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Firefox 3 RC 1 full review
A year and a half after the last major Firefox release, Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is here with a very long list of new features and improvements.
For those who have been following Firefox 3 development you may want to jump to What’s new in Release Candidate 1.
For the whole scoop, make yourself comfortable and read on.
Performance
Firefox 3 gets several performance improvement gains. Among them, profile guided optimizations (PGO) provides an optimized Firefox build based on the way it internally works. So far it is only available for Windows. Linux should follow shortly and Mac OS X could also make it before final release.
A very noticeable gain can be seen in JavaScript: it is about three times faster than Firefox 2 implementation. JavaScript is twice as important for Firefox since it is not only used in a large number of web pages but it’s also what makes Firefox UI work.
Memory wise, a much needed memory cycle collector is now in place to take care of freeing memory no longer used by modules that requested it but failed to release it properly. This and other memory oriented tweaks, seem to have paid off so far: a set of tests I recently ran suggests a noticeable increase in memory management efficiency with more memory freed as tabs and windows are closed and no mysterious memory eat up when Firefox is idle as it has been reported several times in the past for Firefox 2.
Places
A much announced and expected feature is Places, the integrated history and bookmarks manager interface powered by SQLite, a small open source database engine that provides much more robust querying capabilities.
With Places you are able to search your history, tags and bookmarks with a fully fledged search interface. You can select where to search (History, Bookmarks Menu, Bookmarks Toolbar, All Bookmarks or the selected folder), and then save the search as a Smart Bookmark that updates as your personal web grows and changes.
The Library, Places manager, also adds backup and restore UI so it is easier to recover a damaged file or incorrectly deleted bookmark.
Tagging is a new Firefox feature tightly related with Places and some of the changes to the location bar: click on an empty star icon in the location bar to save the current page as a bookmark. Click it again and you can specify a folder to save the bookmark to, create a new one and add tags you can later search on.
The Location Bar
The autocomplete list that appears when you start entering letters in the location bar is no longer restricted to web addresses but also looks into bookmark and history page titles and tags which make it more comprehensive.
Suggestions are shown in two different lines and colors for page titles and addresses, which according to studies on human cognition, makes it easier for us to focus on what we are looking for. So, if the user knows she is entering part of a web address or a page title it will be easier for her to find what she’s looking for. Highlighting the match result also helps to direct the user’s attention.
It features adaptive learning so after a few repetitions Firefox will learn what letter combinations you use for what site and will provide better suggestions. This should address the case where frecency (a combined frequency and recency index) didn’t provide the best results.
You can also perform multiword searches, so for example “firefox downloads” filters address, titles and tags containing both words but not necessarily in that order.
I believe this feature alone is the best Firefox 3 has to offer, justifies Places large resources investment and will become a landmark in Firefox and web browsers in general development. Once you get used to it, there is no turning back.
Visual Refresh
One of the most visible changes are the theme updates in all platforms with a strong emphasis in making Firefox feel as a native application on each operating system.
On Windows XP and Vista, the theme is called Strata.
The Options window on Windows Vista with the new icons.
Mac OS X users get Firelight, a new Safari-like theme introduced with Beta 2, formerly known as Proto. Linux users get Tango, a theme that blends with Gnome native icons.
The back and forward buttons have been combined in a single keyhole-shaped widget featuring a single history menu and is now featured in all platforms except Linux.
According to the new guidelines, consistency across platforms is obtained through icons shape while OS integration is provided by texture. In Linux case, it’s very hard to set one due to the many available distributions and their particular themes.
There’s an invisible splitter between the location and search bars that you can use to set their width when they are placed next to each other.
Developers are aiming to deliver better operating system integration in Firefox 3. This will be most notable for Mac OS X and Linux users who will now get native widgets like text boxes, menus, check boxes, icons, button order and orientation following each OS guidelines.
Mac OS X users get integration with Growl, a popular centralized notification system, while Windows Vista gets native looking menus and blue icons that blend better with overall Vista look.
See more Windows XP, Vista and Linux screenshots in this recent post.
The Page Information dialog has been reviewed to become more organized and informative and allows to set all site specific preference from a single location.
