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Mozilla has 1/10th the resources on this that Google does, and trying to go toe-to-toe with them on release speed will swiftly reduce Firefox to an unusable mess

I don't think it will. The transition from Firefox 4 to Firefox 5 happened easily enough. I read the future feature list the other day (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Features) and the bigger features are targeted for Firefox 7, rather than trying to somehow rush to shove them into Firefox 6.

The rate of development hasn't changed, just the frequency of releases. All that means in practice is that features or improvements that are complete and ready to use are released sooner than if they had to wait for other unrelated features to be complete before there's a major release.

Yeah, and now they even blame Mozilla's POSTDATA bug on it:
Facebook doesn't want you to use the back button
... whereas in the old days, it was banks who were the scapegoat for this obnoxious behavior:
Banks are holding up Mozilla to make it break the back button on SSL pages that are the result of a form submission

Yeah, and now they even blame Mozilla's POSTDATA bug on it:
Facebook doesn't want you to use the back button
... whereas in the old days, it was banks who were the scapegoat for this obnoxious behavior:
Banks are holding up Mozilla to make it break the back button on SSL pages that are the result of a form submission

Which ones still don't work.

HTML Validator. Well, you can download it from a shady site, but addons.mozilla.org doesn't even have the FF4 version yet!

Is Tbird 3.x end of life like FF4? I can still see some 3.1.11 versions for some languages, but English is 5.0 only, and it doesn't seem that anything has 3.1.12 or 3.2

You can get some of the older releases here :
http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/
(most of the major releases anyway ... there's 3.1.11 and 3.3a3 but no 3.2)

So you're complaining about the design of a webpage because of a browser specific bug?

If you have an issue why not put your money where your mouth is and do something about it rather than whining about a feature which seems to work perfectly fine for other people.

Seriously entering something into that database isn't hard, and probably takes less time than reading this very post.

If you have font issues, please note Microsoft just released a hotfix that improves font rendering:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2545698

You might also want to look at:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=667989

Or the stylish's script.

Is a little personal responsibility too much to ask? After all, it is your browser thats kindly storing these cookies, and kindly giving them out on request. Your browser. Yours. That falls within the scope of something you can do stuff about.

That's only half right. Yes you can control who your browser gives cookies to - I use Cookie Safe Lite which is fantasticly easy to use, but keeping it working with each release of firefox is getting harder.

However, that's just the low-hanging fruit. There are lots of other methods that corporate stalkers use besides cookies, like so-called "browser fingerprinting" techniques that, when combined with your IP address, are just as problematic as cookies but donn't practically fall under the rubric of "personal responsibility."

There is one exception to the same origin rule. A script can set the value of document.domain to a suffix of the current domain. If it does so, the shorter domain is used for subsequent origin checks.

just because you don't know how to make it work doesn't mean it's impossible -OR- that the GP was right.

you're an idiot.

Right up until the release of 6, when Mozilla once again tells us, the users of their products, that we're doing it wrong, and makes Firefox disable any plugin that claims to support a version newer than itself, because we, the consumers of their product don't know if those plugins are really up to date ...

At least they do seem to be getting the hint. Finally.

Now they'd better keep that plugin up to date...

> My initial thought would be to assume all
> extensions will work and allow the community of
> users to report broken extensions

That is _exactly_ what's being done with extensions hosted on addons.mozilla.org.

Actually, Mozilla's default behavior is to disable and prevent the user from re-enabling extensions that don't have an updated version number in the install.rdf file (which they now admit is a rather quick-moving target). It was a royal pain to manually update the install.rdf file just to be able to keep using an older plugin that worked fine with the latest version.

At least you can now fix this irritating default behavior in a couple of different ways, allowing the user to still see which of their installed add-ons aren't 'officially' supported, yet enable and try them anyways.

This should be the default. Okay, disable add-ons that don't report as compatible with the latest update, but allow the user to re-enable them if they want to try it anyways!

August 16, actually. https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar#Future_branch_dates

Wait, YOU were the one that locked it down to 4. How is this anyone else's fault?

Set it allow up to 127, and wait till it fails, just make sure your code is smart enough to fail soft.
You created a false dependency. Its your own fault.

Not GP, but I can think of a few reasons:

1. There may actually be a breaking change
2. According to the Building an Extension page, public extensions can only be listed as compatible with versions that Mozilla has announced, which as of this writing is version 7. Failure to do this will get your extension rejected from the Mozilla Addons site.

