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Firefox 1.1 Scrapped
An Anonymous Reader writes: "The Firefox team has decided to scrap the planned 1.1 release (already in Alpha 2) and instead release the final version as 1.5 due to the significant number of bug fixes and changes. The 1.5 feature complete beta is expected next month." From the article: "We are planning for a Firefox 2.0 and 3.0, but will divide the planned work over (at this point) three major Milestones, 1.5 (September 2005), 2.0 (unscheduled) and 3.0 (unscheduled). All major development work will be done on the Mozilla trunk, and these releases will coincide with Gecko version revs."
Wouldn't it be more appropriate and less alarmist to say that Firefox 1.1 will instead be called Firefox 1.5?
I was running 1.0.4 and just happened to notice the mozilla.org slashblurb about a new version. I checked and the new version was 1.0.6 which had major security updates, yet when I did Tools->Options->Advanced->Software update nothing was found (and this is simply a manual way to trigger the normal update mechanism). If the update software can't find a new version with major security updates then what good is it?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Then again, I'm not really complaining about it. All the available extensions out there have got to be giving the Mozilla development team more to consider for the next stable releases. Consider, also, that the other (major) alternatives are broken and commercial (IE and Opera). Not that the latter is bad, but for such a fantastic browser to be completely free and have a wide range of extendability is something that must be accounted for. Then again, if they've already changed the release schedule once, who's to say that they won't do it in our favor in the near future? All this talk of new features makes me want to start coding...
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
I think this is a good move and bumping the version numbers will help differentiate it better than a really minor point release. There is no reason that open source software should follow really miserly versioning while commercial software keeps bumping version numbers big time to increase upgrades.
This space for rent.
It now looks like what was 1.1 will be 1.5, what was 1.5 will be 2.0 and what was 2.0 will be 3.0
This makes some sense, a lot more work on what was 1.1 has taken place (mainly on the automatic update and enterprise deployment side) so it warrants a 1.5 designation.
Whether 2.0 and 3.0 will be significantly different then we won't know until the time but as long as the product is good people will use it. I used it back in the 0.x days (before it was even called Firefox) and it still beat IE and the Mozilla suite in many ways. So whatever version numbering scheme they use is fine by me.
I've spent the morning reading WONTFIX bugs on the Firefox text zoom issue. I'm feeling down on the browser just now.
There is no good option for making text zoom permanent if you have bad eyes. You can kludge by zooming default fonts and then disabling everything else in CSS.
The people working on Firefox are not interested in fixing this because "text zoom breaks page layouts." The fix that they've decided on, which may or may not come someday, is a page zoom feature that zooms everything. (Raise your hand if you love sideways scrolling.)
I am amazed at the lack of consideration for people with bad eyes -- it's not a small number of people either. Mozilla composer bends over backwards to enforce alt tags for images, but when it comes to usability nobody cares.
Maybe we'll start to see some consideration of this sort of thing once the average age of open source coders hits 50 and they find themselves having to squint more often.
Free as in must pay for Windows to legally use it!
They scrapped their UNIX versions ages ago (yes they used to support Solaris and IRIX) and the Mac version when Safari was released.
This is more amusing than 99.9% (3*3*3*37/2*2*2*5*5*5) of all the trolls out there. I generally dislike trolls, but this guy is unique, and worth of at least a short-term boost in karma.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
The worst part of the tragedy of Microsoft's domination is the illusion that components like IE are actually free. I hate to break it to you, but you know the plastic toys inside cereal boxes that said "Free Whiz Bang Balloon Racer", well it wasn't free, and neither is Internet Explorer.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Slashdot is a news website, not a propaganda outlet.
I think Slashdot has been exceptionally fair in reporting these stories.
Is there any plan to start merging the most popular extensions into the browser itself ?
I've noticed the biggest complaint people have with upgrades is that they render their extensions/themes incompatible.
Also, it must be a pain for the extension authors to maintain extensions across so many different releases.
If something is exteremely popular, maybe it should be part of the browser to begin with. Especially since so many people want it.
Doing so will mitigate the upgrade issues, and they'll end up with a more functional browser.
Does this mean they'll fix launch.yahoo.com bug?
Why would it be Firefox's job to provide a workaround for Yahoo's bad browser-detection routine?
Who modded this interesting?
The problem is with Yahoo--not Firefox. Yahoo uses an amazingly shitty browser detection system that lets old Netscape browsers through but still doesn't recognize Firefox.
"I filter at +6, and have yet to miss out on an important comment." (#822545)
At least they are not doing the asinine thing that Sun's marketing has done with Java, with first going from version 1.2 to "Java 2" and now "Java 5".
They could make things really interesting, stick to the buddhist naming theme, and code name the 2.0 release Avalokitesvara!
Is this a jump to appease the version-number junkies? to jump 1/2 a version number closer to IE7 or Opera 8? What is this for, because regardless of how many bugfixes they've thrown in (yeah yeah, and changes, too) it wont warrant a leap to Firefox 1.5 - coming from a self-confessed version-number chaser (posting from a Deer Park Alpha nightly I downloaded hours ago) this just smacks of WinAmp's jump from 3 to 5 just to sound like they'd 'advanced'. What happened to the old system?
