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Firefox 3 In Alpha
illeism writes to note that, a mere six weeks after the launch of Firefox 2, Firefox 3 is now available in alpha. CNet reports that it is currently recommended only for software developers and testers. The big change is the upgraded Gecko rendering engine (the UI is unchanged from version 2). From the CNet article: "Firefox 3 will include some significant changes. It uses version 1.9 of the Gecko rendering engine — which itself hasn't been released yet but which includes the Cairo graphics layer. Gecko 1.9 has been in development since before the release of Firefox 2, and it provides vector-based rendering on all platforms. As the Gecko 1.9 road map explains, Cairo will 'bring modern, hardware-accelerated 2D-graphics capabilities to the whole of the Web without requiring proprietary plug-ins or rendering obsolete the broad and rich set of Web-authoring techniques developed over the past decade.'"
Why ? To each program its own target.
KDE has never been "for older hardware". However, perfectly nice & actively developed Desktop Environment exist for older hw (xfce by ex.).
Same here, OpenSource is about making use of older codebase, so nothing prevents anybody to patch FF2.x !
One of the great strengths of OSS compared to proprietary software is the ability to make use of older hardware.
This doesn't happen automagically when you license something by GPL (or similar). It takes work. The strength of OSS is that no one is stopping you from making it work on older hardware. All the code for older firefox versions, and the code for gecko 1.9 is available. Just because Mozilla team is dropping support doesn't mean they won't add patches to fix this if someone else does it. Now compare that with say Windows Vista - you have no way of patching that to run on an old 386.
Moral of the story... don't be so quick to bitch about stuff.
While I understand your gripe, let me introduce you to Firefox 2.0. It was just released, and likely going to be around for a long enough time to outlast your computer with the P200 chip w/MMX technology that still has windows 98 installed.
Don't worry if you're a kleptomaniac, you can always take something for it.
I'm aware of xfce and blackbox and the likes, they are nice, but if you want to run mainstream software that require KDE libraries, you're still hosed.
But in the case of FF for Windows, the problem is that Win9x users (and there are many left) will find themselves in the same situation they were with IE: they'll have to keep running the latest older version of the browser that works with their OS, which will quickly become out of date. I'm sure the FF/Gecko guys have perfectly good technical reasons to leave the old platform behind, but in a sense I hope someone will fork off a Win9x tree of FF and keep developing it, otherwise it would mean OSS is no better than Microsoft with regard to software obsolescence.
So how long are they suppose to be supporting the Win9x OSes? 2 more years? 5? 10? 20? Until there aren't any more Win9x users? But if all of the Win9x users have their OSS software continue to support Win9x, what incentive do they have to upgrade? They obviously don't care about bugs or viruses if they're still using Win9x software after all these years.
They could have the phishing philter and spell checker as addons which are installed by default - with the option to not install in a 'custom' install, like you can do with the DOM inspector. Then you can remove them if you don't want them. Customisation is always fun :)
which is totally what she said