Which is the most useful feature added to Mozilla Firefox 1.5?Total Votes So Far: 21373
Argh, why aren't the poll graphics in SVG? :) :) Yeah, the graphics also demonstrate a really serious weakness in the system that's calculating them... 8% is apparently about 1/3 bigger than 2%, for instance, rather than four times the size. The amount of mathematical rigor required to display results from a simple online poll is not high, but most poll engines get it badly wrong. SVG would have been my choice. It's a fantastic feature and could be really important for the Web. But it's not really 'useful' until IE supports it natively too. So I voted for software update instead, which is extremely slick. --sam The middle part of the 8% is 16 pixels wide and the middle part of the 2% is 4 pixels wide. But then there's 11 pixels on each end for the roundedness. Too much. If they want to stick with the ends being that wide, they need to have it factor those widths into the widths for the middles. The days when IE support was necessary for a feature to be considered useful are long gone. Literally more than half a decade has passed since IE was updated in any meaningful way. Those looking for innovation and new applications for the web have moved along and now look to Moz for innovation and secure, trustworthy computing, not IE. SVG is useful because of what it enables - data driven graphics. Combine this with forms technology for data input and FireFox becomes the thin client that saves developers orders of magnitude in development time. You can already see examples working with SVG in FF 1.5 with demos from the Mozilla XForms project: <http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xforms/> Woohoo!!!!! For me it's the improved software update, hands down. I mean, all the other features are great, seriously. But the new software update is quick and painless. It's really going to make life easier for people like me who try to help keep their friends and family computers up-to-date and secure. Talking my parents through updating Firefox when security updates came out was always a chore. It looks like that is a thing of the past now. Thanks MoFo. Seems like they're having software updates for nightly builds too. Once per day. Wonder if it's going to continue later on. I hope so. How do I vote for all? only one can be "most" useful For me useless features are extensions that don't work, don't update correctly, install duplicates of themselves (eg Linky, Launchy) or are not even supported in latest FF releases because a two-way communication and verification system was not set up before the latest realese. Having been an FF user (and previous incarnations Netscape and Mozilla) since way back, these latest FF "annoyances" are most infuriating (and i can see yet another O'Reilly book - FF Annoyances - coming soon!). Perhaps focusing on what can and should be fixed first pls? Otherwise great browser. /rant Would you rather have an extension crash the browser and/or create a security issue? I wouldn't. Besides, extension authors have had plenty of time to prep their extensions for 1.5, if you're not a fan of community software (and not aware of it's potential shortcommings), too bad. Not a huge deal, really, but I actually liked the options box the way it was before. I thought it looked classier. Just my .02. You are being very polite. Frankly, I think it is absolutely horrible and counter-intuitive -- options nested behind buttons within tabs within parent tabs. Arrrgghh!! i.e. set your default minimum font size. It took me 30 seconds to find the option. Bad. Very, very bad. Boooo. Why was this changed? Give me one good reason, please! (That's .04, now, I guess.) Honestly I had never once bothered to change this setting but I decided to test your theory. I opened the Options dialog and across the top thought for 2 seconds, chose "Content" and there was a Font section, at first I thought "Font Size" was what you were talking about but it didn't say "Minimum". So then I clicked the "Advanced" button and there it was. Took (maybe) 6 seconds. That may just be my own experience though. It was changed because the old version confused a lot of users. The old options panel looked better, but it was not logically arranged, and often stumped new users. I can testify to this from many hours spent on the support forum. i see your point. but why not let the main menu items be on the left and vertically as before? now it is like a double nested tabpane. only confusing to not-newbies? What krolft said. Exactly. I second what Kroft said. The menu is too Mac-like for pretty much every Windows and Linux users. I think