Outfoxed

[roadrunnertwice]

Matt, a casual pal of mine from school, started working at the AF just recently, and while I was sitting next to him today yesterday, I saw him go to the actual Yahoo.com web page in order to run a search for something. He was browsing with Firefox anyway (the AF PCs have some revision of 1.5 installed), so I leaned over and suggested he use the search box in the right-hand corner instead, pointing out that if you click on the search logo icon in the 1.x series, it drops down into a menu of search engines (which includes Yahoo by default and can be added-to at whim). I swear I saw the top of his head come off. It turns out that he uses something called Netcaptor at home (which makes the second time I've ever heard of that browser), and the ready presence of that kind of raw power--by default--kind of blew his mind.

So I did the socially responsible thing and blew his mind the rest of the way, demonstrating (in rapid succession) Live Bookmarks, incremental find, and the use of apostrophe-start FAYT plus ctrl-enter to open links in new tabs without looking at the screen. (THAT one was the real pisser, since it turns out he's a mousehater.) Then I wrote down the URL for today's Windows nightly of Bon Echo and told him he should skip 1.5 and go straight for that, since it will let him start using the new inline spellchecker, beefed-out search engine manager, and improved feed handling well before the rest of the world knows what it's in for. I am pretty confidant that Team Mozilla has a new convert.

Man, imagine if I was this dedicated a shill for someone who paid me for it.

In related news, I randomly ran into (いきなり出会った、not "collided with") Josh today on the way to work, so we biked most of the way to Mac together. I'd forgotten he was in the city, and it turns out he's living like five blocks away from me. So we'll try and hang out once he gets back from his pending California trip.

Comments

[fozwalla.livejournal.com]

You memorized the goddamn URL for the nightly? XD

[fozwalla.livejournal.com]

edit: Oh, I guess it's not that long or cryptic. Never mind!

Also, what is this 3.0a business (http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/)?

[roadrunnertwice]

Haha, whoops, I totally forgot about the latest/ folder! Yeah, that would have been the easy way to do it, wouldn't it have?

And yes, they're working on 2.0 and 3.0 simultaneously. The scoop is that Firefox 1.5 and Firefox 2.0 are both based on the Mozilla 1.8 core--FF2 is going to have a lot of user-interface improvements, and will implement a few new tricks at the core level, but it will basically render pages the same exact way FF1.5 did. Firefox 3, on the other hand, is based on the trunk version of the Mozilla core, which will eventually become the 1.9 branch. It's going to get all of the UI improvements from FF2, but it's ALSO getting a truckload of huge, sweeping, grandiose changes to the core rendering code.

For example, all of the really low-level graphics stuff is currently done individually for each operating system. With FF3, they're dumping all that and handing drawing duty off to a cross-platform graphics library called Cairo. Programmers love this because while Cairo has different backends for every operating system it runs on, the way Mozilla interacts with it will be the same everywhere, so in terms of stuff like drawing rectangles and lines and shading, it's as if they're only writing for one platform. The reason WE should be excited about this is that Cairo is a lot more modern than what they were using before, and will allow some seriously cool shit. Rotating and scaling HTML, for example. Oh, and if you don't have a 3D video processor, performance should stay pretty much the same, but if you've got anything reasonably modern at all, life will suddenly become very, very fast--all HTML/CSS rendering is going to be hardware accelerated.

As you can expect, it's a bit of a wreck right now, which is why they're doing a 2.0 release based off of the older Mozilla 1.8 branch: they don't have to rush the 1.9 core, and they get to ship an interim release that will still look and feel a lot more modern in terms of the way users talk to it. Also, it'll let them get in one more Windows 9x-compatible release before abandoning that platform--FF3 isn't going to install or run on anything older than Windows 2000.

[fozwalla.livejournal.com]

Huh. IE is going to try to keep up, I've heard. They're supposedly already working on versions 8 and 9, although I think the release dates are stretched way farther out. Each new version is going to be a big leap away from the previous one, like 7 was to 6. I know you're on a Mac and this is near-irrelevant, but ... just saying. MS is trying to go head to head with Google, and if they want to be taken seriously they're going to have to get the really basic things down (like decent page rendering in their own damn browser). They'll probably keep up with the latest tech from now on.