Keep in mind that version 7 is at most 6 months away by Mozilla's new schedule...

Wait, YOU were the one that locked it down to 4. How is this anyone else's fault?

Set it allow up to 127, and wait till it fails, just make sure your code is smart enough to fail soft.
You created a false dependency. Its your own fault.

Not GP, but I can think of a few reasons:

1. There may actually be a breaking change
2. According to the Building an Extension page, public extensions can only be listed as compatible with versions that Mozilla has announced, which as of this writing is version 7. Failure to do this will get your extension rejected from the Mozilla Addons site.

Keep in mind that version 7 is at most 6 months away by Mozilla's new schedule...

Because its impossible to predict what will break in tomorrows nightly build, let alone what will work 2 to 3 version in advance.

As is typical with most if not all OSS software, there is no plan, no concern for compatibility with existing software, its just 'we'll do what we want to do, don't like it?

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Features/Release_Tracking

Doesn't it seem a little fucked up that someone had to create an extension to turn off the checking because it got in the way so much? Does that not let you see the writing on the wall in perfect clarity? Do you need someone from Mozilla to come slap you in the face and scream at you until you get the point?

That extension is intended for beta/alpha testers to check whether the addons work or not. The reason I've got it was because I beta test.
-

Also I found this interesting part in their roadmap:

"To ship smaller bundles of technology more quickly will require us to take a hard look at our existing systems and re-evaluate some of the assumptions we take as immutable, such as:

    - we must provide binary compatibility for Add-ons "

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Roadmap

Because its impossible to predict what will break in tomorrows nightly build, let alone what will work 2 to 3 version in advance.

As is typical with most if not all OSS software, there is no plan, no concern for compatibility with existing software, its just 'we'll do what we want to do, don't like it?

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Features/Release_Tracking

Doesn't it seem a little fucked up that someone had to create an extension to turn off the checking because it got in the way so much? Does that not let you see the writing on the wall in perfect clarity? Do you need someone from Mozilla to come slap you in the face and scream at you until you get the point?

That extension is intended for beta/alpha testers to check whether the addons work or not. The reason I've got it was because I beta test.
-

Also I found this interesting part in their roadmap:

"To ship smaller bundles of technology more quickly will require us to take a hard look at our existing systems and re-evaluate some of the assumptions we take as immutable, such as:

    - we must provide binary compatibility for Add-ons "

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Roadmap

Mozilla is getting retarded. When they say that most of addons are tested and are working. It's a LIE. Read the fine print. EVERY binary addon is incompatible by design and has to be at least rebuilded. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=656331. And then they say that interfaces are not frozen anymore. Well AFAIK most firefox interfaces are used from javascript addons not from binary addons, because of "lacking API" nature of the scripting language. Your browser won't crash but the addons won't work either. Now at least for binary addons they have a solution. Use js-ctypes. Great. Now you can go back from C++ XPCom programing to C programming. So much for fake going forward technology wise. Basically what build mozilla hype is slipping away. Even now I still don't have all the addons working in FF4. Even less with FF5. Goodbye TWAIN addons, goodbye barcode readers addons used in enterprise applications. Well or welcome back IE. Mozilla said that they don't like supporting 10 year old API. Um ... what's wrong with 2 years? Not to mention that most non technical users are using the same browser at home and at work. So by saying fuck enterprise users they are also saying fuck home users. Great job Mozilla. Great job!!!

Firebug worked the first day... OH NO! The horror of being down a few hours!
HTML Validator falls into the "small niche" category
FiddlerHook is rocking the same boat as HTML Validator
You should update AVG. http://free.avg.com/us-en/faq.num-4275#num-4275 (Why would you let AVG go unupdated IDK but hey to each their own)
LogMeIn gee another small niche, fixed the day after with an update.
Skype is now own by Microsoft if it works in something other than IE, well... I'm sure they'll that in the name of innovation.
Logitech Device Detection? Ok I'm sure that pisses off some 3 users somewhere. Your input devices will work fine without it, you're really stretching it on this one.

Overall it's not the HUGE OMG BREAKAGES THAT KILL ALL PUPPIES AND KITTENS EVERYWHERE that the vocal minority is making it out to be. There's little evidence that it is really a wide spread sky is falling problem. Most users don't have a problem. Most users are going to be using add-ons from the top of this list:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/?browse=popular
All of which work fine.

