RSS - Posts
Last night the Mozilla devs froze the code for the next major test version of Firefox 3 (Fx3), and I thought I’d give you all a progress report based on the latest nightly build.
One big piece of news is that they decided that not only did they freeze the code last night in preparation for creating Firefox 3.0 Beta 3, there will probably be at least one additional beta version before they start releasing Release Candidates. This probably means that we won’t see Firefox 3 getting released until at least late May to early June, but the devs have long said that Firefox 3 will be released “when it’s ready.” I’ve been using nightly builds of Firefox 3 for a few weeks now (since I discovered the Zoomer extension to bring back the old default zoom behavior). I’m currently using the 30 January 2008 nightly build (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b3pre) Gecko/2008013004 Minefield/3.0b3pre ID:2008013004) and the observations I’m about to make are based on that build. Things will definitely change between now and when Firefox3 gets uncaged, but I wanted to let you guys know how things are coming along.
Toolbar Icons
A couple major changes were made to the default toolbar in today’s nightly build.The first is that they moved the Home icon to the Bookmark Tools toolbar. It’s easy enough to fix, you just have to open the toolbar Customization window and drag it to the right place. I did have some problems with the Linux version of the build and couldn’t move the Home icon from the Bookmark Tools toolbar, but I created a new profile and was able to move it easily. I was able to identify the problem a being due to a misbehaving extension, but I’m not completely sure which extension was the culprit. I had forgotten to generate a new list of extensions I had installed in my old Firefox 3 profile, but I can tell you that right now I have these extensions disabled.
- Adblock Filterset.G Updater 0.3.1.3
- Fission 0.9.2
- Mouse Gestures Redox 1.9.20080122
They also made a major change in the Back and Forward buttons. They have replaced the Back and Forward buttons with a unified “keyhole.” The new look reminds me of the IE7 buttons and there has been a nice call for the devs to let Firefox keep looking like Firefox. Even someone I felt has been a bit of a fanboy for Fx3 has said needs to keep it’s own visual identity.
This is what the buttons currently look like on Windows, although I have no idea if the user who made the screenshot uses XP or Vita.
As you can see, there’s on other thing changed with the keyhole. The dropdown buttons for Back and Forward (to get to pages you’ve visited in either direction) have been merged into a single History button. You can also right click on either the Back or Forward sections of the keyhole to get to the History list. But there’s a problem here for some of us. If you reuse your tabs much and want to go back a few pages, if you want to go straight back to the “last” page visited (what would be the last page available with the Forward button) you’d better be able to identify the page name in the History dropdown. Let’s say you’ve been Stumbling and need to go back a few pages to check something and now want to go back to the latest page you were viewing. If you don’t remember the name of that page you’re out of luck. What if you’re on a site that doesn’t name it’s pages clearly? The same thing happens. You now have to keep clicking that Forward button. Hopefully someone will be able to come up with an extension to give us back the old behavior.
What does the new keyhole look like in Linux? Luckily they’ve given us native buttons (at least native for Gnome users) so either the keyhole hasn’t landed (been added to the build) yet or we get to avoid that bullet. This is what my Firefox 3 for Linux looks like, after I got my toolbar reset to how I work.
We still get the unified back/forward button, as well as the single History button. You will notice that I moved my address bar to the same line with the menu, and that’s simply how I like to use Firefox. My icons are the keyhole, Reload, Stop, Home, then my personally specified buttons for New Tab, New Window, Bookmarks, History, StumbleUpon, and the three Zoomer icons (Zoom In, Zoom Out and Reset Zoom). Filling out the rest of the Navigation Toolbar are the Search tool, a great little LCD clock extension I found, Gmail Notifier (and yes, I have an email waiting for me in one of my accounts), and Adblock Plus. (I am running development version of some of the extensions because they are not released for Firefox 3.0b3 yet.) The Search box is usually a bit bigger, because I normally use the small icon setting but I wanted to get a screenshot of the full size icons for you all.
The four tabs you see are actually my combined home page: the Minefield Start Page, my personal start page (a custom web page I put together with links to sites I use frequently), Gmail (with two messages waiting, showing that the Gmail Notifier needs to check for mail again), and an admin page for Nanci’s blog so I can check for new comments, write a new post, etc.
While I’m running most of the Mac4Lin Transformation Pack I’m unable to use the VFoxFINDER2 Firefox Skin by vsdigital or the Stop or Reload Button extension since they’re not compatible with Firefox 3 yet. Hopefully they will be updates to work with Firefox 3 before the summer is over.
The State of Text Zoom
The suggested options for the View menu haven’t quite made it into the nightly builds yet, although a few days ago it was listed as a partial check-in/work in progress/incoming fix a few days ago but isn’t on that listing on the nightly build thread for some reason. The good news is that with Zoomer it’s not such a big deal. But I’m still waiting to see how the View menu options work.
The Add-ons Window Gets a Major Upgrade
There’s a new tab in the Add-ons window and it says “Get Add-ons”. Rather than trying to explain how it works (I hadn’t even checked it out yet) I’ll instead give you a link to the article on MozDev about it. Some of us are concerned with what this new tab adds to Firefox and what impact it will have on performance. Personally I think they could have saved the code with better education (kind of like the change to page zooming rather than text zooming) but I’ll withhold any opinion until I can try it for myself and do a comparison between the new tab and simply checking Mozilla Add-ons (AMO), either through the link provided with Firefox or with the built-in search feature (after adding the engine to the tool).
Granted, Fx3 this is a work in progress so anything I’ve said could change between now and when it gets released. Does this mean that my earlier vitriol against Firefox is getting reversed? Maybe. The text zoom issue is getting bettered with Zoomer, and a lot of us hate the new keyhole button (even Windows users, many of whom have actually used IE7 and went back to Firefox). Many of the crashes and slowdowns have been fixed, so only time can tell what I’ll say when Fx3 is finally released. I have a feeling it could depend on available extensions. And I’m not just referring to extensions like Paste and Go 2, which is a must have extension for me but needs to e updated for Fx3, I want to see which old features from Fx2 get extensions to replace their getting taken out of Fx3. As of right now I’m giving Firefox 3 a provisional Maybe.
You’ll notice I haven’t given any links to where to get Firefox 3 beta or nightly builds. This is because you really need to have a damned good idea of what you’re doing with nightly builds, and you need to be able to commit yourself to spending time searching bugs with every update that comes down the pike. Basically, if you are interested in helping test nightly and beta builds of Firefox 3 you either know where to get them or you know how to find out where they are. If I’m wrong about this let me know in the comments. I can always post links as a comment if I get the demand for them.
