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Firefox 3 beta 5

The latest beta of Firefox 3 is out, and Mozilla Links describes what they deem to be a long list of new features. As usual, they tend to be Windows oriented, which is kind of irritating. All the screenshots are from Windows with the exception of a couple of token Linux efforts. And, as usual, they crow about big improvements that have not yet made their way to the Mac. I suppose we should be glad to have a Mac version at all, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that the Mac is an afterthought in the process. It makes me glad we have Camino as an all-Mac alternative built with the same Gecko engine.

Posted Wednesday, April 2, 2008 in

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  1. Mozilla Links is an independent site and I’m guessing the guy that runs it is a Windows user. Don’t mistake a windows slant in anyone’s coverage of the Firefox releases for a slant from Mozilla itself.

    We’ve put huge amounts of work into making Firefox on Mac both a first class Firefox release and a first class Mac citizen.

    The overwhelming majority of Mozilla full-time coders are running Macs and care very much about Mac. It’s just a difficult environment to work, and there’s quite a bit less community and volunteer contributions from Mac users and we depend on community contributions.

    Take Linux for example. The overwhelming majority of the Linux native look and feel work for Firefox (which is just astonishing) came from volunteers who were passionate about making Firefox on Linux rock. I’d love to see that kind of enthusiasm, commitment, and most importantly code, coming from Mac users.

    When Linux users weren’t satisfied with the pace of Firefox Linux integration work, they stepped up. That just has never happened for us with Mac users. I’ve been with Mozilla for pretty much the whole time (10 years) as a volunteer and a full-time contributor and I’m a Mac user. My experience has been that when compared to Windows and Linux users, the stereotypical Mac users don’t want to help make things better, they want someone else to do it for them. That doesn’t help matters.

    But, even with a smaller Mac community at Mozilla, we’re committed to making Firefox a serious competitor there and I think we’re succeeding. Firefox 3 is light-years ahead of Firefox 2 on Mac, both in terms of playing well with the OS style expectations and in terms of performance and stability.

    Asa Dotzler

  2. Thanks, Asa. That’s reassuring in some ways. Maybe Mac developers are too busy creating their own browsers — there seems to be no end to them;)

    Mark

  3. There are a lot of Mac browsers available and that’s definitely a better situation than 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago when the choice was between Netscape and IE.

    Choice is good, but as you note, the downside is fragmentation of efforts. At Mozilla, we’ve got three Mac browsers, Firefox, Camino, and SeaMonkey. Some of the Camino folks also work on bits of Firefox, but it’s a fundamentally different architecture and one that that group is intent on pursuing so we probably won’t see a fully combined effort any time soon. SeaMonkey is really just the continuation of the previous “official” Mozilla project, the Mozilla Application Suite, and that group, while sharing Firefox technologies much closer than Camino, has a fundamental disagreement about the user experience and so you probably won’t see a fully combined effort there any time soon either.

    The good news is that the people we do have working on Mac Firefox (both front end and back end hackers) are really dedicated to making a better experience for the roughly 10 million Mac Firefox users we have today and are excited at the prospect of growing that number dramatically with the launch of Firefox 3.

    - A

    Asa Dotzler





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