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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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Firefox is not free either, because I must buy hardware to run it on.
But it is closer to free than the alternatives:
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