What Do You Want On Future Browsers? 628
Coach Wei writes "An industry wishlist for future browsers has been collected and developed by OpenAjax Alliance. Using wiki as an open collaboration tool, the feature list now lists 37 separate feature requests, covering a wide range of technology areas, such as security, Comet, multimedia, CSS, interactivity, and performance. The goal is to inform the browser vendors about what the Ajax developer community feels are most important for the next round of browsers (i.e., FF4, IE9, Safari4, and Opera10) and to provide supplemental details relative to the feature requests. Currently, the top three voted features are:
2D Drawing/Vector Graphics, The Two HTTP Connection Limit Issue, and HTML DOM Operation Performance In General . OpenAjax Alliance is calling for everyone to vote for his/her favorite features. The alliance also strongly encourages people to comment on the wiki pages for each of the existing features and to add any important new features that are not yet on the list."
On a related note, an anonymous reader writes "The Tao of Mac has put up pretty interesting list of five things that are still wrong with browsers these days, and I have to wonder — with things like AIR starting to be accepted by developers, do we still need the browser at all?"
Re:Not just support for SVG, but mixed SVG/XHTML (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox 3 does support mixed SVG and XHTML. I think the other non-IE browsers do as well.
Re:A less "Awesome" URLBar Would be Nice! (Score:3, Informative)
Bullshit, if they did that, then you'd come back and bitch that it doesn't search thoroughly enough.
Opera's searches both, if the URL, or the Title contain the query, it displays the URL and associated Title, or vice-versa, with the query in bold.
Firefox does the same, just displays it a bit differently, and IE doesn't seem to do it at all, just the normal auto-complete type thing.
So, i'll presume, and simply say "stop using IE"
Re:stability? (Score:5, Informative)
Agree with sibling post. The only time any FF install I've got crashes it's the Linux one, whenever I try to kill a flash video before the system is done processing it.
Otherwise it never blips, and I'm a hardcore tab whore: if I can hit CTRL-T I will.
Re:mathml support and full unicode (Score:5, Informative)
>What is an ``h&j algorithm''?
hyphenation and justification --- instead of just setting one line at a time, the system should consider the entire paragraph and set it so that all lines are as nice as possible w/ the best possible breaks.
See the Knuth and Plass paper on it:
http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/SFCS.1979.46 [ieeecomputersociety.org]
Or look at Knuth's book _Digital Typography_
William
Re:stability? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Upload progress bar (Score:4, Informative)
I know that you probably realize this, but the reason for the lack of upload progress is because it's a limitation of the HTTP protocol itself. In order to upload you have to send the data in one big POST request and there's no way, via HTTP, to poll the results on the server.
That's why, currently, upload progress bars are implemented in HTML/javascript/server-side scripting. It requires a server side script to dump the current file size on the server and some javascript to poll the server-side script. In order to get upload progress bars standard in all browsers there would be have to be a standard way, via HTTP, to poll the status of the upload on the server.
So don't blame the browsers solely. To get this feature implemented would require modifications to the servers too. So the best way to get this feature implemented in all browsers (in a widely-accepted, standard fashion) is to call for an addition to the HTTP protocol.
Re:stability? (Score:2, Informative)
FF 3.0 crashes a lot more than FF 2.0 ever did for me.
It's not every 15 minutes, but it's at least once a day.
Re:Customizable on/off switches in status area (Score:3, Informative)
Re:stability? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm running FF3 on a company desktop without admin rights. It installed just fine. If your system's locked down tighter than mine, try the Portable Edition [portableapps.com]. I haven't tried, but I suspect that it would also run just fine from anyplace you have write access to.
Re:I want what most users want. (Score:4, Informative)
nspluginwrapper (Score:4, Informative)
does that, and also allows me to run Flash 32 bits in a 64 bits Firefox.
Re:stability? (Score:4, Informative)
I absolutely bet it's your flash-plugin. FF3 dies very often for me, when i walk the history with some flash-sites in between. It dies so hard, that the session becemes useless. on windows and linux.
I recommend trying it with flash disabled (=not loadable my the browser!), and when this helps you know the source.
Re:There are so many things I want (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Am I the only one who doesn't mind that much? (Score:3, Informative)
Just raised mine to 6 (supposedly the new preset value in IE8) ... restarted browser, and the difference is amazing!
It's not that my connection is any faster, but rather there's less latency when viewing sites / opening new windows/tabs.