The question is, what the hell does Mozilla want? I don't see a vision.

How can it have a vision of its own?

Mozilla remains, for all practical purposes, bound hand and foot to Google:

The receivable from this search engine provider represented 71% and 80% of the December 32, 2009 and outstanding receivables respectively.

Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements: Note 9 - Concentration of Risks

There were two zingers in this month's news from Net Applications:

The iPad has 0.92% share of all browsing. In other words, the iPad has 53 times the usage share of its nearest competitor.

When Microsoft decided not to support XP for Internet Explorer 9, they narrowed the front for the browser wars to Windows 7. We've been tracking this strategy ever since, and in May, Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7 reached 12.2% worldwide (including custom editions). In the U.S., Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7 averaged 17% usage share during the last three days of May.

Headlines

Firefox, all versions, all platforms: 22%
IE 6 10% IE 8: 31% IE 9: 4%
Chrome 11 10%

Firefox is the new legacy browser, the browser for platforms in decline.

Here I sit with firefox 5.0 chugging along, which I upgraded from firefox 4, and once I look at the Add-ons manager I get a notice that Clear Fields 4.0.3 has been disabled for being incompatible with Firefox 5, and that it isn't available for Firefox 5.0. And besides this plugin I only happen to use Adblock and noscript.

So, contrary to what you imply, if there are plugins which were in fact broken then it becomes clear that you are the one who don't have a clue about what you are talking about.

Damn fanbois, they don't acknowledge reality.

Disable compatibility check

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter/

i think i've only had a problem once with a plugin not working once the compatibility check was disabled.

For the last 3 years, IBM has been promoting Firefox as the browser of choice for internal use. All intranet sites are required to be standards compliant, and in a twist on the preferred browser warning, anyone using IE6 is warned that the site works better on Firefox!

The CCK wizard for customizing Firefox for internal deployments was also begun by an ex IBMer - it lets you create an MSI package for deploying across a corporate intranet with presets for network proxy, browser customizations etc.
With them changing things with every build and calling it a new version, this will further alienate such companies who are trying to get other corporates to embrace open standards and get rid of a decade's worth of IE6 gridlock.

What version of Chrome are you running? Most people running Chrome have no idea that it's going through major version upgrades all the time.

The curse of Firefox is the extensibility. Chrome has had a more limited, but growing extension system, and it isn't brittle like the one in Firefox.

Jetpack is the project to bring a Chrome like plugin layer to Firefox, which will handle the needs of 95% of addons, and should greatly ease the upgrade pain when developers start switching over to it.

It was only released widely a week ago, so there's still some time before it's ubiquitous, but when it is the upgrade pain for users and developers goes away.

TL;DR:
Firefox is doing the right thing, but there will be a bit of pain before things get better.

I have rolled back to 4.0.1 and will move to 5 once all of those things work.

you should roll back to 3.6.18. 4.0.1 has some sec vulns: http://www.mozilla.org/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefox.html#firefox5

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter/

You're welcome.

Actually, what I want from the Mozilla devs at the moment is not new features, but a solution to Firefox's memory problems.

Then you'll be happy to know that the "latest and greatest" includes some pretty big memory improvements. Do a find-in-page on The Burning Edge for "memory" or read Nick Nethercote's blog.

It seems that it's easier to motivate Mozilla developers to work on memory issues when the fixes will reach users in months rather than years.

I'm using Nightly (7) and I'm having trouble getting Firefox to use more than 400MB (explicit) even after a day of heavy use, with Gmail and Reader and Twitter as app tabs. You should try it out and report any bugs you encounter. Yes, we finally have tools that allow users like you to report useful memory leak bugs.

Actually, what I want from the Mozilla devs at the moment is not new features, but a solution to Firefox's memory problems.

Then you'll be happy to know that the "latest and greatest" includes some pretty big memory improvements. Do a find-in-page on The Burning Edge for "memory" or read Nick Nethercote's blog.

It seems that it's easier to motivate Mozilla developers to work on memory issues when the fixes will reach users in months rather than years.

I'm using Nightly (7) and I'm having trouble getting Firefox to use more than 400MB (explicit) even after a day of heavy use, with Gmail and Reader and Twitter as app tabs. You should try it out and report any bugs you encounter. Yes, we finally have tools that allow users like you to report useful memory leak bugs.

If that's your issue, you need to swap in a British-English dictionary in your spellchecker. I've linked the FF extension; Google will turn up similar tools for other browsers as necessary.

