If you, like us, are tired of the so-called
browser wars trying to woo us with barely identifiable, context-dependent
speed differences, this might be of interest. Firefox is about to get a whole lot more sentient on us -- at least those of us with accelerometers in our hardware -- courtesy of a new device API that is capable of maintaining a webpage's vertical orientation relative to the ground, no matter what sort of
salto mortale the underlying machine (Mac or otherwise) might be doing. Think of it as the cherry atop your
Windows 7 multitouch tablet cake. Originally intended for mobile platforms only, this software will make its way into version 3.6 of the full-fledged browser -- and you can find an early demo of what it can do just past the break.
posted Oct 14th 2009 4:01AM
lags
These nerds have completely lost it.
Maybe they should stop wasting time on such useless things and start concentrating on making Firefox boot faster.
From the looks of things it is a very early demo. Doubt it will be in the next update, or even the one after that, unless the video was recorded some time ago.
May in fact be an add-on / plug-in.
Totally agree.
Firefox is such a memory hog. Slim it down please.
blitz, maybe YOU should work on making firefox boot faster. If you're unsatisfied with firefox, demand a refund.
If you want the faster browser, I doubt firefox will ever be your best option.
One option might be to have firefox start automatically.
I have to agree with blitz, this is seriously gimmicky. Of all the things... Ubiquity for one.
Microsofty fanboy engadget readers don't get why firefox is so great. They're happy with 11 year old IE non compliant standards.
Agreed. I don't think a web browser with a super simple UI should eat away about 1GB of RAM after a few hours.
Besides, this nonsense will only make people feel dizzy after a few seconds, especially the "skewing" of the tables etc...
But yeah, if it gives any Mac "evangelist" a boner, by all means. I just need a slimmer, faster FF without all this nonsense that I'll turn off anyways.
Besides, I don't live on a boat, so...
@Steveorevo
The fact that we want Mozilla to work on Firefox's boot speed and memory usage simply means that we are using Firefox right now. :P
Then again, I shouldn't be surprised to see a comment like that from someone named Steve.
blitz, I don't understand how firefox speed pertains to this tiny feature though.
It's so easy to bitch about things like that, but after all, firefox is free. You do not have to use it. It's really an amazing product for the price, and this is a cool OPTION that probably won't ever see the light of day, but is very interesting. It's good that someone is thinking about options like this. It is not the reason firefox is slower than you wish it were.
I think yours is a ludicrous comment. You call them names, say this is useless, and claim they have not concentrated on making their browser efficient. Sounds like FUD to me, but maybe you're just not very nice.
There are indeed many reasons why this would be useful to SOME people. I know my laptop already supports flipping and rotating the image, because it's a tablet. You are not the only computer user, and your needs are not the most important ones. For more firefox users, it's fast and efficient and effective, by the way.
If you really want to help firefox make their system more efficient, like I said, do so. If you want to step up and try to offer a better product, please do. But it's lame that so many people think it's helpful to bash creativity, when all they offer is insults. Look at your record for making comments. Lots and lots and LOTS of whining. You call others 'dickwad' 'screw ups' 'sell outs'. You aren't by any means alone, but you are a one man machine of useless criticism.
No shit it would be nice if Firefox were faster. But this is a nice idea that is useful if you are creative enough to consider the implications. And even if it's not put to direct use, lessons are learned when new things are tried which could go towards advancements in many areas (including speed, I guess).
So I strongly disagree with your views and your attitude. This is a cool idea.
@blitzkrieg,
"Then again, I shouldn't be surprised to see a comment like that from someone named Steve."
nope, i'm really surprised if it comes from Steve Ballmer!
.
"Maybe they should stop wasting time on such useless things and start concentrating on making Firefox boot faster."
If you think that Mozilla doesn't care about making Firefox faster, you might be excited to hear that Mozilla recently achieved a whopping 27.8% speed increase in cold startup time on Windows XP. For more details, see http://autonome.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/firefox-startup-performance-weekly-summary-5/ and http://www.betanews.com/article/Expect-228-performance-boost-from-next-weeks-Firefox-36-beta/1255120768
Regarding Firefox being a memory hog, that's just not true. In fact, Firefox with 7 tabs open (a very common use case) uses less memory than Chrome in the same situation. See http://dotnetperls.com/chrome-memory
@ftw
Touché! My bad. LOL. :))
@the lowest ranked commenter
blah.
"Maybe they should stop wasting time on such useless things and start concentrating on making Firefox boot faster."
