why not make pop-up windows open as virtual sub-windows or tabs. There are existing FF extensions that do this and it's such an obvious good idea that FF would be better off using that than making some extension to add close buttons to tabs mainstream. And make the extension that suppresses loading new pages/tabs for blank pages (such as happen with some downloads) a default. I've yet to see any reason anyone would want those blank pages to appear. Oh, and the extension that opens downloads in your choice of a tab or a sidebar would be a good mainstream change if you polished it up a little.

something needed since the beginning

[Tumbleweed]

Is FF2 going to have a multi-threaded UI? I keep waiting, and keep getting disappointed. I've looked through the lists of what's coming up, but have yet to notice this. For heavy tabs users like myself, that would have a MASSIVE impact on performance.

Re:Let me start by quoting...

[Nimloth]

"Hey, how come we're adding new features to a program that isn't even standards-compliant?"

No RDBMS has fully implemented the SQL92 standard yet, while working on the next gen of features, and I don't see you going off about it.

The standard is mostly good, but it's not 100% plausible nor feasable.

Re:Differentiation

[JulesLt]

I don't think you're an anomaly; it's pretty much what every GUI design expert says.

Improving the design of 'use-once' applications can be done with little impact - i.e. loan application websites, configuration wizards, etc.

Changing the layout of anything used by people on an everyday basis shouldn't be done unless there is a really good reason to do it, even if that layout it 'wrong'. People quickly adapt to dealing with wrong systems, because we mostly use systems by auto-pilot. We stop looking for the back icon and just move the mouse to where it is. Moving the icon is therefore annoying.

That's not saying we should live with bad mistakes forever, but that developers should be mindful of the cost of change. Unlike software bugs, it may be better to let GUI changes build up and address them all in one major revision, than constant small fixes. If something is clearly different this is less of an issue to be people than when it is nearly the same but there are small cognitive differences.

Joel Spolksy's short book on Interface Design also makes a couple of good points about customisable GUI - firstly, if you are a GUI designer, your job is to design usable software. If you have two options, it's your job to make a decision which one is best, rather than expecting the user to decide which one is best for them.

Secondly - a lot of people give up on GUI customisation because it's not portable. For instance if I tweak Word to completely suit me, using it on someone else's machine - particularly if they have also tweaked it in a different way - gives me a learning curve. Ditto when I upgrade machine I need to do all the tweaking again. For some people, it's worth the hassle, but for most people the inconvenience outweighs any convenience.