Avant Browser future plans/2011 roadmap

[Anderson]

Hello Everybody,

This is Anderson. Thanks everybody for caring about Avant, me and my health, I really appreciate everybody's supports.

Thank you guys for asking about my health, I am feeling better now. March-July of this year was a nightmare for me. I cannot sleep continually more than 3 hours during that period at all. Maybe the difficulty of Avant 2010 development give me too much pressure. Plus I have a one-and-half year old of daughter. She is a cute little girl. but I think it just take me some time to get used to sleeping when there is a energetic little girl at home. I have been feeling better since August.

In Avant 2010, Avant started to use Multi-Process/Thread technology, which means each tab runs in its own thread, and a few tabs share one process. This technology makes Avant run faster and use less memories, but it brought in some bugs that we didn't expect. We are very sorry for the previous buggy versions. Now I believe Avant 2010 build 119 is a stable version. We will do more beta testing in future major release.

Okay, lets talk about Avant 2011's roadmap. The following features are on the top of to-do list, they should be avaible in 2011, if there is no unexpected difficulties.

1. Brand New Built-in Download Manager.
2. New Auto-Complete list for address-bar.
3. New Speed-Dial page.
4. Implement Windows 7's Thumbnail Preview.
5. Customizable Profile Folder Location.
6. Built-in Online/Local picture browser.
7. Integrate Firefox/Gecko render engine (Orca will be merged into Avant Browser).
8. Integrate Chrome's render engine.

The above are just the major new features. There will be a lot of minor improvements we will work on during the development as well.

If you have any requests or ideas, please feel free to reply this post.

Thanks,

Anderson

[bassiliin]

Well, well, well.. Master himself is talking. And now we completely understand reason of buggy 2010 version. I'm sure some amount of code is written by this little girl

[bigC]

Whoa... hello to 7 & 8 on the roadmap, lol. Didn't expect those.

Good to hear from you Anderson and glad you are feeling better.

[bksening]

Best wishes and good health to Anderson and the entire family!

7. Integrate Firefox/Gecko render engine (Orca will be merged into Avant Browser).
8. Integrate Chrome's render engine.

So Avant 2011 will be a direct competitor to Lunascape browser and Maxthon browser.

[krgh]

Hello Everybody,

This is Anderson. Thanks everybody for caring about Avant, me and my health, I really appreciate everybody's supports.

Wow. Its always gr8 to hear from You Anderson.

I cannot sleep continually more than 3 hours during that period at all. Maybe the difficulty of Avant 2010 development give me too much pressure.

Please please take good care of your health. Doesnt matter if you release a month late. But You and AB is important to all of us than any New releases.

Plus I have a one-and-half year old of daughter. She is a cute little girl. but I think it just take me some time to get used to sleeping when there is a energetic little girl at home. I have been feeling better since August.

I can understand. Even my daughter does the same. She takes most of free time. But u know that its worth every second.

In Avant 2010, Avant started to use Multi-Process/Thread technology, which means each tab runs in its own thread, and a few tabs share one process. This technology makes Avant run faster and use less memories, but it brought in some bugs that we didn't expect. We are very sorry for the previous buggy versions. Now I believe Avant 2010 build 119 is a stable version. We will do more beta testing in future major release.

So far its been a tradition of AB from 11.x that every new release has more bugs than feature. I know every internally agrees to this but they just say "its not". But with 2010 release it has peaked and its not settling back. Simple problem are repeated over & over & over with no problem solution. This never used to happen b4. Issues used to be solved over 2-3 releases.

Okay, lets talk about Avant 2011's roadmap.

All the best man. I have big hopes on You and AB. Will always be an AB Guy.

No major requests from me. Keep up the good work.

If possible please please please bring back the Group Menu & separate it from Bookmarks menu. Thats the only request from me.

Again. Health 1st. Take rest as much as possible. No Hurry for any releases.

Regards
Gururaja

[Anderson]

Whoa... hello to 7 & 8 on the roadmap, lol. Didn't expect those.

Good to hear from you Anderson and glad you are feeling better.

Integrating Gecko should not be a big issue. It's the purpose of Orca, to testify the Gecko embedding.

And I believe integrating chrome should be easier than Gecko. Chrome is designed to be embedded, not like Gecko. Chrome already has embedding module, that's where I am going to start with. As for gecko, I started from ZERO, it's completely not design for embedding.

I can understand. Even my daughter does the same. She takes most of free time. But u know that its worth every second.

I agree. My daughter is one-and-8-month-old. Baby girls are really sweet. When I move my laptop from dinning table to sofa, she will follow me and make sure I don't forgot the mouse pad. When I put on clothes to have a walk to think about codings, she will prepare my shoes. I have to thank my wife for taking care of her and teach her to be a nice girl.

Again. Thanks for everybody's support. I believe Avant 2011 will be even better.

Frankly the most difficult part of development is we attempt to maintain users' habits (Backward compatible). As everybody can see we try to make each version has the similiar user experience. Even we decide to make a change we will try the best leave a option to users to change it back. If you compare Avant and Maxthon, you will see what I am talking about. Maxthon 1.x, 2.x and 3.x are totally different product lines. For example, making Avant multi-process/thread but still keeping the MDI UI is one of the chanllegess.

Best,

Anderson

[ReleaseRoderick]

Thank you for the clarification and the information.
May you and your family stay in the best of health and good fortune.

[scubamaster]

Hi Anderson

First of all my best wishes for your health and all the best to your family.

