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Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering
Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's Director of Firefox, shares
some early plans for Firefox 4. "The primary goals for Firefox 4 will be making a browser: * Fast: making Firefox super-duper fast * Powerful: enabling new open, standard Web technologies (HTML5 and beyond!), * Empowering: putting users in full control of their browser, data, and Web experience."
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Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 11, 2010 18:44 UTC (Tue) by realnc (guest, #60393) [Link]
Yeah, they had those goal with version 3 too. So what else is new?
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 11, 2010 19:02 UTC (Tue) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
Chrome and Safari's overwhelming successes with Webkit are new. Firefox actually has real competition now. "faster" now has real numbers to aim for, as an example.
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 11, 2010 19:27 UTC (Tue) by dmitrij.ledkov (subscriber, #63320) [Link]
Engadget beat LWN.net to spreading these news =)
What are LWN.net targets for the "breaking news department" ? ;-) I love all the editorial articles with deep investigations but still expecting smaller things quicker.
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 12, 2010 13:01 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Do you also want a pony, no, make that a sparkly unicorn with every issue? Because Jon can do that, I'm sure.
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 12, 2010 13:55 UTC (Wed) by fergal (subscriber, #602) [Link]
Engadget also posted a lot of other things that I don't care about. lwn.net posts plenty of news that I do care about and not a lot that I don't care about.
I no longer have time to read most of the weekly edition and the bits I do read have usually been made free to the world by the time I read them. I continue to pay my subs partly because I value lwn.net as a linux+other-stuff news filtering aggregator.
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted Jun 15, 2010 0:50 UTC (Tue) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331) [Link]
Except that Engadget is a hive of semi-literate PR fluff, while lwn.net practices the dying art of real journalism. I'll stay here, thanks.
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 11, 2010 19:41 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Lets hope that Firefox sees the light and supports using a 'native' multimedia codec.
Similar to how Epiphany-webkit uses Gstreamer.
With Internet Explorer adopting HTML5 video with H.264 in the future then that means that the overwhelming majority of browsers (in terms of market share and in terms of raw availability) are going to support H.264 out of the box.
I know it's unfortunate and I have high hopes for those browsers to eventually adopt Ogg Theora, this means that Firefox is not going to be able to support the majority of the popular HTML5 streaming video sites that are going to be out there.
At least it seems that way for me.
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 11, 2010 19:52 UTC (Tue) by DOT (subscriber, #58786) [Link]
There was a time when ActiveX was an undeniable part of the web. Firefox stopped that by not supporting it. If web developers really don't want to use Theora, they will continue to provide Flash for Firefox. As soon as Google releases VP8, and starts using it on YouTube, the battle will be over.
Had Google used Theora on YouTube, the battle would have been won a long time ago.
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 12, 2010 1:36 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> There was a time when ActiveX was an undeniable part of the web. Firefox stopped that by not supporting it.
I don't think so... Active X was just a wretched design and had massive security issues that were impossible for Microsoft to fix. Not to mention that ActiveX is still a required part of many corporate networks. There have been lots of web technologies both supported and unsupported by Firefox that have fallen out of fashion.
> As soon as Google releases VP8, and starts using it on YouTube, the battle will be over.
I am not holding my breath on that. It would certainly be nice and it would be fantastic for Google to do that, of course. I guess we will find out if that rumor has any reality next week, won't we?
Anyways. It's still technically superior to use platform codecs regardless of the politics. Does Firefox have any support for VA-API, XvBA or VDPAU yet? With the gstreamer-vaapi package both Epiphany and Midori can support all three
> Had Google used Theora on YouTube, the battle would have been won a long time ago.
*shrug*. Google encoded videos into H.264 because that is what Adobe Flash supported.
If there was no H.264 support in Google Chrome and Safari there would of been no Youtube support for HTML5 (however experimental) in the first place.
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 12, 2010 9:17 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
ActiveX is dying a well deserved slow and painful dead. It's probably the second reason for IE6 being so common still today, the main reason being that most people can't be bothered replace the default browser, or the defalt OS.
Firefox didn't kill ActiveX, but it has played a role. I haven't seen any new developments based on ActiveX in a looooong time, the same way I don't see anything based on Java applets. If you ask the people making decisions, both technologies are seen as "risky", AJAX is preferred.
By the way, I'm curious. Why do you assert that using platform codecs is technically superior? If video is going finally to be a integral part of the web (that's what the <video> tag is in the end), why avoid doing it in the browser, like everything else?
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 12, 2010 9:41 UTC (Wed) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link]
> I haven't seen any new developments based on ActiveX in a looooong time
This is somewhat offtopic, but Linksys' NEW managed gigabit Ethernet switches, such as the SRW2048, REQUIRE ActiveX support! There is a telnet interface, but most things cannot be managed over that.
I was dumbfounded when I discovered that! Just needed to get this out there, don't buy Linksys switches!