Instructions for increasing it in IE...
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/282402 [microsoft.com]
Set the values to 6 if unsure - going even higher may speed things up more, but may be poor netiquette...
Welcome thoughts on what the ideal value is? -and does an excessively high value say like 20 truly cause problems for servers? ... or are most servers configured to limit concurrent connections per client already?
Ron
Re:stability? (Score:2, Informative)
Surfing the web with it.
Seriously, I've been using Firefox since before they called it that, and 3.0 is one of the most unstable versions I've ever come across. Of any browser, and I've used a lot of them.
For some reason, when using Google Reader, it randomly pops up an empty pop up window (even though I've told it not to open ANY pop ups), and if I close that window, Firefox simply vanishes. This is on a recent clean install of Ubuntu 8.04, so it's not Windows malware -- it's a fault in Firefox.
I also have a list of complaints as long as my arm about other issues with 3.0. Including the weird way it handles right clicks (sometimes, instead of getting a menu, I automatically get asked to name the bookmark, or an e-mail window pops up, or it automatically opens the link in a new window). I don't know if there's some "Gestures" bullshit I'm missing and can turn off, or if this version is just ass-tastic, but I'm better on the latter.
I am seriously considering downgrading to 2.0. (Actually, with the stability issues... might be an upgrade.)
Re:Not just support for SVG, but mixed SVG/XHTML (Score:3, Informative)
The problem is that IE is never, ever going to support xhtml. They don't support it now. They don't have plans to support it. Their stated policy is to provide support for it via browser plugins, and even if the user does have a plugin, you can't write a w3c-standard xhtml file that will work. All of this applies to both svg and mathml.
For instance, here's a nearly minimal example of a w3c-standard xhtml file with a little inline mathml:
This works fine in ff3. (The user doesn't even have to download fonts anymore. If you install ubuntu hardy heron, fire up firefox, and let it look at this page, it will Just Work.) However, if you serve this page up to any version of IE, it will display a file download dialog, which warns that "some files can harm your computer..." It won't render the page.
There is currently no way to write a standards-conformant, static web page with inline mathml so that (1) it renders correctly in firefox, (2) it renders correctly in IE with the MathPlayer plugin, and (3) it doesn't just give a scary dialog box to the ~85% of all users who have IE without the MathPlayer plugin.
Xhtml is basically dead in the water. However, the w3c html 5 standard is going to allow inline mathml and svg as special cases. That is, html 5 won't be xml, and it won't be able to embed other arbitrary types of xml, but it will have all the mathml and svg tags defined in its grammar. Now the real question is whether MS will support those parts of html 5 in IE 10 or whatever. My guess is that they won't, because mathml has no economic value to them, and svg solves a problem that MS wants to solve with Silverlight. However, it's possible that they will end up providing some more graceful degradation of the content, in which case users might start seeing messages like, "Sorry, this page doesn't display in Internet Explorer 10, because Internet Explorer 10 doesn't support SVG. Please use an SVG-enabled browser, such as Firefox, Safari, Opera, Konqueror, or Galeon."
Re:stability? (Score:4, Informative)
FF 2.0 would crash for me about once a week, tops.
I've upgraded to FF3 the day it was released, and I'm yet to see it crash.
Running on Linux (CentOS 5).
I usually have at least 2 windows (about 15 tabs) open all the time. Lots of extensions and such.
Maybe there is something wrong with your Linux install/distro ?
Re:stability? (Score:3, Informative)
That's being easy on FF.
With Linky [mozilla.org], you can select a range of links and open them all at once in tabs.
Open 100 tabs? No problem. I have yet to see a crash doing that. Linky works well in FF 3.0 with compatibility checking off; it hasn't been updated to a 3.0 compatible version alas.
Re:stability? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Ability to individually kill divisions and fram (Score:3, Informative)
I believe the add-on you want is Nuke Anything Enhanced. It provides a "Remove This Object" entry in the right-click menu.
To get rid of Java / Flash you can select across the object and use "Remove Selection".
Get it at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/951 [mozilla.org]
Re:mathml support and full unicode (Score:1, Informative)
A very simple solu-
tion to the H&J prob-
lem is reduce it to
to the J problem be-
cause hyphenation
just makes things hard-
er to read.
Re:Become the Operating System (Score:1, Informative)
are you insane or do you just lack a complete understanding of the complexities of creating an OS? This is such an incredibly bad idea from just about every standpoint.