Mozilla's Goodger on Firefox's Future 470
An anonymous reader writes "The New Zealand Herald has an interview with Ben Goodger, lead engineer for Firefox at the Mozilla foundation. In it he describes how he got started, his reasons for Firefox's existence and what the future may hold for the little browser that could."
My Wishlist for FireFox (Score:5, Interesting)
2. Firefox renders slashdot correctly, since this is the site that promotes it the most.
Keep up the good work!
Re:Process for Takeover (Score:2, Interesting)
Better handling of extensions (Score:5, Interesting)
If firefox is to hit mainstream, some of the more popular plugins need to be incorporated directly into the product. At the very least, offer for download a chunky version with lots of stuff already installed. But even that won't cut it. Some features, like tabbed browsing, can't just be added on as extensions because they interact badly with other extensions.
Also, there are backward-compatibility problems with each new release. Developers of open-source extensions aren't going to keep updating their work, so supporting at least the more important extensions should be considered essential from a release perspective, and perhaps they should be incorporated into the core project where possible.
There's nothing wrong with an extension arhcitecture per se. In fact, they have worked very well in open source, e.g. Eclipse and Linux. And that's true for firefox too. However, the management of extensions requires careful consideration. In Firefox's case, there's room for improvement.
(BTW maybe this has nothing to do with the interview but it's slashdotted, that's my excuse for waffling on.)
I suggested to my boss today........ (Score:5, Interesting)
I came back with, "More administration than cleaning and recleaning spyware and adware from users' machines on a daily basis? Symantec and Adaware are supposed to come out with a corporate solution in Q2-05 at the cost of roughly $20-30 a seat. This would cost us nothing but the time we spend orchestrating a rollout."
I could see the gears turning, which was encouraging.
bear in mind (Score:2, Interesting)
Overclockers is running a compo on the biggest infection right now (self inflicted though). Check out the current race leader [ocforums.com]!
Re:My Wishlist for FireFox (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm also starting to get annoyed at the lack of progress here. I mean, slashcode is an open-source project, right? Isn't one of the reasons to use open-source because it's faster-moving then closed-source? Slashcode hasn't moved anywhere at all in years...
The ONLY change we've had in years is a few new sections, all of which have TERRIBLE eye-hurting colors (Games, IT for instance.)
Even worse, some features (like filtering-out specific topics) have been broken and never fixed... or is that fixed now?
Code names (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:My Wishlist for FireFox (Score:2, Interesting)
Has anyone else notices how spreadfirefox.com has been slahdotted for nearly 36 hours? There are over 50 news site linked to it according to google news. It must be going really well, except now noone can access it! Anyone, after day 1, they had greater the 320,000 downloads, I assume its only gotten better since then. We are definilty going to make 1 million!
Regards,
Steve
LiveHTTPHeaders (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, yeah, the pop-up blocking is great too, so is tabbed browsing.
Re:Better handling of extensions (Score:1, Interesting)
I tried DLing a search engine extension and it crashed FF when I tried to select it. This was an extension from the FF site itself too, not a warm fuzzy.
Also, the method of installing plugins for viewing content is a litle scary. It merely says that there is no handler and give a button that says "Install pluging now..." or something. Er, WHAT plugin? for WHAT data type? I'm supposed to blindly click on buttons to DL and install unknown software? That doesn't encourage good security practices...
Firefox most reliable? (Score:2, Interesting)
Plugins Don't Work Seamlessly (Score:4, Interesting)
I've installed Firefox on the computers of two relatives, both have inquired about the problems rendering USA Today's contents. Unable to solve the problem I had to tell them to use IE. Yuck! I will gladly forego using photo galleries on USA Today in favor of using this browers but others won't.
Re:GOOD Improvements (Score:5, Interesting)
I installed the new version of Firefox the day it was released, and didn't notice anything different. I went to search for something, hit ctrl-f, typed normally, and found it, no problems.
About ten seconds later I suddenly realized "wait a second, where was the search box?" I hit ctrl-f again and . . . basically stared in total surprise.
It's brilliant. It's simple. I can't think of a single downside beyond "will people think to look for it there". Kudos to the Firefox team.
The only setting change I need now is something to prompt for overwrite when I try to create two identically-named bookmarks - this is a feature I use all the time in IE, and it's literally the only thing keeping me from switching over to Mozilla 100%.
