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.

Differentiation

[MrNonchalant]

I tried the Firefox 2 beta briefly and wasn't impressed. There's very little in the way of real differentiation from 1.5 and 1.5 had very little differentiation from 1.0. Prior to this improvement was obvious, now it seems like there are a few cosmetic and stability/security changes but nothing serious. If you take out Places for 2.0, what's really left? The close button'll be on the tabs, but that seems about the only user-visible improvement.

Re:fork a new branch

[larry bagina]

You can fork it, in theory, but mozilla/firefox is a huge beast. Most of the people that work on it are paid mozilla developers. forking large, complicated projects is difficult. Offhand, I can only think of gcc/egcs (which later re-merged) emacs/xemacs, *BSD (core developers leaving), and xfree86X/Free.org (again, core developers leaving). Unless the firefox programmers want to give up their paid job, (or spare time after work), there won't be a fork.

Use Epiphany

[Anonymous Coward]

The other day I decided to try Epiphany instead of Firefox. It is much "snappier" than Firefox, has a smaller memory footprint and has a smarter topic-oriented bookmark system. Those who are disappointed about this functionality being removed from Firefox should seriously consider Epiphany.

So what are we missing?

[blair1q]

How is this better than the existing bookmarks system?

Re:Bad URL

[pchan-]

Does anyone know if FF2 will have the ability to block 3rd party javascript includes? Right now I have to adblock them manually, but it seems like a handy feature. For example, the Slashdot page I'm currently viewing is serving me:

http ://a.as-us.falkag.net/dat/dlv/aslmain.js
http ://a.as-us.falkag.net/dat/njf/104/slashdot/develop ers_p1_top_leaderboard.js
http ://an.tacoda.net/an/11711/slf.js
http ://anrtx.tacoda.net/rtx/r.js?cmd=ADW&si=11711&r=de velopers.slashdot.org&v=3.1.0.26azzz&cb=0.17824836 675866051
http ://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js

And that's slashdot, a relatively well-behaved site (I had to put the extra space in there to stop the stupid comment filter from auto-linking those).

Re:Take a leaf out of Epiphany's book

[nstlgc]

God knows why browsers do not store bookmarks as files in a "Bookmarks" folder. Slap me silly, but isn't this what IE has been doing for ages?

Re:Firefox has the wrong focus

[QuietLagoon]

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.

Opera's stuck on that same treadmill. The recent beta of Opera 9 is pretty bad. Lots of new features, but fundamental things just don't work right.

Woah...

[The Real Nem]

He's not kidding, take a look at my history.dat file:

// <!-- <mdb:mork:z v="1.4"/> -->
< <(a=c)> // (f=iso-8859-1)
  (8A=Typed)(8B=LastPageVisited)(8C=ByteOrder)
  (80=ns:history:db:row:scope:history:all)
  (81=ns:history:db:table:kind:history)(82=URL)(83=R eferrer)
  (84=LastVisitDate)(85=FirstVisitDate)(86=VisitCoun t)(87=Name)
  (88=Hostname)(89=Hidden)>