I can't imagine this took very long to do. They already had the base code from Fennec, just copy+paste and make a few edits for full rotation and hardware recognition.
Yeah, applications like Augmented Reality just are a waste of time.... NOT.
...But why?
Why not?
"Early Demo" Means nothing to you two? This is just a demo not a public release guys...
Junemas, what are you talking about?
I still have not figure how these going to work out...
Because during pr0n when your lap tilts the laptop you can still see straight.
he meant what's the use?
It will be awesome for tablets or mobile devices. Also, it isn't a feature of FF that you turn on or off. It's an API that some web developers may decide to use on all or parts of their site. It will allow developers to make javascript games for the browser that use an accelerometer and release them for free or ad supported for any mobile device that let's you use a version of FF with these compatibilities.
This is extremely awesome from a developers stand point.
cool dude, my mac has an accelerometer! another free hardware find just like the bluetooth in my iPod Touch.
You shouldn't have posted.
Our definition of free surely isn't the same.
Stuff you, it was a JOKE. Engadget readers are all boring bullies... Who highly rank the same cliched jokes. Go ahead and report me you know it's true. I put my username as fanboy just to take the piss out of all of you.
Right.
Before i had a phone with accelerometers all i could think about was how great they were....then when i got one with them....all i can think about is how annoying they are.
I ended up installing SBS Settings and disabling it...i was sick of lying in bed and the phone "helpfully" rotating. Not to mention the music program rotating to cover flow when i didnt want it to.
Im sure you can guess what phone it is :-P
Anyway this is TOTALLY pointless. Since when do i need to hold my laptop on its side or upside down?
It's pointless for you. I am sure someone out there will make good use of this. For me, it just sounds like a nifty fun way to play with my computer... which is more reason than many firefox extensions have for existing.
I realize that everyone is an expert here, and no matter what the tech is, someone is complaining that it's horrible... but this is just good fun.
You should be able to turn off your accelerometer rotating your screen... if not, that's totally weak. Of course, the problem that will plague this is that if your laptop is randoming swaying... so is the person looking at the laptop. But it still sounds pretty nifty.
I love firefox because it's so easy to customize. That's how they will keep their users.
I have the same problem with my music player on my DARE. i hate how slow it takes the cover flow to rotate orientation. I dont mind the pictures doing it but my music needs to stay stationary. I love the automatic landscape mode for texting however.
Really? you bought a dare?
required for tablets, and other touch based mobule devices. sort of useless for anything else.
the day my PC starts tilting is the day i run like hell out of my house....
wtf is this?....im not going to be tilting a laptop...
Have you heard of this thing called a tablet or have you been living under a rock?
No Augmented reality apps for you!
i would think they would try to make FF less resource hungry now thats more usefull but i guess it's more fun typing while laying on your side with your laptop on it's side. Then again that wouldn't work either :)
So Mozilla is incapiable of doing 2 things simultaneously? You gotta be joking me right? No way you can be this stupid...
@laxfan0930
lighten up dude, I wasn't saying it cant do more than "2 things simultaneously" i was saying i wish it didn't tax my system mem. as much as it currently does and i fail to see the productivity in flipping your laptop sideways to view webpages. That's all i was saying.
You'd think this feature was cool, use it for about 10 minutes; then turn it off and forget about it.
you people don't get it do you? It's not going to tilt every freaking website you go to. It's only going to be used for certain situations, like a game or something. Geeze
This is made so that programs like Firefox optimizers or decrapifiers could exist...
Useless but nerds can make their browser faster by just disabling things like that and laugh on people with fast computers loading slower than their old Desktop. Love it.
The point of this is.....?
I just don't see practical use for it.
When will someone pick up a laptop and just be like
"Oh my goodness! I have to turn my laptop on it's side. Thankfully my Firefox has an add on that will rotate the browser content so I won't have to contort my body"
I'd almost say tablet pc's, but it'd be better if windows itself rotated the screen when you tilted it; not just firefox.
The whole point of accelerometers in cell phones is that when you tilt them, you can still use the keypad for variety of functions (in case of virtual touch keyboards, its better). I don't see anyone using firefox by tilting their laptop on the side or upside down too.
As for people saying its fun, its fun for 10-15 mins, not that u will be running motion games in firefox with a laptop eh!???
The Macbook Pro has an accelerometer to detect accidental laptop falls in which case to minimise the damage, it wasn't meant for people at FF to build a competitive advantage in browser wars!
