Firefox 3 Plans and IE8 Speculation

ReadWriteWeb writes "Information about the next versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer suggest that the two biggest browsers are heading in different directions. Mozilla has published a wiki page detailing its plans for the next version of Firefox, codenamed 'Gran Paradiso'. Among the mandatory requirements listed for FF3 are improving the add-on experience, providing an extensible bookmarks back-end platform, adding more support for web services "to act as content handlers" — all of which show that Firefox wants to be an independent information broker rather than a simple HTML renderer in its next version. Also in the works is Microsoft's IE8. According to ActiveWin.com, a Microsoft official at CES told them that work has already begun for IE 8 and it may be released as a final product 'within 18-24 months'. Looking ahead, it's obvious that IE will continue to hook into the advanced functionality that Vista offers."

features

[dcskier]

keeping up and cutting edge sounds great, but i hope if they plan on adding all of these features they spin off a lite verison too. is it just me or is firefox starting to get a bloated, almost like ie. features are great if they provide useful functionality; but sometimes lightweight, fast, and simple is all you need/want for just browsing around.

Re:What's up with the code names, anyway?

[Aladrin]

It's not a 'codename' in the spy sense. It's a development name. It's boring to say 'firefox 3' and more fun to say 'gran paradiso'. The names are not for the public, they're for the developers. Any time they talk to the public, they call it 'firefox 3'.

Don't confuse news from third-party sources with news from the developers. The people that wrote this article are not on the team. Mozilla simply doesn't keep their development plans a secret. (They created a publicly accessible wiki.)

Internet Explorer 8

[anss123]

"Looking ahead, it's obvious that IE will continue to hook into the advanced functionality that Vista offers."

Does that include the ability to only run on Vista?

Re:features

[chrismcdirty]

I could have sworn the reason that Firefox came into existence was that the codebase of the Mozilla Suite was bloated, and had too many features that a lot of people didn't want in a web browser. And here they go repeating the past.

Re:That old saying about SMPT

[mlk]

Webbrowser != Email Client.

Does IE included a email client? Or does an IE client use the IE rendering component?

extensible bookmarks back-end platform ?

[arjay-tea]

"extensible bookmarks back-end platform"

Can somebody translate this to English?

Re:What's up with the code names, anyway?

[kfg]

That's the rationalization, not the reason.

The reason is because code names are cool and they want to call it a really cool code name.

KFG

Re:features

[Caseyscrib]

You can complain about bloating all you want, but so many of the features I've used in Firefox 2 have been incredibly useful. I've tried to welcome change and learn to do new things, because once you get into the habit it really makes your life so much easier. Online bookmarking, live rss feeds, the built-in spell-checking... these have all helped my productivity. Finding stuff is easier, reading stuff is easier, my internet experience is more pleasant. The little stuff really helps a lot. I wouldn't consider it bloating, because Mozilla is adding features that are helpful. Bloating is more reserved for stuff that makes your system run slower yet it doesn't really do anything (IE the window search dog or clippy).

Re:What's up with the code names, anyway?

[jalefkowit]

It's a development name. It's boring to say 'firefox 3' and more fun to say 'gran paradiso'.

It also makes it clear that it's not for public consumption. If you called it "Firefox 3 Alpha 1" you'd have tons of Firefox fanboys rushing to download the "latest" version of their favorite browser. Firefox versions that don't carry the "Firefox" name aren't ready for prime time; labeling them differently sends that message.

Re:features

[Anc]

I could have sworn the reason that Firefox came into existence was that the codebase of the Mozilla Suite was bloated, and had too many features that a lot of people didn't want in a web browser. And here they go repeating the past.

What makes you think so? If you look at it closely, Firefox sticks to its assumptions. The new features are either supplementing or replacing previous ones, like the improved bookmarks system, or are mostly about streamlining the already existing usage paths.

It's hard to relate to your statement since you provided no concrete arguments or examples. In fact, it sounds as if you were implying that the sheer fact that there's a new release and therefore new stuff coming up means that the application is getting bloated. Perhaps they should halt the development, so not to introduce more bloat, huh?

Re:Mozilla now doing embrace-extend?

[Kelson]

You got half-way there with the part about microformats being created by others. The key is that microformats (the "extend" part in this case) discussed so far are described openly and free to use.

If Firefox starts supporting, say, hCard and hCalendar by making it possible to send the data to the Thunderbird address book or the calendar app of your choice, there's nothing to stop Opera, Apple, or indeed Microsoft from doing the same thing. Other browser developers don't have to reverse-engineer the features, or sign an NDA, or pay for a patent license.

Embrace is good. Extend is OK too, when done in a way that makes the third step, "Extinguish," difficult to do.

Bah.

[The Nipponese]

As a web designer, I'm automatically dismissive of this. Browser makers working and agreeing on the way CSS should look and act is way more important than new features.

On a similar vein

[Solandri]

Why do tabs have to be along the top? Why can't they be on the side?