that on MacOS it would be fine, but on Windows and Linux, the icons should be on the left. The KDE HIG says to align configuration icons on the left. (But there are a lot of KDE HIG violations, in Firefox (e.g placing settings in the edit menu)) Firefox should mold to whatever desktop enviroment it is in, weather is is Mac OS X, KDE, Gnome or Windows, etc. This may be hard, but it is benificial. This would be a good goal for Firefox 2.0 Why not have an option to change how the options look? Extension anyone? P.S. I have a feeling that newbies would have hours of fun fiddling, then forget where anything is! Reset to defaults certainly required! #78 Re: Re: Re: Re: Options boxby MaStAViC <mastavic@mastavic.com> Thursday January 5th, 2006 10:13 PM Agreed. I like how the options menu is now correct, logic-wise, but I'd rather have it the way it was before with the main menu items on the left and vertically. I agree, the new options panel UI is rubbish compared to the old one, and I use a Mac! The backend is a lot easier to use though (you link an option in the UI to a preference, and firefox makes sure the preference is updated when the user changes the option. With the old panel you had to update the preference yourself using javascript). The PC in my parents' apartment is on dial-up, and surfing was very painful when I can't steal onto a wireless network. This really helped and was the reason I d/led it right after I got it on my main PC. Other: The ability to force all links that ask to open in a new window to open in a new tab instead! EM improvements - dropping files to install extensions, killing contents.rdf, etc. :) plz address the memory problem. IE has this amazing feature that allows you to reload an image if it didnt load with the complete page. this helps in loading that image but not the whole page. if you select View Image in firefox, it basically opens the image in the same window, and the user has to click the back button to get back to the page. i was expecting this to pop up in either the extensions or the update. but, sadly, nothing. IE has this amazing feature that allows you to reload an image if it didnt load with the complete page. this helps in loading that image but not the whole page. if you select View Image in firefox, it basically opens the image in the same window, and the user has to click the back button to get back to the page. i was expecting this to pop up in either the extensions or the update. but, sadly, nothing. #39 Re: view image feature :(by billyswong <billyswong@gmail.com> Wednesday December 7th, 2005 8:43 AM I use "show image" for this problem. It will let you select "show image" and then reload the image. I was split between faster navigation, which made surfing on cable instantly fast and drag-and-drop tabs, which I had as an extension in 1.0 Other: I really like the downloadable CSS2 cursors, i.e. cursol: url(...), ...; properties. This section of CSS is now supported better than in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, which leadership there annoyed me before. Definitely the new update system. Rolling out updates has to be the most important thing in the program for security reasons really. Now it is effortless. 1.0 update system was horrible. To me the best improvement is the Non-collapsing bookmark menu (and others). In previous versions, moving the mouse out of the menu collapsed the whole bookmark tree, which was very annoying as this happened easily if you have many bookmarks, sorted in folders within folders. Now the menu stays open until you click elsewhere. YAY! :D Anything to make this beast faster. As for drag-drop-tabs, I've never understood why anyone would want to drag their tabs around. Grouping related content when you have a number of pages open simultaneously. Those who need this, REALLY need it. The popularity of extensions that offered this is an indication of the number of people who do really need this. I was one. I would have Cnet in the first tabs and then five tabs with other stuff. When I opened a new tab in CNET, the content was scattered around. Firefox 1.5's tab reordering was great for me, but I picked the update system because updating all my 6 computers when a new FF version came out was a beast. Shouldn't this be done automatically by the browser? (grouped by domain) Similar to grouping windows on the taskbar. The user might want to group tabs by any type of means. How would the browser know that that sequential tabs 2,5,6 pertain to subject/topic/project A and sequential tabs 1,3,4 pertain to subject/topic/project B ? This selection is ridiculous: there are way more important things to be