(*).*.* is for rewrites or when the software reaches a seriously major milestone.
*.(*).* is for major bugfixes and changes, like this release will have.
*.*.(*) is for minor bugfixes.
Now I understand the logic of PHBs preferring 'Firefox 1.5' to 'Firefox 1.1.34g' or whatever, but it's sad to see the the old system of version numbers for categorisation seems to have descended into a battle of "look, we have teh numborz!!!". Why not just call it Firefox 9 and get one over on MS and Opera in the number stakes?
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
How the hell can you use JAVA to install something? There shouldn't be any way to get out of the sandbox, and if there is that's a major security issue that SUN should be made aware of ASAP. Not sure how Flash could be used either since I've never seen a bullitin about Flash remote code vulnerabilities.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Firefox is not free either, because I must buy hardware to run it on.
But it is closer to free than the alternatives:
You must be a developer. Guess what, Mr. End User doesn't care that its Yahoo's problem, the alignment of the stars, or a fluctuation in the space-time continuum.
All Mr. End User cares about is that launch.yahoo.com WORKS in IE, but NOT in Firefox. Hence, it becomes a Firefox problem.
If the prevaling attitude of 'its an IE compatibility problem' wasn't avoided by lots of the neat plug-ins and hard work of Mozilla & others, we wouldn't have this great free browser to use.
I didn't believe it at first but its true!
2*2*3*75011 = 900132
How on earth do you manage to sign up for an ID like that???
I want to see Acid2 compliance.
I understand that Acid2 is not the be-all and end-all of CSS testing. However, I think it's difficult to deny that it is an important benchmark, and Firefox is seriously behind the pack. WebCore, KHTML, and Opera have already managed this in their development code (with the WebCore and KHTML engines already available to the public), and iCab has a compliant release version already. No news yet on IE7, but at this rate Gecko faces a real chance of being dead last to get Acid2 compliance among the major browser engines. That's just sad.
Again, I understand that Acid2 is not the be-all and end-all of CSS compliance testing. In fact, as test cases go, it's not even all that great. However, it's difficult to deny its importance as a benchmark, and the Gecko crew is getting some pretty serious egg on its face here.
It's not my intent to bash Firefox. I'm an avid Firefox fan on Mac, Windows, and Linux alike. I think it gets a lot of things right. But I also think that in this case, they're getting their priorities wrong.
Posts like this bother me. They really do. Here is someone who for the sake of arguement really is someone in IT who works with large corporations and has the authority to roll Firefox out.
One of the things he desperately needs to get Firefox out there is an MSI installer version.
Any yet he couldn't be bothered to type "firefox msi" into google where he'd fine exactly what he is looking for. I know Firefox isn't perfect, but come on don't go putting up artifical barriers to it when a solution is so easily at hand.
Very FIRST hit on google when you search for "firefox msi"
http://www.frontmotion.com/Firefox/
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Would you roll out IE 7 to 2000 desktops with a MSI created by someone other than Microsoft? I sure as hell wouldn't. And I am not going to push out an unofficial MSI of FireFox to that many seats.
Corporate IT is all about ass covering, and you can't cover your ass with an unofficial MSI.
Please, somebody mod the parent up. When a Fortune 500 company makes a major IT move, they spend months prepping for it, looking at edge cases. What if the node to which we're deploying is unreliably connected? What if we run out of disk half way through? Will the changes roll back if the moron user turns the box off during a dritical phase when it looks like nothing's happening? etc., etc., etc. They depend on the vendor having already tested the main execution path has been thoroughly tested.
An untested and unofficial MSI? I don't think so
No, you don't.
You can run it on borrowed hardware, or on any hardware you can get for free.
Plus, firefox is free as in freedom, meaning lots of things aside from costs.
I had the same problem like the grandparent post.
Makes one wonder how they can claim availability of fixes when they aren't really available.
Anyway Slashdot should be trying to help Mozilla.org and Firefox, not trying to sensationalize every change.
/. should not help out anyone, they should report without bias.
Slashdot - Where the slash is most definitely to the left.
So, no one is stopping you. Make a good one, then submit it to the Firefox/Mozilla team. If they don't accept it, grumble to yourself, and work with them to make it more acceptable. If it is "nice to have" then it must be nice enough for you that you put the effort into building it... Otherwise, why should someone else do it for you?
Why should people who work voluntarily on a free product without pay scramble to put together something for people who get paid and make a profit? I just don't get how people can expect volunteers to stand up and salute for someone else's need to make money efficiently. You make money, great. You have a need, great. So, give back to the community from which you benefit, and all can be happy.
Or, say, what Microsoft did with Windows, going from version 3.11 to version 95.
Or Xbox to Xbox 360, so as not to seem lesser than Playstation 2.
Actually, they also did a big leap with Word, so they could synchronize Word for Windows with Word for Mac.
Marketers always screw around with version numbers, hoping to make things seem "bigger, better, newer."
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net