Firefox 2.0 To Debut Tuesday

An anonymous reader writes "Firefox 2.0 for Tuesday, says the Seattle PI. They give a quick recap of some of the new features, and discuss the ongoing IE vs. Fox debate." From the article: "Version 2.0 also improves on the tabbed-windows interface that Mozilla innovated and that Microsoft introduced for the first time last week with IE7, its biggest upgrade since 2001. Analysts said IE7 is a significant improvement over its predecessor, but the big question is whether it will stem Firefox's growth at Microsoft's expense. Firefox's share of the browser market has grown to 9.8 percent of the U.S. market this month, from 2.9 percent in October 2004."

innovation?

[minus_273]

geez, "tabbed-windows interface that Mozilla innovated" that is beginning to sound like microsoft innovation. Long before firefox existed, I was using tabbed windows in opera. Give credit where it is due.

Re:innovation?

[dvice_null]

So, to whom should the credit go to?
"Web browsers are notable for implementing this kind of interface (called tabbed browsing). BookLink Technologies pioneered this interface design in its InternetWorks browser in 1994"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabbed_browsing [wikipedia.org]

Re:Lies

[ricree]

It depends on whether this was due to misstatements by mozilla people, or if it was just a stupid writer. Never underestimate how ignorant journalists can be.

MDI

[jonasj]

Not that it matters who came first, but Mozilla did actually have tabs earlier than Opera. What you were using in Opera back then was actually MDI [wikipedia.org], not tabs.

But of course other browsers had tabs far earlier than any of these two.

Re:innovation?

[unixmaster]

It was first introduced in NetCaptor [netcaptor.com] browser, more history here [mozillazine.org].

Re:Minimum tab size

[christopherfinke]

s there a way to change the minimum size of the tab headers in the new firefox?

Set browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to 0 (or whatever you want) in about:config.

Re:Minimum tab size

[dvice_null]

Yes there is. You can remove the close buttons from the tabs (make it look like it was in 1.5) and also tell the min width for the tabs:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.tabs.closeButton s [mozillazine.org]
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.tabs.tabMinWidth [mozillazine.org]

Re:YAY!

[aymanh]

The changes are nicely summarized in this page [mozilla.org].

I find "Client-side session and persistent storage [whatwg.org]" to be quite interesting, and wonder if any major web apps will make use of it in the near future. There are also JavaScript 1.7 [mozilla.org] which makes JavaScript more Pythonic, SVG [mozilla.org] support, and several other features.

TabMixPlus RC

[skoval]

I've just checked.
RC1 of new TabMixPlus version (with FF 2.0 support) is already available.

Good news for me.

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

Not suffered from 1, but then I just bought a HUGE screen, running full screen browsers on it, is fascicle. On point 2, it's not antiquated it's constantly being improved, just the stable releases of the engine are behind the bleeding edge you can get hold of one which can pass Acid2 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/dbaron/126886608/), but the rendering engine might crash on you.

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[dvice_null]

Reducing memory usage in Firefox:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_-_ Firefox [mozillazine.org]

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[bunratty]

Good news... There are several [pcworld.com] reports [zimbra.com] that [mozillazine.org] Firefox 2 uses less memory than IE 7. Only a small percentage of users [cmp.com] ever had problems with memory usage to begin with.

FACT: OPERA DID NOT INVENT TABBED BROWSING!

[Sir Homer]

Yes. Stop spreading the myth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabbed_browsing [wikipedia.org]

Re:innovation?

[AcidArrow]

Are there better browsers out there? Again, without question.

May I ask what are those other browsers you're talking about? I am aware of 4 major browsers other than Firefox. Let's have a look at them and how they compare with firefox.

IE7 - It finally got tabs and a search box but still has crappy html and css standards support. Actually it's a little worse than MyIE [myie2.com] for IE6. I'll pass.
Safari - Has a lot the basic features of a good browser and is very simple. Respects HTML and CSS standards. Has crappy PNG support (gamma correction) and for some reason scrolls slowly even on fast machines. It's a fine browser but I prefer Camino [caminobrowser.org].
Konqueror - Although I have limited experience with this one, it looks like a good browser/file manager, but I am un-aware of any features (appart from passing that ACID2 test) that make it better than Firefox.
Opera - The only browser that is at least feature-wise better than firefox. But for some people Open Source actually matters. Though even with that into the equation, I can't really say which one is the better browser.

