Excellent Innovations in Firefox 1.0

The upcoming 1.0 version of Firefox has several new features and user interface enhancements to further improve it’s excellent usability and design.

Firefox Features Screenshot

Firefox has incorporated the “Find” dialog into the the main browser window rather than having a little popup come up. Not only can you do the typical find previous and next within a page, but you can quickly highlight found instances.

Popup blocking has also improved. Instead of just placing a small “!” at the bottom of the screen, you now get a more noticable, yet non intrusive, dialog at the top of the page. This is great for people new to the feature who may never notice the “!” and just assume that the website is broken if they miss a requested or expected popup.

Firefox now also detects RSS feeds and displays an orange “RSS” icon at the bottom of the browser. Right now clicking it shows the feeds and gives you the option of bookmarking them. Hopefully in the future that functionality will improve even more to have some of the features that the upcoming version of Safari will have.

38 Responses to “Excellent Innovations in Firefox 1.0”

  1. Dr.Lun Says:

    Hm… Popup with [!] is great. If I don’t want window then, I also don’t want half-screen notice of it.

  2. midnight Says:

    Yeah, I hope there is an option to turn this ‘feature’ off.

    I don’t need a row across the top of the window alerting me to the fact that I’m not seeing something I didn’t want to see in the first place.

  3. R. Seoul Says:

    Yeah, I have serious objections to a toolbar across the whole window telling me that it has blocked a popup - who cares, the “I” was just fine.

    Next we’ll be having a popup window telling us that we’ve blocked a banner ad!

    Also, doesn’t every app have a find dialog instead of yeat another toolbar?! Soon Firefox won’t have enough room for the web pages with all these toolbars.

    This kind of cr*p should be left as an Extension, or have the option to kill it.

  4. marvin Says:

    well, well, well… seems firefox is gonna replace something bothering, with something awful. and they are gonna add support for RSS… next they are going to include a mail client, and sir… wasn’t that a different and overbloated browser called mozilla we were running from??

  5. ath Says:

    The bar is completely optional, the first time it shows up you can click on it and choose ‘Don’t show this message when popups are blocked.’ .. and the find toolbar auto-hides (ie., it is only visible when you are searching).
    Although, I do understand the need to complain about it, since it is different and all.

  6. kidproto Says:

    Mozilla and FireFox need SVG compiled in standard like yesterday!!!

  7. [ct] Says:

    The bar only shows up the first time and I’m sure it will be a great help for new users. People have a tendency to overlook status bar icons, sadly.

    Also - and I’m mainly talking to R. Seoul here -, you should really give the Find Toolbar a chance before bashing it. I used to be sceptical about it but I’ve grown to like it. I think it’s more convenient than having to open a dialog and, again thinking of new users, Find As You Type used to give no visual feedback except the highlighting, which has probably confused quite a few people; now, they get a nice toolbar for it.

  8. errr Says:

    Why not just leave the find feature to the Googlebar? Do I really need another built in bar to find/highlight/select when the Googlebar does all of this and more?

  9. keytotime Says:

    How about instead of having an auto-hide toolbar at the bottom we have a search icon near the home button ann when we click it. It open’s the new search bar at the bottom.

  10. keytotime Says:

    Also can we get a window’s screenshot

  11. Novell Says:

    Windows screenshot.. g
    How different do you think it looks in Windows anyway ?
    Not that I use Windows but my vote goes to “not different at all”.

  12. interOperate Says:

    kidproto is spot on .. Firefox should come standard with SVG support

  13. Oliver Clevont Says:

    Will the Information Bar Spoofing be fixed with this one?
    http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=252257

  14. email Says:

    firefox is newb friendly, anorexic, the Fisher Price design team have obviously created the “front end” and a few other crits that i can’t be arsed mentioning…..

  15. syd Says:

    You know, the best thing about mozilla is that just about everything is configurable. Removing any toolbar, including the File menu is doable with simple text scripts. Personally, I will give the Find toolbar a chance. The only thing I can’t figure out about firefox is how to over-ride plugins. I’ve been trying to change my mpeg player from Quicktime to something else for quite some time, and can’t seem to find where this God foresaken QT plugin is configured.

  16. rainer zufall Says:

    Every time soemthing new arrives everyone is crying “NO”, “Don’t need it”,… have you thought about that YOU may don’t need it, but other people? I’m using firefox/phoenix for a long time and it’s true: you can change nearly everything in the browser editing the text-files, so why do you care about a single bar which is intended to help new user to use firefox? And by the way: all you people complaining about new features/design/…, have you ever thought about that you’re using a completly FREE browser programmed and provided with extensions/themes from people doing that in their free time? Think of that the next time you call something “crap”,ok ? Free software lives from their popularity, so help them, make constructive proposals, find new user…

  17. Kmos Says:

    What about make the upgrade option working !? instead of installing everytime the last mozilla and the new features… Think about that!

  18. Luca Says:

    is it better Mozilla or FireFox?