improved, here is just a small selection out of my head: *) Make breaking words at soft hyphens work. That bug is ancient and still unsolved and absolutely essential for many non-English languages. IE and Opera do support this. *) Make title-tooltips work properly. The current situation is just embarrassing (text is truncated, no way to make them stay until you can actually read them etc.). All other modern browsers do this properly. *) Make search engines work properly. Let the user easily manage them and provide an improved ressource at addons.mozilla.org. First steps have been done here in 1.5. *) Allow the profile to be stored anywhere, allow to pass the profile path as a parameter or environment variable. *) Improve the history. I want to know where I had been and what I have read that other day and that should include full text search in the actual pages. *) Imporve the bookmarks. Lots of ways to do this. Look elsewhere to learn how. *) Make the browser multi-threaded. OK I know this is probably not possible any more and the design had been bad from the start, but currently there are too many things happening in single threads. If something locks up the thread or makes it crash, the whole browser will lock up or crash. Bad design. #27 Re: Nice selection, but without the real problemsby Peng <mnordhoff@gmail.com> Wednesday December 7th, 2005 7:24 AM This was about improvements that have been made, not improvements that should be made... #30 Re: Nice selection, but without the real problemsby dummy00001 Wednesday December 7th, 2005 7:43 AM I second everything but last point: """"*) Make the browser multi-threaded. OK I know this is probably not possible any more and the design had been bad from the start, but currently there are too many things happening in single threads. If something locks up the thread or makes it crash, the whole browser will lock up or crash. Bad design."""" If single thread of multithreaded application has crashed - there is no way whole app can recover: memory is shared among threads and if incorrect state of an object caused the crash to occur - it is still would be there in memory available to other threads to crash on. No OS will ever allow application after such event to go on. M$ (for WinAPI) & Sun (for Java) dumbly put sticker "use threads" as if it was panacea. Threads for most of the time is lame excuse of incapable API designers. (And I hardly beleive WinAPI or Java had designers at all.) Unfortunately, some people buy into this PR campaign, which has nothing to do with actual programming and quality of software. I'm programming for about 10 years with 5 years under Linux/BSD and for once I has to see good reason for using threads. I did some work for computational math - and even mathematiciens used threads not always. It's so much easier to write single threaded application. Multithreading requires much time to do it properly - the precious time one could have used for actual computation rather than programming. Multithreading make programming more complicated. Crash in single-threaded application is traced in half minute. In multithreaded application you never really know what caused the crash: one thread can overwrite memory used by other thread. And that other innocent thread will die. (That is actually why Unix thrived always for lightweight processes and easy-to-use IPC.) P.S. Since dawn of programming, programmers (which must not be mistaken with operators) mastered the art of FSMs - the true art of programming. Now the art is mostly forgotten... #67 Re: Re: Nice selection, but without the real problby kotheus Saturday December 10th, 2005 3:06 PM You're right about multithreading not preventing crashing any more than a single threaded one. But multithreading is very useful because it allows the processor to do something useful while waiting for I/O (which includes network requests) instead of wasting cycles polling. By the way, nice troll... you could have thought up a more creative throwaway ID though. > *) Allow the profile to be stored anywhere, allow to pass the profile path as a parameter or environment variable. This already works. And as the poster above said, this poll is about features that already work, not a poll on what is not implemented. #50 Re: Re: Nice selection, but without the real problby johann_p Wednesday December 7th, 2005 1:07 PM How? "firefox --help" does not seem to give a hint how to do it. Yes, I must have totally misread what this was about - probably some Freudian selective blindness or something. Still, lets talk about the future!! *) Make the browser multi-threaded. OK I know this is probably not possible any more and the design had been bad from the start, but currently there are too many things happening in single threads. If something locks up the thread or makes it crash, the whole browser will lock up or crash. Bad design. What you are probably looking for is multi-instance support. That way, if one FF instance is locked up by for example an improper designed web site, the other instances will not be affected. Related to that problem in a more subtle manner you can find this ancient bug: <https://bugzilla.mozilla.