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted Jun 12, 2010 17:55 UTC (Sat) by tack (subscriber, #12542) [Link]
I got suckered into buying this switch too. I picked it up because it advertised a command line interface, so I figured it didn't matter what the browser support was like.
Unfortunately the command line interface is useless (allowing only primitive changes like port speed/duplex) and, as you say, the web interface only works under IE.
It's on my todo list to unload this switch and get one with a proper interface (perhaps a D-Link DGS-1216T).
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 12, 2010 12:22 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]
If you use the platform codecs, vulns in the codecs only have to be fixed in one place.
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 12, 2010 9:31 UTC (Wed) by angdraug (subscriber, #7487) [Link] Active X was just a wretched design and had massive security issues that were impossible for Microsoft to fix. Flash is just as bad in that regard, but it is supported by non-MS browsers, which I believe is the main, if not the only reason it succeeded were Active X has failed. I will even go out on a limb and say that it will fail in the similar manner if Apple manages to keep it out of its mobile systems.
ActiveX worse than Flash Posted May 12, 2010 12:15 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
No, Flash is not "just as bad".
ActiveX takes a desktop technology that runs third party native code and arbitrarily repurposes it for embedding in web pages. Then Microsoft realised - oops, this means software that can do stuff like write to arbitrary files, or snoop your keystrokes is accessible via the web. So did they apologise and remove it from the OS? No, they added a blacklist. Brilliant.
Whereas in contrast Flash is a virtual machine, what the Flash app can do is strictly limited to what it's allowed to do by the virtual machine.
So for Microsoft ActiveX, security means having a blacklist which contains every possible piece of 3rd party software that could be malicious - an impossible task. Whereas for Flash "all" you need is a correctly working VM that implements a policy you agree with.
That's hard, but it's not a big deal on the web, where we already use several other virtual machines that are part of big complicated software. Flash, Javascript, and so on may not be wise security choices, but they're smarter than ActiveX.
ActiveX worse than Flash Posted May 12, 2010 13:19 UTC (Wed) by angdraug (subscriber, #7487) [Link]
Fair point on security model difference. And still, I'm not convinced that it was technical inferiority and not lack of ubiquity that killed Active X. Top tier decision makers that have at least basic understanding of software security are far and wide in between, market share is a much easier concept for them to understand.
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 12, 2010 13:38 UTC (Wed) by dmitrij.ledkov (subscriber, #63320) [Link]
> *shrug*. Google encoded videos into H.264 because that is what Adobe Flash supported.
I was under impression that was done to have YouTube on iPhone cause with first iPhone announcement Steve Jobs were showing that we have so many popular videos already encoded in H.264 and more will be added as time goes on.
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 12, 2010 10:40 UTC (Wed) by AndreE (subscriber, #60148) [Link]
The "native codecs" argument ignores the problem for the content distributor. Ostensibly the point of a web standard is allow content distributors to be sure that browsers implementing a certain standard will be capable of accessing content provided as specified in the standard.
Using system codecs breaks this guarantee. Distributors can never be sure that two systems using the same browser can actually play back the same content. In such a situation 90% of content distributors will use codecs that are popular rather than superior and/or free, just to "make sure" their audience can access their material. Why would most content providers encode in vorbis or theora if most systems out there don't actually include these codecs by default? Ultimately, things like mp3 or h264 would become DE FACTO standards, meaning all the discussions around patents and royalty would just be irrelevant.
Ultimately defining a standard codecs for the web is important for interoperability and also to highlight the issues surrounding patents and licensing.
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 12, 2010 11:20 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
If you tie together multiple causes into an "all or nothing" cause, then of course you can leverage strength in one cause to gain the other. The flip-side of course is that if you lose one cause, you may lose all. So it's a higher-risk gambit. E.g. if you tie together "Use the HTML5 video delivery standard" and "Use the H.264 codec" causes, then if it turns out you can't win the latter argument you may well damage the former. I.e. you may damage HTML5 video (with whatever codec) against Flash (with its /proprietary/ codecs).
Mozilla is gambling that it has the upper-hand in browser share to force the hand of those who make content available using proprietary video codecs. However, I'm not sure that's so. There are competing browsers from different vendors (Apple, MS, Google), and all of them have an interest in H.264. All of them do not appear keen on Theora (sadly). One of them potentially could make another unencumbered codec available (we shall see).
It'd be nice if Mozillas' strategy paid off, but tbh the risk that HTML5 video fails to take-off cause YouTube doesnt work in Firefox is not appealing. Ultimately, if Mozilla does not have the leverage to force the issues and hence if its strategy is unlikely to succeed, then if I had to choose between a world where:
a) a limited amount of video was in an open codec AND open delivery standard, but MOST video was still in a closed delivery standard (with /no/ free software implementations) and proprietary codecs (many of which have free implementations, modulo the patent issues)
OR
b) where ALL video was openly delivered, be it with proprietary (but often free implementation, mod patent issues) or open codecs
then I'm not sure I'm willing the risk the easily achievable outcome of b, given the high-risk of a. I.e. I would prefer Mozilla stays out of the codec question. Hand it off to an underlying decoder library/framework. The patent issue potentially could be solved another way soon, depending on legal stuff in progress. (False hope I guess, but hey).