Re:Firefox v. IE (Score:4, Interesting)
If you install it as the default browser, then it breaks updates (completely for Office). If you don't install it as default, then it frequently doesn't come up (any time a URL is launched via a shell command, which is more often that you might think)
In the end, I feel like I now need to maintain TWO seperate browsers with constant security updates (Yes, for FF too) and security settings to cover 99% the same functionality. I opined before that I also don't believe that FF is all that secure. Several surprising default settings and demonstrably anti-security minded UI features make it a little frightning.
In the end, all I really want is a browser to look at webpages, period. This was in fact a main factor for the creation of FF, to have a simple fast browser based on the Moz engine. Well it is so simple and so virtually identical to IE that there really doesn't seem to be a point in using it on Windows...
On Linux though, It's the shiz-nit! Well, with tightened security settings (hust like IE) and as long as you don't go DLing 500 plugins, it only took one to crash it for me
Dare I say it? ...TBE (Score:4, Interesting)
Lemmy start a small laundry list of TBE's perks though:
-Single window mode (EVERYTHING opens in a new tab)
-Drag & Drop tab rearranging (its just common sense)
-Undo close tab (possibly the BEST feature of the entire extension. I use it daily)
-Modifyable tab bar (move it around, scroll it, make it double layered, etc)
-Customized tab behavior for new links (hypertext/bookmarks/history/javascript/external apps/etc: choose if they open a new window, tab, or load in an existing one. Very nice for steamlining your browsing experience.)
-Tab grouping (including pretty colours!)
-Tab locking (lock a tab to a specific page)
-Auto reloading of tabs
I could go on and on... TBE is like everything AND the damn kitchen sink (which is why some people seem to have a seething hatred of it). Really though, would it kill Mozilla to add just a few of the more popular features? I know extensions are supposed to be this big, grand, wonderful idea, but I think a LOT more people (especially average joe's) would be appreciative rather than pissed off to have a couple more handy dandy features. You've got to remember that if you want your browser to go mainstream, its got to have a bit of a "smack you in the face" slant for all the little old ladies and joe-sixpacks out there that aren't gonna spend an hour sifting through the extension library. Leave the "OMG my browzer has NO bloat n' runs 1.00283% fastr on my AMD becuz I compiel'd it myself" to the geeks who know and love that kind of stuff.
Just my $0.02 anyways. In the meantime i'm just gonna keep loving the hell out of this browser. Firefox RULES! \o/
What happens to the net when everyone has AdBlock? (Score:5, Interesting)
Does this mean an huge impending change in the way advertising works on the internet? Will companies like the NYT, who make a lot of money from ads, start embedding advertisements in ways such that AdBlocking them with regexp filters would also block out the non-ad images?
Smart Keywords (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What happens to the net when everyone has AdBlo (Score:2, Interesting)
I download the ad, but tell AdBlock not to display it. Just doing my bit to bring down the system.
The point is, the vast majority of ads are completely blocked by the filters, as they have been since 2001. And as long as Gecko had 2% of the market share, sites didn't care. Now they'll have to.
Firefox is coming along nicely (Score:2, Interesting)
- A more exposed menu to temporarily disable popup blocking.
- An option to open new tabs in the background rather than switching to them.
My favorite aspect of Firefox is that it doesn't try to do everything. It's just a browser, like... well.. IE. Only it's better. It doesn't have that Craptive X stuff.
Web designers have gotten sloppy in the last few years, coding only for IE, causing problems for those that don't use IE. The trend is changing and I welcome our new extra workload for lazy web designer overlords!
Re:Won't help (Score:3, Interesting)
If you average catching between 1-3 trojans a day that come by the way of Firefox, which of course means you aren't CHOOSING to download these files (that would be no fault of the browser), then surely you'll be able to come up with specific sites and post them here for us to see.
Otherwise it's just pure BS.
Re:Firefox v. IE (Score:4, Interesting)
Max
Re:My Wishlist for FireFox (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:LiveHTTPHeaders (Score:2, Interesting)
Now perhaps someone can explain to me why Slashdot has Futurama quotes in their response. When I load Slashdot I see X-Fry and X-Bender headers with quotes from the show.
Cool.
Re:My Wishlist for FireFox (Score:3, Interesting)
Precisely the case. From what I understand, it was caused by a race condition, a class of problems that popup when multiple threads (or processes) work in parallel on the same resources. Such bugs are very subtle and hard to reproduce, as they depend a lot on external conditions.
I used to get this problem at
Anyway, as long as you're having problems, the quick work around is to change the text size and back. Just hold Ctrl and scroll you mouse wheel once up, then once done, and its fixed.
Re:My Wishlist for FireFox (Score:5, Interesting)
The RSS feed doesn't include the full article summary, it limits the length.
Makes the RSS much less useful IMHO.
Editors - any chance of changing that?
