Firefox 3.1 brings new features and forces yet another Remove-on
Posted by Peng on 20 November 2008
No sooner had the Mozilla devs released Firefox 3 that they had already begun work on Firefox 3.1. I’m not helping test it this time, but I’m hearing that they’ve redone the JavaScript engine and they’re adding a nice tab preview feature that reminds me of the Shift Switcher in Compiz-Fusion, but I’m also hearing that they’re changing yet another default behavior: They’re pulling the New Tab button off the toolbar and putting it to the right of the tab bar itself. It turns out part of the problem was that some people didn’t know tabbed browsing was available, possibly due in part to the fact that the default behavior was to hide the tab bar unless more than one tab was open.
Before anyone tells me how nice that feature is, especially in other browsers, let me point out the fact that this is yet another feature that’s currently available in an extension. As was the case when they rolled out the Smart Location Bar this change has prompted quite a bit of discussion, and the moderators of the MozillaZine Forums have had to work pretty hard to keep the topic constructive.
Luckily our friend Cat Thief has once again come to the rescue with her New Tab Button remove-on. The Mozilla support crew is already telling people about it, despite the fact that Cat Thief flat out refuses to have her extensions on AMO.
This begs a question: If an existing feature is available via an extension, why the hell do the Firefox devs have to add them to the base package? I know they get a lot of requests to do this type of thing, but Firefox has always been a quick little browser that can be customized with the use of extensions. Now they’re adding so many extensions to the default browser that it may not be all that small anymore. I also know that this particular feature is a popular feature of IE7, but I’ve said this before and I’ll say this again: Firefox is not IE, Opera, or Safari. Firefox is Firefox, and people love it because it’s different from the other browsers. If we wanted to use IE or Opera we’d use them, but we don’t (and yes, I can run IE on Linux, but why would I want to?). We use Firefox, although some of us are less happy than we used to be.
If someone wants to put out a web browser that has the speed of Firefox 3 but with the default behaviors of Firefox 2, I’d love to help test it. I bet there are some others who would kill to be part of the testing team for it, if not helping code it. Otherwise we need easier ability to add extensions like Firefox has in Epiphany or Opera. I’d use Epiphany myself except I can’t see how to add some third-party add-ons or change behaviors like being able to select new tabs as they’re opened.
Please, will somebody come to the rescue of all of us users who hate what has happened to our beloved red panda?
Nukeador said
In this case, adding this button is an usability improvement. Normal users don’t know about [Ctrl]+[Tab] or they were just using File menu, which is 2 clicks away in the right direction instead of a single click on a icon in the tab bar.
This change, from my point of view, was very necessary. And other changes included in Firefox try to improve the usability not to bloat the browser.
Peng said
Actually my complaint wasn’t about adding the button, which I agree is a big plus for usability, but the fact that once again we have to get a remove-on to get the new tab button on the toolbar, where so many of us are used to finding it. The now frequent need of finding remove-ons to regain features and usability that has long been a part if Firefox is why I wish I had another alternative for my browsing needs.
bielawski said
The new location bar introduced in 3.0 is mostly (apart from the two-line list items) reversible in 3.1 without an add-on, so maybe 3.2 will have a customizable new tab button that combines 3.0 and 3.1 behaviour.