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Firefox 2.0.0.11 Released
BrianAU writes "Firefox 2.0.0.11 has been released, the Release Notes show the only major change as a correction of a compatibility issue with some websites and extensions as discovered in Firefox 2.0.0.10."
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Fix any problems? I always have this weird slowing down, to the point where I can't switch between tabs and the URL bar is frozen. They should fix that. Beck to using Opera (out of necessity because I really do like the Fox better, when it's working)
Maybe it was different in the past when software didn't automatically tell its users to upgrade but now that Firefox reminds you automatically when a new release is out I don't see the reason why Slashdot would put this on the front page... Not only that but this release was pushed out yesterday (or the day before, I can't recall when I picked it up). In addition to even that aside, 2.*.10 was out just several days before that and was a bigger update. If anything, we should have heard about that instead and not this minor fix.
Until the "editors" stop pushing garbage through w/o letting the firehose "fix" stupid submissions, Slashdot will continue to lag other sites in the quality coming through. If you really want to keep it up let the firehose do its job -- if not, let it degrade to the steaming pile that is Digg and be done with it already.
... a new Firefox point release. Time to run regedit and delete all the .htm/.html DDEExec keys by hand again.
Why don't they ever seem to fix that bug?
Firefox is a terrific product which I use and wholeheartedly endorse, but I think they have lost sight of their original intentions a bit. I originally started using Phoenix way back when because of the fast, simple interface. People have been so enamored with lots of pretty icons, plug-ins and add-ons, that in many cases, IE is a faster, leaner browser. ::shudder:: I like many of the add-on features on more powerful systems, but I pine for a browser that I can run quickly and easily on low-end machines. I've ever once used a Firefox theme. The default one is just fine for me. I've heard rumors that FF3 is headed in that direction, and I just hope that they keep that focus. Maybe they could even have separate installations or installation options for low-end and high-end machines.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
so thats how web pages are made...they take the paper right off the rollers and scan them into the internet. I have always thought there was some kind of programming involved here...You learn something new everyday.
Yes, what the heck is that? Restarting fixes it, but that just shouldn't be. Happens under Linux on my machine at work that rarely reboots.
Ever since 2.0.0.8, Firefox is crashing regularly on both my Win2k and XP (both fully patched) boxes. New Firefox releases keep coming fast this year, but do they ever address these stability issues? Is anyone else getting regular (2-3 per week) crashes? Do I need to quit surfing for free porn in the .ru domain on my Win95 box with no firewall? (ok, that last part was actually bs).
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
Yes, I use Firefox, happy user and all, but how is such a minor update news worth to make it on the title page?
Just as a comparison: when OpenSuse 10.2 was released (or was it 10.1) not a single of the many submitted articles was published on Slashdot.
So why is this worth its own article on Slashdot?
If I'll be able to see my account activity on Vonage now. Because while I can't see it with Firefox, I can see it with IE which annoys me to no end.
A simple bugfix release is definitely !news. If slashdot were to consistently post stories for simple bugfix releases for major software packages these would be 90% of the news! Imagine MS patch Tuesdays.
Ok. It doesn't. But wouldn't it be nice if it did? Preconfigured with the most usable web enhancements. You could toggle the menu to [dis]appear much like extra Office doodads. Honestly, I don't know what's all out there, but extra exposure is the punch behind advertising. Show me what I'm truly missing in my web experience.
I think such an addition will separate Firefox from IE. Imagine another toolbar installed by default with all these gizmos, leaving IE users scratching their chin, "Hmm. Wheres mine?"
I found some Flash-based stuff causes that to happen to me every once in a while. Killing off tabs with Flash content one at a time usually reveals one of them was solely responsible for the sluggish performance. What that really means I don't know. Time for Flash-block perhaps? I'm too lazy to bother...
It is a sad day when the crapflooding is more interesting than TFA.
.. when I have to hear about an update before I am notified.
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
Even this is more interesting than the "news" of Firefox getting a minor update.
If only there was a way for Firefox users to be automatically notified of new patches.
What are the security changes, in some sort of detail? The ChangeLog is completely vague. I know I can diff the code, but an explanation would be a lot better.
This release did not address a "compatibility issue;" it was released solely to fix a bug in canvas.drawImage that was introduced in 2.0.0.10, the bug being that it no longer worked.
See more details at John Resig's blog.