Tabbed Browsing
On tabbed browsing, Firefox will not only warn you when closing several tabs and windows at once but will prompt if you want to save the currently open tab set: a good catch and a good way to introduce this helpful feature to new users.
You can duplicate and move tabs (including its history and current status). To clone, press Ctrl while dragging a tab, or just drag them across windows to move. A very helpful addition!
Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is here
On schedule, according to the latest estimate, Mozilla has released the first Firefox 3 release candidate. For Mozilla it means what says in the label: unless there is some major bug reported for this release, the “release candidate” part will just be dropped form the name and become Firefox 3 final. Otherwise, additional candidates will be released until the desired level of stability is attained.
If you’ve been following Firefox 3 release, this post is for you as it focuses on changes introduced since the latest Firefox 3 Beta 5 released on early April.
For the full scoop, I have updated the full Firefox 3 review with all the details you want to know.
Most of the changes in this release are related to the visual refresh, particularly on Windows. On Vista, the Library (Bookmarks Organizer) toolbar now features a black glossy background similar to other Vista management windows.
You can select multiple files in the download manager and copy the download location, visit the original web site you downloaded the files from or open the containing folders. In the latter case, it’s not smart enough to detect they are all in the same folder so you get multiple windows for the same folder.
Also, the Clear List button was added back.
The DOM Inspector, a useful tool for web and extension developers, has been removed from the installer and is available at Mozilla Add-ons as an extension only.
Help is no longer shipped with Firefox. Instead, all documentation will be available online at Mozilla Support.
On Mac OS X, pressing the up and down keys while in single line text boxes moves the cursor to the beginning and the end as expected on Mac OS.
Cairo, Firefox 3 new graphics layer was updated to version 1.6.
An option was added to the malware detection page to bypass the warning and continue to the requested page.
Note that this isn’t the final Firefox 3 and there may still be some ugly hidden bugs that could mess with your data. Unlikely, but that’s why it is called a release candidate.
You can download Firefox 3 RC1 from Mozilla Corporation’s web site. As usual it is available for Windows (7.1 MB), Mac OS X (17.2 MB) and Linux (8.6 MB) in more than 45 languages. On Windows, RC1 requires at least Windows 2000. It won’t work on Windows 95/98/Me.
I noticed the installer has a checkbox to set Firefox as the default browser checked by default. This feels a bit too pushy for user trying it put for the first time.v. The correct way would be to ship it disabled. Neither Opera 9.5 nor Safari 3.1.1 installers attempted to do the same.
BUSINESS PROCESS AUTOMATION IN MANUFACTURING
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The Boeing Center for Technology, Information & Manufacturing | E-Business
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Blender Conference, Kingsport, Tennessee
[read the full article on blendernation.com]
BSDCan 2008: ZFS Internals
Pawel Dawidek first ported ZFS to FreeBSD from OpenSolaris in April of 2007. He continues to actively port new ZFS features from OpenSolaris, and focuses on improving overall ZFS stability. During the introduction to his talk at BSDCan, he explained that his goal was to offer an accessible view of ZFS internals. His discussion was broken into three sections, a review of the layers ZFS is built from and how they work together, a look at unique features found in ZFS and how they work internally, and a report on the current status of ZFS in FreeBSD.
The BSDCan website notes that Pawel is a FreeBSD committer, adding:
"In the FreeBSD project, he works mostly in the storage subsystems area (GEOM, file systems), security (disk encryption, opencrypto framework, IPsec, jails), but his code is also in many other parts of the system. Pawel currently lives in Warsaw, Poland, running his small company."
Flock takes home two VIATeC awards
Hi Flockers! This is my first time posting to the Flock blog, but I've been with the company since September 2006, working out of the Victoria, BC office (informally known as Flock North).
Not two weeks after taking the Webby award for Social Networking, last night Flock was honoured to receive two awards at the annual VIATeC Technology Awards dinner. VIATeC is the high-tech industry association serving Victoria (and the rest of Vancouver Island), where much of the Flock development team is based. Vancouver Island is quickly becoming a hotbed for innovative tech companies, and the Flock Canada team is very excited to be part of that growth.
Online Strategy of the Year - This award recognizes Flock's success in integrating and forging relationships with the major players in the social networking and social media spaces.
