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Mozilla Rolls Out Firefox 3.6 RC, Nears Final
CWmike writes "Mozilla has shipped a release candidate build of Firefox 3.6 that, barring problems, will become the final, finished version of the upgrade. Firefox 3.6 RC1, which followed a run of betas that started in early November, features nearly 100 bug fixes from the fifth beta that Mozilla issued Dec. 17. The fixes resolved numerous crash bugs, including one that brought down the browser when it was steered to Yahoo's front page. Another fix removed a small amount of code owned by Microsoft from Firefox. The code was pointed out by a Mozilla contributor, and after digging, another developer found the original Microsoft license agreement. 'Amusingly enough, it's actually really permissive. Really the only part that's problematic is the agreement to "include the copyright notice ... on your product label and as a part of the sign-on message for your software product,"' wrote Kyle Huey on Mozilla's Bugzilla. Even so, others working on the bug said the code needed to be replaced with Mozilla's own."
Ahh, slashdot. Come for the condescension, stay for the pedantry. Unpriveleged users don't get offered or notified of updates in 3.5. You can't even use the built in facility to manually check for an update. It is actually less secure to use Firefox as an unpriveleged user than it is to run as an admin unless you actively go and see what the latest release is.
I can install it as a normal user. Here's how:
1. Log into Windows as a normal user.
2. Double click installer.
3. Windows prompts you to elevate automatically. Enter password for elevation.
4. Install. Close down FF if it runs after install because it is running as admin.
Then, as a normal user, start Firefox. You are logged in as your normal user and running the browser you just installed. But mysteriously FF's update feature is completely turned off. It doesn't even WARN you that there is an update pending, never mind downloading it, or downloading it and asking to elevate privs so that you can install it or ask an admin. The feature is so fully disabled that you can't even ask it to check for updates. This means that I have to rely on hearing about updates through some third-party channel, such as /., then remember to start Firefox as an admin to manually make it check for updates. This is so fundamentally broken that it's clear not a single FF developer uses a normal user account on Vista or 7.
The fixes resolved numerous crash bugs, including one that brought down the browser when it was steered to Yahoo's front page. Another fix removed a small amount of code owned by Microsoft from Firefox.
For a piece of software that's been actively developed for so many years, Firefox has way too many bugs that cause it to crash. The memory footprint seems to be getting bigger and bigger with each release and Firefox is noticably slower compared to Opera when it comes to rendering and general GUI responsiveness. I don't want to start any flame wars, I'm just sharing my experience and point of view, it just seems to me that Firefox has been on an unfortunate development path that will lead to its death before it hits version 5.0, much like Netscape.
Some of you know that FreeBSD 5.x was a very unfortunate branch plagued with serious bugs. Can you recall any other pieces of software that suffered under the 5.0 curse?
That's an odd question considering that Firefox continues to gain market share.
Perhaps you should ask yourself if "smaller" and "faster" are really the dominant factors driving users to switch browsers.
*sigh* back to work...
Firefox is horrible to administer in corporate environments already. Adding a hidden pref that is only settable at the system level wouldn't make this any worse.
Until Opera and Chrome get usable, working AdBlock+ and NoScript, then there are no good alternatives to Firefox.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
8GB RAM is 120 EUR. Thats a month of quality food for a single person. Saying hardware is cheap is wrong because it's not cheap. Not for the majority of the people.
Guess you've never really used Opera since it has the equivilants of those add-ons built in.
Unlike IE-specific features, Mozilla-specific features have a better chance of getting into the other three major engines (Safari based on Apple's WebKit tree, Chrome based on Google's WebKit tree, and Opera based on Presto) and into W3C drafts.
I am always dismayed by the lack of Linux x86_64 Firefox releases.
I can download current releases of OpenOffice for Linux x96_64.
Why is it so hard to find Firefox for x86_64???
Heres my guess:
Statistically out of every 10 Windows users 7 will be average (mom, dad, grandma, etc) , 1 user will be a moron and will fall for every phishing and malware attack, 1 will be a moderately advanced user and 1 will be a fairly advanced user / developer.
When you're dealing with that kind of audience, your goals are *vastly* different than highly customizable operating systems like Linux. Your criticisms are minor and superficial. Given *ANY* UI decision you can find users that disagree with it. Calling it proof is frankly laughable.
If you're interested in why windows is "bloated" you can read this: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/11/19/disk-space.aspx
As far as RAM is concerned, firefox itself is going to consume/require several hundred megs for an average user visiting youtube and other misc. flash heavy websites. That said, I don't have a clue what the actual RAM usage levels are of Win7 vs Ubuntu 9.10