<(4B6E=LE)(4B6F=http: //www.google.ca/)(4B70=1146443053431000)(4B71
    =google.ca)(4B72=G$00o$00o$00g$00l$00e$00)(4B73
    =http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=slashdot&btnG =Google+Search&meta=)
  (4B74=1146443064149750)(4B75
    =s$00l$00a$00s$00h$00d$00o$00t$00 $00-$00 $00G$00o$00o$00g$00l$00e$00 $00S\
$00e$00a$00r$00c$00h$00)(4B76=http://slashd ot.org/)(4B77=slashdot.org)
  (4B78
    =S$00l$00a$00s$00h$00d$00o$00t$00:$00 $00N$00e$00w$00s$00 $00f$00o$00r$00 \
$00n$00e$00r$00d$00s$00,$00 $00s$00t$00u$00f$00f$00 $00t$00h$00a$00t$00 $00m$00\
a$00t$00t$00e$00r$00s$00)(4B79
    =http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/06/04/3 0/2128229.shtml)
  (4B7A=1146443070774750)(4B7B=developers.slashdot.o rg)(4B7C
    =S$00l$00a$00s$00h$00d$00o$00t$00 $00|$00 $00P$00l$00a$00c$00e$00s$00 $00F\
$00e$00a$00t$00u$00r$00e$00 $00C$00u$00t$00 $00F$00r$00o$00m$00 $00F$00i$00r$00\
e$00f$00o$00x$00 $002$00)(4B7D
    =http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=18 4502&cid=15234094)
  (4B7E=1146443122321625)(4B7F
    =P$00l$00a$00c$00e$00s$00 $00F$00e$00a$00t$00u$00r$00e$00 $00C$00u$00t$00 \
$00F$00r$00o$00m$00 $00F$00i$00r$00e$00f$00o$00x$00 $002$00)>
{1:^80 {(k^81:c)(s=9)[1(^8C=LE)]}
  [3ED4(^82^4B6F)(^84^4B70)(^85^4B70)(^88^4B71)(^87^ 4B72)]
  [3ED5(^82^4B73)(^84^4B74)(^85^4B74)(^83^4B6F)(^88^ 4B71)(^87^4B75)]
  [3ED6(^82^4B76)(^84^4B74)(^85^4B74)(^83^4B73)(^88^ 4B77)(^87^4B78)]
  [3ED7(^82^4B79)(^84^4B7A)(^85^4B7A)(^83^4B76)(^88^ 4B7B)(^87^4B7C)]
  [3ED8(^82^4B7D)(^84^4B7E)(^85^4B7E)(^83^4B79)(^88^ 4B7B)(^87^4B7F)]}

That's one way to kill interoperability.

Re:Take a leaf out of Epiphany's book

[friedmud]

You can do this in firefox now... _and_ have your bookmarks stored on an external server so that wherever you are they are available.

Just go sign up at http://del.icio.us/ [del.icio.us] and start posting and tagging sites...

Then nab Foxylicious: http://dietrich.ganx4.com/foxylicious/ [ganx4.com]

Fire it up and set it to "use tag combinations to create hierarchies" or whatever... and there you go.

I have been using this system for a while and I love it... because between dual-boots and different labs on campus I will use 6 or so different firefox installations on any given day... it's great to have my bookmarks roam with me.

Friedmud

Re:So what are we missing?

[Jerf]

Let the master, jwz, rant about Mork [jwz.org] (it's in the comments round about the second page for most people):

#
# And Now, The Ugly Truth Laid Bare:
#
# In Netscape Navigator 1.0 through 4.0, the history.db file was just a
# Berkeley DBM file. You could trivially bind to it from Perl, and
# pull out the URLs and last-access time. In Mozilla, this has been
# replaced with a "Mork" database for which no tools exist.
#
# Let me make it clear that McCusker is a complete barking lunatic.
# This is just about the stupidest file format I've ever seen.
#
# http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/arch/mork/primer. txt
# http://jwz.livejournal.com/312657.html
# http://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html
# http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24143 8
#
# In brief, let's count its sins:
#
# - Two different numerical namespaces that overlap.
#
# - It can't decide what kind of character-quoting syntax to use:
# Backslash? Hex encoding with dollar-sign?
#
# - C++ line comments are allowed sometimes, but sometimes // is just
# a pair of characters in a URL.
#
# - It goes to all this serious compression effort (two different
# string-interning hash tables) and then writes out Unicode strings
# without using UTF-8: writes out the unpacked wchar_t characters!
#
# - Worse, it hex-encodes each wchar_t with a 3-byte encoding,
# meaning the file size will be 3x or 6x (depending on whether
# whchar_t is 2 bytes or 4 bytes.)
#
# - It masquerades as a "textual" file format when in fact it's just
# another binary-blob file, except that it represents all its magic
# numbers in ASCII. It's not human-readable, it's not hand-editable,
# so the only benefit there is to the fact that it uses short lines
# and doesn't use binary characters is that it makes the file bigger.
# Oh wait, my mistake, that isn't actually a benefit at all.
#
# Pure comedy.

