Firefox 3.0 Makes Leap Forward 401
Kurtz'sKompund writes "Mozilla has announced that Firefox 3.0 has passed a major milestone! The Places feature has been added to the alpha client slated for release next week. Places is a complete re-work of the bookmarking and history browser functions. It was at one point slated for Firefox 2.0, but will instead see release in Mozilla's next major version. '"We enabled the Places implementation of bookmarks on the trunk," said the Places team in a post to the Mozilla developer center blog. "Although there is still much to be done, this is an important milestone for us." Firefox 3.0 alpha 5 is scheduled to launch June 1. Because Places uses the open-source SQLite database engine to store and retrieve bookmarks and history entries, it's incompatible with earlier Firefox editions' bookmarks. Alpha users must convert their existing entries, Mozilla developers said."
Hrm.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Bring it on... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Reinventing the wheel? (Score:3, Interesting)
Light version? (Score:4, Interesting)
PS: It would also be nice if Firefox didn't highlight "Iceweasel" as a typo.
Re:Hrm.. (Score:1, Interesting)
Except that you have to construct SQL queries instead of the leaner unabstracted way of function calls. Constructing a scripting query and parsing the resultls is always going to be extremely slow compared to a dedicated function call. Abstraction for abstraction's sake is never a good idea, especially when the job is so simple and the data set so tiny (typically no more than a few hundred bookmarks with 2-5 fields).
Who uses local bookmarks anymore? (Score:4, Interesting)
SQLite is brilliant (Score:4, Interesting)
This lightweight, fast, simple database eliminates many of the headaches associated with using a full-on SQL installation, and works just as well for most of what most developers and users need.
If you're a Perl geek, like me, you will find this Perl module for seamless SQLite interface [cpan.org] to be a power tool. The next time you need to get something working by morning, and it's 2am and the person "in charge of databases" hasn't called back, you'll be thanking it.
Re:Reinventing the wheel? (Score:5, Interesting)
Native Mac UI (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:When? (Score:3, Interesting)
Bookmarks were strings 10 years ago, now they are multi-field records, especially things like live RSS bookmarks. The hole point of the "Places" component is to give more state and functionality to bookmarks and history.
I also think the SQLite engine is going to be used for the new client-side persistence framework which does need database capabilities, so it would be there regardless.
Re:Who uses local bookmarks anymore? (Score:3, Interesting)
The Places system is designed (among several other objectives) to facilitate synchronizing Firefox bookmarks with remote storage systems.
Re:When? (Score:1, Interesting)
Actually, it's a specially formatted HTML file, but it's almost XHTML so that's close enough.
But the big thing about it is that, being an HTML file, it's human readable. I can open it in Internet Explorer or Opera and import my bookmarks from it should I decide to stop using Firefox. I can open someone else's bookmarks.html file and copy out bookmarks should I decide to.
It's plain text, so it's human readable, which is great if for some reason the profile becomes unusable. (Most common time I need to do this is after a Windows reinstall, when I'm copying out old profile data from the old Windows install.)
You can also get bookmarks from a Windows profile into a Linux profile quite easily.
In short, bookmarks being plain text or in XML is a very good thing.
Replacing that with a binary blob is a very bad thing.
Re:When? (Score:5, Interesting)
Even the phrase "launching a SQL database" indicates you're thinking of SQLite the wrong way.
A better way of thinking of it is this: Mozilla developers are removing thousands of lines of code with an unknown number of bugs for a simple data storage mechanism used in thousands of software products, including embedded systems. SQLite works. In fact, it works astonishingly well. We're gradually using it to replace most data storage in our own products.
Autoexport to HTML (Score:4, Interesting)
Snappy Firefox (Score:5, Interesting)
Even if they just had watchdogs that could restart and recover session state, they'd be more useable.
Re:When? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Bloat or Performance Issues? (Score:3, Interesting)
I was ready to correct you on the difference between open source and public domain, but upon further reading, you're right: it's completely public domain. They'll sell you a license if you really must have one for some reason, but it's available for downloading and embedding for any use you want to put it to. Kudos, dev team. That's pretty cool of you.
Thank you! (Score:3, Interesting)
Case in point: GAIM/Pidgin. When I first switched from Windows to Linux on my desktop I switched from the "official" IM clients (ICQ and Yahoo) to GAIM. But I had to retrain myself to use control-enter to send an IM, rather than tab-space (tab to move my focus from the text-entry box to the "send" button, space to "click" the button without using the mouse). This key combination worked in all the official clients, but GAIM couldn't be configured to use it. I liked being able to embed newlines in my IM's using just the enter key, so I didn't want that to be my "send" key. So I retrained myself. Fine; I'm willing to make compromises.
But now the new GAIM/Pidgin comes along and, oh, hey, guess what? You can't configure it to use control-enter to send any more! No more embedding newlines with a simple enter key press! Nope, that's not the "right" way to do it! And remember that send button? The one that was so handy every time you just had to go to the mouse to teach the built-in spell-checker all those words or acronyms it didn't know? Well, that's gone, too! It, too, was the "wrong" way to do things. No, there's only one right way, and that way is to send using the bare enter key, embed newlines with control-enter, and never, ever click a "send" button. So now I have to retrain myself yet again. Thanks, guys.
So apparently that's what's happening with Firefox now, too. The concept of history and bookmarks, which is perfectly fine and has been since NCSA Mosaic, is now uncool. No, it needs to be replaced with something else. And if I don't like it I need to suck it up and just take the time to completely revise my work habits! 'Cause some basement-dwelling, self-appointed God of Computing said so, I guess.
I really don't mind change. I welcome it! But I want to be able to change on my terms, not someone else's. I took to tabbed browsing like a fish to water, if you'll pardon the cliche. But nobody forced it down my throat. And I'm getting pretty goddamned sick of developers forcing these things down our throats just 'cause it's the "next big thing." I'm a geek, too, and I love playing with computers just for the hell of it. But I also use computers as tools to accomplish other things, and I don't need my software getting in my goddamned way.
Failure? (Score:3, Interesting)
Left running for 24 hours, with google homepage and gmail up, I am looking at about 1GB of memory used.
This just does not seem reasonable to me, but I'm a minimalist.
Re:When? (Score:3, Interesting)
Places? How about tagged bookmarks (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Bloat or Performance Issues? (Score:3, Interesting)
A single file contains the schema and data.
Personally I wouldn't be too worried about the memory footprint, but I guess this means that they're dropping the text based configuration files in favour of a binary format? - If that's the case, I sincerely hope they'll reconsider, from The Art of Unix Programming [faqs.org]:
When you feel the urge to design a complex binary file format, or a complex binary application protocol, it is generally wise to lie down until the feeling passes.
I had hoped that the mess that is the Windows Registry had taught people to avoid odd binary formats if at all possible...
Re:Places? How about tagged bookmarks (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:When? (Score:1, Interesting)
I routinely have 50-100 tabs open. If I bookmark something, I'll just forget about it and never read it. Bookmarks to me are for filing away things that I have read at some point and found useful, not something that I look through to find something new to check out.
Useless Bloat (Score:1, Interesting)
gmail leak (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:When? (Score:3, Interesting)