Firefox 29 Beta Pulls In Many Features

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Firefox 29 Beta Pulls In Many Features

Mozilla has put out the first beta of Firefox 29.0 and with it comes some exciting features...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTYzODM

[liam]

Has anyone else noticed that nightly has turned on browser.remote.tabs? That places each tab in its own process.

[zanny]

So I main firefox beta (daily updates and breakage isn't my thing on Aurora, I do enough debugging in my day). So I just got smacked with Australis.

First thing is first, this is essential: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...themerestorer/

You can get your tab real estate back and get rid of that stupid pointless Chrome ripoff menu nobody asked for.

So of course, gripes:

• The icon theme is now monochrome. A lot of system tray and folder themes have been doing this monochrome white on black thing for a while. Just as a reminder, I *gasp* have a COLOR monitor. Shocking, I know, it is kind of a new thing to not have black and white displays any more. I'd like my RSS icon (whose brand is recognized by the orange icon) the right color, please.
• The navbar no longer intelligently shows / hides icons that are relevent anymore. Most importantly, the bookmark icon is now bound to the bookmark menu and never hides itself in the navbar. So now I'm wasting like a 1/5 my screen width on useless icons I use once a month.
• The whole thing got glossed over with some stupid reflection layer that makes me afraid to point a bright light at my screen in fear of melting my eyes.
• Of course, without the addon to fix this mess (at least it works, so one up for FF over Chrome) you waste half your tab bar on stupid curvy lines. Even with this addon, though, mousing over a tab no longer presents the close button, so you have to enter a tab to close it.

~rant. Just think this whole UI "overhaul" is a waste of time, and I'm losing functionality in the process.

[Daktyl198]

Has anyone else noticed that nightly has turned on browser.remote.tabs? That places each tab in its own process.

HOLY CRAP THANK YOU FOR NOTICING
But browser.tabs.remote.autostart is set to false. What does that one do? (also, it's browser.tabs.remote )

• The icon theme is now monochrome. A lot of system tray and folder themes have been doing this monochrome white on black thing for a while. Just as a reminder, I *gasp* have a COLOR monitor. Shocking, I know, it is kind of a new thing to not have black and white displays any more. I'd like my RSS icon (whose brand is recognized by the orange icon) the right color, please.
• The navbar no longer intelligently shows / hides icons that are relevent anymore. Most importantly, the bookmark icon is now bound to the bookmark menu and never hides itself in the navbar. So now I'm wasting like a 1/5 my screen width on useless icons I use once a month.
• The whole thing got glossed over with some stupid reflection layer that makes me afraid to point a bright light at my screen in fear of melting my eyes.
• Of course, without the addon to fix this mess (at least it works, so one up for FF over Chrome) you waste half your tab bar on stupid curvy lines. Even with this addon, though, mousing over a tab no longer presents the close button, so you have to enter a tab to close it.

* Monochrome icons look nearly identical on every monitor and have high contrast, making them easier to see (and much easier to deal with when it comes to super-colorful themes)
* What icons? The forward button? That hides... The "stop loading" turns into "reload" when done, like always... what else is there? And yeah, the bookmark menu/icon thing is kinda annoying, I'll give you that (but I mean, what's the point in having two buttons?)
* Mine follows my mostly-flat GTK theme, so I'm sorry if I don't know what this gloss-over is you're talking about...
* "waste half your tab" aka 20 pixels, if even (the content goes inside of the curve a bit). Also, the Classic Theme Restorer is breaking the close buttons. For me (default Australis on Nightly), the close buttons are actually always present so no, you don't have to select a tab to close it.

[GraysonPeddie]

CSS3 Variables... Interesting!

Too bad I get this message in Chrome 34 (Beta) when I had a look at the website: http://css3.bradshawenterprises.com/blog/css-variables/

Bad luck, your browser doesn't support variables

Hah... It's been since August 2012 as written in a web page and I don't know why Chrom{e,ium} 33 or 34 supports CSS3 variables.

Making use of CSS3 variables can be of very helpful tool for maintaining color scheme.

[smitty3268]

So I main firefox beta (daily updates and breakage isn't my thing on Aurora, I do enough debugging in my day). So I just got smacked with Australis.

Me too, although it seems our impressions are very different.

I definitely see hints of Chrome coming through in this interface, but that's not really a bad thing. It's not just a copy or anything.

I seem to have exactly the same amount of space used by the interface as before. I don't like the transparency, but the curves and new menu work just fine.

If anything, it seems to be a little more responsive than before, which is always nice.

I'll have to use it a bit more to confirm, but right now my first impression is that all the noise about this is about nothing. It's slightly nicer than before, but not really that much of a change, good or bad.

[BSDude]

Me too, although it seems our impressions are very different.

I definitely see hints of Chrome coming through in this interface, but that's not really a bad thing. It's not just a copy or anything.

I seem to have exactly the same amount of space used by the interface as before. I don't like the transparency, but the curves and new menu work just fine.

If anything, it seems to be a little more responsive than before, which is always nice.

I'll have to use it a bit more to confirm, but right now my first impression is that all the noise about this is about nothing. It's slightly nicer than before, but not really that much of a change, good or bad.

There will always be people that welcome UI changes and those that don't.

[balouba]

i hate UI changes but i must say, while i was ready to hate on australis.. its not that bad.. in fact.. turns out that after a few days i started liking it (im a nightly user)

also yes remoting of tab is on but they're not actually running in a separate process.. turning on this thing did that before.. so i don't know what it does now ;-)

turning on remote autostart does turn on multiprocess tho (you need to restart the browser)

[liam]

HOLY CRAP THANK YOU FOR NOTICING
But browser.tabs.remote.autostart is set to false. What does that one do? (also, it's browser.tabs.remote )

Hmm, you're right. The autostart is a new key-value they must've added. Back in December all you had to do to turn on process separation was toggle the one I mentioned. The fact that .remote was no longer off made me think they're switched it on.
So a search indicates they toggled .remote around the middle of Feb so that you can explicitly launch a window of of process. The autostart key toggled to true turns on oop for all tabs (presumably all new tabs, that is).

[liam]

Before you try this make sure to create a new profile just for this.
If you want to turn on skia for drawing perform a search in about:config for cairo and replace it with skia (you should have to do it in two places).
Skia is so much faster at drawing in canvas you won't believe it (also it uses less CPu).