Newsmaker of the Year - It has been a very good year for Flock in the press. So much so, in fact, that there were no other finalists listed for this category. With over 400 published articles including PC World, BBC, and many other major media outlets, Flock was far and away the biggest newsmaker.
We were also finalists for two other awards: Executive of the Year (Clayton Stark) and Innovative Excellence: Software or Electronic Service Delivery.
Thanks to the judges for these honours, congratulations to all the other finalists, and thanks especially to VIATeC and its members for helping to develop such a vibrant and exciting technology community here on "Silicon Isle". :)
Chris Campbell
Director, Product Architecture
chris dot c at flock dot com
2008 Webware 100 Awards
Intrusion to Intent: Content is the Advertising
Lately, I have been thinking about advertising - no, not as a business model for Zoho, advertising and work-oriented software don’t mix, in my opinion - but from the point of view as an advertiser ourselves, again not primarily related to Zoho. AdventNet, the parent company of Zoho, uses a variety of marketing channels, ranging from trade shows to search advertising, to popularize our software products. What we have noticed is that the ROI of internet advertising, outside of search, has been dismal and getting worse. I was reminded of this when I read the post by Jason Calacanis on falling advertising rates in social networking sites.
But this trend extends far beyond social networking. As a WSJ Online and NY Times online regular (30 minutes a day), I can safely say that I don’t recall any of the ad impressions on those sites in months. No doubt they have always been there, but I just can’t recall any. In contrast, I have watched CNN perhaps a total of 1 hour in the last 2 weeks and yet, I can recall at least a couple of ads from CNN. What makes TV advertising so effective is that it is so intrusive. In the other end of the spectrum lies search ads on Google, which has access to the most distilled form of user intent available, making it possible for ads on Google to almost become content.
Where in the spectrum do other forms of internet advertising lie? By their nature, intrusive ads on the internet don’t work - the user simply clicks away. Even when the prospect of some form of compelling content forces the user to stay (pre-roll ad on internet video, for example), pretty quickly users figure out they can switch to another browser tab until the ad runs itself out and the content becomes available.
Personalization and micro-targeting are thought to be the answer to this problem, but I am not persuaded. Let me give an example: let’s say I list reading & economics as my interests in my profile somewhere that is available to advertisers. Let me be even be more specific and list Austrian School economics. So could a publisher micro-target me to try to sell me a book? Here is the problem they would face: there are a number of specialized blogs that offer outstanding content on these subjects, and I am very likely to hear about books from these sites organically. People who post on these sites (both authors and commenters) are likely to be far more relevant than any computer algorithm could ever be in targeting my interests. So a prospective book publisher in these topics is better off providing real content to these sites to seed user interest than to run banner ads all over the place. In fact, in at least one case, the publisher of such books runs a fairly active content site, and I end up buying the books because I like the content offered in the site.
So here is what is going on in a nutshell: targeted advertising is competing for attention with targeted content, and content would win that contest every time, as long as intrusion is not possible. The only way for targeted advertising to win is to actually become content itself. That explains why Google search ads are so effective: they are a form of content.
From 30 seconds to zero in 1 day.
Its been a while since I introduced ‘Vng’. Vng is still under production and innovation is happening 
As a quick intro can be read here, which will tell you that vng is a version control system made to be usable by humans.
So, what has happened since my last blog. Well, I’ve been polishing a lot. This means that I have added various options to the major commands. Like adding all files in a dir recursively to the repository. Which you really miss if you need it.
Another thing I added was a matcher. The most obvious place where this is visible is in watching past changes. The changes command will naturally list things like commit-message, author etc. Using the various matchers it becomes trivial to do some more intelligent interrogation of your repository.
vng changes --match zander #show all the records which ‘zander’ made.
vng changes --last 10 #show 10 records
vng changes --from-match 'fix assert' #Find the record with ‘fix assert’ in the message and start showing changes from there.
vng changes --to-patch 'Add.*Command' # show only changes until one that matches the regular expression.
Naturally you can combine all those without problems.
Most of these things you probable just have to try out to see how it works for you. I’m someone that really cares about the tiny details so you’ll find things like showing when you changed whitespace at the end of the line with a colored marker, or being able to type ‘vng what’ instead of the full command ‘vng whatsnew’ since, well, vng knows you must have meant the full one, naturally.
