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Places Feature Cut From Firefox 2 394

Posted by Zonk from the sing-thee-to-thy-rest dept.
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.
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Places Feature Cut From Firefox 2 More

Places Feature Cut From Firefox 2

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  • Cut from Firefox2, but "removed from the roadmap"? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Glonk ( 103787 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @07:38PM (#15234047) Homepage
    This feature was cut from Firefox2 because it was unpolished and unacceptably buggy still. It is now on the "trunk" for inclusion in Firefox3, so it's still on the roadmap.

    In fact, it remains enabled on the Trunk nightlies for Firefox3.

  • Bad URL (Score:5, Informative)

    by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @07:40PM (#15234057) Journal
    Only one number off. So close, and yet so far.

    Features cut from Firefox 2:
    http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060430-6701 .html [arstechnica.com]

    • Re:Bad URL (Score:4, Interesting)

      by pchan- ( 118053 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @07:58PM (#15234133) Journal
      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:Bad URL (Score:4, Informative)

        by (H)elix1 ( 231155 ) <slashdot.helix@nOSPaM.gmail.com> on Sunday April 30, 2006 @08:15PM (#15234197) Homepage Journal
        Adblock lets you nuke things at the domain level. I have *.falkag.*, *.tacoda.*, and *.google-analytics.* in my filter list mostly due to other sites. You can also use your wildcards to take out js files as well (and a mess of other stuff if you are clever with your regex) if there is something on the domain you want to see.

        • Re:Bad URL (Score:4, Informative)

          by Firehed ( 942385 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @10:23PM (#15234567) Homepage
          I don't think you need to use adblock to disable javascript entirely, but it would be great if there was a "from originating site only" option as per "Load Images" and cookies. A blanket ban on JS will kill navigation on many sites, as js menus aren't uncommon (regardless of what fancy crap you can do with CSS or whatever).

          For the record, though, Filterset.g updater combined with Adblock (Plus) pretty much eliminates every ad in existance. Plus has the bonus of letting you whitelist sites so you can support them by giving them ad views. An earlier verson had a "load then hide" behavior which was nice, but that seems to be gone now.

      • You could use noscript. http://www.noscript.net/whats/ [noscript.net] It autoblocks ALL javascript then you opt in for one time or forever for each site.
      • It probably wouldn't be that hard to write a content policy component that simply compares that domain of the referer and the script and refuse those that don't cut your mustard (about 30 lines of javascript)
      • http://kb.mozillazine.org/Hostperm.1 [mozillazine.org]

        Have a gander at that.

        p
      • You want noscript. It's an addon. I'm using it under Seamonkey.

        http://www.noscript.net/ [noscript.net]

  • Corrected arstechnica link (Score:5, Informative)

    by Nate Fox ( 1271 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @07:40PM (#15234058)
    The correct arstechnica link is here: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060430-6701 .html [arstechnica.com]

  • Places discussion (Score:5, Informative)

    by rayver ( 770680 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @07:46PM (#15234090)
    In case someone is looking for more information about the actual implementation of the "places" concept: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Talk:Places:Design_Overvie w [mozilla.org] http://wiki.mozilla.org/Places:Design_Overview [mozilla.org]

  • Differentiation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MrNonchalant ( 767683 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @07:48PM (#15234093)
    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:Differentiation (Score:3, Insightful)

      by CCFreak2K ( 930973 )
      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.
      • Right, but in order to convince users that updates are worthwhile you need visible differentiation. Especially if the update process is something of a hassle. 1.5 elicited something of a ho-hum from those I know.

        • Re:Differentiation (Score:3, Interesting)

          by BobPaul ( 710574 ) *
          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 utilit
          • Is Norton system works still useful? I used to use it from Win95 to Win98SE, but ever since I got WinXP combined with NTFS, it's been stable enough that i never needed the features of NSW...
        • It's a web browser. What are you expecting, Firefox to microwave your dinner?

        • Re:Differentiation (Score:5, Insightful)

          by number11 ( 129686 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @10:16PM (#15234547)
          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:Differentiation (Score:3, Insightful)

            by JulesLt ( 909417 )
            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 ba

    • Re:Differentiation (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Tearfang ( 881364 )
      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:Differentiation (Score:5, Insightful)

      by et764 ( 837202 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @09:52PM (#15234486)
      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.

      • MOD PARENT UP (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Trogre ( 513942 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @10:08PM (#15234538) Homepage
        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 (Score:3, Informative)

        by zerocool^ ( 112121 )

        Especially since right now (in firefox 1.0.7, which is what i'm running, stfu) you can middle click on the tabs and close them anyway. Adding an x on the tabs accomplishes nothing.

        Why do people not use the middle click in firefox? Middleclick link = open in new tab, middle click tab = close. I go through a page like fark, and middle click on the links I want to read, then they're all there waiting for me in tabbed glory when I'm done and ready to digest.

        ~W

    • Re:Differentiation (Score:3, Insightful)

      by misleb ( 129952 )
      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

    • Well, a few fixes, sligtly better security, and a few cosmetic changes are well worth the $0,00 price.

