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Mozilla Firefox 3 Features Screencast

Posted by timothy on Sat Jun 07, 2008 03:21 PM
from the next-new-now dept.
Mozilla The Internet
An anonymous reader points to a mention at MozillaZine of "a screencast by Mozilla developer Mike Beltzner, demonstrating some of the new features in Mozilla Firefox 3, which is due out very soon. Weighing in at under four minutes, the screencast gives a concise overview of why you should be excited about Firefox 3. Due to its visual nature, the screencast shows Firefox's features far more clearly than the many written previews that have been published. A picture really is worth a thousand words."
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Submission: Mozilla Firefox 3 Features Screencast by Anonymous Coward
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  • Great! (Score:5, Funny)

    by physman_wiu (933339) on Saturday June 07 2008, @03:29PM (#23695651)
    I've got like 4,200 bookmarks...I tried organizing them a few times...that was a lesson in futility.

    • Re:Great! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Threni (635302) on Saturday June 07 2008, @03:45PM (#23695779)
      > I've got like 4,200 bookmarks...I tried organizing them a few times...that was a lesson in futility.

      You don't need a browser, you need a secretary.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by FudRucker (866063)
      my bookmarks number in the thousands, but what i did was moved bookmark.html to /home/$USER out of my profile directory and open it with a text editor and remove all the meta tags and "last visited" info and left it basically as a html file with only URLs in it and made my bookmark.html my home page so the browser has no bookmarks internally and the home button opens my bookmarks like a regular web page, if you know html pretty good you can make some tables and/or horiziontal lines and categorize them...

      • Re:Great! (Score:5, Funny)

        by lanc (762334) on Saturday June 07 2008, @04:35PM (#23696205)
        sure. and if you invest a little more time, you could even integrate it into the browser menubar in drop-down tree-form.

        YHBT. YHL. HAND.

  • Weight in minutes? (Score:5, Funny)

    by clang_jangle (975789) on Saturday June 07 2008, @03:31PM (#23695667)
    Dagnabbit, I can't find the conversion chart for that one anywhere, and I really want to know what I weigh in minutes.

  • Excellent! (Score:5, Funny)

    by AtomicSnarl (549626) on Saturday June 07 2008, @03:34PM (#23695679) Homepage
    Not only will this let me I better organize my porn links, but I can avoid those Icky Malware sites, too!

    Thank you Team Mozilla! The world is a better place because of your hard work.

    Now, where'd I put my tube of lube...

    • Re:Excellent! (Score:5, Funny)

      by moderatorrater (1095745) on Saturday June 07 2008, @04:58PM (#23696355)
      After reading your comment, I came to the conclusion that "lubetube" would be the greatest name for a porn version of youtube ever.

      Turns out, I wasn't the only person that thought so...

  • SVG animation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gr8_phk (621180) on Saturday June 07 2008, @03:45PM (#23695775)
    Ever since I started using SVG with Firefox 1.5, I've been waiting for animation capability. The SMIL patch is apparently working reasonably well, but it's just not getting applied to 3.0. This is really sad. I appreciate all the bug fixes and performance improvements, but it's really frustrating that plugins always seem to get higher priority than web standards. Just apply the patch guys. Thanks.

  • Good job FireFox Devs! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Toreo asesino (951231) on Saturday June 07 2008, @03:57PM (#23695899) Journal
    I have to say FireFox 3 has some features I can't believe have been missing up until this point. The awesome bar, looks awesome.

    In fact, i find it amazing most areas of browsers haven't been "just searchable" like FireFox 3 is now, having seen how much sense this makes.

    Good job guys, you're setting a high bar for the rest to follow (no doubt).
    • But did they fix the Slashdot b

    • Re:Good job FireFox Devs! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jugalator (259273) on Saturday June 07 2008, @04:22PM (#23696085) Journal
      For me, it's a lot about the little things. When he showed the thing about right-clicking on a downloaded file and being able to go back to the actual download page, that's when I thought "why haven't other browser devs thought of that before".