For the future of Avant, I missed in my own humble opinion the most important feature, making Avant running on the IE9 engine. I'm testing the new beta right now and it is blazing fast and has some great features. I don't know how complicated it is to port Avant to IE9 but if it isn't done quickly, Avant is going to lose a lot of users. I myself have already switched to IE9 after testing it yesterday and beeing blown away by its speed and functionality. But I'm looking forward to use Avant as my standard browser as soon as possible again.

Keep up the good work and have a great day!

[newtekie1]

I too was hoping to see an IE9 rendering engine integration pretty quickly. I know it just came out in beta yesterday, but I'm really liking the rendering engine, and hope to be able to use it in Avant at least by the time IE9 is officially released.

I think the intigration of Chrome and Gecko/Firefox will be totally awesome too.

[rich2rob]

Anderson

First of all, good health.

I have been a basic user for a few years now and find Avant excellent for what I want, a simple no thrills browser, although I dare say others will find wonderful things to do with the browser.

Could you please consider dumping the Private Mode as I don't understand its purpose and its annoying have two icons on my desktop.

Thanks again for a great browser.

rich2rob

[bigC]

Could you please consider dumping the Private Mode as I don't understand its purpose and its annoying have two icons on my desktop.

Its just a shortcut... delete the green one.

[Pip]

That all sounds really great Anderson......also.....glad you are feeling better.......

Please advise if Avant will run with IE9.......I'd like to download/install the IE9 beta, but don't want to give up Avant.

[newtekie1]

Could you please consider dumping the Private Mode as I don't understand its purpose and its annoying have two icons on my desktop.

Its just a shortcut... delete the green one.

I can see hwere rich2rob is coming from. If you select "Standard" install every time you upgraded, then the icon comes back, and you have to delete it again. If you select "Custom" and uncheck Desktop Icon(shouldn't it be Icons?), then it deletes the normal icon that is already on the desktop.

Perhaps there just need to be an option in the Custom setup for each icon.

[Jasmine]

That all sounds really great Anderson......also.....glad you are feeling better.......

Please advise if Avant will run with IE9.......I'd like to download/install the IE9 beta, but don't want to give up Avant.

Anderson will test IE9 in next few days, so it's not decided yet when Avant can make it.

[Jasmine]

I can see hwere rich2rob is coming from. If you select "Standard" install every time you upgraded, then the icon comes back, and you have to delete it again. If you select "Custom" and uncheck Desktop Icon(shouldn't it be Icons?), then it deletes the normal icon that is already on the desktop.

Perhaps there just need to be an option in the Custom setup for each icon.

You're right, good eyes~

[Jasmine]

That all sounds really great Anderson......also.....glad you are feeling better.......

Please advise if Avant will run with IE9.......I'd like to download/install the IE9 beta, but don't want to give up Avant.

Anderson said he'll make Avant 2010 run with IE9 in a week~

[scubamaster]

That is absolutely great news

[Anderson]

Here is a testing build of Avant for IE9 test. Could anybody also give it a test, and let me know if you see any problems. So far I can see is file download not working. But we are working on the new download manager.

http://www.avantbrowser.com/tests/ab.ie9.testing.exe

Thanks,

Anderson

[flowrush]

Again. Thanks for everybody's support. I believe Avant 2011 will be even better.

Frankly the most difficult part of development is we attempt to maintain users' habits (Backward compatible). As everybody can see we try to make each version has the similiar user experience. Even we decide to make a change we will try the best leave a option to users to change it back.

If you have any requests or ideas, please feel free to reply this post.

Indeed it is hard to maintain user's habits from one version to the next (though all around it seems to have transferred pretty well), but there has been one request I have pushed for to be brought back time and time again (along with many other's who support it), which is to bring back the non-variable multi-row width option. My old thread requesting this is here- viewtopic.php?f=5&t=27870 ...and Jasmine noted that this feature would be possible in 1-2 months time. Well now it has been almost 2 months so I am hoping that something about it can be done soon as I really miss having the ability to multitask with many rows of tab's but still able to recall each one by photographic memory because they maintained their location instead of constantly moving around, or resizing too small by themselves. Here is an old screenshot from the 10.x days with a tab layout and size that worked perfect for me and is not possible in the current version- http://yfrog.com/izavorigp.

I sincerely hope you can respond on this as well as the fact I am happy to hear progress in moving forward with IE9. I have faith that Avant will eventually go back to being the greatest browser, with speed, custimazation yet minimalistic, low memory use and stability. I have to say the latest version of Avant has been very stable for me so far. Your work does NOT go unappreciated after all these years. Thank you for your hard work and good to hear you are feeling and sleeping better.

[Jasmine]

Again. Thanks for everybody's support. I believe Avant 2011 will be even better.

Frankly the most difficult part of development is we attempt to maintain users' habits (Backward compatible). As everybody can see we try to make each version has the similiar user experience. Even we decide to make a change we will try the best leave a option to users to change it back.

If you have any requests or ideas, please feel free to reply this post.

Indeed it is hard to maintain user's habits from one version to the next (though all around it seems to have transferred pretty well), but there has been one request I have pushed for to be brought back time and time again (along with many other's who support it), which is to bring back the non-variable multi-row width option. My old thread requesting this is here- viewtopic.php?f=5&t=27870 ...and Jasmine noted that this feature would be possible in 1-2 months time. Well now it has been almost 2 months so I am hoping that something about it can be done soon as I really miss having the ability to multitask with many rows of tab's but still able to recall each one by photographic memory because they maintained their location instead of constantly moving around, or resizing too small by themselves. Here is an old screenshot from the 10.x days with a tab layout and size that worked perfect for me and is not possible in the current version- http://yfrog.com/izavorigp.

Last days were spent in improving performance. This request will be taken care of future days~