2006-07-21 Trunk builds
Fixes:
- Fixed: 343251 - Add "all tabs" menu to tabstrip to address usability problems with tab overflow / scrolling.
- Fixed: 319078 - [Mac] Handle smooth mousewheel (and two-finger touchpad) scrolling.
- Fixed: 345095 - Find bar only searches for the first character if search string is copied into search bar.
- Fixed: 337491 - Add checkbox for disabling search suggestions (and only use traditional form history autocomplete in the search bar).
- Fixed: 313443 - Caret move events from keyboard input not reported for XUL textboxes, confusing floating input panel on Tablet PCs.
- Fixed: 327932 - Implement search engine update system.
- Fixed: 155053 - Make the spinbuttons a real widget.
- Fixed: 335122 - Clean up XUL Sort Service.
- Fixed: 278981 - Extension mechanism for XPath extension functions.
- Fixed: 344571 - Upgrade cairo to 1.2.0+cvs.
- Fixed: 345057 - [Mac] Improve launch behavior through xpcom fork/exec restart and autoupdate restart.
Fixes for recent regressions:
- Partially fixed: 344895 - Spellchecker hangs Firefox when dealing with a largish textarea.
Trunk regressions:
- Since VC8/Cairo: 329237 - [Windows] Firefox uninstaller fails.
- Since Cairo: 324707 - Animated GIFs leave trails / don't erase in Cairo.
- Since Cairo: 324560 - Can't see many Unicode characters in Cairo.
- Since Jan 26 (FDL): 325296 - [Mac] Opacity doesn't work in HTML. (Switching to Cairo will fix this bug.)
- Since Jan 26 (FDL): 324819 - Fixed positioned elements now lag/flicker when scrolling.
- Since Jan 26 (FDL): 324963 - [Windows] Menu highlight is broken/doesn't show up/not painted.
Trunk checkins between 2006-07-13 06:00 and 2006-07-21 06:00
July 21st, 2006 at 9:39 pm
Ugh, a checkbox for google suggest? If people really don’t like it, and evidence does point to that conclusion, why not remove it altogether? Slow connections make it annoying. Dial-up connections will try to dial just to get suggestions, and steal focus (with spacebar probably cancelling the dialing process, oops!), and the same problem exists with authenticating proxy dialogs. Then there’s the privacy issues, and the issue of what to do with the dialog which warns about submitting insecure forms. All this for a feature of marginal usefulness in the best case, which clobbers a similar existing feature that is already about as useful?
History autocomplete is actually more useful for me, and could be improved with a few tweaks (unify toolbar and google homepage autocomplete lists, for one). We should just all agree that Google suggest isn’t worth implementing, and improve search bar autocomplete instead. If Google somehow improves Suggest (perhaps by integrating with Google’s own search history feature) to the point where they put it on their own homepage themselves, then perhaps it would be good enough to warrant integration with Firefox. Until then, I really don’t see the point.
Is there anyone out there who just loves Google suggest and uses it all the time?
July 21st, 2006 at 9:58 pm
Current trunk builds only show Suggestions *in addition to* (local history) autocomplete entries, and then only when the autocomplete entries don’t fill the dropdown. The dialup problem can probably be fixed, as can the issue of local autocomplete results not appearing until the server has responded to the Suggestions request. Wouldn’t it be better to fix the bugs than eliminate the feature?
July 22nd, 2006 at 2:04 am
Better to remove the feature since people dont like it, it isnt useful, it achieves nothing other than irritation and bandwidth use and its a waste of time putting a lot of resources into fixing something which people dont want anyway when those resources could be doing something far more beneficial….
if they arent careful this is going to turn into bloatware with dozens of features people dont want or need…..hmmm sound familiar?
July 23rd, 2006 at 9:05 pm
I like the new suggest feature in Fx2 and it could be useful for normal people too. If someone knows the first 3 characters of the word but doesn’t know how to exactly spell it it will probably show up in the suggestion list. Suggest could also suggest multiple ways of looking for the same thing(synonyms) or how to finetune the search: “firefox” gives “download” “browser” “extensions” etc. People see the list while typing or while pausing to think about what to exactly type and think “yeah thats the thing I want”.
July 24th, 2006 at 11:39 am
Yes, it would be better to fix all the bugs than to remove it. But *all* the bugs should be fixed, not just some. If someone out there is willing to spend their time fixing this because they love Google Suggest, then that’s fine, it’s an open source project after all. But if nobody is that dedicated to it, better to remove it than force someone to spend their valuable time fixing its bugs. Or worse, to release Firefox 3 with regressions in the search bar UI!
It just seems to me that this is a feature that requires lots of complexity to be added to the autocomplete code for little gain, because Google Suggest is really not very useful.
July 29th, 2006 at 12:42 pm
I personally like the suggest feature of the search bar and will be sad to see it go. I understand that Google suggest is not useful to you, but you have to remember that there is no escaping the 20/80 rule (*) – most people will not use most of the features of any software. But also, you have to remember the sub-clause for that rule: all those 80%, are not using the same 20% of the features – together they probably reach close to a 100% coverage of features available, so while suggestions in the search autocomplete may not be useful to you, its likely that not only its useful to someone, but to that someone its probably within the only 20% of the features that they use.
(*) unless you want to go the way of Epiphany which considers anything other then bookmarks to be a useless browser feature, and I hear that they are going to remove that as well in favor of keyword searches with… hmm… suggestions.