Oh well maybe apple should have thought of it first. Then safari could have a rotating screen. I mean they did it for the iPhone first. Not that I see much usefulness in a laptop, but progress is mostly always good. I see this being usef in MIDs and tablets.
You have yet to hear about Augmented Reality?
Why is an application responsible for detecting orientation? The basic display management software should detect it, resize and rotate the display, and applications should redraw to the new size. What are these mozilla knuckleheads doing?
Well, they are partly responsible for the onslaught of tabbed interfaces, too. I think the Firefox source code is designed so that, once you look at it, it makes you forget that there is a window manager to make life easier for you.
LOL! WTF? Why?
Yay, now Firefox can use more memory!
I think the best use of the accelerometers will be to make them work with the iPhone simulator!
Guys, grrreat work! Now all that's left to needlessly increase load times and hog more resources are a feature to say "bless you" when your web cam detects a sneeze, a feature to display a 10-second cool-down timer when the mic detects yelling, and a Joe's Crab Shack feature to drop down a disco-ball and do the YMCA every 30 minutes. Hop to it, dorks!
Oh my, so much ado for nothing. This is demo for API that allows the webpages to read the accelerators. Few pages might use it for orientation, some games for input, the rest will happily ignore it. It doesn't mean that all pages will randomly sway as you move your laptop!
*face palm*
its fine as long as i can turn it off. sometimes i sit sideways and use my laptop and i dont want it flipping the screen
it's free!!! they can do anything :)
Don't most new laptops have accelerators in the hard drives to prevent damage from a fall? Is this going to be the only other way that we can use it?
I think some people didn't watch the whole video.
A lot of phones have the auto orientation feature, and yes it's annoying when it auto-reorients by flipping sideways when you slightly tilt.
HOWEVER- in the second or third demo, it simply adjusts based on the angle. Say you're laying sideways in bed, or you're going up stairs, riding the train or going on bumpy road and trying to read- perhaps you don't stay indoors all day and have a busy lifestyle and actually have to do some mobile computing. This is where it comes in handy- as it's oriented based on the tilt of the laptop itself, it doesn't just flip like cellphones, it rotates the whole amount of content live. I personally hate having to alt-arrowkey when laying in bed so I can read properly because my laptop is small and is tilted, and it never works properly. On the road, it's often too jittery of a ride to read..
This tech has a lot of useful features, if you can look past what you're already used to. Jeez people.
Also, WTF is with people complaining about boot time? so what if it takes 5-10 seconds to start- it's not like windows doesn't take 2+ minutes to become completely usable anyway, perhaps you should bitch about that instead.
I'm a longtime FireFox user and on Windows I will only use Chrome now. FireFox has become so clunky, slow and unstable. For whatever reason it runs great on my Mac where I still use it. I hope FireFox gets it's speed back though
As much as I love Firefox and am grateful to the Mozilla team, I really wish they would finally support Windows 7 jump lists. They've had almost a year now of beta testing to add the feature. I know there are hacks out there out there. I'm talking about out-of-the-box support from the source.
it would be perfect for an Apple Tablet!
Another prime example of "just because we CAN do it, doesn't mean we should waste our time on it."
wow!! this is gonna be irritating..
Looks perfect for the browser based flight control setup I'll need for the manned/unmanned fly-by-wire attack gunship I am building in my basement.
... did I just type that out loud?
Is accelerometer the right word? Wouldn't it be a gravity or orientation sensor since its measuring which way is down, rather than changes in velocity?
What is the purpose of this??
Anyone who's used Minefields knows very well that Mozilla IS focusing on speed.
Remember when Firefox, was the speedy, lightweight, efficient alternative? yeah... those were the days.
yawn...
Most useless thing...EVER!!
I have been playing around with the accelerometer in firefox 3.6b, check out my youtube video: http://bit.ly/wLGb9 or try out the webpage itself http://playground.marmaladeontoast.co.uk/ff3.6
If they had a screen you could rotate around the keyboard, or for those dual screened ebook/netbooks, it would be cool; but they don't exist, so...
And for everyone complaining about bootup times; CHROME OS
All i can think about is how annoying they are.
http://www.avrupaestetik.com/meme_buyutme.html
I havent seen anyone using firefox by tilting their laptop on the side or upside down too.
http://www.avrupaestetik.com/vajina_daraltma.html
A couple things I could potentially see this being useful is for forward and back button replacement or Tap your laptop for you Home page. Two for email links etc. Just got to be creative I guess... Hit the side to bring up porn, iI dunno but I can see some useful Ideas already..