What's new in Firefox 10 (shipping this week)

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/10.0/releasenotes/

by ck2 • 14 years ago

109 74 14 years ago

ck24• 14 years ago

Also, Changes in Firefox 10 for Web Developers

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Firefox_10_for_developers

Now that I've learned to think of their major version numbers instead as minor (ie. this could be 5.10) I have no problem with their "rapid release schedule".

gcp5• 14 years ago

I don't think that makes much sense (nor has the entire version number debate ever made sense). You'll get as much work as was completed in the 6 weeks window. This might be a bunch of smaller changes. This might be some important stuff. It's just less clumped together because each version covers a fixed, smaller time period.

A good comparison is Ubuntu. Is Ubuntu 12.04 a bigger increase than Ubuntu 11.10 was to 11.04? The major version number is bigger, after all.

bad_user• 14 years ago

     Is Ubuntu 12.04 a bigger increase than 
     Ubuntu 11.10 was to 11.04?

On 11.10 I've had and still have problems with wifi, video, audio in, audio out, webcam and freezes on boot. Also the last time I felt a laptop so sluggish was when I was trying to work with Windows XP on a 486 DX 66Mhz, even though my laptop is a dual-core T4500 @ 2.30GHz with 4 GB of RAM.

So considering how 11.10 completely fucked my laptop and nothing works properly anymore, spending countless of cycles going through every 11.10 bug report ever created and trying fixes in the hope that something works, I sure hope that 12.04 is an "increase", otherwise I swear to God that I'm switching to anything else I can get my hands on. And in the meantime I just have to live with "sudo reboot".

IMHO 11.10 should have been called "Ubuntu Millennium", as that would have made more sense.

dredmorbius2• 14 years ago

Ubuntu version numbers are strictly time-based. 12.04 is the April, 2012 release. 11.10 is the October, 2011 release.

As with FF, the version number gives you no indication of the scope of change between releases. FF releases are planned "at 6-16 week intervals" according to Wikipedia.

I'm not so much a fan of incrementing major with each rev, but it's just a number.

bryanlarsen• 14 years ago

I disagree. I think this is a case where Mozilla did the right thing and Linus got it wrong. Linus should have called the version after 2.6.39 "40" instead of "3.0". If there's no semantic reason for two or more fields, just go with a single field. Humans instinctively realize that the difference between "40" and "41" is probably minor so there's no need to emphasize this through the use of a minor digit. Firefox doesn't have this advantage yet, but will soon.

sp3324• 14 years ago

There is a lot of infrastructure at this point that breaks if the Linux version number is not "x.y.z" and in fact, a lot of scripts had to be fixed in the bump from "2.6.39" to "3.0".

melling• 14 years ago

Why do you even think about version numbers? Just always be on the current release. The numbers keep getting bigger so the average user stops and considers how far out of date he is. The average tech person should be happy with version # 3.1415926535.

ilaksh• 14 years ago

So the average user considers how far out of date he is? Oh! I thought it was just a marketing thing. If this is making users upgrade then that's totally different and I am all for it.

Google Chrome originated in December 2008 and is now at version 16. At the current rate, Google Chrome version 37 will be released in 2016, and Google Chrome version 58 will be released around 2020.

moomin• 14 years ago

I believe the average TeX person is.

sp3324• 14 years ago

The forward button is now hidden until you navigate back.

I've been using the "Aurora" channel, so I've had this feature for a while. It does take some getting used to, since the whole address bar now jumps around when you push the Back button, and then jumps back when you click Forward enough times. On the plus side, the address bar usually has more room now.

kijin7• 14 years ago

Hmm, that sounds annoying. Couldn't they find a more elegant solution than having toolbar elements jump around all the time? I'm not sure if ~30px of extra horizontal space is worth all the jumping around.

gkoberger• 14 years ago

It's pretty smooth, so it's not a huge deal.

Edit: Plus, it only shows up when you change pages, and everything (favicon, SSL, site info, etc) is going to jump around anyway.

gcp5• 14 years ago

Huh, I don't see that here on Aurora. It's just greyed out and the layout stays static.

sp3324• 14 years ago

Here's an example: http://seanpalmer.smugmug.com/photos/i-bpVFjBV/0/O/i-bpVFjBV...

