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."

Comments

Scrapped?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't it be more appropriate and less alarmist to say that Firefox 1.1 will instead be called Firefox 1.5?

Re:Scrapped?

[mattdm]

Wouldn't it be more appropriate and less alarmist to say that Firefox 1.1 will instead be called Firefox 1.5?

If the headline had said that, the slashdot editors probably wouldn't have even looked at it in the submission queue. The more alarmist entry grabs attention better, so has a greater chance of getting published. Basically, nothing to see here, move along.

They really need to fix autoupdate

[afidel]

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?

Can you read this?

[Henry V .009]

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.

Re:Is there any plan to ...

[Will2k_is_here]

This is antithetical to Firefox's mission. Give the user a capable browser that contains no bloat (ie. stuff some users don't want).

I looked at the 5 most popular extensions on mozilla's update site. The top 4 may be pretty popular but that's a bad idea since Mozilla would be guaranteed a lawsuit.

The fifth is ForecastFox and a lot of people (myself included) don't want it in there.

How Firefox is more "free" than IE

[tepples]

Firefox is not free either, because I must buy hardware to run it on.

But it is closer to free than the alternatives:

• With Firefox, you have a free choice of hardware to run it on. You can run it on PowerPC hardware, or you can run it on x86 hardware, unlike IE 6. Currently, if you want to run IE 6 (with Trident layout engine) on a Mac, you have to pay Microsoft for Virtual PC and Windows XP. Or if there is a large number of people on another kind of hardware, they can all pitch in to fund a port of Gecko to another platform; Microsoft would never allow that.
• You're also free to upgrade your Firefox installation independent of your hardware or your operating system. In order to upgrade to IE 7, on the other hand, you have to toss out Windows 98/ME, Windows 2000, or Wine/GNU/Linux in favor of Windows XP with slipstreamed Service Pack 2 ($200).