Oh, and if you don't have a 3D video processor, performance should stay pretty much the same, but if you've got anything reasonably modern at all, life will suddenly become very, very fast--all HTML/CSS rendering is going to be hardware accelerated.

There's nothing on the web yet that really benefits from a decent 3D card, is there? (Aside from more complex Flash stuff, but that doesn't count.) Maybe some of the really advanced stuff done using ajax?

Man, it's weird to realize that Flash is probably going to be unnecessary in a decade, or at least that it won't be the one thing people go to when they need animation.

It's also weird to realize that web technology (browsers, languages, etc) is in its own little stone age right now, and that it's going to go through enormous changes over time. Just twenty years from now, what we know as the "web" is probably going to be unrecognizable. The standalone "browser" app will be in a tech museum somewhere. MS integrated IE with their OS once upon a time, got sued for it, and ended up making gazillionaires out of the higher-ups at antivirus companies, but in the future the integration will likely happen again in a bigger way, across all common OSes. Huge web apps and remote storage will be the norm. The common 'net access machine (an advanced thin client/Internet appliance) will probably be built inside the walls of a house when it's first constructed, and it'll make itself available to a wide variety of I/O devices, like UHDTVs and weird keyboards of the future, all embedded everywhere. (Heh. Imagine seeing Microsoft or Apple branding on your walls.) It'll all be serviced remotely, or by handymen/women, or by the shrinking portion of the general population who actually knows anything about these unseen and unheard machines. Only nerds, scientists, and other riffraff will go on buying and customizing PC towers, and putting them in their rooms and stuff, as enhancements to the gizmos in the walls. 2026 will finally be the year of Linux ... since most of the other OS juggernauts won't be developing desktop OSes anymore.

Anyway, I wonder if Mozilla will still be around in 20 years, and in what capacity. Makers of a respected net OS? Hardware manufacturer? No idea.

[fozwalla.livejournal.com]

... much later ...

Whoa, did I get derailed there.

[roadrunnertwice]

Hahahaha, it's all good.

Interestingly, one of the very few backend enhancements FF2 brings to the table is a local storage API for web-apps.

And I'm TOTALLY excited about MS trying to make IE7 into a real browser. Lights a fire under people to improve the stuff I actually use. =p The threat of IE7 already made improved tab behavior a more urgent feature for FF2.

[roadrunnertwice]

N...no! I went to ftp.mozilla.org/public/mozilla.org/ and clicked through!

I don't think you can memorize the formula for nightly URLs, because a lot of the time, the different OSes end up compiling at different times of the day, and consequently end up in different directories. (And by knowing that, I've shown myself to be pretty much as dorky as you initially thought.)

[froborr.livejournal.com]

Wait, there's a way in Firefox to open links without using the mouse?

TELL ME HOW!

It will bring me to the verge of a gloriously mouseless existence! If only I could figure out how to do photo-editing and Flash with keyboard alone...

[roadrunnertwice]

Okay.

To search for text in Firefox, you usually just use ctrl-F, same way every other program does. Except instead of opening a dialog, it makes an unobtrusive little bar at the bottom of the window, and then searches the page as you type.

There are two other ways to use that incremental find. The first one is to type slash ("/") and immediately start typing what you're looking for. This does basically the same thing ctrl-f does, though it'll start behaving slightly differently sometime soon.

The second one is to type apostrophe (" ' ") and immediately start typing. THAT only searches for LINKS, and the currently "found" link always has focus on it, so you can "click" it by just hitting enter. To open it in a new tab instead of the current one, hit ctrl-enter. If more than one link on the page has the text you're looking for, you can go to the next or previous result by hitting ctrl-G or shift-ctrl-G.

If you want to leave out the apostrophe, type about:config into the location bar. Find the lines that say "accessibility.typeaheadfind" and "accessibility.typeaheadfind.linksonly," and double-click each of them; now, just starting to type (as long as your cursor isn't in a text area) will start searching for links.

Also, Windows Firefox users can just hit tab repeatedly, and the focus will cycle through every link and control on the page. I find typeahead-find to be more humane, though.

[froborr.livejournal.com]

I knew about tab -- I think that's pretty standard in all Windows browsers -- but it was always more trouble than it was worth. This, however, is awesome! Thank you!