      IMHO, Firefox 3 isn't a huge advance among web browsers, and actually catches up in some areas with some of the competition -- thinking of the site identification support. And it isn't the dominating browser in the Acid3 test either. But it does a lot of things right, and that with the extensive plugin support not found on any other browser (besides Firefox compatible derivatives). With the resource consumptions fixes (that Safari is in dire need of on Windows, and IE 7 too somewhat), it's really becoming a quite pleasant browser to use.

      I'm a former Opera user, but the thing is that I feel Firefox 3's new Javascript speed enhancements and memory fixes making it so fast (and with the scrolling plugin YASS giving it the final touch of smooth "speed scrolling"), that I can't really switch back at this point. I did with Firefox 2 due to the memory issues, but I doubt I will again until perhaps Opera 10 or something is released.

  • Treadmill Kittens (Score:5, Funny)

    by Evil Closet Monkey (761299) on Saturday June 07 2008, @04:04PM (#23695955) Homepage
    This sneak peak at Firefox wasted an hour of my life, watching treadmill kittens on You Tube!
  • Wow, the summary is totally right for once - watching the screencast makes the features actually seem desirable.

    Normally you just download the software and are sort of pleasantly surprised when you find a new feature, or similarly disappointed when there are none. In this case, it actually makes me /want/ to download FF3 and get to having some of those neat widgets.

    • Re:Wow, actually creates interest (Score:5, Interesting)

      by owlnation (858981) on Saturday June 07 2008, @04:29PM (#23696141)

      Wow, the summary is totally right for once - watching the screencast makes the features actually seem desirable.
      Not sure I'd go quite that far... however, I am less concerned about some of the new features now. The name "awesome bar" and the description of what it did had me worried. Originally it looked like a feature for a feature's sake, with a stupid name to boot.

      Now, I admit I am more open minded about the Bar (except the name, that remains stupid). I'm open to seeing how it behaves in practice. If the searchable aspects of it are returning good results then maybe it's useful. If, however, it's like the built-in dictionary in Fx 2 that seems only to recognize words in Webster's 1893 edition, then it may be beyond irritating.

      But, the Site Identity thing -- and it recognizing how may times you've visited a site, looks like a whole bundle of trouble waiting to happen. At best a divorce, and at worst a 1st class ticket to Gitmo when they impound your laptop at an airport check-in and you forgot to clear it.

      I'm also thinking the fact that this changes color might be potentially distracting and irritating. Almost all of the extensions I add to Firefox are about stopping things distracting me on a webpage or browser. I'm not MTV generation, I need to focus when I read, and I only use a browser to read (and for pr0n too obviously, but I don't want distracted then either).

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by miro f (944325)
          it's called browser history, and every browser has it. You can, of course, quickly erase your tracks by pressing ctrl-shift-delete. The site info gives you information in the hopes of being able to identify the site you are visiting. If it looks like your usual site but firefox says you've never visited it before, then you might get suspicious.

          Also telling you if it stores cookies and being able to quickly see those cookies is fantastic, imo.
  • That address bar is brilliant.

    I've seen several complaints across the web about it and I simply do not know how.
    I am the first person to complain when something changes un-necessarily (Windows Vista's explorer in classic mode is nothing short of an abortion, a filthy disgusting abortion and I mean every goddamned word of that, you'd be surprised how many little bugs are in it)

    That being said, this firefox bar is virtually flawless, it seems to remember what I normally open based on what I type, how often I go there, how many times I hit the down arrow for another option etc.
    As a hardcore keyboard user, I love it.
    The only flaw is one of the benefits and that's how it hunt and pecks through your bookmarks.
    If you share your machine and say you have bookmarks like 'tranny gets railed by 15 guys' it could be kind of bad if your co-worker jumps on your PC and starts typing in 'tran' for transmission or transformers in the address bar :/

    Baring that though, it truely is gold.
    Oh and it's genuinely and substantially faster.

    Now just fix google browser sync, tabs menu and we're good to go.

    • 2%? really? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by spazdor (902907) on Saturday June 07 2008, @03:33PM (#23695675)
      I am a seasoned Linux maven, and Flash playback works perfectly for me.

      Just saying.

    • Re:SWF? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 07 2008, @03:39PM (#23695727)
      2%...really? You think only 2% of /. users have flash installed? Even if that is a hyperbole, it seems a bit extreme.

