https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-pag...
It also doesn't hold Mozilla accountable to get these new features into Firefox's core without proving that they are viable and popular.
I'm impressed.
Edit: I'm also in two minds about the plugin systems between the two browsers. The idea of all JavaScript plugins scares me to death, there really are no good download managers for chromium / chrome, on the other hand Firefox plugins I rely on like Evernote web clipper keep breaking and don't even work on dev/nightly when enforcing the new plugin system.
I hear your concerns, though. The platform and desktop teams are doing tons of great work on improving stability and performance--you might want to give Firefox another try sometime. If you do, maybe try out some Test Pilot experiments while you're at it, and let us know what you think.
Do you alternate between improving these things and worsening them? Could you possibly not worsen them, or at least warn us to not upgrade when that happens?
Regressions are really not OK. People are trying to use this browser. Well, mostly they were trying to use it. I stuck it out longer than most. Having 512 MB of RAM and dozens of tabs is my use case.
Personal Take: Completely agree. I am opening up Firefox with Panarama Mode missing, Pocket, Hello.
And BTW, e10s hasn't shipped yet, and at the current timeline, even if it ship in Firefox 49/50 it will still not be any good for power / heavy tab users, which incidentaly is the only group left using Firefox, most have moved on to Chrome.
I see light of hope in Servo. But liscenses ( MPL? Why not Apache 2.0 ) are a concern for a few company to join and devote resources into it. ( Apart from Samsung )
And, when FF crashes and reloads, restoring all the tabs, it seems like the tabs aren't loaded (the page is blank and does a reload when selected), yet if you look in task manager (Windows 7), all the memory seems to have already been consumed.
Should tabs be able to be unloaded from memory, in theory? If so, is it implemented this way? If not, is there a reason?
I'm not using firefox out of sheer ideology and support for the FOSS community, but it's not the superior product I used to sell to everybody.
Some are just starting to land after literally years of work:
You might be more interested in reading about platform improvements like getting Servo/Rust components into Gecko: https://blog.servo.org/2016/05/09/twis-62/
Or progress in multi-process support (codename e10s): http://arewee10syet.com/
While these are focused on Firefox to improve performance, stability and responsiveness, there are also experiments like the Positron project, which is making Gecko able to host Electron applications: https://github.com/mozilla/positron
Opening the dev tools has such a huge performance impact these days (on an i7 with 16GB RAM and an SSD...) that I mostly don't bother to develop with Firefox anymore.
Let alone missing features like user agent spoofing, which still requires an addon, or the bug that messes up file associations with every update.
I hope they do less UI changes, get their shit together and improve the core.
Once experiments have incubated in Test Pilot for awhile, we will have a number of options depending on each experiment's overall success. We may push them over to AMO, or integrate them directly into the browser. If an experiment is really unsuccessful, we may simply cut our losses and walk away. Test Pilot should help us make these decisions more quickly and effectively.
We'll be blogging more about the overall Test Pilot pipeline in the weeks to come. Stay tuned!
When will Mozilla stop flailing and just go back to making a good browser, like they did when they just had a couple thousand users? When they're fully defeated by the multi-market behemoth again?
I still appreciate that Mozilla saved the web from IE, and I still use firefox because it's not yet multi-process and thus not yet multi-gigabytes-memory.
The simple story is that the current tabbing model in was designed to save you from needing half a dozen browser window open. It just doesn't scale well past a dozen tabs or so, and we know that some users have dozens or even hundreds open at the same time. Tab Center is taking a fresh look at the problem with that in mind.
Ideally, I think I'd like something similar to the spatial system of the Classic Mac OS Finder, which I coincidentally expounded upon recently in another thread[0]. Tab Groups goes part of the way there with its spatial organizational system but it lacks the hierarchy and persistence of those Classic folders and desktop.
The tab UI works because it is part of a larger 3-level system. There are tabs, windows, and virtual desktops. With 10 at each level, you can handle 1000 tabs... except for the performance.
It's important to avoid running things on pages that aren't in focus or even in view. It's important to avoid walking data structures that scatter nodes all over the address space, causing swap access and cache misses. Watch your RSS. Keep those extra tabs idle. Make sure the "Esc" key and the stop button actually work, stopping everything (all tabs, all video, all animation, all audio, etc.) until the user explicitly asks for something to run again.
I think the main thing that keeps tree tabs from happening is that it's an advanced concept for the everyday internet surfer, which is what Firefox has been trying to appeal to more and more lately.
Just because something isn't for everyone doesn't mean you can make a browser for everyone by removing said feature for everyone.
This should be obvious but thanks to what seems to be a certain kind of ux designers we are now stuck with lots of pixel perfect and consistent but otherwise broken and unusable apps.
Tab Center appears to be available from http://people.mozilla.org/~bwinton/TabCenter/
Universal search: (edit: link here was incorrect)
Activity streams: https://moz-activity-streams.s3.amazonaws.com/dist/latest.ht...