Back to the “what happened” point. I always get a bit excited when I have a tool that is just smart in visualization etc. But I actually started writing this blog for a reason;
The main complaint I have heard from people trying git on the Qt repository (specifically on Windows) is that its slow. Now, we know that git has some scalability problems on Windows, and the git people are working on that. But in my interviews with various perforce users that actually made the above claim I noticed a very different problem.
The way that perforce works is that your checkout has all files checked out as read-only. Whenever you want to edit a file you have to tell perforce. Which tells the server you are editing this file.
The effect of this is that doing a ‘p4 diff’ will first ask the server which files you have opened and then do a compare of only those files with your local copy. This is substantially different from git or darcs or many others which all use the file-date to check if you have edited a file. Using a filedate has the big disadvantage that for a repository the size of Qt (or KDE) you have to stat 30000 files if you ask your app to give you a diff. This is disk-access and thus slow.
So, no matter how much the file-access is optimized and duplicate statting is reduced, the concept of making the user keep track of which files to diff will always be faster then letting the tool auto-detect this.
This conclusion then lead me to investigate in what manner it would be practical to re-use this concept for the people that now have very good reason to complain about slowness. I mean; instantaneous diff, or waiting 30 seconds on cold caches to do a diff of Qt…
I have used my creative-Friday today to work on this in vng and have for the most part finished the implementation. I have added ‘vng edit’ and ‘vng opened’. Edit will ask the user if he wants to switch to the way of working that he has to mark files for editing. After which any whatsnew / record etc will only happen on the files that are being edited. The biggest change, naturally, is the speedup. The results will be on screen instantaneously since we already know which files are changed and we avoid any file listing or statting.
Next step is to make the perforce integration that virtually all tools have work for vng. This integration is in most editors, in diff and various other tools already. They will detect a file that is read-only and will call p4 edit on the file prior to writing out your changes. If we can fool those tools into doing the same but then call vng edit instead we get a huge speedup virtually for free.
Are you interrested in trying out vng; see vng.googlecode.com or just download the sources from repo.or.cz/w/vng.git. Note that the speedups are not in the downloadable executable posted on the projectpage. I’ll have to rebuild that one soon.
Have a good weekend!
HELP WANTED, Inquire within.
[read the full article on blendernation.com]
Andre Tries Out the New “Independent Detail View”
Chandler 0.7.6 features the ability to keep multiple items open in separate windows. You can access this feature by clicking on the 
icon in the upper right hand corner of the item details pane or by going to View>>Separate Item Details. (You can also select an item and hit Ctrl-I on Windows/Linux or Apple-I on Mac.)
User Andre Mueninghoff has already been making use of this new feature for a few weeks now, helping us track down bugs and providing feedback. Here are 2 uses he’s found so far:
Andre keeps two items open all the time in separate windows:
The first is something he calls a “Bucket” item:
…to capture those random thoughts and bits of information that appear during the day.
The second is a GTD Projects List. Andre consults this list repeatedly throughout the day. In his words:
This saves me the trouble of having to leave the Chandler item I’m working with, find the GTD Projects List item, and then find my way back to the original item.
OMG Announces InRule Technology as New Sponsor of the GRC Roundtable
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BSDCan 2008: Opening Session
BSDCan 2008 officially started this morning at 9AM with an opening talk by the event's organizer, Dan Langille. However, in reality the event has already been running for two days, with the FreeBSD tutorials having started on the 14'th. After arriving in Ottawa yesterday afternoon and finding my room in a 20 story University of Ottawa residence, I wandered down to the Royal Oak Pub for early registration, meeting several dozen BSD hackers from all over the world.
This morning's opening talk was well attended, filling up first with clusters of laptop users around the power outlets along both walls. By 15 minutes after the hour, the room was completely full, and Dan started with a humorous slideshow of example letters he's been receiving ever since posting the words "letter of invitation" somewhere on the BSDCan website two year back. Coming primarily from Nigeria, the letter's authors often claim to represent large groups of developers, yet always coming from "disposable" email addresses. After some laughs, he launched into his opening keynote.