Oddly enough, this is at least somewhat informative.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
why is this on the front page of slashdot? The folks who already have the browser will already get it automatically, and for those who don't... well doesn't really matter for them no? So who does this leave, the folks who do have firefox, but disabled auto update, yet still cares to update his/her browser while NOT visiting firefox's release page?
I see some people saying that this isn't news, but I am glad to see Firefox get some attention. Some people may have disabled auto update and forgotten to update for a while. (I personally don't like apps that automatically phone home even with good intentions).
This specific release only fixes a canvas regression from the previous one, (Whoops! And I thought I was having a bad day trying to rush out some software) but altogether previous releases fix many security issues and it is nice to see a reminder elsewhere once and a while. If nothing else it seems like a good time to download a fresh set of installation files.
And I wonder why I spend more and more time at Ars Technica these days...
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
Well, on my G4 Mac Firefox 2.0.0.9 seemed to hit a peak for resource usage, and needed to be restarted every couple of hours if I had my usual six or seven tabs open. Eventually it would slow to a near halt. Slashdot in particular just stopped loading for some reason that I couldn't bothered to figure out.
2.0.0.10 seemed to be better in terms of bring a memory hog, but crashed repeatedly. I suspect that specific to a few sites, but still there hadn't been problems before.
2.0.0.11? We'll see.
Although I haven't quite reached the point of abandoning FF, I do find myself jumping to Safari on the Mac or IE and Opera on the PC when FF starts having problems. I too long for a browser that compatible, fast, and stripped down.
I really think that browsers are one of those things that needs to be totally reinvented every few years. The people that create IE or Firefox or Opera inevitably get locked into one paradigm or the other, even if the Internet landscape has changed around them. Just as Netscape refined what Mosaic had created, and IE trumped Netscape, and Firefox was a grand improvement on IE, it may be time for a new take on browser design and usability that doesn't just copy what has been done before.
That likely means a few dead ends, but it's what I'll be watching for.
Three Squirrels
Open source projects tend to have somewhat byzantine version numbering schemes, but Firefox really takes the cake. It has four different numbers, out of which only two are used. The second one was a "5" once, but that was completely arbitary, too.
I know the reason for this is supposedly the extension system, but that is not a valid excuse. An internal technical detail should not exposed to users like that, and even so, the reason is not the extension system, but that the version checking for extensions was designed wrong from the start.
Now, can we please have a sane two-part version number for 3.0 and up?
Mozilla Dev1: OMFG, we haven't been mentioned on the front page of slashdot in like 20 minutes or something!
Mozilla Dev2: No problem. We'll just release yet another pointless sub-sub-sub-sub-sub version.
Me: (looking at yet another firefox recompile from FreeBSD ports) Screw it, I'm going back to seamonkey.
Ubuntu: If at first you don't succeed, blindly slap a sudo in front of it
Calendars indicate today is Saturday. week.day.07 to be released tomorrow.
Wait. Stop scrolling for a sec. O.K. Thanks. - P
My system doesn't know what a "regedit" is. Maybe that's your problem?
You should be careful before upgrading. Firefox upgraded itself for me, without my consent, to this release. It was working fine before, but now it's crashing a few seconds after it starts up. I've had to switch back to using Safari until they get this resolved.
I tried going back to Firefox 2.0.0.10, but right after starting it up it upgraded automatically to Firefox 2.0.0.11, which of course doesn't work!
How is this a news item? All 4 of my computers updated automatically. NAtural as breathing. Reporting this is like reporting "The sun rose today for the nth time this year...."
2.0.0.10 f*cked up a lot of AJAXy web apps, and, frankly, Mozilla's initial response was less than "customer oriented". The "shoot the messanger" attitude exhibited in some of those early Bugzilla posts - despite there being numerous random URLs provided to point out the flaw - is a bit troubling.
As is the fact that Firefox's release process seems to be either lacking basic tests for std. API's, or is choosing to skip those tests.
And of course, the lack of an easy 1-click "Revert" menu item/button to back down versions when an auto-updater introduces such a bug further compounds the impact of these sort of bugs.
Of course, the /. crowd are somehow spinning this serious failure of both
software and processes into proof of Firefox's superiority, due to
the quick turnaround time. However, those of us that were
actually bitten by this - and esp. had customers bitten by this (see the Bugzilla link above)
- are having to rethink the usual practice of recommending FF over IE/Opera/etc.
007: "Who are you?"
Pussy: "My name is Pussy Galore."
007: "I must be dreaming..."
Is there a mute function like the [esc] key in IE?
