Mozilla Firefox 3 Features Screencast

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."

Great!

I've got like 4,200 bookmarks...I tried organizing them a few times...that was a lesson in futility.

Re:Great!

> 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:Great!

Can a secretary show you naked women?

If you are asking this question, you got the wrong kind of secretary.

Re:Great!

Can a secretary block pop ups for you?

Maybe if she stands in front of your screen?

Re:Great!

Can a secretary block pop ups for you?

Maybe if she stands in front of your screen?

No, that just caused another pop up...

Re:Great!

Can a secretary show you naked women?

Can a tree show you wood?

Re:Great!

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?

Dagnabbit, I can't find the conversion chart for that one anywhere, and I really want to know what I weigh in minutes.

Excellent!

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!

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

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!

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).

Re:Good job FireFox Devs!

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

This sneak peak at Firefox wasted an hour of my life, watching treadmill kittens on You Tube!

Wow, actually creates interest

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

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).

2%? really?

I am a seasoned Linux maven, and Flash playback works perfectly for me.

Just saying.

Re:Grr sidebar history

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:Grr sidebar history

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

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

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

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:Grr sidebar history

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:Grr sidebar history

The mods need to get a clue.

I believe it's a well-known fact that the current mod system allows users to only have mod points or a clue. ;-)

Re:One of the most interesting new features

that would be quite unrealistic - it's like saying that with a flying reindeer powered sleigh you can not only solve the travelling salesman problem in no time, but also visit every household in a single night

Quantum Santa?