So, while you can argue and I might accept that opera is better than firefox, what are the other browsers that I've been missing that are better than the "overrated" firefox? Oh, and preferably opensource.

Re:FACT: OPERA DID NOT INVENT TABBED BROWSING!

[yoyhed]

Nope, but in 1996 Opera had buttons in their browser for each page along the top, which worked EXACTLY LIKE TABS. NetCaptor was just the first to draw them like tabs in their interface. Stop spreading the myth.

Re:innovation?

[jZnat]

Konqueror comes with AdBlock built-in, so that's an instant win in my book. It's fast, integrates with my desktop (unlike Firefox), and even has a few extensions of its own.

Re:Tuesday?

[antdude]

I doubt any updates are coming out on the fourth Tuesday of the month. I don't recall seeing any MS Bulletins about upcoming update releases either.

Re:FACT: OPERA DID NOT INVENT TABBED BROWSING!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, but in 1996 Opera had buttons in their browser for each page along the top, which worked EXACTLY LIKE TABS. NetCaptor was just the first to draw them like tabs in their interface. Stop spreading the myth.

(emphasis mine)

If you actually RTFA, you'd find out that "BookLink Technologies pioneered this interface design in its InternetWorks browser in 1994."

Stop spreading the myth.

Re:innovation?

[elcid73]

Opera can block ads just fine. May not have all the bells & whistles, but I get along just fine with the content blocker that's built in.

Re:innovation?

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

You beat me to it. Seriously though, firefox is highly overrated. Is it better than IE6? Without question. Are there better browsers out there? Again, without question.

But in terms of compatibility with the vast majority of websites, Firefox is far ahead of every other competitor.

I'm a power user. I routinely switch between Camino, Safari, Firefox, and IE under CrossOver as I'm browsing different sites and designing web pages. But for my friends who aren't power users and want something that "just works", I always recommend Firefox. It's safer than IE and has a few nice features that they'll appreciate, but is still simple and most importantly, is going to work on 99% of the sites they visit. Safari, Opera, Konqueror, and others all have compatibility problems.

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[WWWWolf]

2. FF fails CSS rendering because it uses an antique CSS engine. http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/ [webstandards.org]

Um, acid2 represents one faction's idea on what an ideal, future-proof CSS implementation should do. It's not be-all end-all test of absolute must-have features of CSS. Gecko doesn't fall too far from the goal, and rest assured they're working on the issues.

Those are my FF issues. What are yours?

I'm not using the beta yet. Um... I would terribly appreciate it if middle-click would do nothing. Currently, on Linux, middle-clicking goes into the URL that I have on selection buffer. Middle click gets clicked by accident awfully often when scrolling and I end up staring at http://www.whateverthecrapihadonclipboardwhenmymou seslipped.com/ [whateverth...lipped.com] (see below).

Um... seems like this can be fixed in about:config. middlemouse.contentLoadURL = false. I think. Didn't know this. Very cool.

Another beef is the automatic expansion of example => http://www.example.com/ [example.com] which just gives me bunch of false alarms. If I find myself looking at http://www.whateverthecrapihadonclipboardwhenmymou seslipped.com/ [whateverth...lipped.com], I'm going to scream. While I'm at it, it shouldn't even assume I want http:/// [http] there; it should demand full URLs. And above the heck all, if I want to use this as a search engine, I type "g (keywords)", not the plain address - I don't want a search bar, I don't want an intelligent search bar;I just want an ordinary address bar that also has this keyword support thing. Is it too much to ask?

I think this is at least the latter is somehow fixable through about:config, but I forgot the instructions (didn't try it at first because it appeared to have side effects). Setting keyword.url = about:blank, keyword.enabled = false has little effect...

Re:MDI

[Esine]

Opera still doesn't have tabs. It has an MDI interface and it calls the subwindows "pages", not tabs.
Newer versions of Opera also have a restricted MDI mode that's similar to Mozilla tabs.

  -- dbg

Re:IE 7 Quick Tabs

[imbaczek]

foxpose [mozilla.org] has had it since, um, I can't remember. I'm pretty sure Opera has this built-in, but don't take my word for it.

Re:IE 7 Quick Tabs

[gozar]

The IE 7 "Quick Tabs" feature is very cool. It shows a tiled view of all tabs open with all pages rendered so you can quickly find your way and click a tab. I don't think any previous web browser has this feature.

