

Firefox 4 Beta 2 is here – Welcome CSS3 transitions - paulrouget
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/07/firefox4-beta2/

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sachinag
You know, I'm impressed with Firefox pushing the envelope inside the browser
window, but their chrome is still terrible: the tabs on top take up many more
pixels than Chrome's do; closing tabs in rapid succession doesn't mimic
Chrome's resizing; you still can't have favicons in the bookmarks bar without
using Stylish or something similar; the bookmarks bar and the Bookmarks folder
aren't one and the same; and so on. (EDIT: Mac; I think some of these are
better on the Windows side, particularly favicons in the bookmarks bar)

The only reason I ever used Firefox any more was to use the Mozbar, and that's
not an issue any more. I really would love it if the Mozilla Foundation
stopped focusing on rendering and focus on experience. Normals go to the same
seven (or nine) sites. Make using the browser to visit and interact those
seven/nine sites as good as possible first.

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ergo98
Humorously I just saw exactly the opposite complaint - "I wish they'd stop
focusing on visuals and start focusing on functionals".

They'll never please everyone. Chrome is for you (clearly given that it is
obviously what you hold as your benchmark). It would be a lost cause pursuing
that.

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thaumaturgy
Why did they use Bezier curves for their transition intermediate value
functions? Most of the text I've read on how humans interpret "smoothness" is
that logarithmic (or exponential) are the norm [1].

[1]: e.g., "...in many areas, our responses to stimuli are logarithmic, not
linear in nature." <http://everything2.com/title/exponential>

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xal
The new App Tab feature is downright brilliant.

Link: <http://videos-cdn.mozilla.net/firefox4beta/appTabs-480.mp4>

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Hovertruck
Chrome also offers this in the form of pinning tabs via right click. I'm not
sure if the Firefox method does anything differently.

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balac
Thanks for the tip, don't know how I missed this in chrome!

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sigzero
OSX now has tabs on top like Chrome. Nice.

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pornel
...like Opera since 2002 (I know probably nobody cares who did it first, but
it's a shame that Opera's innovations get noticed only when bigger players
copy/reinvent them).

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balac
That is completely Operas fault. They need to open source & get some better
marketing.

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terrapinbear
The latest dev version of Google Chrome performs (most) of these CSS3
transitions too. The one transition I didn't see was the "video in a round
frame". Maybe it's my system, but I thought the text rendering in the first
transition example was sharper in Google Chrome than in FF b2.

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aaroneous
For the rounded video effect I'm pretty sure they're just applying the moz
equivalent of border-radius or doing an alpha mask to a video tag. Chrome has
supported both for a little while now in their stable releases.

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gps408
In the video he says it's svg I think.

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motters
Updated to beta 2, but the demos all looked so slow and clunky that I'm sure
most users would consider the experience unacceptable. I have hardware
acceleration enabled, with all the wobbly compiz effects, but the browser
doesn't seem to be making use of the hardware.

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jtgeibel
My understanding is that the beta only supports acceleration under Windows via
Direct2D and DirectWrite, which is only supported on > Vista. This is similar
to the current IE9 previews. I'm not sure when they expect to add similar
functionality to other platforms. The demos I tried under Linux were usable,
but admittedly they lagged a bit.