…rg/show_bug.cgi?id=117222> You can read more about it here: <http://forums.mozillazine…rg/viewtopic.php?t=185983> Regards. The most improved feature has to be improved security and software updates. Keeping Firefox secure is the most important feature and IMO is what keeps it ahead of MS IE. It is also nice to know that I don't have to worry about checking for updates as it will update for you. I *really* miss being able to right-click on a bookmarks folder (i.e. on the Personal Toolbar) and selecting "Manage Folder". It was a lot faster than navigating the whole bookmark tree, especially when one has heavily nested (read:organized) bookmarks, as I have. What's the logic behind this reduction in functionality and convenience? I see "Options"... On linux systems, the Options menu is accessed via Edit > Preferences. Why this is different from the Windows version, I have no idea. IIRC, this was how Mozilla/Netscape Communicator had it since, like, forever. #40 Re: Re: There's a preferences window?by billyswong <billyswong@gmail.com> Wednesday December 7th, 2005 8:50 AM My guess is IE's "Tools > Internet Options..." I'll buy that. Regardless, this should be standardized across platforms. I have both, here, and it's annoying to have to hunt for options when switching from one to the other. #43 Re: Re: Re: Re: There's a preferences window?by mr_lizard13 Wednesday December 7th, 2005 11:02 AM I'd have to really disagree here. In Windows, nearly all program's options are access by a Tools menu. On Mac, nearly all program's options are accessed by clicking Preferences in the app menu. Standardising something like this across all builds will confuse users who are native to that particular OS. #51 Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: There's a preferences window?by dcmoose Wednesday December 7th, 2005 2:27 PM Sorry, but that argument simply doesn't hold water. I checked a variety of apps on my SUSE linux box and noted the top-level location on the menu bar of the Settings/Preferences dialogs -- here's what I found: OpenOffice.org (Tools), Konqueror (Settings), Pan (Edit), Gimp (File), Gaim (Tools), BitTorrent (View), NVU (Tools), Acrobat Reader (Edit), ... The least one can hope for, given the circumstances, is that it be consistent within a given family of applications. Heck, both NVU and Firefox are from the Mozilla "family" and even those two apps differ on the same platform/OS. I use Firefox on both Win and Linux, and all I'm saying is that this is an annoyance from the perspective of a user in a multi-platform environment. #56 Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: There's a preferences windby mr_lizard13 Wednesday December 7th, 2005 11:59 PM Seems to be that this is a far bigger issue for apps built for Linux than it is for other platforms. Macromedia Flash 8, Dreamweaver 8, Microsoft Word/Powerpoint/Excel, Adobe Photoshop CS2, Roxio Toast, Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird, MSN Messenger, iTunes, and Emagic Logic have their options under 'Preferences' in the app menu on a Mac. Macromedia Flash 8, Dreamweaver 8, Microsoft Word/Powerpoint/Excel, Adobe Photoshop, Nero, Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird, MSN Messenger, iTunes, and Emagic Logic have their options under 'Tools' in the tools menu on Windows. Clearly, there are going to be oddballs here and there, but in most cases, if its under 'Tools' on Windows, then it's under 'Preferences' on the Mac version of the same program. #63 Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: There's a preferences windby Ryukage <ryukage@aol.com> Thursday December 8th, 2005 3:09 PM That's because SUSE uses KDE. KDE applications all use Settings >> <appname> Settings. The non-KDE applications you listed are multiplatform apps, which tend to follow the Windows Tools >> Options style. For some reason the Firefox devs decided Linux Firefox should look like a GNOME application (maybe they mistakenly believed the propaganda about GNOME being the standard Linux desktop?), and all GNOME apps use Edit >> Preferences. I believe Edit >> Preferences is also the standard for