The latest nightly releases of Firefox 3 have a new feature in them that allow you to select items on a site that are not all adjacent to each other. This is often called discontinuous selections, and the result is something similar to the screenshot that I posted to the right.
They designed it to be much like a normal text editor such as Microsoft Word or OpenOffice Writer where you just hold down the Control key while making multiple selections. Then you can copy and paste it into a document or text editor.
This feature will actually be pretty useful for me when copying and pasting things from websites, and it is just the beginning of the good things that are yet to come. There aren’t any precise dates set for Firefox 3 milestones, but they gave a rough timeframe for the future releases as well a list of features to expect:
- Firefox 3 Alpha 4 – Late April 2007
- Places
- Safeguard against data-loss
- Bookmarks never lost between sessions
- New Password Manager
- Growl integration for Mac OS X
- Search engine keyword support
- Places
- Firefox 3 Alpha 5 – Late May 2007
- Places
- Sync infrastructure
- API for extensibility (this makes it easy to integrate with other bookmarking services)
- Backup and restore
- Places
- Firefox 3 Alpha 6 – Late June 2007
- Places
- Sync client
- Unified organizer
- Starring
- Tagging
- Export to other applications
- Full-text indexing
- Extended metadata search
- Improved performance
- Download manager improvements
- Places
- Firefox 3 Beta 1 – Late July 2007
- No new features
- No new features
- Firefox 3 Beta 2 – Late September 2007
- No new features
Source: Firefox Extension Guru
I’m not very impressed. Essentially, alpha4’s places which we won’t get till the end of April are the stripped-down version we were told to expect in the end off March. It looks that that really is the ONLY new feature. I guess there will be some minor changes to the download manager, but that’s it. It’s now been confirmed, Fx3 can be summed up fully by places and page rendering. Are they even gonna toss in that everlasting “restart firefox” button? To be honest, I expect Fx3 to be far less improvement than Fx2 (which people rejected). We have 3 alphas and no noticeable features! By this time Fx2 had everything you could think of! Places could turn out to be very impressive, but if you ask me it’s long overdue. Come on, people were expecting this in Fx2!? Hopefully “sync infrastructure” means bookmarks will be auto-synced to a site for anywhere access! That’s really what I’d consider the best part of places. But we have to wait until late May to get it?! When I see “unified organizer,” does that mean places won’t even combine bookmarks and history until late June?! Whatever happed to incorporating ext’s like that address-bar enhancer or those unified notifications?
Breaking my balls Mozilla!
I agree that the features are slow in rolling out
However it could be worse
We could all be stuck with IE
This list does make it seem like Firefox 3 won’t feature any more improvements other than Places and rendering enhancements. While those are definitely important, this does sound a little disappointing, especially since they asked for so much input from users on new feature ideas. However, I don’t ever recall hearing about the discontinuous selection feature in the latest nightly, so is it possible that Mozilla still plans to release some of the planned/theoretical features by rolling them out slowly and unannounced in the nightlies?
Firefox 3 will be more of a major upgrade than it was with 1.5 to 2.0 as 2.0 was essentially 1.5 but with some feature updates.
[wiki.mozilla.org]
Firefox 3 on Linux/Mac OSX could be a improvement with things like Firefox forms as it currently looks like Win9x on Firefox 2.0 and earlier unless you do some worarounds like [gnome-look.org] – Clean Firefox Forms?content=21812 . Tt was turned on before but there were some issues with gtk themes and such on Linux before.
although i share most of the same disappointment that netster007x has, i do think we should remember 2 main things:
1. mozilla/firefox relies on much less resources then it’s commercial competitors, and it still managed to ship out a 3rd version in relatively short time frame.
2. places is the first “in the browser” system that offer many of the things we could only have through web 2.0 web based services. it is also a very important step towered a more structured web content.
it will offer a much more flexible and better way to save loads and loads of information.
in fact, i am very unimpressed by most of what is offered online in this area (although Rawsugar making [blog.rawsugar.com]), and i hope places will be everything Del.icio.us and company are not.
so better later then never, and hopefully it won’t cause Firefox to loose ground to IE.
From what I understand regarding Places they are going to make it capable of syncing with popular services like Del.icio.us but each service will be available as its own add-on. That way Firefox won’t get cluttered up with a bunch of services that most users don’t need. Not only that but the API will make it easily extensible so that users can create their own add-ons for nearly all of the services available.
As MetaMan pointed out there will probably be features incorporated that they are yet to mention, but the major feature will definitely be Places.
Ryan, when you say add-on, do you mean in the form of an extension or just some type of smaller plug-in, like search plug-ins? Hopefully it’s the 2nd choice. If it requires an extension then I’ll really be disappointed because there are already extensions that let Fx2 sync with bookmark sites. If this new thing requires extensions, then it makes the programmers rewrite their extensions while the user still has to go through the same ext hassle and extra recourse use as with Fx2!
Sorry, I did mean something more like plug-ins because most of these bookmarking sites have API’s that are so simple to use that it should only require some URL’s and then the processing of the bookmarks will be the same for most sites.
So, according to that schedule a milestone including a limited version of places should be released late April. Well, it’s April 24th and still no sign of places in the nightlies. Are they even going to be able to maintain this feature-limited schedule? You know, if there weren’t so many great extensions Firefox really wouldn’t be anywhere good.
I’ve been wondering the same thing. I would have thought that something would have appeared in the nightlies by now even if it only adds the same functionality as the current bookmarking system, just with a new UI. It’s probably going on a year since they pulled Places out of Firefox 2 already which is pretty ridiculous.
If you go to the Mozilla Wiki, you will see that the [wiki.mozilla.org] has been [wiki.mozilla.org] According to the new schedule, Places will appear in Alpha 5, which is to be released in late May. Alpha 4 is still slated to be released in April, which is odd, because there are only four days left. Mozilla better get its act together. Places is supposed to be the big feature of this version and they know it. If they cannot get it working in time I’m afraid they will postpone the final release until early 2008.
Wow…pushing it back another Alpha release. And they had said that it almost made the last Alpha release and that it was going to be put in the nightlies about a week after Alpha 3. This is very disappointing news.