Can I quickly add a page to the bookmarks toolbar (or a folder on the bookmarks toolbar) by right clicking the toolbar (or on the folder)?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
with the difficulty of creating a computer program compared with the hastle from armchair programmers I 'm suprised there's any programmers.
It's news for nerds in the tradition of slashdot to announce software released!
Flashblock is damned nice. I just started using it in response to some unusually-gross ads on Fark. It doesn't require much motivation to install -- just google flashblock and click on the obvious link.
Let me know when FireFox 3.0.1.0.1.11 gets here.
Does anyone know how to turn off the loading of the "you've just upgraded" web page that appears after you install the update? I was looking through about:config but I didn't see anything relevant.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Damn, now I need to recompile again.
Yes, SeaMonkey 1.1.7 released yesterday as well.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE
Do not use revision numbers on your software that look like IP addresses. ESPECIALLY please don't use them in the user agent string so that these numbers appear in web log files. Such numbers muck up many things.
Use dashes, parentheses, brackets, underscores, r.10, or ANYTHING except 4 numbers in value range [0-255] separated by 3 periods. There is no way to tell them apart from an ip address. Then we have to write blacklists, manually scan for errors, adjust counts, grep through log files with filters for the front of the line, etc etc etc. Bleachk!
I just upgraded a few hours ago and have had a single problem yet! it works great. please do not scare off those who are about to upgrade just because yours doesn't work
It would be worth a mention on /. That causes me to let firefox non-responsive a couple of times a day on the company network, where dns/proxy is slow as hell if you have a large .pac file.
Yay - they fixed the canvas bug that was introduced with .10.
Thank you very much. Now can we see some real news?
We were actually one of the companies that found the bug shortly after the release of 2.0.0.10 and if you can't see why this is news then I'm really glad you don't work on my dev team.
Just so we're clear on what the bug ACTUALLY was, the bug specifically effected the canvas drawing capability in the browser. It's not something they test for and frankly, given our experience developing for IE, it's not one they test for either (if IE's random and aberrant behavior is any indication, hell MS can't even make a browser that displays content in a compliant manner given the HTML spec).
A number of sites and web applications use this functionality specifically for navigation, and when Firefox was updated to 2.0.0.10 on many client machines automatically, some business critical web applications were seriously effected. Because of this it was a pretty serious issue.
The reason this IS news is because after confirming the bug and determining the extent of the effect on the user base, the Mozilla folks had nightly builds in our hands just hours after a fix was checked in. This got most of the immediately effected back to work within hours.
A number of us then independently verified the fix against our code and then provided rapid feedback to the team so they could issue a release.
This resulted in an astonishingly fast turnaround. I think the Mozilla folks are to be commended for both not resisting requests for a new release, and the speed with which they were able to respond to a bug effecting business critical web applications. If this had been MS we would have spent 2 weeks navigating mindless support bureaucracy and then fought with management excuses as to why a fix just "can't be turned around overnight." We would have then been forced to contact all of our customers and go into long, boring explanations most of them would never have understood... it's all down hill from there.
Why this IS big news: It is a really bright and shining example of why this type of development is succeeding even in a situation where recursion testing fails (and if you think recursion testing can't fail then you just haven't been developing long enough).
The other good thing that came out of this is we now have a mechanism where developers can subscribe to a mailing list alerting then to pending releases.
Not only did Mozilla respond with a technical fix to the bug AND promptly issue a release which addressed the issue, but they were humble enough to recognize there was a process related problem that needed addressing as well; they fixed that too.
ER
why the hell do they use such a retarded versioning scheme? every single 2.x release is going to start 2.0.0.x, and then the next planned release is 3.x, whats the point in the .0.0? one zero i could understand, but having two and NEVER incrementing either is silly
TIAEAE!
We were actually one of the companies that found the bug shortly after the release of 2.0.0.10 and if you can't see why this is news then I'm really glad you don't work on my dev team.
I am not a developer by choice as I'm not an underpaid and overworked retard and for you to claim that I'm an idiot is nothing more than troll food.
Now, if you had submitted what you just did as the summary instead of "looky here, a shiny new Firefox *.*.*.x version," as what was posted on the front page, then maybe it would have been news but most likely not as I couldn't care less because it didn't affect me in the least.
Move along trollbag, you're not wanted here.
My linux box doesn't have Flash, you insensitive clod!
well, they fixed: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=405584 (which broke in .10)
it may not matter to you, but my favourite addon ChromaTabs was broken because of that one.
is it newsworthy? of course not. i got the auto-update notice long before i saw it on slashdot. guess it's a slow day.
