From the 'open source goodness' files:Posted on 10/10/2012 5:05:55 AM PDT by ShadowAce
From the 'open source goodness' files:
Mozilla's Firefox 16 open source web browser is now generally available and with it comes more goodies for developers.
That's right. While Firefox has long positioned itself as browser for users, the focus since moving to the rapid release train cycle has clearly shifted – towards developers. I personally think that's a good thing because it's not something that any other major browser vendor does.
The Mozilla focus on developers means that developers will use Firefox more than other browsers. If developers use it more, I suppose that the prevailing notion is that they will also be more prone to recommend it to others, thus feeding a virtuous cycle of referrals and future adoption.
So what's new for developers in Firefox 16?
The big new item is a developer toolbar. This toolbar is yet another element that Firefox is adding (on top of the Web Inspector and the 3D view that is the pinnacle of awesome – first introduced in March with Firefox 11)
Mozilla developer Joe Walker explained in a blog post that the new toolbar also includes a command line.
"It's a great place to add small tools and experimental features, and we're making it easy to add your own commands," Walker blogged.
From a practical point of view this new toolbar makes it easier to access and control, other tools that Mozilla has already baked into Firefox. One of the nifty little commands that Mozilla has also included is something that I've never seen before – called screenshot. Mozilla developer Kevin Dangoor explained in a post that the screenshot command can quite simply grab a screenshot of whatever element you want. The Export command is a simple way to, export HTML.
Sure these are things that you could kinda/sort do before, but not from a simple CLI. Firefox is now evolving into what I will call the world's first true Browser IDE. View Source is still fun for me, but with all the goodness now exposed through the dev toolbar, I suspect that view source won't be used nearly as much in the years ahead.
Firefox 16 also fixes a long list of bugs and security issues. As is Mozilla's habit, they haven't listed the full list of security advisories just yet. Given Mozilla's history though, I can already speculate that there will be some JavaScript use-after-free memory issues fixes (because there always are..)
Mozilla has also moved to stop accepting MD5 hashes in signatures and memory reporting is now getting a boost with the about:memory per tab reporting feature.
While I'm always a user of the leading edge of Firefox's generally available releases, I still tend to not recommend them for enterprise usage. It never ceases to amaze me how many custom built applications seem to break with each Firefox release. Thank goodness for Firefox ESR (but hey you devs out there stick with Firefox 16 and get your code in gear!).
I like Google Chrome the best, it's fast, dependable and has nice navigational features.
IE lost me a while ago because of it's bugs.
I prefer Chrome for most tasks but there are times when Firefox is the right tool for the job.
- Accessing a port on a local machine e.g. for CUPS admin or 3ware admin. AFAICT Chrome cannot do this.
- Certain aspects of Webex.
- Proxy settings are settable in Firefox whereas in Chrome they just default to the system settings.
For general purpose browsing for my taste Chrome is faster, renders pages more pleasantly and accurately and probably works better for the Googleverse suite of apps.
Flash is one of the harbingers of the Apocalypse. :-)
Oracle has switched their support site from Flash to HTML 5 and I couldn’t be happier. It would be great if HTML 5 starts to be more broadly accepted and puts that buggy, POS Flash to rest.
Would one of those bugs be that it stops working all the time? Ever since I switched to IE8 it kept happening. I now use Firefox.
I tested out AVANT and it was...OK. I also sometimes use FlashPeak Slim Browser - good, fast, but still uncomfortably close to IE for my tastes.
Will continue with FF for the time being.
Groan... Here we go again. Seems like as soon as I get everything working, a new release comes along and one or more of the add-ons/extensions fails to work. On the other hand, I'm getting quite good at finding and going into the individual install.rdf files and changing the max version number. Also, this addon may help with the problem, too:
Disable Add-on Compatibility Checks 1.3
As per usual, your mileage may vary.
Has the time come for them to have a “compatible schism” of the browser?
That is, a complicated, bells and whistles version for developers and other advanced users, and a streamlined version for those who just want to use the browser, and what developers develop for it, but don’t want to futz around with additional gizmos, thingamabobs and other performance inhibitors themselves.
When I finally went from version 3.6 to v. 14 in August it took forever for me to recreate my screen the way I want it. The whole layout was changed to more "modern" looking. Now when I upgrade it leaves the layout alone, just disables extensions. Grrr...
I've had this happen in FireFox, Opera, and Google, it's not JUST an IE thing. But, yeah that is part of it.
You would think so
I don’t want a browser IDE, I want a browser to workee. They should figure out why the games on facebook run 5 times faster on all the other browsers and fix that.
I've used, at one time or another: IE, FireFox, Google Chrome, Sea Monkey, Safari, Opera, and Komander (or whatever that KDE default browser is in Linux).
I pretty much use IE and Chrome in Windows and FireFox in Linux.
That's nothing, I tried IE 8 and the whole thing went nuts. Showed only images and NO text ... I am not kidding! I could not read any website. Needless to say it is now off my PC.
Actually, I've had good luck with IE 9.
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