Also, I think you're pointing to older demo versions of some of those add-on and not the current Test Pilot releases. We're trying to work more in the open on this stuff, so you'll likely find things like this here and there.
What you've downloaded is a deprecated earlier prototype that may not work at all--you're looking at the wrong github repo. (I just took down the built add-on, so other people don't make the same mistake.)
Test Pilot is about reconnecting desktop Firefox with its community; it's about more than just whatever add-ons are available today. We have feedback forms now, we'll have Discourse user forums integrated soon, and I hope we can eventually start building ideas that come from the community, with the help of the community. You should give it a try :-)
I can totally understand wanting more community involvement in the feedback process and with this context, the account requirement makes a lot more sense. Thanks for explaining some of that reasoning. I only wish this was documented a bit better on the site - I guess it just appeared a little unwelcoming to me with the sign-in requirement at first.
Now that I've actually tried it, the site itself is very slick and the experiments I've played with look pretty interesting. I look forward to seeing how things develop.
Given the level of Mozilla tone-deaf-ness wrt. the recent forced and poorly thought through Addon Signing process, this can only be a good thing.
(Seriously, introduction of mandatory addon signing has now been postponed by five major release versions. Time to admit it was a crappy idea and just scrap it?)
- Sync your experimental add-ons across browser instances
- Provide useful metrics for the TestPilot add-on
- Cleanly remove all add-ons and metrics when you uninstall it
Although, actually, the experiment installs are per-browser-profile and not necessarily sync'd if you haven't turned that on in your sync prefs. So if you wanted, you can try experiments in one release channel / profile, but not in another.
And I don't see how the other things need an account.
https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/c/test-pilot
*Yes, you'll need to sign in with Persona ;)
Firefox always shows a warning doorhanger if an add-on is installed from a website other than addons.mozilla.org.
What you're seeing is a Mozilla web property following the same rules as every other website. Nothing to worry about.
Why is the add-on not hosted on addons.m.o? I thought mozilla thought there was some benefit to users when they only installed things from addons.m.o.
(oh wait, no, we had to cancel that one for licensing reasons)
"You have google analytics blocked. We understand. Take a look at our privacy policy to see how we handle your data."
On that note, one usability suggestion: having the tab sidebar run all the way to the top of the window means that the years (decades?) of muscle memory I've built up telling me to mouse to the top left of the window to hit the Back button now results in me hitting the New Tab button. It'd be better if the awesomebar area spanned the complete width of the window, and the tab center column started at the same height as the content area.
That said I did find a bug and I have some performance problems to report, but it's not clear to me where I can report a bug for a particular experiment.
It looks like the feedback button wants me to fill out a whole satisfaction survey, and "File in issue" takes me to the test pilot github, which seems to be about the Test Pilot program in general.
Is there a better place to report bugs?
Our wiki has a list of bug trackers: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Test_Pilot#Found_a_bug.3F
You can also talk with us in #testpilot on Mozilla IRC.
That, or the atmosphere's just really thin up in the experimental altitudes.
Either way, it was a surprise, and not entirely pleasant. Test Pilot will hopefully be a way to reduce surprises of this nature.
All the more power to introducing improvements to the Browser, but above does not give me confidence in signing up.
I'd like to help, but you need to make it easy :(
It's actually super easy, give it a try :-)
For the love of all that's holy: Put a compelling argument for a CTA on the page BEFORE the CTA.
And ... put a compelling argument there regardless. This lacks both.
The features mentioned, especially tabs management, strike me as useful. Tabs are a mistake. That's not my opinion, that's Adam Stiles' view -- and he invented them. Content management is a huge problem.
Web design isn't the solution, it's the problem. My standing recommendation now is that Pocket add a Web Intent to its Android app. If I could use it rather than Firefox or Chrome for browsing, I'd be vastly happier.
Streams, search, bookmarks, content, organisation, reputation (of authors, sites, publishers), fact-checking, influence-registries (Nature just had an item on this IIRC) are all other areas of issue.
Paying content providers is a concern. I'm notafan of micropayments, but building the system into the browser is one option. Broadband or content taxes with usage monitoring similar to music's mechanicals is another. Browsers could play a role in both.
I'm also not a fan of having to register for stuff. But might regardless.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Call to action.
2. Among my longer rants, with a future roadmap: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_...
3. Specific to Firefox: https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/VX64KGmi...
Thanks, frontend web developers.
If you have a bugzilla account, you can CC yourself on the bug to catch future updates :-)
[1] Not exaggerating: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=390936
It's frustrating seeing them spend so much time on Firefox OS, Hello, etc. and not on making Firefox a really good, standards compliant browser.
Disclaimer: i'm a front-end web developer and rhinoceraptor's comments does not represent me.
Mozilla and independent contributors, please continue developing Firefox as openly and inclusively as you've always done. Web browsers have become a major tool of communication and information for many people, and i really appreciate having a good free (as in freedom) alternative on that front :)
Of course to even to read this advice after fucking up you need to know about firefox's -P startup option.