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
Second, if you did work for me you'd be making deep into the 6 figure range like most Oracle savvy developers and you would hardly fall into the underpaid and overworked category.
Third, the reason f&%ktards like you don't work for me is exactly the attitude you exhibited in your last post.
I was working on Sperry systems making more money that your dad ever took home when you were still puking formula onto your mommy's blouse. Check the attitude at the door unless you want to walk out with a flat dic%.
E
Tab behaviour is frankly rooted since these 2 new releases.
They've been pumping them out fast to boot, it's actually been quite frustating as I could have sworn I've disabled auto updatinig in FF several times before yet it seems to keep doing it.
I'm hoping tab mix plus's author fixes it up, I can't use FF without it now.
As a casual user, these frequent firefox updates are getting to be a pain. At the least, can they not rub in the inconvenience by sending me to that stupid "you've updated"' page?
(different AC here)
Hell, I *still* work on Sperry systems. It pays more.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
have they done anything to stop the memory leak? its the only draw back I see in FireFox.
I saw one of my friend (using a PC with 1GB memory) wasting 250MB just for the FireFox. phew!
If I had points, I'd boost you. Mine was set to auto and now is not.
Thanks!
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
This makes me wonder when windows will finally have a centralized update system. It seems that every single software has it's own update system. If you install enough softwares on your computer, I'm sure you can spend your weeks just updating them all.
i won't go back to IE, but i'm getting really annoyed with you guys breaking my extensions. Please fix whatever it is you are trying to fix and let the makers of extensions catch up. Using FF went from dreamlike to almost as annoying as IE. i'll stick with you for a little while longer, but i'm more open to switching to the next FOSS browser now because you're breaking what made FF so awesome.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Ah yes.
"Hey Guys, Kernel 2.0.3.4.1.2.325.234234324 was released today"
"Linus might be on TV not sure let you know later"
"Every Goddamn release of support for some game by that company that tried to port games to Linux"
"Micro$oft!"
"CowboyNeal!!!!"
How the hell does this site stay around. You all must have osdn by the balls or something.
I'm happy this was posted, because it gives me a chance to vent about how bad Firefox really is! To wit:
Ever since last spring, Firefox has been suffering from the yips, like a pro golfer who can't putt straight because he's afraid the ball won't go in. What I mean is that the software just hangs up for between 10- and 60-seconds every time a new page is loaded. I've gone through all the "here's how to solve the problem" pages I can find, to no avail. I even went back to V1.5, which does NOT suffer from the problem, but may (or may not?) have the dreaded "security vulnerabilities" about which we're warned so often. Last night, I downloaded and installed V3.0b1, and it was blazing fast, for about an hour, and then began getting the yips just like V2.whatever. This leads me to suspect that this problem might be caused by some sort of fast "fill-up" of a file with useless data or a fairly fast memory leak. Arguing against that is that merely shutting the software down and restarting doesn't cure the problem.
I've worked in the past as a scientific programmer. (I'm actually an astronomer by trade.) I've also managed fairly large engineering tasks that included programmers working for me. What I believe is happening is that the folks who are writing this software are not working in a disciplined environment where everybody knows what the product is supposed to be and where she/he fits in the effort. I'd call such a product-oriented environment. I suspect that the environment in which the programmers are working is a process-oriented one, in which the programmers are so in love with the process of writing the code that they lose sight of the fact that their code is intended to actually be USED. I further suggest that, since the customers aren't expected to pay for the product, that fact alone tends to insulate the programmers from any really aggressive accountability.
Meanwhile, I find using Firefox to be really frustrating, so frustrating that I'm using IE7 more and more, despite my distaste for anything produced by that company founded by "The Wicked Wizard of the Northwest". IE7 isn't particularly fast, but doesn't suffer from the yips.
I've also tried Safari and Opera, which seem to suffer from their own set of hang-up problems. This suggests that some upgrade to WinXPsp2 might be perfectly compatible with IE7 but not with all other browsers. Of course, "The Wicked Wizard of the Northwest" wouldn't do THAT, would he?
(Meanwhile)^2: Does anyone know of a browser that has a reasonable feature set, is reasonably fast, and just works? I'd even lay down some (weakened) US dollars for it!
(Note to any member of the Tribe of the Mozillites who might be reading this: OK, so we don't actually pay for Firefox. No matter. Somebody's paying your salary. Unless you're independently wealthy, behave like you actually need your job....)