most other GUIs. That's how all the GeoWorks Ensemble apps were arranged, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were the standard for NeXT as well. Might even be a SPARC recommendation, I don't know. It's really the Windows and KDE placements that are the oddballs. Or maybe just the most progressive; I think maybe the reason preferences are traditionally on the Edit menu is because in the past it would have been the only entry on a Tools or Settings menu. How do you account for Pan (Edit), Gimp (File), Gaim (Tools). Are these not all Gnome/GTK apps? I'm not trying to be argumentative, I just want to try and understand the reasoning behind this "mess". Thanks. I believe gimp and gaim are GTK apps but not GNOME apps, hence the ignorance of HIG. Anyway, no matter how you do your UI design on linux, you're going to frustrate a lot of your userbase, since there are no HIG standards, only HIG options (the KDE HIG, the GNOME HIG, the GNUSTEP HIG, and so on...). That's why a lot of projects say "screw it" and go their own way. #42 "Add Icons to..." selections ignored (win install)by dcmoose Wednesday December 7th, 2005 10:09 AM Something that I was hoping would be fixed in 1.5 was not. Why is it that, regardless of the options the user selects when installing Firefox on a Windows box, that icons are added to the Start menu, the desktop and the quick launch bar? I want only the quicklaunch icon, for example, and FF insists on placing one on the desktop and creating a new Start menu folder. Is it just me? #44 Re: "Add Icons to..." selections ignored (win instby mr_lizard13 Wednesday December 7th, 2005 11:04 AM Maybe not just you dcmoose, but I have to say that when used to use Windows I didn't have the same issue. Have a look around in the support forum, you may not be alone #47 Re: Re: "Add Icons to..." selections ignored (winby rcmoz Wednesday December 7th, 2005 11:17 AM Speaking of icons, I don't want them added to my bookmarks. They make loading a long bookmarks page take longer. Wish there was some sort of mass favicon cleaner extension. #52 Re: Re: Re: "Add Icons to..." selections ignored (by dcmoose Wednesday December 7th, 2005 2:33 PM I'll second that: an option not to store favicons in the bookmarks.html file would go a long way in speeding things up, I think. Have you ever looked at your bookmarks.html file in a plain text editor? Scary. I have just over 1000 bookmarks and my file is 1.6MB in size. It's ridiculous! }:O) #46 Re: "Add Icons to..." selections ignored (win instby mr_lizard13 Wednesday December 7th, 2005 11:16 AM Maybe not just you dcmoose, but I have to say that when used to use Windows I didn't have the same issue. Have a look around in the support forum, you may not be alone #53 Re: Re: "Add Icons to..." selections ignored (winby dcmoose Wednesday December 7th, 2005 2:34 PM Not a big deal, just bugs me. Probably windows registry gremlins hard at work. Win98 SE, for the record. I just voted; and I did it for the "Faster navigation" option. cheers, Ivan Tadej The most thing that i like firefox very much is it's has many extensions. The new feature 'Improved software update' was for me the best thing on the Firefox 1.5, because I use the Night version. They're buggy on Linux, have been since their introduction. If you simply click the tab while your mouse it moving slightly, it'll start dragging, and keep dragging even when your mouse button it up. The only safe way out of it is to hit the escape key on the keyboard. I wish I could disable this broken "feature". But this bug occurs at least half a dozen times a day. I've never once intended to actually drag a tab. There's nothing to gain by dragging tabs. It just looks neat (or would if it worked outside of Microsoft Windows). Ditto. It's driving me nuts. I'm using ubuntu breezy and firefox 1.5. It'll actually freeze my desktop. Escaping doesn't always work for me. I just have to wait a few minutes sometimes. I <3 css-based columns and stuff. By far the most convenient new feature. Using Dial-Up it was particularly annoying to wait through a complete Fx download just to benefit from revisions. Clear private data, so I can clear my tracks when in doing illegal stuff. If you really are doing secret stuff on your computer (illegal or not) they can get at everything that was ever recorded on the computer with at least some degree of likelihood no matter how you try to erase it. I think it's essential that 2.0 fixes some old bugs that IE handles better than Firefox - eg. tooltips and soft hyphens. I would love the ability to disable Flash from the preferences. |
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