When I click a link, it shows the URL without a Forward button. If I click the Back button, the Forward button appears and pushes everything over. When I click Forward, the Forward button is grayed out, but as soon as I move my cursor away, it disappears and again looks like the first.

zanny• 14 years ago

My observation is that using the small buttons disables this feature. And I use the small buttons anyway (I'm on nightly).

dreamdu5t• 14 years ago

The forward button is now hidden until you navigate back.

The cost of inconsistency and confusion is not worth the 40px of extra address bar space.

starwed4• 14 years ago

I've been using the Firefox nightly channel for a while, and I had never even noticed this change til it was pointed out to me.

I think you're overestimating the opportunity for confusion, here... :)

-edit- I'm using OS X, perhaps the change is somehow more obvious on other systems?

skeletonjelly• 14 years ago

> the opportunity for confusion

I like this phrase. It makes me aware of bad practices. Studying anti-design patterns.

Zirro• 14 years ago

On OS X at least, this looks really good and I haven't found it a bother at all. Then again, I'm probably not the average computer user.

As it is only hidden when there is no forward-history, and the user wouldn't be looking for it at that time, I still believe it's a good change.

kijin7• 14 years ago

when there is no forward-history, the user wouldn't be looking for it

The only way I can tell whether or not I have any forward-history is by checking whether or not the forward button is disabled. If the button is altogether missing, I'm going to wonder for a split second if I did something wrong the last time I tried to customize my toolbar.

Well, I guess I'll get used to it after a few days.

Still, I wonder if there's some usability testing data comparing the lack of a button with a disabled button. A disabled button conveys different information from the lack of a button. Every web browser is trying to be minimalistic these days, but there's got to be a point where any further minimalization hurts usability rather than helping it.

Silhouette• 14 years ago

Yes. This constant urge to remove any browser chrome possible is getting more and more irritating. It's basically a textbook UI anti-pattern that some fool thinks is a good idea and some other fools are copying.

I have a nice, large monitor that runs at a nice, high resolution. In fact, I have several. Not even my laptops are short of screen space these days. Some of this is high-end kit, but entry-level monitors are widescreen and run at decent resolutions these days too.

Space for an extra icon in a consistent position is nothing in this context. However, the irritation from having UI elements or page content move around under-cursor is significant, and the irritation from having to click multiple times or click-and-hold to access functions that used to be one-click is also great, particularly if you first have to guess which of the entirely meaningless icon thingies might hide the secret menu with the item you're looking for, or remember which browser you're using so you know whether the icon you want is on the left or the right of the other unlabelled random icon thingies and whichever text box bar thingies we're drawing this week.

I'm all for innovation, but we have platform UI standards for a reason. Breaking them because you think your software is more important than everyone else's isn't clever. Being the company that also makes the OS and wrote the platform UI standards is no excuse, either.

kijin7• 14 years ago

I think we have two groups of people to blame for this phenomenon:

(A) "Novices" who get confused when presented with more than a handful of buttons, because they never bother to figure out what those buttons do. BTW, what's a browser? You mean Google? No, I use Bing.

(B) "Experts" who don't care whether or not there are buttons in the UI, because they know where everything is hidden, and they use keyboard shortcuts anyway. Meanwhile, everything Apple does must be the One True Way.

When Group B makes software for Group A, you get the results you're describing. Caught in the middle are a large number of moderately proficient users who rely on explicit visual cues (buttons, arrows, menus) to perform tasks.

hobin• 14 years ago

<.<

>.>

People actually use those buttons?

smosher• 14 years ago

This is an odd thing to complain about. Sure it's a UI faux pas, but it's nothing compared the the creative placement of cancel buttons that's been introduced in 4+. It took me a full day to figure out why 90% of the files I downloaded were nowhere to be found.

ck24• 14 years ago

I fixed it with this

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-3-the...

and this

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/backforward-d...

And now I am happily back in Firefox 3 / 4 days. Looks perfect.

kijin7• 14 years ago

In recent versions of Firefox, the back-forward dropdown menu can be activated with a right click over the back-forward buttons. No need for an add-on for that.

w1ntermute• 14 years ago

I think it's wonderful. I'd been doing this since the days of Firefox 2.x, using a custom userChrome.css file that hid the back and forward buttons, and combined the stop and reload buttons. But ever since I discovered Vimperator (I've now moved on to Pentadactyl), I've hidden all the chrome buttons, since they're entirely unnecessary.

tabaflaba• 14 years ago

What's the difference between Pentadactyl and Vimperator?

dave5104• 14 years ago

For what it's worth, Nielsen just released an alertbox today about "chrome" and the user experience.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ui-chrome.html

The general gist is that /too much/ chrome is bad, and a good way to fix it could be to temporarily hide parts of the chrome, as long as it's consistent in how to find it again and that there is a simple and reliable way to re-enable it.

