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Mozilla Pitches Firefox 3.1 Alpha For July Release
An anonymous reader writes "Just a week after Mozilla shipped Firefox 3.0, the open-source developer has proposed ship dates for the next version that, if approved, would produce an alpha release next month and a final no later than early 2009. According to a draft schedule discussed at a recent meeting, Mozilla wants to have the first Firefox 3.1 developer preview ready by July, then move to a beta by August. The schedule slates final code delivery in the last quarter of this year or the first quarter of 2009. A month ago, when Mozilla first started discussing Firefox 3.1 internally, Mike Schroepfer, the company's vice president of engineering, said the upgrade's target ship date was the end of 2008. If Mozilla holds to that plan, Firefox 3.1 would be its first fast-track update. Firefox 3.0, for instance, launched approximately 20 months after its predecessor, Firefox 2.0."
But so what?
There's nothing in the article or summary that hasn't already been covered in the other 76 articles about Firefox in the last 2 months.
Firefox team is still developing Firefox... shit, so is Opera, so is IE, Safari, etc, etc...
They could change the version number and release a production-quality 3.1 tomorrow. What matters is the new features/bugfixes/optimizations in 3.1. Without them there's no context for the news.
Firefox 2.0 was also supposed to be a quick development, based on the same gecko branch. It eventually took about a year.
I think the past record of Mozilla.org has repeatedly shown that it is unable to release a product on time, given the huge amount of testing/fixing iterations that must come before the final release. A Firefox "quick release" will take time, and divert resources from important future projects such as Gecko 2.
I would have thought Mozilla.org would have finally admitted that the architecture and development model of Firefox is characterised by long maturation times. This is needed to keep up its high quality level.
I do have add-ons installed and it hasn't crashed once. Aren't anecdotes fun?
I'd really rather they focus on important things first. The Acid tests are specifically much harder than what a browser needs to handle to do a good job with web browsing, in fact a few of the tests specifically use broken code IIRC.
Really the updates to the bookmark system scheduled for 3.1 are probably going to make a bigger impact on most users than Acid compliance would.
I think the main point of getting 3.1 out there is to get the features in that couldn't be completed for 3.0 but weren't necessities. And with the level of rebuilding that 3.0 required it's not a shock that a few less important features would have to be dropped to get the important stuff finished.
"Well, I can dream, can't I?"
I dream of a Firefox that doesn't have CPU hogging problems. Firefox 3 seems to be a little worse than the previous version.
For those of us who open a lot of windows and tabs and leave them open a long time, as when doing research, Firefox is a hassle. It slows the entire computer until all windows and tabs are closed.
Try playing around with "browser.urlbar.search.chunkSize" and "browser.urlbar.search.timeout" in about:config. The prefs file says this about it.
"Kindergarten interface" is probably the most subjective complaint possible on the matter and last time I checked, kindergartners don't write in a sans serif font face. If you're referring to multiple colors, there is scientific research to support such a change, but then again you consider research to be garbage so I don't see you taking much stock in that.
It's also interesting how you reiterate "Change for the sake of change isn't good" with no new content despite that very point having been dealt with in the parent (repeating the same point verbatim is not actually a rebuttal). Despite what you may think, you have not successfully argued that these changes were made for the sake of change (they were not, any such statement is clearly ignorant and closed minded) or that the changes were actually negative. All you've done is described why YOU don't like it in the vaguest possible terms you could manage. I assure you, you are a minority and a small one at that.
While I don't have a problem with your personal taste in web browsers, I do find your critiques to be more of insults rather than critiques. If you don't like Firefox 3, that's fine, but making ignorant statements is a hard position to defend. I challenge you to provide actual evidence that suggests the user interface in Firefox was changed solely for the sake of change.
Just to be technical, there is an algorithm for what to display based on what you have typed. It is anything but random.
I went to Tools/ Options/ Applications/ and selected "Always ask" or "Save File". I will try that. It's necessary to do that carefully, because the selection box is buggy.
I was already using the latest Adblock Plus and NoScript versions.
I don't think Google is getting much software development for the $50,000,000 each year it is paying.
It'll only be a PR problem in the small circle of "browser nerds", everyone else will just get on with their lives, having realised there's more to life then what score your favourite browser gets in the Acid 3 test.
The Acid tests are specifically much harder than what a browser needs to handle to do a good job with web browsing, in fact a few of the tests specifically use broken code IIRC.
The things tested by ACID3 are not in general use because browsers don't reliably support them. Many would be in use if they were actually supported. That is the aim of ACID3, to drive browser makers to actually fix these things so people can finally start using them.
People get "bent out of shape" because something that worked well for them has been taken away and replaced with something that (for them) works less well, is less intuitive (when I'm in a URL entry box, I don't expect to have searches on titles), looks awful (that two line layout is not nice to read, despite having pretty colours) and does not allow a return to old functionality. If "awesome bar" had been an option, then there wouldn't be a fuss. But the developers seem to have decided they know what is best for the users and because they have made this great new thing it should be shoved down their users' throats. Last time I had this happen to me was Clippy - but at least you could turn that wonderful new functionality off!
As we can customise the interface, the awesome bar could exist alongside the address bar so that you could drag one or the other into your interface to use.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
I've installed several add-ons and it hasn't crashed for me, either. I thought it would be just as stable on any other OS, so I installed it on my mother's tablet (with M$ Vista), and it crashed almost immediately. Every once in a while, it'll randomly crash when I hit F6 (to highlight the URL), or when I first browse to a site. I would venture a guess, based upon my admittedly limited amount of experience on the matter, that the Windows version may have more instabilities than that of Linux... gosh, imagine that. ;)
Sanity is like a condom: rather have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.
It seems your usage is so far removed from both
that I don't see why a browser should be expected to perform well against your criteria.
FF is open source, so it would be a simple enough thing for you to either fork it yourself or hire someone with the skills to do so, and build a variant that could be left running for days on end, with hundreds of tabs left open.
But I'm not sure that the community needs a browser that meets these requirements. Maybe I'm wrong, in which case I expect this post to get soundly trounced.