    • Re:Grr sidebar history (Score:5, Informative)

      by maxume (22995) on Saturday June 07 2008, @03:35PM (#23695685)
      Ctrl+H is shorter than Ctrl+Shift+H, and it opens the history in the sidebar on FF3 here. Of course, I don't remember what FF2 did.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by aussie_a (778472)

        Ctrl+H is shorter than Ctrl+Shift+H, and it opens the history in the sidebar on FF3 here. Of course, I don't remember what FF2 did.
        Crtl+H opens up the history in the sidebar on FF2. Its hardly new.

    • Re:Grr sidebar history (Score:4, Interesting)

      by snl2587 (1177409) on Saturday June 07 2008, @03:44PM (#23695763)

      Having the history open in the sidebar by default was fantastic...

      It does if you go to View->Sidebar->History (or Ctrl+H). It's slightly different to get to it, but roughly the same otherwise.

      Personally, I like the database structure implemented by FF3. Especially the speed of reviewing the history and the "awesome bar".

    • Re:Grr sidebar history (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Splab (574204) on Saturday June 07 2008, @04:21PM (#23696081)
      The awesome bar is pretty fucking annoying to say the least. In the last 8-10 years when I've been surfing I've been typing the first part of the domain I wanted to visit and the auto complete would show it. So if I wanted to go to slashdot I just type s and arrow down and slashdot would be the first link since its my most visited site with S in the beginning. If I wanted to go to sinfest I'd go si and arrow down - this behavior has to change with FF3, now the browser will popup the most visited site with S in it - and that isn't necessarily slashdot.

      Yes this might be a nifty feature for some, but seriously, please stop changing interface behavior! Windows does it all the time and it is driving hordes of supporters nuts. Keep it consistent and let people with special needs enable it - or at least do it the WinZip way; ask the user what he or she wants! (FF3 is default browser with hardy heiron - thats why I'm actually using it, downgrading a package usually leads to nightmares and I just want an OS that isn't in the way of my work - All other OS I got is running FF 2 and is staying that way till I figure out how to make FF3 behave like FF2)

      • Re:Grr sidebar history (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 07 2008, @04:39PM (#23696237)
        in that case you typing "sla" should be good for most of your needs. If you need more reliable method then I suggest you use "keywords." open bookmark manager, right-click on the bookmark and set its keyword. next time you type the keyword and hit enter it will take you to the bookmarked site.

        I have set "/." as the keyword for slashdot. it is a quick one-hand operation. takes a fraction of a second.

        I found the awesome bar annoying for about a week but now I can't live without it. The best part is that you don't have to remember the domain name. You can match by any part of URL or by page title. To me that is awesome.

          • Re:Grr sidebar history (Score:5, Insightful)

            by miro f (944325) on Saturday June 07 2008, @06:44PM (#23696945)
            why go to all of that effort to fix your problem when you can just complain about it on slashdot?

            The vast majority of us love the new address bar, and yes, there is an extension that brings back the old behaviour (I have no idea as to the reliability of the extension as I don't use it, it took about 2 minutes with an open mind to get used to the new location bar and now everything is so much easier with it)

            It's a shame developers always change behaviour without giving the option to change it back, there should be an option to revert every single user interface change ever made so that people who hate change can keep things exactly like they used to be while everybody else has to sift through a billion different options to change something important (such as the proxy settings). Or maybe those of you who hate change can just stick with IE5 on Windows 98.

            For fuck's sake, it's not difficult to get used to the new location bar, and once you do I guaruntee you'll love it.

          • Re:Grr sidebar history (Score:5, Funny)

            by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 07 2008, @09:26PM (#23697735)
            You obviously don't surf porn. If you surf porn for half an hour you'll visit dozens and dozens of sites. Unless you visit a HUGE number of non-porn sites, then many of the two-letter sequence you type in the "awesome bar" (groan) will display large, colorful evidence, clearly legible from across the room, of the fact that you have surfed porn sometime in the last month.

