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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."
I wonder what effect this is going to have on the implementation of SVG animation, which is part of gecko 1.9.3, which was to be used in 3.7. Is it going to be slotted into 3.6 sometime or will it get pushed to 4?
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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."
I'm using it already as my predominant web browser of choice. Works like a champ so far. I know it's not even pre-release blah blah. It works for me.
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
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.
Firefox will be dead before it hits version 5.0.
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
codename: Minefield...which is now, possibly, ironic
No, it's intentional. Mozilla has been using Minefield has the code name for their cutting edge nightly stuff for quite some time... you know, the stuff that could randomly explode.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
It doesn't?
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.
Perhaps they intend to roll out new features to 3.6 in the same manner as they do security updates; one 3.6.x release might be a bug fix, another might be new features and another a combination of the two. You don't have to bring out new features on major releases, so this might even mean that we'll get features added to 3.6 sooner than we would have done waiting until 3.7 before releasing them all in one go.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
It doesn't?
No it doesn't. Straight from the author's mouths.
Chrome does not yet allow extensions to prevent page elements from being fetched, just to hide them.
Maybe I'm lucky (conversely, maybe you are unlucky), but 32-bit Firefox 3.5x is 100%* rock-solid stable on my PCs. I can't compare this to IE's stability, as I never, ever, use IE. Granted, I only have 4 add-ons installed (ColorfulTabs, Flashblock, ForecastFox, and Oldbar), but Firefox simply works.
*Actually, I can remember 1 time that Firefox locked up on me, months ago, so its stability is 100% minus one_event.
AdBlock for Chrome still loads the ads, it just hides them immediately. AdBlock for Firefox actually prevents ads from loading. This is due to the fact that Firefox has what's called a 'content policy' that allows AdBlock to prevent things from loading, while Chrome has no such alternative.
"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."
[jay@gobstopper ~]% date
Fri 15 Jan 2010 12:32:18 EST
I think you're missing two things:
1) The article's first paragraph is taking a proposal for a possible future plan of action
and claiming that it is the plan of action.
2) Right now (Firefox 3.0 and Firefox 3.5) there are no features shipped as minor updates;
all features are "withheld" as you put it until the next major version.
The only firm current plan here is that one particular feature, namely out-of-process plug-ins, is currently planned to be backported to Firefox 3.6 and shipped in some form in one of the minor updates. Once it's judged ready and so forth. Since minor updates are all about security and stability, this particular feature fits well in their scope (for example, a significant fraction of Firefox crashes are actually Flash crashes).
There is also talk of possibly backporting some other small features (mostly performance-related) to the stable branch as they become ready. This may or may not happen. There is also discussion about what and when the next Firefox major update will be, and discussion about what and when the next Gecko release will be. These may not happen at the same time. None of that is decided.
I have seen you post this ANY time Firefox has been mentioned for the past couple of weeks, cut and paste style. You are either a shill of some sort, or forced to do this because of one of your clients. Either way, you aren't wanted here.
Living With a Nerd
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.
I keep HEARING about all these serious problems, but the five computes in my household using Firefox 3.5x (two of them Ubuntu 9.10, three of them Windows XP SP3) haven't SHOWN me any of these problems.
These posts keep talking about how there are major problems with Firefox, and they keep getting worse...yet I haven't experienced nor do I know anyone in my relatively large nerd circle who has experienced what is being described after the release of 3.5.
It sounds like paid shill bullshit to me.
Living With a Nerd
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)
You're missing this:
(3) Mozilla does individual security fixes and feature updates for 3.6 as they are completed (maybe grouping the two together in an update if they happen to be ready at the same time, but not holding either to wait for the other), but doesn't have one big list of featur updates that must be complete for a "v3.7" that are released all at once. The "feature updates that will be rolled out with security updates", in this case, would mean that the feature updates are rolled into the usual chain of flowing, as-completed security update point releases rather than bundled together into a minor version release, not that each individual feature update must accompany at least one security fix.
Have you seen $200 million worth of development in Firefox?
http://planet.mozilla.org/
Spend a little time reading this on a regular basis, and you'll soon discover how many projects Mozilla handles, and all the developers they're paying.
The big projects include:
Firefox, Bugzilla, Camino, Fennec, Lightning, Sunbird, Seamonkey, and Thunderbird.
These are major multi-platform projects.
Mozilla has several projects for first-party add-ons for all of the above such as Firebug, Chromebug, . Then they have tons of major projects that most people never hear about. At the moment they're working on:
Jetpack
Raindrop
Bespin
Concept
Personas
Prism
Snowl
Test Pilot
Ubiquity
Weave
Electrolysis
A tool recently said the KDE code based purely on lines of code should have cost $175 million to develop, and that wasn't counting Koffice, and anything outside the main KDE trunk.
Mozilla also doesn't just do code projects, they do tons of community management and outreach projects like Mozilla Education, which costs even more money.
They also help support outside developers using Mozilla and Xulrunner for other apps such as Kompozer, Songbird, etc.
I don't know where all their money goes, but Mozilla does *A LOT*. To suggest they're not doing much development is ignorance or lies.
Firefox experiences a LOT of crashes and memory hogging, and has for years.
