Firefox 149 beta develops a split personality The new beta of the next version of Firefox lets you view two web pages side by side, with a split you can drag with your mouse. As usual when a new version of Firefox appears, the following version graduates to beta testing. Firefox 148 came out a few days ago, which means that Firefox 149 is now in beta test. Although they' …
The business of a profile not being readable if modified by a later version, especially a version only one minor revision away, is a fundamental architectural bug. The config file parser should just ignore an entry if it does not recognize it. (Treat it like a comment.) The user should not have to jump through hoops to roll back a minor revision.
I'm not aware of the details. But it's sound like there is a switch to do exactly that.
The authors of version x can never be sure what the authors of version x+n might decide to do and how features it doesn't understand might impact the meaning of what it does understand. Downgrading is not a common use case, either. So you can understand why this is "at your own risk".
I'm not sure if this will be the right UI choice for me, but I can see a lot of people liking it.
Kudos to Mozilla for seeing browsers as both mature technology as well as still being capable of significant improvement.
Another interface choice will help some get far more work done than yet another buzzy AI "feature."
Especially since most websites *still* haven't caught up with widescreen monitors.
I wish I I had this feature for some of my work yesterday and today. I have an online spreadsheet open in one tab, as I copy and paste out of another tab (or window) involving frequent tabbing and switching. In a multi-monitor setup, that's not a problem. It becomes a real bear when doing it on one laptop, even though mine has enough screen real estate to accommodate both side by side (which is what I've been doing).
This split makes it much easier to resize, needing only one tool action, rather than two.
I also wonder how users who hadn't thought of this before will now say "bloody good idea" and find their time much better spent.
If only we could get more people on Firefox. Chrome's near-monoculture is not healthy for an open web. Remember the days of Internet Exploder?
> chrome has had this feature for eons.
No, it has not. It was launched on February 19th.
https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/chrome/chrome-productivity-improvements/
Even if you define "aeon" as "week", it has not yet been a plural number of weeks. It is less than a fortnight.
Split windows are all very well, but what if you want a third or a fourth? What if you want to expand them so they overlap, and toggle between the two? I get by very well by firing up multiple instances of the browser, or whatever app. Can then size/position them without interference from half-baked UI decisions. Of course, an app with too many sticky bars and panels is a bit crippled, but most are not too bad these days.
> Split windows are all very well, but what if you want a third or a fourth?
You did read as far as the 2nd screenshot, didn't you?
> What if you want to expand them so they overlap, and toggle between the two?
You can't. This is *not* window management.
There was once Opera with an MDI interface.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-document_interface
I do *not* want that back, thank you very much.
If you want two web pages open next to each other, then can you not just open two windows and put them next to each other? Window tiling and management is an OS thing, no need for individual applications to be doing it too.
"multiple tabs" was the killer feature of Firefox, when MS was trying to promote an active desktop, with browser windows and tiling managed by the OS, and tabs (by default) along the bottom of your screen. Clearly, many people like to have in-app window tiling and management, like that provided by the wildly successful applications Word, Excel and Outlook.
> can you not just open two windows and put them next to each other
Of course you can.
The point of computers is automating stuff that we could do by hand so it's quicker, you know.
Like calculating numbers, making people redundant, destroying jobs, increasing unemployment, accelerating global warming, and driving the species to extinction.
They're just saving time. Making this stuff quicker and easier.
Having a firefox dedicated way of doing split screens instead of using the OS isn't easier. It's more complicated, gives you two methods of doing very similar things and raises questions about how it works with the existing, OS based tiling.
It's not very linuxy, either. Do one thing well? Window management is a desktop thing. Every app deciding on it's own tiling mechanism is pointless duplication and unnecessary complexity.
> It's not very linuxy, either. Do one thing well? Window management is a desktop thing.
1. That ship sailed so long ago you can't even see it over the horizon from a mountaintop now.
2. Most people and most distros don't have tiling WMs and I suspect don't know how to use the tiling features in their OS.
Just 2 web pages, and only 2, side-by-side, is probably all the tiling that 80% of users will ever need. And there you go: Dr Pareto is thus satisfied.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
Firefox may have had this first, certainly before Chrome and Edge... I think it was part of something called TestPilot? It wasn't as fully featured as what we have now, but it did allow side-by-side windows in the same browser window. I can't have been the only one to use it?
I tried it on Windows Firefox 147. It works -- the two sides both work as expected. However, when you un-split, the remaining tabs are still small. You can slide the split tab to the side to make it use most of the screen but there's always a gap from the missing split view. So a bit is left to do.
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