• Widescreen monitors and notebooks are becoming the norm rather than the exception.
• Even the normal 4:3 aspect ratio is wider than it is tall.
• In addition to starting smaller due to aspect ratio, the vertical space in your browser is taken up by the window bar, menu bar, toolbars, tab bar, status bar, and temporary popup info bars. Windows' taskbar defaults to using vertical space as well.
• Horizontal space is taken up by the scroll bar, that's it.
• Most web content automatically adjusts itself to the width of your browser, but to see excess vertical content you have to scroll.
• Many forums I visit already limit the width of their text for legibility, indicating there's excess horizontal space available.
• It's already difficult to read text due to the width if you maximize a browser at 1280x1024 or 1280x800 resolution, again indicating there's excess horizontal space available.
• Books, newspapers, and magazines are larger in height than width. Browsers attempt to mimic this by allowing you to scroll vertically, but there's something to be said for being able to view a larger vertical chunk of text or images at once.
• Pictures in portrait mode are common, and I'd like to be able to view them in a reasonably large size instead of having to always squash them down so they're significantly smaller than pictures in landscape mode.
• Most Western text layouts reference the top left corner as the origin. So if you have a tab bar (or any other bar) that pops up along the top or the left, the content shifts forcing you to spend a split second to relocate what you were focusing on. Suddenly the link I clicked on to open the tab is no longer under my mouse pointer. If the bar popped up on the bottom or the right, this would not happen.

All this seems to point to vertical desktop space being overutilized and horizontal desktop space being underutilized. So why force tabs into vertical space? Give me the option to put them on the side(s).

Re:Oh boy, here we go.

[John Betonschaar]

I'd have the whole thing installable in a single sub-folder that could just be moved wherever, whenever I wanted. The install program would simply create the folder, copy the files, and put a shortcut in the start menu - and that's just because I'm lazy.

Hmm sounds like a spot-on description of the 'install procedure' of applications on OS X ;-)

Re:That old saying about SMPT

[Clazzy]

Never mind that you misinterpreted the parent, but Opera allows for the ability to check email. Granted I don't use it, but it doesn't bloat up the browser and is easily hidden if you don't want it. Of course, we have Thunderbird if we want email clients, so Firefox will never get that feature.

What Bloat?

[mhall119]

This same comment, in one form or another, comes up every time there is a story on a new version of Firefox. I read the article, I skimmed the features list, what bloat is being added? The only thing that seemed that they would cause any excess bloat are the extended bookmarks.

Other than that it's improving the functionality and usability of things that already exist, or building a simple framework that will let other systems (extensions or webservices) provide additional features like microformats and identity management.

They are not bundling a mail client, chat client, html editor, voip phone, or anything else, so stop implying that it's becomnig just like Mozilla.

Re:What Bloat?

[mhall119]

That's what screams bloat to me, although that's the words of the article writer, not the developers. It doesn't give details, so I'm left to interpret what an "information broker" is based on the little description given. What web services do they plan on supporting? IRC? BitTorrent? Instant messaging? POP and IMAP? Anything other than HTTP and FTP and you're leaving browser territory and getting closer to something resembling the Mozilla Suite.

You are confusing a broker with a client (and webservices with internet protocols, but thats for another post). Just like a stock broker doesn't consume the stocks he works with, neither will Firefox consume the data or services. It will just provide a way for content on a web page to be passed directly to a program or service you want to consume that data. Look at Firefox's RSS options, it has a very rudimentary RSS viewer, and has options to add the feed to an external program or web services from google or yahoo. Essentially Firefox will act as a data router, passing data between the web and applications of your choosing, without needing to operate on that data. Since there is already something similar in the codebase (the RSS example), this should cause very little bloat.

Re:features

[lsdino]

Does your RAM have better things to be doing? If so, why isn't your operating system using the RAM for that instead?

Large caches can remain in RAM and the only reason not to keep them there would be if you wanted to ensure persistence across sessions or you were running out of virtual address space. Otherwise the operating system should really be doing it's job in swapping out unused portions of memory to disk on your behalf.

That's not to say that a program can't take some consideration in its allocation strategies to maximize efficiency. For example if a program was just blindly calling new or malloc (assuming C/C++ here, given we're talking web browsers that's basically the case) then presumably those allocators would be doing their best to not fragment memory across all allocations. But for a web browser you really want to not fragment memory across significant user-accessed boundaries.

One simply idea is you have all data structures related to a web page to be allocated in 1 continious chunk of memory. That memory would be mmap/mmap2/VirtualAlloc/brk/sbrk's depending on your poison of choice and then handed out in suballocations for various things related to the page. Because the memory is contigiously allocated the OS, after detecting those pages haven't been used in a while, would swap that out to disk.

In the end you get exactly what you want: your large cache is on disk. But it's only on disk if you're using your memory for something else, otherwise it's in RAM. Best of all the developer didn't have to write code that: dealt with how much memory there was on the system, and how much they should keep on disk, write code to write it out to disk, read it back from disk, deal with navigating to a page which might be on disk so you have to check, first reading back in it's date/time to see if you actually should refresh the page, and if so then go and read back to the page, and have algorithms to reconstitute all your data structures, and then deal with the inevitable feature requests to enable cross-session caching, and fixing all the bugs that come out of this featutre, and finally keeping all these pieces in sync as you evolve the program.

Instead all that needs to be written is a dumb memory allocator (really, it's just incrementing a pointer and returning the previous value - allocate a new set of blocks if you run out of space) that has easy life time management rules (page going away? just free all the blocks). Even better the dumb allocator provides assurances that you don't leak memory. When a page is dead it's allocator is destroyed and all memory associated with it is freed. Forgot to free some suballocation along the way? No problem, the allocator freed it up anyway. Now, maybe this isn't how web browsers are working these days. But one would hope their creators are masters of the art and are applying techniques like these to leverage all the great facilities of modern OSes: in this case paging.