      I'll probably upgrade just because the number is bigger. But only when Debian tell me so.

    • NO CLOSE ON TABS! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by MikeFM ( 12491 )
      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 t

  • Firefox has the wrong focus (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Theovon ( 109752 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @07:48PM (#15234094)
    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.

    • Re:Firefox has the wrong focus (Score:4, Funny)

      by Cheapy ( 809643 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @07:57PM (#15234131)
      Well there goes your Karma.
    • It's open source, if people didn't like it somebody would have forked it by now.

      As for me, I have never experienced any of your problems. It gets faster with every release in fact.

    • Re:Firefox has the wrong focus (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Xelrach ( 726281 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @08:03PM (#15234153) Journal
      Doesn't the fact that "Places" was delayed show that they _are_ focused on polish?

    • Not just Firefox (Score:2, Insightful)

      by houstonbofh ( 602064 )
      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.
      • Come on now, browser-lite was always a niche market, and it's only getting more niche. Mozilla never tried to be the snappiest. Opera was pretty good, but lately, it's started packing on many more features too.

        More and more people are spending more of their time online, learning more of their information from the web. Information propagation online is also getting more complicated (eg. del.icio.us, digg, wikipedia, rss blogs, podcasts, ....), and the tools that people use to access those also need to a

      • Re:Not just Firefox (Score:5, Informative)

        by rho ( 6063 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @10:03PM (#15234525) Journal
        I wanted to add weight to this argument. I once put together a system for somebody using a 486 and an old Adaptec SCSI card. This was when Pentiums (and the Pentium Pro) were cutting edge. Running Slackware, it made a seriously nice system. Quirky, but stable and useful.

        I have an old Thinkpad 760, but it won't run any of the new distros. I used to be able to run OpenBSD 2.something on it with acceptable speed, but XFree86 made point revision and it stopped being reasonably snappy. Running Firefox on any modern distro, BSD, Linux or otherwise, is painful.

        However, I can run Win98 on it with little trouble. Is that a good thing? I don't think so.

      • Re:Not just Firefox (Score:3, Insightful)

        by misleb ( 129952 )
        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 ins

      • At FreeGeek Chicago (shameless link alert [freegeekchicago.org]), we've been using the Xubuntu desktop [ubuntu.com] on systems as low as Pentium II 400s. The project has been moving more and more towards being very close in look and feel to the default Gnome-based Ubuntu distro, but it runs pretty well on quite limited hardware. You don't have wonderful load times for GTK heavy apps, like FF, but the system is quite snappy -- it certainly feels lighter and more responsive than Win XP on the same hardware, and that's without spyware/malware

      • 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.

        Strip it down so that it only includes the functionality of XP and it'll still fly. You can hardly compare XP to a full-blown Kubuntu system featurewise.

    • Re:Firefox has the wrong focus (Score:4, Interesting)

      by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @08:10PM (#15234176)
      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.

    • 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 stil

      • 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 wh
      • Deadlines for releases are different from deadlines for features.

        You *have* to set a release deadline, or you'll be stuck in continuous development. That's not a bad thing unless they're trying to push half-baked features to meet the deadline. For Firefox, they're just choosing the bits that will be ready in time, and delaying the features that aren't.

        So I think they're holding to both of those statements, if you look at it in terms of "deadlines for features".

    • I agree (Score:2, Troll)

      by imsabbel ( 611519 )
      Personally, 1.5.0.2 has been the buggiest version in a long time.
      Closing firefox without a zombie process? No happening since 1.5.0.0...
      Firefox using 350Mbyte after a few hours? Well, seems to be 50Mbyte more with every version...
      Firefox freezing spontaniously when dealing with embeded media files? No problem in earlier versions, but recently everything goes bolloks.

      During a normal day, the typical "oh, clicking on links doesnt work anymore->close firefox->open task manager->kill zombie process-
    • > Instead of fixing incessant crashes and debilitating memory leaks

      That's an insult to the developers who have spent hundreds of hours fixing crashes and memory leaks and other polish issues.

      Your message is also completely off base given that the article is about features being cut to allow more focus on polish.
    • "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."

      And this is why the current browser war is irrelevant. XHTML/CSS is a mess to use, none of the browsers implement the standards completely or properly, and instead of the W3C and the browser developers sitting down, getting their shit together,
    • Fixing Firefox's memory problems might be an unglorious task, but many commercial projects are plagued with the same problems. An ambitious developer could turn Firefox's problems into the beginning of a lucrative career as a performance analyst and bug hunter, if he managed to make a significant difference and get credit for his work.

  • Use Epiphany (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 30, 2006 @07:52PM (#15234107)
    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.

  • yes, but (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fuentes ( 711192 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @07:54PM (#15234115)
    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!

  • So what are we missing? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by blair1q ( 305137 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @07:54PM (#15234117) Journal
    How is this better than the existing bookmarks system?

