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Firefox 4 the Last Big Release From Mozilla
nk497 writes "Firefox 4 will be the last major browser release from Mozilla, as it looks to mimic Chrome's speedy release schedule — echoing previous statements that Firefox 7 would arrive this year. "What we want to do is get the power into users' hands more quickly," said vice president of products Jay Sullivan. "For example, the video tag was shippable in June — we should have shipped it." That new schedule is also why Firefox 4 has had 12 betas, he said. Mozilla also said future versions of Firefox would feature a stronger "do not follow tool", as the current one is a "non-technical solution"," Sullivan said. "All you're doing is raising your hand and saying 'I don't want to be tracked.' There's no technical teeth.""
Sounds like Firefox is dying (like BSD).
I guess I'll have to write a plugin that disables auto-update until all installed plugins are updated to support the newest version of Firefox.
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I thought it meant that Mozilla wouldn't have more releases, period. I'm sure I'm not the only one who read it that way--a much better headline would have been "Mozilla to have faster release schedule following Firefox 4" or somesuch.
All they would have to do is call some of their betas number releases.
This is a trench op on the marketing side, to make pointy heads happy that Firefox can be in version 7 this year and version 10 next year. Apparently something pending about betas exhausted them.
So now each version will only have some three features and a few bug fixes. That's about the same as the jump from version 3 to 4 which all told, tackled a whole lot.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
So they can't release certain functions unless they call the browser FireFox 14 or 82 or 198? Does it really matter what "version" it is, as long as you've given the functionality you're adding or the tweaks you're making considerable thought and testing? This sounds an awful lot like "they're on version 13, so we have to catch up in version numbers so people won't think we're a much older out of date product!".
As it stands, we've been getting a new major point version every 12-24 months. What's wrong with that?
I've seen no reason to go with Chrome, but it sounds like Firefox might be trying to find ways to convince me that there's nothing special to stick around for.
Are you sure you're seeing leaks? Firefox will use a certain % of free memory for cache. Just because memory goes up and doesn't come back down immediately doesn't mean the application is leaking. Mozilla's position would seem to be, and I entirely agree, that as long as you have the memory you might as well put it to good use instead of letting it waste away as free memory.
Rapid-update philosophy sounds good for early adopters and hobbyist users (does Chrome have much traction in the corporate environment?)
But what about corporate environments that require software to stay stable and on fixed known-working versions? For example, Firefox 3.6 broke compatibility with a plugin that we have widely distributed at our site, and the solution to this issue requires another mass deployment. We've had similar issues with Java's auto-updater breaking compatibility with some applications (and no, we're not an IE6 shop).
Doug
As if having to support 3 major browsers wasnt a web design nightmare enough..now to support multiple versions of each..yay. I can hear it now.. well.. it looks ok to me, but I got a support email that it looked like (random crap) for this person, looked like (wierd problem) to my other friend and this (random thing) didnt work for one of my friends at work.. see about that will you? Oh.. they all said they used FireFox if that helps.
The last time I used Google Docs, it generated a PDF when I printed the document. Why wouldn't every browser display and print the PDF the same way?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Certainly every browser has memory leaks, and browser releases fix memory leaks all the time. The question is -- do the memory leaks leak enough memory to cause problems? In Firefox's case, the answer seems to be "no", because Firefox uses less memory than other browsers when performing common tasks. If you think you have found a bad memory leak in Firefox, you're welcome to write up a benchmark that will demonstrate Firefox using more memory than other browsers.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
^^ Join the club.
In my case it's usually memory leaks related to having previously handled large amounts of images and also some addons.
Once Firefox has reached a critical mass between 1 and 1.5 GB it always finds ways to crash. Granted, it's a way of freeing up memory, but I'd prefer ones that don't include possible loss of data in open tabs.
Of course not. IE6 shops tend to have no problems with Firefox breaking plugin compatibility. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
That way we can avoid this "you have a higher number than me" syndrome. Ubuntu 10.10, Office 2010, Windows 98, etc.
End this nonsense.
Either that or they have found new ways of fucking up the UI which are so bad, each one deserves its own major release number?
