Firefox 3.2 Plans Include Natural Language, Themes 285
Shrike82 writes "Mozilla have described plans for the next version of their popular web browser, Firefox. Mozilla's "Ubiquity project" is set to become a standard feature, allowing "users to type natural language phrases into the browser to perform certain tasks, such as typing 'map 10 Downing Street' to instantly see a Google map of that address, or 'share-on-delicious' to bookmark the site you're currently visiting on the social news site."
Also of interest is so-called "lightweight theming" allowing users to customise the browsers design more easily. The launch date is still somewhat unclear, and Mozilla are apparently unsure if version 3.2 will be released at all, apparently considering going straight to Firefox 4."
Re:More bloat... (Score:1, Informative)
It's time to make firefox fork.
so those that care about speed, can avoid the bloat
Re:More bloat... (Score:5, Informative)
Weird you should say that. Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 is the fastest Firefox browser yet. The Places feature saves me tons of time by not having to manually go through hundreds of bookmarks. I have far fewer memory leaks then past versions. I can customize Firefox to be as simple or as complex as I wish.
While Mozilla maybe adding features, it sure isn't looking like bloat to me.
IE7 is a steaming pile of crap, but it is better then IE6's steaming pile of crap and vomit.
Re:NOOOOOOOOOO! (Score:5, Informative)
RTFA - Ubiquity is an extension ! But it needs a few changes under the hood, that's all. The main difference is that it will accept commands typed in the location bar, and you don't have to type ctrl-space first (which is what the extension was all about). The actual commands will have to be downloaded/installed from the net.
Besides, it's nothing really special, you can call it a "command line interface for the browser". It has nothing to do with natural language.
Re:More bloat... (Score:0, Informative)
Re:Map 10 Downing Street (Score:2, Informative)
Bookmark keywords uses only one parameter %s, ubiquity is much more flexible.
For example, "tra[nslate] something to french"
Besides, you don't have to open a new tab for a result, just type "we[ather] madrid" and you get info in a small elegant console, it's faster.
You can change text with it. E.g., you're writing an email, and you want to change a URL to tinyurl. Select the URL, ctrl+space, type [tiny]url, enter. Voila, it's changed. I find it very useful.
And it looks cool with different skins.
Re:Are you kidding me? (Score:1, Informative)
And IE7 is pile of crap how exactly?.
Not cross platform. (no, old versions that were available for solaris or hp-ux do not count)
More holes than swiss cheese.
Dependent on one team of corporate developers.
Still implement ActiveX a FAILED technology. (Please, for [insert deity]'s sake, let it die.)
Poor implementation of HTML and CSS standards, the only reason SOME web pages look better on IE is coders originally got used to writing bad code to work for it!
Re:Are you kidding me? (Score:3, Informative)
This will fix the toolbar...
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Toolbar\WebBrowser]
"ITBar7Position"=dword:00000001
But it seems to be a losing fight -- from my peeks at Server 2008 and Win7 beta, it looks like MS is keen on making IE7's toolbar behavior (off by default, appears as a minor sub-toolbar when invoked) part of the standard UI.
It's been 7 years! Fix the CPU hogging. (Score:3, Informative)
If you can't visit Bugzilla from Slashdot, put this URL into another tab: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=CPU [mozilla.org]
Re:Three words: Enterprise deployment tools (Score:3, Informative)
I'm tempted to adjust my preferences just to mod you up higher.
Mozilla has poked around with MSI, in the sense that they just have an MSI wrapper over their executable installer, which defeats the point of MSI almost entirely.
It's not that they're barreling down the road towards bloated browser, it's that they are putting no effort into the enterprise level support at all. I was in a similar situation, and wanted to deploy firefox across the company. There is no way to centrally manage preferences, and that's assuming you can manage to get it installed across the company in the first place. Never mind things like upgrading!
eh? (Score:2, Informative)
"such as typing 'map 10 Downing Street' to instantly see a Google map of that address"
Why is this new?
I've been doing this for years. In Firefox. Try it yourself.
* Make a bookmark to this URL: 'http://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s'
* Click the 'More' button
* Add a keyword of 'map'
* Type 'map 10 Downing Street' in the address bar.
* Shout for joy at your upgrade to Firefox 4 months ahead of schedule.
Re:Three words: Enterprise deployment tools (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, please!
How can firefox be taken seriously if you can't push it to 1000 machines in a network and manage all its settings from an administrative console.
Have you stopped to consider how much of IE's "marketshare" is happening on the countless workstations at various companies?