For the last few weeks I’ve made Firefox 3 nightly releases my primary browser because my extensions all work well with it. I always like to get a sneak peek at what is coming, and there are always so many things that change that it can be hard to keep track of them all. I find that the people who see the new features gradually appear will notice them the most, which is why I want to jump on the Firefox 3 bandwagon early on. I did the same thing with Firefox 2 pre-release versions, and each time a new feature worth noting appeared in the nightly releases I made sure to relay the information onto our readers.
So far I have noticed two new things in Firefox 3 that will probably be overlooked by anyone who just tinkers around with it. Even though these features aren’t anything to die over I thought it might please some people who were afraid that Mozilla has not begun to implement new things in the browser. Actually, Mozilla has been working very hard on implementing Firefox’s graphics engine, called Cairo, that will not only load pages faster but it will also do things like scale images much better. I’m sure this is something a lot of Firefox users will probably take for granted when Firefox 3 is released later this year.
So what are the two new features that I found? Like I said, these aren’t exactly ground-breaking but I like them. First off I noticed a new setting in the Options that will let a user choose whether or not they are notified when a site tries to automatically reload or redirect the user. By default this is disabled, but I’ve now had it enabled for well over a week and I really like it.
Then when a site tries to redirect or reload the page Firefox will notify you with a little bar at the top similar to what’s seen when a popup window is blocked:
So it is just something small right now, but it does make you notice when you’re being redirected. However, I’m hoping that they will implement a feature similar to the popup blocker where you can permanently allow certain sites. I still have this feature enabled, but it can get annoying if you constantly click on links in emails you receive at a Gmail address…which redirects you each time you click on a link. I’m sure there is a large list of sites this would get annoying at, which is why they need to let users choose which sites to permanently allow.
The other feature that I noticed is when you click in a textbox to enter the path to a file on your computer it will automatically popup with the Open dialog box. Here is an example of how it works when composing a message in Gmail:
It kinda sounds like a stupid feature and really simple since you can just click the Browse button, but I like this. Well, I’m not even sure if this is a feature because I couldn’t find any info on it, so for all I know it could be some kind of bug. The reason I’m questioning whether it is a bug or not is because some fields let you enter in either a file on your computer or a URL to an existing file. With this you can’t actually paste in a URL since the Open dialog box opens immediately.
That’s all I’ve found since my last updates on the Firefox 3 graphics engine. I’ll continue to keep you posted as new things get included in the nightly builds. Oh yeah, and according the latest meeting notes for Firefox 3 it looks as though Places will be back in by the next Alpha release planned for the middle of March. It hasn’t made its way back into the nightlies yet, but I expect that it will within the next week or two.
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Tags: Firefox, Freeware, Software, Alpha, Firefox 3
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All extensions work for you?
Wow!! That would be a first for me and i only have about 14 of them installed.
Are your themes okay too?
I actually don’t use themes. I just stick with the default theme in Firefox.
I also don’t use many extensions so your experience may differ from mine. You can see which extensions I currently have installed in the left sidebar. I’m currently using a version of Gmarks that hasn’t been released yet, but that is the only extension that didn’t work immediately.
Correction: Cairo is the new graphics back-end introduced in Fx3. Mozilla has abandoned working on their own graphics back-end in favor of Cairo - so it isn’t their project (that’s not to say that some of them won’t submit patches to the project). Fx’s layout engine is called Gecko, and Fx3 will include gecko 1.9.
Since Gecko now uses Cairo to rendering what it lays out, I would say Mozilla has been working on INTEGRATING Cairo as their graphics layer, and done much in Gecko, their layout layer.
On that front, I have to say the most exciting thing now is the units patch that was landed a few weeks ago. You might have noticed some positioning irregularities in the Fx3 UI because of this, although they are constantly fixing those.
What is Units?
Different layout elements use different units to determine positioning (pt, px, em, etc), however in the end these must all be mapped to REAL pixels on your screen. This gets a little confusing and doesn’t work to make things like full page zoom or enhanced printing support work well (because things will be disproportionately positioned). Mozilla’s solution is to place an abstraction layer between the pixels on your screen, and the size elements in the layout. This allows positioning to be device-independent - lending itself to easy zooming for things like printing, visually impaired, and even large, high resolution screens. The possibilities are endless, and this abstraction can lead to many more extensions never before possible.
For a more detailed explanation from the mouth of the developer himself: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org.....h_lan.html
Oops, corrected the post.
That actually sounds super cool, and I hope that means Firefox will support a real “zoom in” and “zoom out” feature much like Opera and Internet Explorer. Right now it just scales the text size on the screen, and I have been wanting zoom functionality for quite some time.
That redirecting notice sounds worth testing. The auto-browse when selecting a browse path box sounds like a bug to me, and should hopefully be squashed soon.
That enhanced unit graphics patch sounds pretty cool. Hopefully this will lead to enhanced page zoom, maybe with an IE7-like statusbar menu.
I’m glad places has been tossed back in, according to the rumors that could be a real powerful feature.
Ryan, do you have a portable edition of FX 3? I’ll like to download and test it.
Thanks
I had put one together for Alpha 2 that you could try out: http://tech.cybernetnews.com/2.....-released/
The redirect warning is pretty cool. I can see where that can be very helpful.
Spoke too soon! From today’s meeting, will not be in Aplha 3.
Man…I was pretty excited to see that start appearing in the nightly releases, but now it will probably be several weeks before we even start to see them.
Awh, too bad places won’t arrive anytime soon.
BTW:I went to Fx extension guru’s link to [today's meeting] and looked at the extension nominations list. LocationBar2 looks amazing! Would make address bar simpler and even replace that page “up” feature some extensions give. I hope if they add any they add that one!
That is an awesome extension and I definitely think I’ll have to write about that one. Took me a little bit but I found the nominations link you were talking about, but here it is for anyone else interested in it:
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefo.....miniations
Just FYI, the “click in a file upload widget shows the open file dialog” is a feature, and a security feature at that. The worry is that malicious script could trick you into typing in a filename in the box, and cause you to upload a file you didn’t really mean to.
Thanks for the info Ted! I think it is a nice feature but sometimes I like pasting in a text link (or URL) into the box. This makes doing so much more difficult, but I see how it is a security feature.