Re:Differentiation

[BobPaul]

Right, but in order to convince users that updates are worthwhile you need visible differentiation

No, that's almost true for commercial software, but for free software all you need is a bigger number and people will think they need it. Especially if the FireFox update manager says you need to update.

Actually, it turns out that's not even true for commercial software. My Dad gets the newest version of Norton System Works every time he sees it on the shelf and then pisses and moans because of the great utilities and features this new version now lacks, even though his old version was working just fine and all he really needed was a new subscription/upgrade for the AntiVirus.

Make the number bigger and people will buy. Why do you think Microsoft went towards using year numbers rather than versions? Years are four digits. That's huge.

Could be a good thing

[unoengborg]

The ability to use the mozilla bookmark file as an ordinary html file, is a very nice feature that I would miss if they used a database engine instead.

If they should use a database engine, they should use some kind of client server solution so that bookmarks could be shared between multiple machines or users. Preferrably they should use some abstraction layer such as JDBC or ODBC, so that users could have a choise of what database engine to use.

There is also a need for standardization in bookmark storage. Free and open source browsers should agree on a common standard, regardless if it includes databases or not.

Re:thank god for small favors

[kv9]

Storing bookmarks and history in a sql database is possibly the dumbest idea I've heard in a long, long time. With any luck, this will remain a feature of the future...forever.

FYI SQLite [sqlite.org] is small, fast and stores everything in a file. it's not like they want to store your bookmarks in a fucking Oracle installation. SQLite is embedded and fits the purpose quite well. perhaps not very boner-inducing from a user standpoint, but a programmer can clearly see the benefits of such a thing: easy access, searching, management, etc. even for third party tools.

a vast improvement over the current XMLish kludge (i won't even mention the MORKiness, plenty of other slashdotters did). if you ever tried to do anything else with an XML file (besides transforming it) you know how *fun* that is.

Re:Why do the 2.0 release?

[Compholio]

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.

Open Source projects go into a state that is called a "feature-freeze" in preparation for the next release of the core product. During this time no new features may be added, only bug-fixing and removal of features can occur. This step of the release process is present in order to ensure that a feature didn't add too-many unnecessary bugs to the software that sacrifice the core goals of the project. In this case Mozilla is trying to ensure that the next set of core changes to the browser aren't messed up by the new bookmarking system since the new bookmarking system isn't as important as the changes to the internals (which is what the new release is really about).

Re:Take a leaf out of Epiphany's book

[harves]

I'm curious. How does the "use tag combinations to create hierarchies" system work? Do you select the combinations, or does it generate all, or... ?

wrong, this is a serious problem

[circletimessquare]

and it's turned me off of firefox

look:

http://copia.ogbuji.net/blog/2006/Mar/06 [ogbuji.net]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69799 [mozilla.org]

Re:Bad URL

[JulesLt]

A problem I can see going forward is that 'Web 2.0' sites are going to make it very difficult for software to automatically distinguish between a site that's legitimately using a third-party web service to serve content, and one doing the same to serve advertising. You could say that the first 'mash-ups' were actually those sites that seem to consist of nothing but externally served ads and the tiniest bit of original content.

Personally, I find the best thing to do with adverts is ignore them. However, rather like commercial television I can accept WHY they are there - it strikes me as a bit irrational to get upset by their presence while also enjoying what they are supporting. But then it's hardly new - people always complain about the number of adverts in magazines, while refusing to pay the extra for magazines whose price isn't subsidised by ads. The likes of HBO are also in a minority - while GMail is more appealing to people than paying for a private email account. People are generally cheap-skates who will sell their minds for a small saving.