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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
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
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.
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.
Really? That one, relatively useless piece of eyecandy is the only thing holding you back from using Firefox.
Uhuh.
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.
Last I saw tab previews in the taskbar was the default for Firefox 3.6, I had to disable it any time I did a clean install.
browser.taskbar.previews.enable in about:config
IMO it entirely defeat the point of having tabs in ONE program, so only one app wastes taskbar space, even preview space
"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
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.
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)
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.
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.