Actually I've built a CCK Wizard for Firefox. It's been around for a while. It doesn't do the installer, but it does a lot of the other stuff: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/cck/

My Firefox plugin uses a mix of native app & web to create mp3s. There's no reason not to when it's convenient. Even Microsoft is moving to html5 + javascript. It beats the heck out of VB.

If you spent as much time actually working on the patch to officially support MSI as you did ranting about its absence, maybe it would be done by now.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter/?src=api

Installing this and following the instructions is how this is done by the way. It also allows you to report if the addon works or not so the author can know to only update it using a version compatibility bump.

For many years my employer stuck to IE6 while I used Firefox in my home. Why was this? Was it because one browser was superior to the other?

After raising questions, it turned out that for the longest time (although it should be changing soon if not already) there were enterprise controls like group policies, remotely configuring proxy, enterprise settings, locking down the browser, etc. that were actually considered better on Internet Explorer (even IE6) than Firefox.

The fact is that at some point, there are some features that matter much more to large corporations. Will I ever use any of the above in my home? Never. But that was the sole reasoning behind a Fortune 500 company clinging to IE6 for a dangerously long time. Your assumption that "better" for a user is "better" for an enterprise is often false (though I'm not claiming the two are mutually exclusive). Further improvements for the enterprise are likely to be far outside a home user's need. Hell, making the settings tabs more confusing is probably detrimental to mom and dad configuring their cookie settings or cleaning up their cache.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nightly-tester-tools/ will get around that problem.

It's pretty much an essential addon these days, which is sad, though in my case I run the latest Seamonkey nightlies so its use is at least justified there.

I welcome Mozilla's speedier development/release cycle, however, I don't welcome their new "every-release-is-a-new-major-version" version numbering system for the very same reasons that many others have commented - it plays havoc with your add-ons.

Again, as many others have commented, most of the FF4 add-ons will just work just fine with FF5 and the "incompatibility" is merely a setting in the add-on's XML manifest saying "this add-on is for FF4 only" (or settings to that effect).

One way around this is to install the "Nightly Tester Tools" add-on and enable the "Force Add-on Compatibility" option within it. It'll magically bring back all of the addons that were disabled when FF5 installed.

Of course, there may well be some add-ons that genuinely aren't very compatible with FF5, and force enabling them may cause stability problems, but you can still them manually disable those add-on's causing problems until a "proper" add-on update is released.

They're basically trying to kill the old-style add-ons and move everyone to Jetpack. In addition to the version bumps, they're also completely ignoring compatibility across versions for their internal stuff, so anybody doing advanced things is screwed. Jetpack is supposed to have a stable API, but it's only 1.0 now and completely unknown how good they will be at keeping their word - outlook not so good, there's been at least one incompatible change pre-1.0.

Will they lose some people in the transition? Probably; they're now no better than Chrome in terms of what you might be able to do with extensions, and at least Chrome is snappy. Will they care? Who knows.

Or easier, use the official Add-on Compatibility Reporter extension. Besides allowing you to install any version of any extension, you can report back if it still works or any problems you have, so the developer easily knows if he needs to fix something or just bump the version.

Disabling the version check has been available since forever in the excellent MR Tech Toolkit extension (which was standard for devs) though he ceased all his Firefox activities rather suddenly after 3.0 (went "on Safari", perhaps?), and I'm guessing the thousands of "incompatible" reports most of his add-ons have gathered by now won't motivate him to come back. Or, perhaps we owe *him* the release of the Compatibility Reporter, his disappearance forcing the Mozilla devs to create an alternative to his Toolkit, when the problems with it became even more annoying than the compatibility check. ;)

20/20 hindsight: swapping a few normal users crying "my Firefox shows pink elephants! Yes, I set extensions.checkCompatibility=false long ago, though I don't know what that means!" for *hordes* of one star "dis not workin in ff5 pluuuuuuz updatez must haz cheextension!" lusers for *most* addons with *every* version change must not seem like a good trade now for the Mozilla devs.

The Compatibility Reporter is a step backwards (or rather, a waltz), and if it becomes popular, they will get both ACR aided pink elephants *and* must haz cheextensioners in increased numbers (thanks to the new rush to go up to 11), unless they take it to the next logical step: automatically bump the version of extensions that receive 95%+ "still works" reports (in Mozilla and locally, so we don't even have to download again). Most extensions keep on working anyway, and for popular extensions it would take a short time to get enough reports from power users on release day (or before, if they consider RC reports). If they work, let the normal users use them, and kill two birds (pachyderms, whatever) with one rock.

