Category Archives: firefox

Firefox 3 is released

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Mozilla has released the final version of the most anticipated and celebrated browser : Firefox 3. This is the second “true” release from Mozilla, as the Firefox 2 was actually a kind of small update to Firefox 1, and at the time of the development Firefox 2 number was set on 1.5, but then basically to compete with the Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7, they decided to increase the version number.

This time there was no need in doing it, Firefox 3 is a brand new release with quite a number of new features and functionalities. Codenamed “Gran Paradiso” it has been under development for more then 1.5 years, and it uses the newest version of layout engine – Gecko 1.9, which has quite a number of difference in comparisson with a Firefox 2, which was Gecko 1.8.1 based. The most important features of the Firefox 3 are: Gecko 1.9 (it passes the ACID 2 test, opposite to the Firefox 2, which fails; it implements some of the HTML 5 upcomming features), APNG (animated PNG: besides Firefox, Opear 9.5 is also supporting it), completely reworked url address bar (which will truly search visited urls as you type the address to show you a list with urls to select), verified pages (the icon before the url bar, which allowes to consult the certificate, reworked bookmarks system : one-click addition bookmarks (a golden star, which allow you to add a page to your favourites with just one click on it) and tags for the bookmarks (the social part is getting even inside your browser), completely reworked add-ons system (a number of plugins even stopped working with the new version, but i believe that in a couple of weeks those problems should be addressed by the developers of the respective plugins).

Also there are some serious improvements in memory-management area, at least the first impression, is that Firefox 3 consumes much less memory then it predecessor. It appears to be more stable, especially when opening multiple google pages (gmail, analytics and docs for example), which is quite important since the Firefox 2 required a lot of attention while working with multiple tabs with google pages open.

A number of pages appears to have some serious bugs — the layout engine is quite different to the elder one of Firefox 2, and i currently see a lot of pages which rendering wrong, one of the most famous examples is Google Analytics, where the second date of the range “falls” down below the start date and breaks the interface. I have noticed, that various pages reendering in a very similar way as a Opera 9.x and opposite to Opera 9.5, i have one of such examples in a current project which should go online next month.

Another favourite feature of mine is a closing page controller, which will allow you to save and restore current tabs when closing Firefox. A part of this feature on Firefox 2 has already working when shutting the computer down, but without a message box to confirm if you want to save it. It is very usefull, when you wish to close Firefox while starting some memory-consuming applications as a graphical editors for instance. Opera 9.5 recently released has this feature as weel.

Firefox 3 has finally abandoned support for Windows 95 (yeah, a product which is 13 years old), Windows 98, Windows ME and Windows NT 4, and if you are still using one of those systems (insane thing because of the security problems and the fact that all of them are more then 2 years are not supported), then Firefox 2 is your best friend. You won’t miss anything groundbreaking on the web in the next couple of years, so if you stick with the elder “brother” you will still be quite safe. As for the Mac OS X version – the OS X 10.4 is required and its a typical situation for macintosh software – i don’t really thing that any real Mac user will be affected by this fact. The reason of using the OS X 10.4 was implementing Firefox natively, so it will have a native Cocoa widget interface, and such things as transparency when overlapping with Flash elements on the page, for example (it has bugged me for quite some time). It is also much faster as a native application, there is no doubt about it.

After 1.5 years of the development, 4 beta versions and 3 release candidates the final version has finally arrived. Take a look at it, and while some graphic bugs and incompatibilities are unavoidable, this is not a future browser – this is a browser of the moment.

Firefox 2 Session Restore

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I have to say that i am very positively surprised by the new firefox – i just cant get enough out of the Session Restore feature, as well as from the dictionary feature. Having had some crashes over the last days, i am not worrying anymore about finding those sites i was browsing at that moment, as well as when i go home, i dont need to bookmark everything in a temporary folder, i just switch my computer off, and when i get back early in the morning, i will simply continue at the places where i have stopped yesterday.

There are a lot of voices around, blaming mozilla for a poor release, let me not agree with them. I think that at least those 2 features (Session Restore and Dictionary) are already deserving enough publicity. What on earth of groundbreaking and new have Internet Explorer 7 brought to the users ? Which feature that we have not seen in other browsers, which standards are supported, that are not in the most other browsers on the market, yet everyone is so pleased with it, just because microsoft finally started fixing the bugs. Yet Mozilla releases a browsers with several new useful features and it is blamed to be nothing more then publicity.