Re:I suggested to my boss today........ (Score:3, Interesting)
Changing a "no" to a "yes" is a lot harder than extracting a "yes" in the first place.
I think my father's advice is even better:
"Sometimes, it's easier to beg forgiveness than to get permission."
Re:Computer science is not a science yet. (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Yes it's a hack. Yes it's better to actually find the cause of the problem. I hate hacks as much as the next guy - but to the user it would solve all these "reflow bugs" easily and simply. There is nothing to stop them being fixed in the background and for this hack to eventually be taken out. But to a user, if a page looks screwed up, and it doesn't in internet explorer, it's firefox's fault.
Make it a preference that defaults to on, make all pages render correctly today, and worry about performance improvements later.
Functionality beats performance anytime.
2) I would suggest the refresh be double buffered, and just swap buffers when it's done. The page will take the same time to load, but after x (the time it takes it refresh the page) ms, the page will also look right.
Re:Firefox v. IE (Score:3, Interesting)
My friend once got into a debate with me over Opera and Firefox, and it got down to him finally saying that despite how wonderful Firefox was and everything, he'll stick to Opera because he liked the ads! Well, I promptly directed him to a site [squarefree.com] where you can install ads for Firefox as well.
Re:My Wishlist for FireFox (Score:1, Interesting)
Second, most of the complaints I hear come from a confustion between HTML as a text markup language and the desire to make it a page layout language. HTML marks up text and then the browser decides how to best display the text to give meaning to the markup. We have had lots of hacks to convert HTML to more a of a layout language, CSS being the latest, but to do anything useful you still have to hack. This gets complicated by the fact that the IE does not play well with CSS.
Other much more well funded sites, especially those that are 'IE' only, fail to render well in anything but the current version of IE, and often only work sporadically in that. For instance, something as simple as a password or tabs often fail in some of the IE only commercial pages I am forced to use.
Finally, aside from the color, /. does a good job with the UI. I seldom hit the wrong button. Or get confused on where I am.
I am not a /. fanboy. I am not an HTML expert. But there are sites that I hate to use, and sites that I use as examples of practical ways to solve problems. /. is the later.
firefox money (Score:1, Interesting)
where does the funding come from?
Re:Oh? Then why do you block wc3 validator? (Score:1, Interesting)
HTML is as good as XHTML (Score:3, Interesting)
Deprecation is not a matter of opinion in the world of webstandards
HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 offer exactly the same capabilities, only XHTML offers ease of use inside XSLT based publishing systems. Anyone else might just as well go on writing HTML 4.01.
What matters is that you write valid HTML, and that you separate style and structure, farming out all presentation to the linked style sheet. So I agree with the sentiment to use 'Strict with CSS'.
I see a lot of invalid XHTML on the web, where the use transitional or proprietary markup like 'topmargin' and 'center'. I always wonder, why did they add those slashes? What's the point?
slashdot is NOT html 3.2 compliant (Score:2, Interesting)
PAT
Re:HTML is as good as XHTML (Score:3, Interesting)
Deprecation is not a matter of opinion in the world of webstandards
Is that why the W3C site isn't written in HTML 4.01? Is that why people who make build websites for a living (like myself) code XHTML?
Just because ASP.NET serves any non-MSIE 5+ browser HTML 3.2 by default doesn't mean that it's the right choice.
And just as much invalid XHTML that you see on the internet, I bet there are more than 10 times the amount of invalid HTML. Easily.
I agree with you on CSS ;-)
XSLT and XSL-FO (Score:3, Interesting)
XSLT is for tranforming XML data between different XML formats or sometimes from XML to non-XML formats. It doesn't have much to do with "structuring layout". (I routinely use XSLT to transform Simplified Docbook into HTML, LaTeX and XSL-FO)
XSL-FO, on the other hand, is an XML application for describing (loosely) typesetting parameters. It's actually almost parallel with CSS in purpose, but CSS is more rich in functions relating to on-screen interactive content, like support for links and behaviors. XSL-FO could be used, for example, as an internal data structure resulting from applying CSS to some XHTML, although of course in practice browsers just use their own stuff. The relationship between XSLT and XSL-FO is that originally they were one lump (called "XSL") which was used to translate XML documents into FO documents for rendering, but W3C noticed that XSLT has more uses outside of that and split it into two separate specs.
Incidentally, passivetex is an XSL-FO interpreter for TeX. If you're happy specifying typesetting parameters at the lowest level it can be quite useful, but I prefer to just go straight to LaTeX since I trust it to "do the right thing" with regard to page layout and presentation most of the time.