            Sticking to the theme (established above) of what happens when you type "sl" to get to Slashdot, the first suggestion for me is actually Slashdot, but the second suggestion is a porn page. This has been bothering me for weeks. I know you'll wonder if I've hit that page a bunch of times, so I just checked: the chick doesn't look familiar or even remotely hot, so I'm sure I didn't visit it more than once.

            For some reason (probably legibility and/or predictability) I didn't worry nearly as much about the history drop-down.

            Fortunately, although my friends notice my reluctance to look things up on the internet when they're around, they think I'm just a Luddite, or I'm showing off my ostentatiously non-geeky preference for IRL stuff. When I'm forced to use the web in front of somebody else, I use Google for EVERYTHING because Google search results do not, thank God, advertise what I do when I'm alone. Yet.

            (The third suggestion from the "awesome bar" is developers.slashdot.org. C'mon. I view that page almost every day. It would be so awesome if it was listed higher than the porn page I visited a month ago.)

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by fmoc-86 (1279012)
        If you really care that much, you can use "s" as a keyword for slashdot.org if you have it bookmarked in FF3.

        • Re:Grr sidebar history (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Splab (574204) on Saturday June 07 2008, @05:32PM (#23696553)
          Just like the sibling AC comment you are telling me that I need to change my behavior to adjust for what the FF team think is right. This is just like the Pidgin team telling the world that the behavior all have learned is wrong and the new way is the right way. It's the wrong way around - programs has to help the user optimize his or her work flow, while this is what they wanted with the feature, changing behavior means the user has to relearn everything from scratch - my way of doing it was fast, reliable and worked for me.

          This is by no means a unique incident, someone comes up with some thing they think is nicer, but always forget that they have taught hordes of people to do it the other way - you have to leave in options for going "old school" rather than alienating your most devote supporters - and it shouldn't be buried somewhere in the internals of the system.

          Oh and to the mods, get a life - I'm stating the facts as they are from my point of view, developers needs to keep users work flow in mind when adding features.

          Don't get me wrong I love FF, but the added features has alienated me from it and too much bloating could lead to switching to others like Konquerer/Opera.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by fmoc-86 (1279012)

            Well, I see your point. However, I think one can (and should) adjust behaviour--of course, not for the programmer's sake.

            I mean this in the sense of Bram Molenaar (vim's main author) generic advise: 1) Detect inefficiency 2) Find a quicker way 3) Make it an habit. I think that advise is valuable and to the point.

            In this case, changing behaviour doesn't mean learning *everything* from scratch. But: if you can't find a quicker way, then maybe it's fault of the program. The interface isn't accesible enough

            • Re:Grr sidebar history (Score:4, Insightful)

              by Brian Gordon (987471) on Saturday June 07 2008, @08:54PM (#23697597)
              Yes, a seamless FF2 to FF3 is exactly what I'm looking for. Javascript is slooowww in FF2, so slow that I really can't go back because it's noticable. But with FF3 I'm stuck with this funky awesomebar, a screwy theme (for Vista/Server 08), and all sorts of weird changes like the new unified History/Bookmarks organizer. Why can't they just optimize the heck out of the existing codebase, implement new and faster technologies on the backend, and leave the interface alone? Come on, if people want all sorts of crazy URL tracking capabilities, maybe they should use a less lightweight browser like Seamonkey or Opera..

            • Re:Grr sidebar history (Score:4, Insightful)

              by try_anything (880404) on Sunday June 08 2008, @01:55PM (#23701591)

              I disagree with your implication that the url is the important thing to remember about a website. Remembering tags, words, context is much more natural
              Tags, words, and context are helpful when groping for a hazily-remembered website, but is anything easier or more human than using names? If you see an actor on TV and ask somebody what his name is, what would you rather hear: "That's Ricardo Montalban," or, "He's that guy, who was in that Star Trek movie, and his name was Khan, and Kirk was like, 'KHAAAAAAAAAAN!' and he's been in a bunch of TV stuff too."


              Arguably the second description tells you more about the man (what's in a name?), but as a human being you're more satisfied by the first answer. That's just the way we work. A name gives us something around which to crystallize our knowledge and our memories. Analog information fades and blurs. Without a name, similar people blur together. Is there one cute divorced brunette with glasses in the professional services department, or two? Once you have names for them, you can start sorting out their characteristics into two individuals.


