All posts tagged Firefox.

The restore session feature of Firefox is really nice, It allows you to prune down what tabs you want to restore after a crash. Assuming you know which window has that nasty flash file fucking everything up.

The problem I have with it is that there are two actions which can be taken from this screen: start a fresh browser session or to restore existing tabs. A similar issue has been a major annoyance for many people in GMail where the Send and Discard buttons are right next to each other and have similar prominence.

There’s a few problems with this screen. First of all the wording “Start New Session” is ambiguous. In conjunction with restore one can infer that a new session is a blank session but on its own “Start New Session” could mean starting a session with the selected tabs. I’d prefer something along the lines of “Blank Session”.

The other problem is that both of these buttons are given equal prominence. Or more specifically there’s very little differentiation between them visually, they seem arbitrarily placed. I wouldn’t really mind if it weren’t for the fact that if you accidentally click start new session there is no way to get those tabs back.

There’s also an issue with the placement of each of the buttons in relation to the dialog:

The check marks for pruning the tabs you wish to open form a line pointing at the Start New Session button. If you’ve done any pruning you’re going to want to restore and yet the flow leads you to create a new session. Every time I’ve mistakenly clicked Start New Session it was after pruning.

Hopefully Aza Raskin and the rest of the Mozilla team can just swap the button location and maybe add some other restore features so starting a new session isn’t quite so permanent.

I like how they’re using the browser as a slideshow app.

davidkaneda:

Raindrop from Mozilla Labs, yet another new communication platform.

This looks pretty awesome but it’s going to have to have some pretty incredible features to rip me from gmail.

There are many I can’t live without but tab-kit is far and away the main one.

Although, too many tabs is also extremely useful.

(via sds)

marco:

I wonder if “Firefox.next” will be able to print reliably without crashing. Because that’s still a problem in the latest 3.5 builds, along with most of the interface bugs and incorrect OS X behaviors.

But that’s not fun for developers to work on. So they don’t. And the same annoying bugs persist in Firefox for years. Printing hasn’t worked reliably since 3.0. The interface, especially context menus, window placement, and tooltips, has been extremely buggy for Firefox’s entire existence.

They keep making things Awesome™ for the fringe of uber-power-users instead of fixing the common issues that frustrate everyone else and drive average users away from Firefox every day.

I find Marco’s interest in printing to be strange. I’ve never had any problems with Firefox printing, but that probably has a lot to do with the fact that I almost never print anything. Printers seem to be anathema to what Apple stands for.

There are some bugs in Firefox, but Safari has historically been much more unstable for me. I will admit that Firefox is much less polished than Safari, but for the functionality you gain, it’s more than worth it.

webkitbits:

And more than 6 million of the downloads came from Windows users.

This is interesting, but to put it in a bit of perspective this is what Asa Dotzler (who looks a lot like Jonathan Coulton) from Mozilla said:

I just read that Apple is reporting 11 million Safari 4 downloads in just three days. That’s pretty amazing.

I’d like to follow up that report with one of my own.

Firefox 3.0.11 was downloaded about 150 million times in the last 24 hours.

Aza Raskin is the most visible member of the Mozilla Labs user interface and on his blog I came across this mockup with some incredible developments.

On the side. Our screens are wider than they are tall; vertical height is the scarce resource.

While this makes sense, it can seem like a bit of a waste of space. I’m sure I’d get used to it.

Applications. Much of our time on the web is now spent in web apps. We use them in long-lived session, and when we close the tabs that house them we know we’ll be coming back.

This is fucking genius and I want an extension for it now.

Grouped Tabs. In a world where we have more tabs than fingers and toes, we need a better way of keeping track of them then just a horizontal strip. Group-by-domain seems like a reasonable way to make scanning to find a tab easy. Are there other, better groupings?

I already use this feature in Tab Kit and group by origin of opening. I find it almost indispensable.

Work Spaces. We browse in tasklets: I’m researching a vacation, I’m working on Ubiquity development, I’m procrastination, etc. We should be able to easily take the sites we are interested in and drag-and-drop them into a workspace for safe keeping.

I love this idea but I’m curious as to the implementation. I kind of see it as an open ended Read it Later or if Instapaper if it had an extension.

The Mozilla Labs team has come up with inspiring project after inspiring project and has been very open with all their ideas. Firefox is by far the most prevalent application in my life and it’s intriguing to see the process they are going though with their ideas.

Firefox 3.1 beta 2 brought with it a nice new feature: support for multitouch gestures (the ones available from the new unibody trackpad). Some of these features are awesome, swipe to go forward/back and rotate to change tabs, the others are more annoying than helpful.

It turns out there is a simple way to change these gestures. If you steer your browser to about:config and filter for the word gesture you can see all the settings for the gestures.

Available gestures are:

browser.gesture.pinch.in
browser.gesture.pinch.out
browser.gesture.swipe.up
browser.gesture.swipe.down
browser.gesture.swipe.left
browser.gesture.swipe.right
browser.gesture.twist.left
browser.gesture.twist.right

Any of the gestures can be captured with modifiers (all but cmd seem to work)

browser.gesture.pinch.in.shift

There are also two settings that are available for the pinch and twist gestures.
The latched command dictates whether the command is continuously sent or only set once (e.g. if you twist will the command keep running till you stop or just run once). This is useful for preventing the continuous closing of tabs. It has a boolean value.

browser.gesture.pinch.latched
browser.gesture.swipe.latched

The second setting is threshold. This setting says how far you have to do the gesture for it to register, tweak it to your preference. It has an integer value.

browser.gesture.twist.threshold
browser.gesture.pinch.threshold

There are quite a few values the gestures can be mapped to. A full list of the built in commands is available here, this is as complete a list as I could find. Some of the functions which are more interesting are:

• cmd_newNavigatorTab - opens new tab
• cmd_close - closes tab
• Browser:AddBookmarkAs - adds bookmark and opens interface to add details
• Browser:Home - Goes to home
• Browser:BackOrBackDuplicate - goes back or duplicates into new tab or window depending on modifier new
• Browser:NextTab
• Browser:OpenLocation - selects awesomebar (same as cmd L)
• Tools:PrivateBrowsing - turns on private browsing mode
• History:UndoCloseTab - opens previously closed tab

Have fun playing with this, let me know what sort of setups you create.

This is fairly annoying, same error in chrome.

soxiam:

terrible idea. why? because my brain doesn’t think this way no matter how logical it sounds. it thinks sequentially and chronologically from left to right in the order the tabs were opened. this is one of the few things i didn’t like from otherwise fine browsers: chrome and opera. i pray to phoenix they will change their mind.

There is a wonderful addon for managing your tabs called tab kit. I can’t run firefox without it.

You can restrict the search to your history by typing ^, or bookmarks with *, or tagged pages with +. To make what you’ve typed match only in the URL type @, and for title/tags only use #.

This will be extremely useful. Yet another great progression from the Mozilla team (yes I’ve been gushing lately).