It seems that Mozilla nailed the consistency (in this case, the forward button will always come back when the user goes back), but I'm wary of the "simple and reliable" method of re-enabling it. From what I understand, you technically can't make the forward button show up until you go back, correct? You can't always reliably go "back", especially if you're on the first page when opening a new tab. I'd say that Firefox is violating design guidelines (or whatever you'd want to call the research just put out by Nielsen today).

serge2k• 14 years ago

yeah, but they seem to love that type of thing.

Lets hide the http:// prefix... but we have to show it on https connections so really we have accomplished nothing.

fl3tch• 14 years ago

> Full Screen APIs allow you to build a web application that runs full screen

Finally YouTube HTML5 videos can play full screen and not just full browser window.

acqq• 14 years ago

Am I the only one old enough to believe to remember that IE had this functionality (I refer to the "full screen on click on something in the page" functionality) at least more than 10 years ago and it sucked big time, as poor users would just click somewhere and then they would end on some malicious page which would "replace" their menus, taksbars etc with some nefarious code?

Why should it be different this time?

kzrdude• 14 years ago

Because mozilla has given it some thought https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gecko:FullScreenAPI

jon6• 14 years ago

Some users may experience a crash when moving bookmarks (681795).

Seems pretty strange to proclaim a crash as something to be proud of in the 'whats new' list.

Probably they mean this bug went away (thus the fixed tag) but then the text should say 'Moving bookmarks no longer crashes'.

starwed4• 14 years ago

Weirdly, there's actually a bug filed for that: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=701653

ck24• 14 years ago

FF 10 Release Candidate is here:

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/10.0-...

Been using it 24+ hours now with zero problems (including a ton of extensions and custom theme).

Or just wait for the release late tomorrow or Wednesday I guess.

ruethewhirled• 14 years ago

The release notes format is quite "pretty" but very simplified and I can't seem to find a more detailed version?

ck24• 14 years ago

some of it

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/Features/Firefox10Bugs

jbrackett• 14 years ago

In the past they have provided a full list of bugs fixed. My guess is that they will tomorrow when it's released.

This should be pretty close though: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?op_sys=All&quer...

pjscott• 14 years ago

Some day, the new <bdi> tag is going to save me a huge headache. Hear this prophecy, and know it to be true: weird hairy Unicode problems always happen, though usually not immediately.

gcp5• 14 years ago

I understood that this is also the release that makes all add-ons compatible by default.

jlongster• 14 years ago

It does. I think the release notes are slightly out-of-date and are currently being regenerated. Check back tomorrow!

nchuhoai• 14 years ago

Excited for the CSS Transforms!

ams6110• 14 years ago

Unresolved: This version of Firefox will not work on Macintosh hardware with Power PC CPUs

Seems the folks building TenFourFox are pulling it off...

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2012/01/100-rc-finally-availa...

unicornporn• 14 years ago

But with TenFourFox you can't have flash.

Erunno2• 14 years ago

Or JavaScript JIT compilation.

bzbarsky2• 14 years ago

Yes, by disabling various features until the remainder works.

Mozilla just feels that shipping an effectively crippled Firefox on a particular platform is not a good idea; for one thing web developers would scream bloody murder because of their browser-sniffing habits...

westiseast2• 14 years ago

not related to this release per se, but could anyone give a 'helicopter view' of why Mozilla seems to be releasing new versions so quickly?

It seems like a year ago and I was on v3.6, and now it's version 10. I'm kind of getting upgrade fatigue and often struggle to see any major differences, except occasional performance changes (for better and worse). Just hoping somebody has an insight into the strategy and why the numbers are churning so quickly.

westiseast2• 14 years ago

sorry, replying to myself - I didn't realise that this had a name (Rapid Release Schedule) and that there's already plenty of googlable information. Ignore...

Piskvorrr• 14 years ago

So, essentially...nothing? Major version, my shiny metal butt.

What's new in Firefox 10 (shipping this week)

Related Stories