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.
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.
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].
...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).
I know Opera had them. However this post is about FF4 beta and not Opera. FF4 beta1 did not let you put tabs on the top in OSX so I mentioned that is a welcome change. I made no attempt to justify who got what, when and from who.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.