              Usually when people refer to a site's URL, they mean its domain name. A domain name is even better than a human name, because they are unique and are usually carefully picked to be memorable and easy to spell. It took a while for people to figure out how to choose good domain names, but they do a good job these days. Often, when a website has a long official name that doesn't match its domain name, people find it more natural to use the domain name as the name they use in casual conversation.


              Domain names are also absolutely essential to disambiguate between sites with similar content. If you give somebody ridiculous directions to a web site (like "gis kitten star trek indiana third row second column" or "delicious my tags linux radius second listed") then there's a good chance they'll end up on a different site, despite the apparent precision of the directions. You'd better give them part of the URL so they can distinguish between the really cool site you're trying to send them to and all the really lame sites with similar content.


              Better yet, give them a name. Giving someone a long context-sensitive algorithm for finding a site, instead of giving them a URL, is like saying, "You should really watch this movie, that has Tom Hanks in it, but he's not the main character, and it's set in Miami, and there are all these drug dealers and a pastry chef...." Don't you just want to punch people like that? Don't be like that. Just say you'll send a link when you get a chance.


              All in all, tags and search terms are essential fallbacks when you don't know the name of something, but everything is easier and more certain when you remember the name. Plus, names are essential when communicating with other people (who don't have the same context and memories as you) and when you aren't sure you can recognize what you're looking for or distinguish it from similar content.

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by drsquare (530038)
              Why would I need bookmarks? It's easier to type the first couple of letters and have the address come up. It also means I can see the most commonly visited parts of the site and go straight to them, you can't do that with bookmarks.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by pbhj (607776)

        ... I just type s and arrow down and slashdot would be the first link since its my most visited site with S in the beginning. If I wanted to go to sinfest I'd go si and arrow down - this behavior has to change with FF3, now the browser will popup the most visited site with S in it - and that isn't necessarily slashdot.

        I don't think it quite works like that, I thought it "learnt" from your choice (takes a while) now when I press S slashdot comes up, if I want splatterladder I use arrow-down - that's the same behaviour as you had before, perhaps a different number of arrow-downs? It seems that it tries to guess what I'm going to choose (based on most used, bookmarks, freshness?) and makes it come up first.

        I'll admit I didn't like it to start with either, but I've gotten used to it now.

        Perhaps it's not as clever as I thin

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Splab (574204)
          but it is learned behaviour - I don't look at the address bar, slashdot has been s and arrow down for the last 5-6 years for me in all browsers.

          To me it is like someone deciding Dvorak should be the new defacto layout - suddenly I'm back having to look at what the computer is doing rather than expecting it to do as I want.

      • Re:Grr sidebar history (Score:4, Insightful)

        by poetmatt (793785) on Saturday June 07 2008, @06:34PM (#23696897)
        Umm you still have this.

        If you went si, unless you have a ton of sites starting with si, it'll still find it that way. This isn't any different than other autocompletes.

        Your difference between 1 and two letters is the same as anywhere else. Honestly, autocomplete tracks most used links too so what's your point? Your comment seems to contradict itself a little on what your problem with how the new awesomebar works, which is same as before in your case really. an AC who got a +4 put dead on your options.

        Firefox 3 in my opinion is huge improvements all around.

    • Re:Grr sidebar history (Score:4, Insightful)

      by x_MeRLiN_x (935994) on Saturday June 07 2008, @04:43PM (#23696265) Homepage
      The Firefox 2.0 history panel is damn near useless to me. It offers the convenient option to sort by date and site, but apparently one would never need to search within those results, because typing in the search box clears that filter.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by WiFiBro (784621)
        Firebug works for me, check it's homepage.
        There's a recipe for overriding the compatibility check for add-ons.

        The way for to force FF3.0.pre to accept all your add-ons, EVEN if they may NOT BE GOOD for FF3:
        I have no idea how this procedure could create havoc but since you're evading proper procedures, well.. better backup your profile and whatnot.
        Download the *.xpi file from a reliable source.
        Rename it to *.zip
        Open the zipfile.
        Edit file install.rdf so maxVersion reads 3.0pre

        [em:maxVersion]3.0pre[/em:maxVers

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