Then we have voices around saying something like “how could a modern browser not pass an ACID2 test?”, forgetting that only a few browsers on the market already are (Opera, Safari among others). We have to wait just something like 9-10 months for a new release which as was promised will pass the test. Its aint nothing in compare to those 5 years, passed since the last release of Internet Explorer…

Yeah, I am ranting … =O)

Firefox 2.0

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Just in the current “trends” of the web, mozilla, after long testing, has released a new version of firefox. It seems, that everyone is going 2.0 (my work’s application, skype and even “web”), so probably mozilla decided to follow it … just kidding … =OP. Also a week ago, after 5 long years we have finally enjoyed getting a better version of internet explorer 7 (waiting for Safari 3.0 and Opera 9.1 to compare them all). There are pretty exciting times around ! A lot of work and testing – i like it this way =O)

I have to confess that i was pretty skeptical about this new release, cause it seemed to me, that increasing the 0.5 of a number was not really justificated, in the practical terms – boy i was wrong… From the marketing point of view it was a very well planned step – a big number difference, 1 week after IE7 release to help to compare the browsers and to make some news. =O) Well it is already making a lot of news, with 3 or more slashdot postings in just a one or two days… Well done, marketing !

  • Stability and Speed – from the very first moment are the things to notice. Much less memory, better garbage collection, Lightning bolt startup. Amazing !
  • Dictionary – fantastic !!! even while writing this article i was using it. Extremely useful and very well implemented
  • Improved usability – no doubt, good job and well done. I am still analyzing some of the improvements, but with no doubt some things were really necessary. Addons, Options, Tabs all deserving a very good notes
  • Visual Redesign – very nice, good icons, a kind of a “modern silver” look – not really much to write about =O)
  • Anti-fishing – every home user favorite and following the trends of the market( see IE7 Opera and Safari )

From the things i am going to try out tomorrow are:

  • Feeds
  • Javascript 1.7 – having a lot of interest in it – this little =O) is going to be viewed with a lot of care in the following days
  • Session Restore – never tried plugins for elder firefox version, but going to try it out
  • SVG text – sounds good, i am a fan of SVG … Was badly disappointed that IE7 has no support for it
  • Client-side session and persistent storage – sounds exciting

A big bow once again to Mozilla developers, you have made a beautiful job !

Why standards do not work ?

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Why standards do not work ? It is a question that i have been asking myself for quite some time. Its not only the problem of the web, its been a natural problem in all the areas, everywhere around the world. Perhaps, ironically, the humanity is trying to avoid some kind of an artificial control, even the nature in itself does not have standards defining everything with absolute(100%) precision, though a nature has a tendency to define some certain rules – gravitation, growth, life, death and so on.

I think that as long as the “manufactures” of the web-related software (“browsers”,”visual designers”, “readers”, and so on), avoid putting stricter rules to the web, there wont be a lot of standards following. Why ? Because, the most do not care. Sad, by true – have been working in some countries in some different companies, i have seen that the final results, and have heard the thoughts of the web-designers. Timeframes, technical difficulties, . Those who wish, wont get a lot of support from the administrative and marketing departments. Its like, its not easy to answer such questions as “Is is possible to sell ?” or “What will it give us ?”. As long as it is not a question of working or not working, there wont be a lot of thoughts about following the standards.

I think that W3C did a good job of introducing the XML. You have to have a good structure for it to be usable, and so i think, that the move to the xHTML was a very reasonable one. The problem is that almost noone has noticed and followed that move. I think that there are some requirements, that should be fulfilled, before the web standards will become widely accepted:

  1. Some good WYSIWYG visual editores, producing valid code. As of now – there are none on the market, though i have to name the Dreamweaver 8 ( it has surprised me very positively ), and until some editors wont be accessable to the mainstream public, the vast majority of webdesigners, will continue producing (?)HTML(?) code with GoLive, FrontPage and co. It is one of the reasons, why i think that the work of WebStandards group should be much more appreciated.
  2. Bigger browsers market – i think, that this one is pretty much clear. With an absolute dominating power of the crippled IE there are still no big alternatives, though Firefox is rising fast, it has allready awaken the sleeping giant, and the next IE version seems to be not so far (as it was 1 year ago) =O). I would love to see 3-4 browsers prevailing on the market – please, dont get me wrong, i dont wish to return to the Netscape-Microsoft case, but i think that if the market would be devided between IE-Firefox-Opera-Safari, we would have a different kind of progress, and even the marketing departments of those, who produce them, would be more then interested in fulfilling their job, by saying – “we have full standard compliance, and its 15% more then our competitors.”
  3. Web-applications giving advantages to the use of the standards – lets take a look at the browsers, for example. If Opera would give some additional functionaly(for example live content re-editing – curstomization and adoption by user needs) to those pages, which are not reendered in “quirks-mode”, then for any web-designer this would be an interesting and an important thing to not forget.
  4. There must be done some moves in promoting, advertising and convincing the web-community of moving toward the standards. There are a lot of “galleries” sites doing an amazing job, by promoting the use of (x)HTML and CSS, but i think that even more things can be done – for example by promoting competitions between the young designers (schools,universities,..), then a big (especially designer) companies (or big ones like Apple,IBM & Microsoft) could help out, by providing additional publicity and even some prizes. I know it sounds very naive, but “sky is the limit” and as Ghandi said – “You must be the change you wish to see in the world”.

For something to work, to function – there must be conditions and needs. If at least 50% of those requierements would be fulfilled, then i believe that the use of standards would start to be a normal requirement and an overall victory in the battle for the use of the standards would be not so far away.

Google Web Authoring Statistics

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Google Web Authoring Statistics – are: nice, cool, interesting, useful & unusable, advanced (SVG), ignorant (no alternative solutions), fascinating (information).

First of all of course, as usual for Google (insert here a sad smile), – no doctype for those pages was found, at least no valid one. And then, no real alternative for firefox – i am strongly supporting the firefox, but not at the price of destroying everything else by not providing any alternative at all. Its a shame, that such imaginative company as Google, has had no ideas (?) about accessibility while doing such statistics. Safari, i have tried on this page has crashed (with the latest “panther” installed) – not nice, not nice at all, Opera 8.51 shows black squares instead of any useful graphics, Adobe SVG Viewer with IE has not provided any reasonable result, to talk about. And by the way, the only firefox versions to view the graphics are 1.5+, that means that a very big part of the firefox users are also not capable of viewing any result (SVG was included only since the 1.5 release).

They could have provided some alternative – images or text, why ignore more then 80% of the web users ? Very strange move, i have to say, and a pretty weird one. Anyway – from what i have managed to see inside those results – a majority of the pages are still “made with tables”, more then 50% of the <background>’s have “bgcolor” attribute, more then 80% of the scripts are have attribute “language”, and my favourite one – “A scary number of pages use <table gridx=”" gridy=”" showgridx=”" showgridy=”">, not to mention the multitude of <csscriptdict>, <csactiondict>, and <csobj> elements.” (see for yourself )

I hope that one day, the majority of the web developers will start looking at the WCAG, and at the other web standards, but until that day … enjoy the titles like “best viewed with not your browser“.

Browser statistics

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I have seen the statistics from the Xiti and its nice to see that firefox is gaining even more percentage. I think it totally deserves it – by being a more standard-compliant browser, by moving away from the dead end where we have stalled in the past years because of the absence of the concurrence, by being open source, and so on. Dont get me wrong – its far from being perfect, but i think it moves into the right direction. All the things that mozilla guys added in 1.5 realease (excluding for some problems =O)) are nice. I am looking forward to more use of SVG in the future, but of course a lot of the things will depend on the redmond guys (as usual).

I think it is a kind of a natural effect that people are getting tired of some-what buggy browser which has not been updated in several years (oh, of course i am not counting the security updates from the microsoft).I would say that with every month until the IE7 arrives more and more people will move away from IE – and its a good thing. But with the arrival of IE7 the thing will change drastically, cause no doubt microsoft will gain some percentage back, but i am confident that it will be only a question of some time, until people wont start to realize that in order to have all that “newest features” on something other than XP SP 2, they will have to install a reasonable browser – doesnt matter which one – Opera, Firefox, … I know some people who are Opera die hard fans, and though i am keeping the Opera on my computer it is only for the testing and compatibility reasons. There is something about the interface of the Opera which makes me feel less comfortable using it. I hope that maybe in the 10th release they will correct it… A friend of mine from Austria introduced me to the Opera browser in the end of the 90s, but even at that time it had not enough appear to convince me. Anyway – i hope that with much anticipated 9th release they are going to improve their position on the market of the browsers.

p.s.: red panda is my favourite animal =O)