I don't get it: why does it suck? If you want ff5 for linux, just go here:

http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-5.0&os=linux&lang=en-US

If you want the 64 bit version, go here: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/5.0b7/linux-x86_64/

If your extensions won't work with ff5, see this post to get them working: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2257134&cid=36519454

I don't get it: why does it suck? If you want ff5 for linux, just go here:

http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-5.0&os=linux&lang=en-US

If you want the 64 bit version, go here: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/5.0b7/linux-x86_64/

If your extensions won't work with ff5, see this post to get them working: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2257134&cid=36519454

Might be a workaround for some:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/checkcompatibility/

Yes, I agree, the arbitrary version compatibility strings are the problem, for extensions in a lot of cases. A move from 4.x to 5.0 should not actually break many (or any?) extensions, because they haven't changed those interfaces.

If there's no update for an extension that is essential and the versioning doesn't jibe, there's this extension:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter/

That allows you to ignore the compatibility version check, enable disabled extensions and submit "this extension works" or "this extension doesn't work" to developers.

I'm using Firefox 5.0 in Linux (self compiled), but in Windows I use Nightly, because it gives me a 64 bit firefox that gets updates. When Nightly reached a version number that was to disable my Status4Evar addon, I used the tool to enable it again and it's still working with the firefox version being 7.0a1

As someone else suggested, get the add-on compatibility reporter and manually enable the add-ons. (Chances are, Garmin will take their time about releasing a version that's compatible with Firefox 5.*.)

It's not that they're "outdated" exactly. The problem is that each addon has a file called install.rdf, which is an XML file where you define properties of the addon, like the addon's name, version #, author, type, etc. It has this section:

<em:targetApplication>
<Description>
<em:id>{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}</em:id> <!-- Firefox -->
<em:minVersion>4.0b7</em:minVersion>
<em:maxVersion>6.*</em:maxVersion>
</Description>
</em:targetApplication>

When you try to install an addon, it looks at the minVersion and maxVersion and if your FF version is outside of that it won't let you install it.

Therefore, whenever a new version of FF comes out, each addon developer has to update their install.rdf file and upload a new version. It's kind of a hassle for those of us who have made FF addons, especially with the new development cycle.

However, there is this page that's constantly updated and lists the valid version numbers. You can set your addon's maxVersion as far out as 7.0a1 right now, so in theory you wouldn't have to update it until 7.0a1 comes out.

Yeah - I'm really interested to see if WebRTC combined with the Mozilla "Verified Email" incubator project gets us away from the server owns my identity world of today.. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity

Seems like then all you need the servers for are to issue short-lived identity certificates and host public keys to verify the certs. Then we could do some interesting browser to browser tech without having servers to authenticate every step.. Some interesting P2P tools could emerge. Hmm.

I don't think you understand who you are talking to. Secondly as a non-profit selling Firefox is not a primary goal. It is then ends to a mean of promoting open source and open standards on the web. https://www.mozilla.org/about/mission.html

They are all important, because they all fix critical security vulnerabilities.

yes, but secruity vulnerabilities shouldn't increase the release number (maybe make it 4.1... but not jump it up to 5).

It's kind of like saying I have 4 banannas, if I break on in half I now have 5 banannas.

If you use the compatibility reporter plugin they will all run regardless of the version of Firefox. Then you can flag them as compatible or incompatible which notifys the author and prompts them to either make them compatible or flag them as compatible with the new version.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter

The WebGL news is pretty depressing. Found this recently (explained here)

I'm still very excited about having a real drawing API in the browser to work with that's not tied to MS or Adobe. Guess it'll still be a while until this tech is ready for prime time (sigh, been waiting YEARS already).

It's not helping that MS is slinging as much FUD as possible. Claiming that IE is "more secure than Chrome or Firefox" is laughable, but crap like this is not helping our case to the casual observer.

I don't care about IE, that is not really the question here, but do you really think it is a good idea to give web pages access to exploiting graphics drivers, the most buggy piece of software on any platform? This is ActiveX on stereoids.

right-click in about:config -> New -> Boolean, name it
extensions.checkCompatibility.5.0
and pick "false" for the value.
Or just install the add-on compatibility extension