Omniweb has had it for a little while, here's a screenshot [omnigroup.com].

Re:innovation?

[Plutonite]

You were using the IE engine inside a 3rd party browser, not the IE browser provided by Microsoft. I also made my tabbed IE-based browser years ago, and thousands of apps use the IE active-X object to display HTML.

In other words, point doesn't apply here.

Re:innovation?

[gerrysteele]

http://www.privoxy.org/ [privoxy.org] is the best way. I use it on my router.

Re:I'm a web developer

[Anonymous Coward]

The 1.x branch of Firefox used Gecko 1.7
Fx 1.5 uses Gecko 1.8
Fx 2 uses Gecko 1.8.1, so a much smaller change (as in no new feature in HTML/CSS, just bug fixes I think). The new features are in SVG (textPath support), JavaScript (1.7) and Client-side session and persistent storage [whatwg.org]
Fx 3 will be the next big jump to Gecko 1.9, with the reflow that will fix Acid 2 and incremental layout bugs, plus more CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 support.

Summary Is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera pioneered tabbed browsing, not Mozilla.

You just put egg on your face with that comment because clearly Mozilla copied that idea from Opera. Is it OK for Mozilla to copy but not MS?

Re:MDI

[Tony Hoyle]

Um no.. they're talking about tabs. MDI != Tabs. Windows 3.1 had MDI but it didn't have tabs.

MDI is very unintuitive on its own - tabs make it much better by putting, well, a tab on the page so you know it's there.
Closest analogy is Windows 95 property sheets I guess, although they weren't the first (just the first that most people will have used).

Re:innovation?

[VertigoAce]

In case anyone wants to do the same on IE 7, the shortcuts are:

Switch between tabs
  CTRL+TAB or CTRL+SHIFT+TAB

Switch to a specific tab number
  CTRL+n (where n is a number between 1 and 8)

Switch to the last tab
  CTRL+9

Re:Tuesday?

[funfail]

There was already a (real!) SP6 for NT4.

Firefox 2.0 Themes

[aplusjimages]

They already have Firefox 2.0 themes out.

Re:innovation?

[shakey_deal]

Install Quicksilver for OSX and you can get this for any browser. Everything will sort of auto complete like opening programs, just type in the first few chars, find email, contacts etc. like spotlight on crack.

Re:YAY!

[bwilson]

Is this a non-standard attribute?

We wanted web pages to control the spellchecking defaults to some degree. For example, webmail applications will want to automatically turn it on for subject lines, even though it is normally off for <input> elements.

We discussed with the WHATWG web standards group to come up with the attribute. I'm not sure about the status of this in any of their specs, as I'm not sure there was any strong consensus. That's one of the problems coming out with a new feature not currently supported in any other browser or mentioned in any standards.

- Brett (Firefox spellcheck contributor)

Re:MDI

[Fweeky]

"MDI is very unintuitive on its own - tabs make it much better by putting, well, a tab on the page so you know it's there."

Tabs being in such a case buttons linking to the child windows. Hmm, I'm pretty sure Win 3.1 supported buttons ;)

Re:innovation?

[rHBa]

Hmm...

That's the same shortcuts as FF1.5

Re:Another reason to use Opera..

[slashdotmsiriv]

Browser cache is always committed to disk. You may have a problem with firefox memory consumption if u never shutdown ur browser. Perhaps in this case it allocates more memory for cache that is not committed to disk unless ur disk space limit is large enough. I doubt it though. But if u restart it it never brings more than X MB cache in memory, actually it brings much less, depending on which pages u actually visit. So in this case, disk memory has pretty much the semantics of RAM and this is why the developers dont differentiate between the two.

Re:MDI

[hkmwbz]

Yes, Opera has "tabs". Whatever it's called it's the exact same concept: Click a button on a toolbar to switch to that page. Just because they didn't look like tabs doesn't mean that they actually worked differently. You clicked a button to switch to another child window. That's what tabs do.

Re:Auto update to 2.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

It will update using the auto-update feature however it will ask you first (even if you have set it to update quietly in the background) because it is such a large change.

Re:innovation?

[Digitalwingx]

Actually, it's more like the majority of the websites are developed to accommodate IE, not because IE has better compatibility.