    • Re:So what are we missing? (Score:5, Informative)

      by WWWWolf ( 2428 ) <wwwwolf@iki.fi> on Sunday April 30, 2006 @08:08PM (#15234171) Homepage

      Basically, in Netscape 4, bookmarks were stored in a quasi-HTML file, and history in a DB file.

      In Mozilla, bookmarks are stored in a XML-that-almost-look-like-HTML format, while the history is stored in the most insane file format ever devised by mortal mind. It's called MORK. Remember that name. Remember it well. (Seriously, take a look at your history.db. It's a text file. It really is. Or it might look like one from a good distance.)

      While in the new grand concept, everything is stored in a SQLite database - simple, well tested, portable, efficient, doesn't make Firefox much bigger than it already is, and above all, programmer-friendly file format that isn't causing peoples' brains to ooze out of their ears when they try to figure it out.

      • Woah... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by The Real Nem ( 793299 )
        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
      • What's wrong with bookmarks as html? I've always liked being able to set my home page to point at my bookmarks.htm.
        • Agreed. It also makes it possible to open your bookmarks file in another browser.

        • 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, Mo

      • Re:So what are we missing? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @08:44PM (#15234290) Journal
        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.

  • Disappointing but not unusual (Score:3, Insightful)

    by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @07:57PM (#15234132) Homepage
    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.

  • Take a leaf out of Epiphany's book (Score:4, Informative)

    by MoogMan ( 442253 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @07:58PM (#15234134)
    I really like the way Epiphany handles bookmarks with it's "Smart Bookmarks" features... Basically, you just tag your bookmarks with arbitrary tags e.g. "Work", "Sport", "Geek", and you can search for them dynamically.

    I would like to see an extension of this (and I know work is in progress)... With meta-tagged files. God knows why browsers do not store bookmarks as files in a "Bookmarks" folder.

  • Not really removed feature... (Score:5, Informative)

    by MTO_B. ( 814477 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @08:11PM (#15234181) Homepage
    - Places is still in the roadmap, just not for v2.0. (maybe 3.0 if not earlier)
    - Places was too buggy to work with. Nightly testers report far "too many" bugs with it... even if they were fixed, imagine all those bugs that would be uncovered if used by the masses (nightly tester build bugs are a good indication of how many bugs will be found if open , it's somewhat proportional).

    More to read at MozillaZine [mozillazine.org]

  • Why do the 2.0 release? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mccoma ( 64578 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @08:16PM (#15234200)
    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.
    • 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

  • Welcome to Software Engineering (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DigitlDud ( 443365 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @08:16PM (#15234202)
    You start with 1000 awesome features, and end up implementing 2.

  • If you RTFA... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Hachey ( 809077 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @08:34PM (#15234257)
    ...you might see that Ryan Paul wasn't just turning his nose up at FireFox:

    "As a Firefox user and a software developer, I am personally very disappointed with the removal of this innovative feature. With over 1,000 bookmarks to keep track of, I was really looking forward to being able to leverage the SQLite database engine for bookmark organization and management. That said, my disappointment is tempered by my capacity to appreciate the rationale for such a delay. In the world of software development (both open and proprietary), such delays are common and they typically result in software that is more polished and reliable. As long as inclusion of the feature isn't delayed indefinitely, the consequences of this particular decision will most likely be positive ones."


    It is early adoption folks. It's an alpha. Not a big deal.
  • The world has been spared a feature with a vague, incomprehensible, metaphorically incorrect, and just plain stupid name.

    n
  • I don't know anything about this format, so I probably shouldn't comment, but off the top of my head, it seems to me that for url bookmarks a human-readable format is prefferable and easier to convert or otherwise process.

  • Let me start by quoting... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Biomechanical ( 829805 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @09:28PM (#15234406) Homepage

    ...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?

    • 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 impl

    • Eh-hemm, though it does appear to have stagnated a bit of late there is Amaya [w3.org]
    • Hey, man, I know what you mean. Hold on, I need to open this other page in a new tab... there we go. Alright, I agree. I mean Firefox is definitely better in the standards department than its Microshaft counterpart, but it still isn't perfect. Why the hell doesn't Mozilla get faster volunteers?! They are a "corporation" now, after all. I mean half of the SVG standards don't work on Mozilla browsers. Check out the w3schools tutorial [w3schools.com] and you'll see that all the animation examples are just static pages. Of cou
  • I've wondered in the past if the traditional web-browser bookmark system will be replaced with a web-service (like del.icio.us?) or maybe even a combination of a web-service and firefox extension.

  • Could be a good thing (Score:3, Interesting)

    by unoengborg ( 209251 ) on Sunday April 30, 2006 @09:45PM (#15234465) Homepage
    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.
  • Sorry for shouting, but I'd be happy if they did *nothing* but fix the memory leaks.

    Memory leaks are unforgivable.

  • something needed since the beginning (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) * on Sunday April 30, 2006 @11:32PM (#15234780)
    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.

  • If you don't like it (Score:3, Funny)

    by Rogerborg ( 306625 ) on Monday May 01, 2006 @10:30AM (#15236801) Homepage
    You can just fork off.

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