Firefox does crash for me from time to time, on Windows and Linux. I tend to use a lot of extensions, and the most common thing I hear is that extensions are the largest source of memory and stability issues. Do I get daily crashes, or 10 crashes a day? No. And I run daily snapshot builds. I maybe get 1 crash a week, if that.
As a Systems Engineer, I troubleshoot and support some big money apps that crash fairly often. Large software projects are going to have bugs. However, I wager if you run without extensions, you'll find that Firefox is pretty damned stable for such a massive multi-platform app.
Memory issues are all but lies these days. Memory usage has improved so much over the past few years. Firefox is actually better with memory usage than Chrome in many ways. The core app doesn't take too much memory on first load. It doesn't have memory leaks.
There are some intentional features which cause Firefox to eat up some memory that you can turn off, such as Firefox keeping fully rendered pages in memory, so that when you hit the back button, they just display immediately without having to re-render. When you close a tab, it still keeps that full session in memory for some time, so that you can reopen the closed tab with full rendered pages and history if you want.
If you don't like these features, turn them off. Not to mention, these are set to use dynamic chunks of memory which is preportional to your total memory. If you have a desktop with 8 gigs of memory that you're not using, why get upset that Firefox is using 300-400 megs of memory?
Unused memory isn't doing you any good.
Stop with the FUD. Real geeks know better and see right through BS and lies.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Not to feed a troll, but...
If he and a number of other people, as stated in his report (and I'll throw my experience in there as well), don't have the problems, it calls into question the original report of overwhelming issues.
Personally, I'd have to say that I use firefox for an average of 12 hours a day. I use it quite a bit at work and again when I get home. If you add in the time that my friends and relatives use firefox without on going crashing issues (ESPECIALLY those that take down windows, I've NEVER even heard of Firefox itself bringing down properly patched XP, and I know I've not had it take down either my Ubuntu, Gentoo or Fedora systems). I'd have to say that daily useage of Firefox in my circle has to be aproaching 80 or 90 hours per day.
I'm also saying that the "Automatically Generated Crash Reports" "Didn't happen" because, well, they didn't. mostly because there was no need for firefox to automatically generate a report on an event that didn't take place.
Is Firefox perfect? No, far from it. But I have found as many other people, that crashes, when they do occur are almost never caused by firefox itself, but one of the extensions. In the times I've heard of someone with a crash or two, they uninstall the last extension they put on there and they're back to stable. It's that easy. Same goes for slow load times, large memory usage, high CPU usage, etc.
Also, that originating post says that 91% of the Mozilla Foundation's income is $68M, and complains that we haven't seen $200M in development... Well, did you ever think that calculation is a bit off? after all, that'd only mean we'd see $75M which, last I checked is less than $200 by quite a bit.
You really should think about these things more before you post. If you bought that info, you might want a refund...
-=JML=-
I just read mine - I have one in Nov 2009 & one in Dec 2009. I seem to recall that both of those were caused by some script on cnet.com; it was certainly one particular site in both cases. I start each morning with a fresh 12 tabs open and go through the day opening & closing tons of tabs. Maybe this is "lighter" browser use, but I also have a machine at home which keeps 50+ tabs open for weeks at a time & almost never crashes. This leads me to agree with the GP, claiming that Firefox has major problems with crashing sounds like shill bs.
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
I don't. Here's a list of my firefox crashes from one week:
7/27/2009 9:21 PM 9:31 PM 9:34 PM 9:34 PM 9:36 PM 9:44 PM 9:53 PM 9:54 PM 10:12 PM
7/28/2009 1:16 AM 4:05 AM 4:36 AM 12:29 PM 1:41 PM 1:55 PM 5:44 PM 6:55 PM
7/29/2009 11:17 AM 12:28 PM 1:39 PM 6:19 PM 8:24 PM 8:25 PM
7/30/2009 12:24 AM 12:58 PM 1:14 PM 5:22 PM 6:49 PM 7:01 PM 7:30 PM
7/31/2009 11:24 AM 5:35 PM 8:29 PM 8:32 PM 8:44 PM 8:55 PM 9:02 PM
8/1/2009 2:50 AM 11:36 AM 1:31 PM 9:48 PM 9:58 PM
This continued up until 10/9/2009, when the crashes just stopped happening. Since then, I average 1-2 crashes a month.
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"
It is a serious flaw in FireFox that a crashign plug-in brings down the entire browser and all tabs. Yes, applications and plug-ins are going to have bugs. Software architects should take this into account when designing things. FireFox's architects seem not to have done so.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
There's been continuous rearchitecture going on in the 1.9, 1.9.1, 1.9.2 Gecko milestones, and it's ongoing. I mean.... the JS engine is being rewritten from the ground up, in 1.9 CSS layout was rewritten from the ground up, the DOM is about to see some major changes...
Not sure why you decided that there's no rearchitecture going on. ;)
For all you Snow Leopard users...
In case you did not know, you can download optimized Mac versions of a number of browsers from here
Specifically, one of the browsers available is a 64-bit optimized version of FF 3.7 for Snow Leopard.
I finally installed it the other night, after eyeing it warily for the last month or so (as I worked through the latest 3.6 optimized builds). I finally installed it last night, and have to say that it's the biggest improvement to FF that I've came across.
It loads faster, uses less CPU & memory than previous builds, and it's mega fast. My impressions are that it's now as fast as Safari is on a Mac.
It's now my main browser. If you run Snow Leopard, you should check it out.