Slashdot Mirror
Firefox 3.7 Dropped In Favor of Feature Updates
Barence sends in a report from pcpro.co.uk that says "Under its original plans, Mozilla would roll out Firefox 3.6 and 3.7 over the course of 2009, each bringing minor improvements to the browser. However, a steady stream of delays to Firefox 3.6 has rendered that goal unobtainable, forcing Mozilla to rethink its release. As a result, Firefox 3.7 has been dropped and will be replaced with feature updates for Firefox 3.6 that will be rolled out with security updates. This should free up the team to work on the next major release, Firefox 4, slated for the last quarter of 2010, which is expected to follow the same development process." Updated 20100116 00:54 GMT by timothy: Alexander Limi, from Firefox User Experience, says that the PC Pro article linked above misinterprets the situation, and that 3.7 is still on the roadmap before 4.0. The confusion stems from a schedule realignment: the out-of-process plugins feature, originally slated to land in 3.7, will instead ship as a minor update in Firefox's 3.6 series. According to Limi, CNET gets it right."
So now we have to wait until 2011 for Firefox 4 to get tab previews in the taskbar? Time to investigate ad-block addons for IE8.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
Just like when running through actual minefields, others may not be as lucky as you.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
What purpose does it serve to skip version numbers, except for some political or media-relations reason? The Linux kernel and many other open source projects have release cycles of "it's done when it's done" -- and a predictable version numbering system. What next, Mozilla Firefox 2010 Professional Edition? Delays are inevitable in any software development project.
Also, Slashdot -- this news post was like saying "X replaced by Y. Z reported jealous, but A and B are looking forward to bringing C onboard soon." Numbers should not be used in place of content. $WITTY_COMMENT. $RETORT. $TROLL. $VAGUE_REFERENCE_TO_SEXUALITY.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
will be replaced with feature updates for Firefox 3.6 that will be rolled out with security updates
This seems to be a horrible idea to me, unless I'm misinterpreting it. I can see this being implemented in two ways:
One, Mozilla withholds security updates until there is a feature ready to go, which is just stupid - don't leave a hole if you've got a fix ready. One of the arguments in favor Firefox over IE is the more rapid security updates.
Two, Mozilla withholds features until a security update is necessary. I can't see any advantage to doing this, but there's a few obvious downsides (like withholding a perfectly good feature until someone finds something we're supposed to be hoping is not there).
Unless I'm missing something?
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
Security updates should never be combined with feature updates. Anyone who doesn't want the feature update is then in the unfortunate position to decide whether they'll get the unwanted features or keep the unwanted vulnerabilities. Bad Mozilla.
Small feature updates are not conducive to getting corporate support. With large updates, a company can say, "We support Firefox 3.5+", and they can be reasonably confident that they don't need to fully test every minor release of Firefox 3.5. With small updates they have to say, "We support Firefox 3.6.7", and can't be sure that they will actually be able to support 3.6.8 without fully testing it. If you want corporate support, you have to have feature freezes, or support stops being worth the testing time.
Is Lynx not working out for you?
It's true that my Fx has crashed seven times in the last three months. However, I can trace two of them to a faulty extension. The rest may very well come from the Flash plugin, which isn't entirely stable on Snow Leopard and hasn't been fixed in ages. Offhand I can't remember a single crash not directly related to Flash (excepting the extension, of course).
I'm willing to bet that a fair part of the stability issues people have actually comes from badly-written extensions and plugins. Remember that most other applications don't execute code written by Adobe (and yes, I see that as an argument as to why they're more stable).
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Helpful Hint of the Day: There are other browsers. Use one.
Seriously, if it's not working for YOU, use something else. It works for everyone else here, so it must be something with you.
Also, it's open source. Please submit your patches directly to Mozilla or ask them for a refund in the amount of your purchase price. Either way this is not the place for it.
The far and away priority one feature should be Multithreading. Each tab and each plugin should have its own process and its own memory space, so that a crash of one tab/plugin, or one tab/plugin using loads of CPU power, should have practically no effect on my other tabs/plugins on my 4-core CPU.
So I don't care about copying Chrome's GUI. But copying Chrome's sandboxing and multithreading architecture I very much care about!
There is a Mozilla project to implement this, but the project page hasn't been updated in months, as far as I can tell.
SO damn slow
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Please enlighten us on how firefox has gotten worse.
From where I sit, v3.5 is a huge improvement over what came before. I'm optimistic that v3.6 will be an improvement over v3.5.
In a word: "Awesomebar"