  19. James Says:

    I hope they fix the annoying tendency for it to chop off part of the url you enter in the address bar. Eg. If I start typing http://www.microsoft.com it will display my previous entry, when I click on it, half the time I’ll end up with http://www.mic.com or http://www.micros.com etc. It’s been doing this ever since I first started using Firefox back at 0.8

  20. Eddie Says:

    When will the FavIcon Bug be fixed? Will this ever happen?
    A Browser that claims “I’m a 1.0 version” should not “forget” the bookmark icons each time I start a new session/clear the cache…
    Of course Firefox is the best browser around and I really love it :-)

  21. Anon Says:

    The forgetting favicons but is fixed.

    I also like the highlighting of the location bar when on an HTTPS site :)

  22. ironfist Says:

    Veeery nice Butterfly there.. MorphOS Power! :)

  23. MaxiGroovy Says:

    “I’m a 1.0 version” should not “forget” the bookmark icons

    Like IE (version 6) does this right…

    Find bar looks very good!!

  24. Indigo2 Says:

    What’s that theme (Not the firefox theme, the OS-wide one) you’re using there and where can I get it?

    Thanks

  25. snarkeater Says:

    I guess I’ll just stick to 0.93 forever then.

  26. Marcus Vorwaller Says:

    I failed to mention, the new features can be disabled if you like.

    The Mac OS X theme I’m using in that picture is Aluminum Alloy. One of my favorites, very polished. You can get it here:
    http://www.macthemes.net/articles/reviews/000031.php

  27. -df- Says:

    Did you preview these features from a nightly build or did you get access to something on a fork that is not public yet?

  28. Andrew Booth Says:

    I teach an online course in Bioinformatics. I’d really like to use something other than IE6, but our online material uses SVG graphics… I can get Firefox to use the Adobe SVG Viewer 6 plugin in Windows, but many of our students use Linux. Come on - SVG is the W3C standard. It should be your highest priority.

  29. J. J. Ramsey Says:

    Will middle-clicking links actually work on Mac OS X? (Yes, there are Mac users with 3-button mice.) It’s annoying to have middle-click work in Safari but not Firefox.

  30. Slash Says:

    If you like these themes on your Gnome look here :
    http://art.gnome.org/themes/gtk2/615/
    http://art.gnome.org/themes/gtk2/614/

  31. Clax Clinton Says:

    I think that book-marks should be the same as in
    Gnome Epiphany, namely that a book-mark can be part
    of several categories. Not only one, like in the todays
    hirarchiacal book-mark.

  32. utomo Says:

    need better download manager. now the download manager is really not enough.
    for some website still have some problems displaying it correctly, meanwhile on IE it is good. we need to consider to improve it (I know some of the site is not using teh standard correctly), but user can feel bed if it is OK on IE but bad on Mozilla.
    More Icon please, look at the MyIE where we can access many things from the toolbar and menu. but we can customize it when needed.
    and many others improvements

    for the thunderbird, they need to be more securing the data, so the data cannot be copied to other computer easily without the password. the data itself need to be password protected. and the calendar and others also need to be integrated.

  33. Marcus Vorwaller Says:

    Middle clicking works to open tabs works in OS X. I’ve had more success with the Kensignton mouse drivers though. I still have not been able to get my Logitech mouse to open tabs by middle clicking.

  34. Gabriel Says:

    Firefox wasn’t to be a very basic implementation of mozilla browser? type ahead was just fine. why cumber the screen with more toolbars (i will not enter the popup alerto row).

    This kinda of things should be extensions.

    i just hope that i can at least drag the buttons from that toolbar that i find useful into another toolbar.

  35. Marcus Vorwaller Says:

    Gabriel - the point of the ‘cumbersome toolbar’ is to allow you to quickly highlight all found instances and to unify the standard find dialog and the find as you type dialog. As with everything else, this can be disabled. I don’t think it should be a plugin because I believe this is functionality the majority of users will want.

    Again… the point of the popup notification is to alert new users that they’ve missed a popup.

    Here’s a scenario. A user visits a site that pops up a new window for Flash content (while I think this is a bad practice, many movie sites do it). Popup blocking blocks the window and the user figures the site is broken and leaves. Now they will have a more obvious indication that they’ve missed a popup (which they are free to disable at any time).

  36. Your Mother Says:

    Son; I have told you again and again that the possessive form of the word “it” is “its”, not “it’s”. Your second-grade teacher taught you this but you stubbornly refuse to learn this basic rule of writing. Today would be a good day to begin to use the right word.
    Your father says to remind you that the word “it’s” is the equivalent of “it is” or “it has”.

  37. Jesterace Says:

    Heh actually that popup blocker notification in the form of that alert will be quite similar to the way IE with XP SP2 does. Honestly when firefox implemented that new download manager i was disapointed. I was much happier with the way Firebird 0.6 downloaded apps in a little download applet that showed the progress. Not some download window that gets cluttered with apps that I hate clearing every so often.

  38. Firefox Says:

    Firefox.fr