I'm using Chromium at the moment, with a system FFmpeg (on Fedora) - it's all free software, though some likely has patent issues. It's just great to see how slowly but surely web video is starting to become watchable. All the major video sites seem to have HTML5 video betas.
I sometimes wonder how many of the "Mozilla must only support Theora - proprietary codecs are not acceptable!" proponents are running proprietary Adobe plugins in their browsers..
Anyway.. we shall see :)
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 12, 2010 12:04 UTC (Wed) by DOT (subscriber, #58786) [Link]
You can't honestly believe that the HTML video train can be stopped any more, whatever Mozilla does. An eventual standardized codec is only one part of the HTML video equation. All content providers are switching to HTML, and they do it because they don't want to depend on Flash any more.
I do believe that a free video format will eventually become the standard, exactly because of Mozilla's stance. Content providers *want* to get rid of Flash, and Mozilla won't let them unless they use Theora. If it's not going to be Theora in 2010, it will be VP8 in 2012. If it's not going to be VP8 in 2012, it's going to be Dirac in 2014. At some point in the next 10 years, a free codec will become a viable option, and the industry will switch.
I'm sure close to 100% of the proponents of a free video format use Flash right now. I sure do. Moving from Flash to HTML+H.264 is an improvement, sure, but it's not a complete solution. If you settle for that, the complete solution will never come. Sometimes you have to make a stand, and not go for the easy wins.
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 12, 2010 18:42 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
I can see Mozilla only supporting Theora significantly complicating things, such that HTML5 video adoption is much slower than otherwise, yes. That extra time gives Adobe a chance to try save Flash, if they wish - is the risk.
While Mozilla can certainly frustrate the use of HTML5 video with encumbered codecs, I'm not so sure they have the clout to get providers to change to Theora. Let's be honest here, Google/Youtube are the only ones with real codec leverage. They've not publicly shown much love for Theora. We'll see what they do one way or the other (shortly maybe).
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 12, 2010 10:23 UTC (Wed) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]
As far as I've noticed, Opera was (and is) always faster than Firefox, so there's nothing new in this department...
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 12, 2010 15:53 UTC (Wed) by Kit (guest, #55925) [Link]
Opera's market share is far too small for Firefox to take them seriously. Until recently, Internet Explorer was the only other browser in the universe in the eyes of Mozilla.
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 13, 2010 18:08 UTC (Thu) by i3839 (guest, #31386) [Link]
In the early Phoenix/Firebird days, it was getting faster with every release and when I compared it to Opera it was slightly faster than Opera.
Nowadays even the original Mozilla (now SeaMonkey) is faster.
I'm glad it got some good competition from Chormium/Chrome, that was sadly missing since Firefox became the official Mozilla browser.
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 11, 2010 21:20 UTC (Tue) by eparis123 (guest, #59739) [Link] Please use vertical space wisely. For me, Chromium killer feature is vertical space efficiency; it makes the web look way better!
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 12, 2010 9:45 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
I just hope they improve the garbage collection. As it is, Firefox pauses and ignores all input events for 15 seconds at a stretch, every few minutes.
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 12, 2010 19:38 UTC (Wed) by branden (subscriber, #7029) [Link]
Is THAT what that is?
It's been driving me bonkers.
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 12, 2010 23:17 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
I didn't see the problem until I upgraded to ubuntu 10.04, so I wasn't sure if it was a firefox bug or an OS bug.
is there any way to adjust this timing?
Garbage collection stalls Posted May 13, 2010 2:21 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
I assume that's what it is. What else could it be?
It reminds me more than anything else of BASIC programs on Apple ][, except they didn't pause as long. I'm betting the fix will be shorter, more frequent pauses. Yay GC.
Garbage collection stalls Posted May 18, 2010 14:18 UTC (Tue) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]
It could be SQLite database commits.
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 17, 2010 10:02 UTC (Mon) by gerv (subscriber, #3376) [Link]
I see this too (albeit not for as long as 15 seconds). AIUI it's a Linux-only issue, it's better in 3.6 than 3.5, and it's much better on the trunk than in either.
Gerv
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 12, 2010 16:59 UTC (Wed) by RobertBrockway (guest, #48927) [Link]
I hope they aren't using the same definition of 'fast' as was used in FF3. I reluctantly changed to Chrome recently as FF was getting slower with each version. I routinely saw freezes of 10-20 seconds while trying to access a menu in FF. I thought it was just the Linux version but my MS-Windows using friends have reported similar experiences.
I will definitely try out FF4. I really hope it is faster.
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering Posted May 13, 2010 10:01 UTC (Thu) by russell (subscriber, #10458) [Link]
I noticed that their answer to the question of who uses firefox does not include distros. Perhaps they should put up their hands and work out a way of unbundling libraries.
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