Firefox 4.0 features.

[patrickjdempsey]

I'm watching the video on this link and there's some fun stuff coming:

http://beltzner.ca/mike/2010/05/10/fire ... mpowering/

In addition to the add-ons manager and new theme we have seen in the trunk builds, new features will include:


App tabs - tabs for web applications stickied to the tab strip and lacking the traditional navigation toolbars.

Customizable tab strip - this is already in the trunk, you can move all of your navigation buttons down to the tab strip!

Permissions manager - allows you to control cookies/site settings/logins etc on a per-site basis.

Dialogs locked to tabs - instead of forcing the user to close-out a site-specific dialog before using the rest of the browser, the new dialogs will live in the tab and the user is free to navigate other tabs.

Install add-ons without restart - not all add-ons require restart to install and developers will be able to mark their extensions as not needing a restart. I'm not sure if this will also apply to enabling/disabling those add-ons but that would be cool. Note that this is separate from Personas/Jetpack and there was no mention in the video of switching themes without restart.

Web Inspector - similar to the DOMinspector, the new Web Inspector will actually be built-in to Firefox, a boon for developers!

Official 64-bit builds - for Windows and OSX.

JagerMonkey - for faster JavaScript base code interpretation.

Aero Peek - support for Windows.

MultiTouch - for both Firefox Mobile and for desktop Firefox for use with touch monitors.

You can probably bet that support for WebM, Google's new open video standard based on VP8, will also come stock.

Edit: Oopps... totally forgot these:

Direct Write/Direct 2D - Hardware support for graphics and text acceleration.

Electrolysis - full multi-process support including OOPP, OOP Tabs, and possibly OOP Applications.

[ajnauron]

Official 64-bit builds - for Windows and OSX.

Oh yes. This+D2D=awesome.

[grenavitar]

Official 64-bit builds - for Windows and OSX.

Oh yes. This+D2D=awesome.

I guess this is as good a place as any to ask: What can we expect the benefits of 64bit to be?

[GTK66]

A 64Bit for windows will be great but that being said was this roadmap that was published on last Monday's Conference call a lie?

[dbcooper.dk]

UI responsiveness is probably the big thing for me. It seems they are making good progress on separate processes for tabs etc for mobile- will this make it into FF4.0?

[patrickjdempsey]

Official 64-bit builds - for Windows and OSX.

Oh yes. This+D2D=awesome.

I guess this is as good a place as any to ask: What can we expect the benefits of 64bit to be?

Since the browser would be optimized for a 64-bit processor/OS everything should be faster.

[patrickjdempsey]

A 64Bit for windows will be great but that being said was this roadmap that was published on last Monday's Conference call a lie?

A lie how?

Edit: the 64-bit announcement was part of the same meeting. Did you watch the entire 50-minute video? Everything I mention in this post is covered in that video.

[Omega X]

UI responsiveness is probably the big thing for me. It seems they are making good progress on separate processes for tabs etc for mobile- will this make it into FF4.0?

I'm not sure. The separate processes for tabs seems to be taking them a while. A lot of subsystems still have to be adjusted for the new model.

The UI responsiveness comes from the Async rewrites.

[dbcooper.dk]

UI responsiveness is probably the big thing for me. It seems they are making good progress on separate processes for tabs etc for mobile- will this make it into FF4.0?

I'm not sure. The separate processes for tabs seems to be taking them a while. A lot of subsystems still have to be adjusted for the new model.

The UI responsiveness comes from the Async rewrites.

Got a link to a moz wiki or bugzilla page? Has this already landed in the nightlies?

[GTK66]

A 64Bit for windows will be great but that being said was this roadmap that was published on last Monday's Conference call a lie?

A lie how?

Edit: the 64-bit announcement was part of the same meeting. Did you watch the entire 50-minute video? Everything I mention in this post is covered in that video.

That was when I thought that Mozilla dropped the development of 3.7/4.0 and just was going to make it 3.6.4. I was totally wrong. Yes I did watch the entire video and if Mozilla comes out with a 64 Bit Browser, it will rock.

[Omega X]

UI responsiveness is probably the big thing for me. It seems they are making good progress on separate processes for tabs etc for mobile- will this make it into FF4.0?

I'm not sure. The separate processes for tabs seems to be taking them a while. A lot of subsystems still have to be adjusted for the new model.

The UI responsiveness comes from the Async rewrites.

Got a link to a moz wiki or bugzilla page? Has this already landed in the nightlies?

No, its still not in the nightlies.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.c ... ectrolysis
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=516752
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

[dbcooper.dk]

Awesome, thanks mate.

[AmorAmor]

Will a 64 bit firefox work with 32 bit plugins? Like flash and silverlight etc

[Omega X]

Will a 64 bit firefox work with 32 bit plugins? Like flash and silverlight etc

Yes.

This is done through Out Of Process Plugins. Because the browser no long has to fully manage the plugin, the 32bit plugin-container can run the plugin separately and talk back and forth to the 64bit Firefox process.

[teoli2003]

Will a 64 bit firefox work with 32 bit plugins? Like flash and silverlight etc

Yes.

In fact, no. Theoritically they could do a 32-bit plugin-container.exe but they didn't (yet?). There is an open bug on Mac as the plugins shiped with Apple (among them Java) cannot be used with the 64-bit Firefox (even with OOPP).

Third-parties on Linux did such a container though.