Mozilla Gets Places Back in Firefox 3, Prepares for Tagging
There has been some good news lately on the progress of Firefox 3. Mozilla was able to get the backend of Places back into the latest nightly releases, but as of right now you won’t notice many differences. Once Places has been completed, it will offer a central location for users to manage things like their RSS feeds, website history, and bookmarks.
Firefox 3 Alpha 5 is due out around June 1, and by that time they will have Places functional, but it is doubtful that they will get around to polishing the frontend (the actual interface) by that point. Here are some tips that were pointed out in the forum regarding the use of Places as it stands right now:
- Backup your bookmarks before running the latest nightly of Firefox 3! The file that you need to backup is called bookmarks.html and is located in your Firefox profile folder. Of course, there is an automatic backup created called bookmarks.preplaces.html just in case anything terrible should happen and for those who are too lazy to back it up themselves.
- When you run the Firefox 3 nightly for the first time it will migrate from bookmarks.html to places.sqlite. The places.sqlite is the new storage location for your bookmarks, but Firefox 3 will also keep the bookmarks.html file up-to-date in case you want to switch back to Firefox 2. However, if you switch back to Firefox 2 and modify your bookmarks the changes will not appear in Firefox 3 the next time you launch it. This is because Firefox 2 doesn’t keep the places.sqlite file up-to-date like Firefox 3 does for bookmarks.html.
Here is a quick screenshot to show you that there is no difference to the interface yet, even though the backup file for Places has been created which verifies that Places is running:
I also did a little digging, and noticed that in Firefox 3 Alpha 6 (due out June 29) more functionality will be added to Places, including tagging capabilities. I eventually came across this image that demonstrates four different methods of implementing tags in the bookmarks:
The problem that they are trying to conquer is getting around those people who don’t understand what tags are and how they are used. Judging by the smiley faces in the mockup, they have determined the last option (the one furthest to the right) to be the best. I would have to agree with that because if I was going to bookmark or tag a site I would want to have a nice unified interface for doing it. This solution provides just that. The only thing that I’m hoping they implement is an auto-complete feature that will show a listing of matching tags as the user types them.
So what do you think about the tagging being built-in to Firefox?
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Tags: Firefox, Freeware, Software, Firefox 3
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I’m not sure I ‘get it’. Is it like, tagging in Gmail?, where all mail is stored in one place essentially, tagged, n then you view the tags. Er, is it a total replacement to folders that works in the same way? If so, what benefit does it provide over the current folder system? Smaller bookmarks file size, faster, what? If none, then this just seems like yet another not very necessary extra feature to bloat it up.
I am looking forward to this, hopefully it would be put in the final version. As I know in FF 2.0 it was taken out.
At first I though the real interface was back. Reading on showed it’s just background file changes. Let me know when places is really back in it (although then it’ll just be a feature limited UI at first). I don’t think tagging is all that great. I like the last option best, because it doesn’t add unnecessary clicks. Also, that page drop-down menu from the URL bar looks pretty cool. I like that more than tags. Also, is Places going to have duplicate bookmark checking? That would be very helpful.
Oh I forgot to mention that the Places in FF3.0 seems very simialr to the one that is avaible in Epiphany browser.
Yes!
Fx3 just keeps getting better and better!
It’s good to see Places starting to take shape, and on schedule, too - looks like they might actually be able to keep up with the schedule.
Won’t be long before I have to sort my bookmarks out… I keep putting off going through several thousand of the things until I can use tags to replace all those folders and duplicates…
Regarding duplicate checking - with the move to SQLite, it does sound like something that ought to be under Tools->Options. But if not, there’s always the Bookmark Duplicate Detector extension, which should get more efficient under SQLite too.
@xpgeek: Tagging would mostly look like a folder system much like how Del.icio.us handles it in the browser. The main benefit is that you can place the same bookmark under multiple tags, so that finding them is much easier later on. To do the same thing with bookmarks you would need to bookmark a site multiple times.
@Motang: I guess Epiphany is based on the Gecko rendering that Firefox uses so that is understandable…kind of.
@nester007x: No, the interface isn’t back yet which is something I was expecting to see when trying it out. At first I didn’t even think that it was running. Of course, they need to start somewhere and logically the backend makes sense.
As far as the duplicate bookmark checker goes, I don’t think we’ll see that feature included because that is more of something they would expect an extension to cover.
@Oropher: It is definitely good to see Places starting to make its way back in. And you have thousands of bookmarks!?! Wow!
Actually, there are a few UI changes already, albeit minimal.
More here: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Places.....ifferences
Yeah, I just saw the post by Mozilla that said that. I don’t think I would have noticed those changes though.