Turning it into a Chrome-lookalike and requiring an addon for the status bar while useless animated bling is included by default is certainly a successful start in that direction
Try searching online for a very special necklace for your wife's 40th birthday and then have THAT still following you around when she is around a few hours later. Cue some very fast bull-shitting excuses and a very quick close-down and cache/cookie clear as soon as she left again.
ESR described the most efficient way to release/produce free/libre/open_source software long ago.
Mozilla seems to be late to the game in realizing that the cathedral approach is not the best way to manage software releases when you are actually participants in the bazaar.
Quite ironic, actually, since Netscape was the first publicly visible software product to embrace to "open source" philosophy back in the day. The release of the Netscape source code was quite shocking and simultaneously gratifying at the time. I was quite gratified personally to be able to compile a Netscape browser from source and surf the web back then. Thank you, ESR.
My Firefox has a CPU leak. I have to kill it and start over every couple of weeks because the CPU usage slowly rises until it hits 100%. This, of course, may be an extension or plugin that's doing it.
I would like the various browsers to have some way of controlling the CPU usage of plugins and web pages running Javascript.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
First of all, kudos to Google for finally going with MSI. It's like providing an RPM and makes everyone's life easier.
Now, that said, the situation with respect to delayed updates is fundamentally different because Chrome hasn't provide security updates for older versions. You're essentially running snapshots all the time. Any IT department would have be bonkers to follow that model.
that I don't already have? Just curious. I've looked at it a little, and it looks like building Plugins with javascript & HTML/CSS instead of pure XUL, but I'm already doing that with the next release of my plugin. It's easy enough to use the DOM to load custom HTML and insert it where you want. I've seen lots of these frameworks build up super complex stuff that'd be great if I was writing a complete application, but in the end it's just a plugin...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
all they have to do is make firefox scale to multiple cores. There's no reason the UI from the current webpage I'm browsing should grind to a halt because I loaded 5 slashdot discussions in the background using middle-click. Both Chrome and Opera 11 have no problem handling this.
And before someone chimes in and posts this saying that they're working on it, take a look again, that page hasn't been updated since May 2010.
At the moment I couldn't care any less about javascript benchmark speed. I just want multicore scaling from Firefox and then I'll be happy.
All they would have to do is call some of their betas number releases.
No. A beta release is (in general) bug fixes and improvements to existing code. They generally don't introduce swaths of new features, that's what the FIRST beta did, the rest are fixing problems with those features. The fact that they have had more than 11 betas of Firefox 4 is proof that what they are trying to do is necessary. They made 4.0 too big.
This is a trench op on the marketing side, to make pointy heads happy that Firefox can be in version 7 this year and version 10 next year. Apparently something pending about betas exhausted them.
They are going for more releases BECAUSE the betas exhausted them, and that's a good decision. What they are trying to do is go to a smaller, more focused release on a smaller number of changes at a given time, and get that version out as the regular version more regularly. It allows them to keep their release and development codebases closer together, meaning less effort for security backfixes into the release version. It allows them to manage the complexity of their changes so a new version of Firefox doesn't feel like a new version of Windows - something that comes out maybe twice in a decade and is so different from what you had before that it's basically unrecognizable.
They've been trying to bite off too much at each new major release, and as a result they've fallen victim to BPS (Perpetual Beta Syndrome) because the scope of changes they are trying to do simultaneously exceeds their development capacity. It's a nasty, unrewarding cycle to get into, and it makes support hard and expensive, and it makes the project stagnate and stagger under its own weight.
In order to dig yourself out of that cycle you need to pick smaller targets and set out to accomplish them, rather than taking on the world with insufficient resources and ending up with a version so buggy and unwieldy that you need a dozen or more betas to get to something you're comfortable won't actually find a way to kill your users, much less work correctly every time. So you'll see a pattern of smaller releases focused on smaller sets of new functionality.
Having said that, I've been using 4.0beta(latest) for a few months, and I find it pretty solid. But the point remains - if they had focused on one task at a time and released that feature, we'd probably be about where we are today, without the vast chasm between "production" and "beta" releases being so huge that a lot of people are going to resist moving to 4.0 for a long time (and keeping the development teams working on two very different codebases for bug fixes).
The bigger you make your changes, and the less often you release, the harder it is for your users to upgrade. And the harder it is for you to maintain two stable and increasingly-different codebases (one development, one stable).
Firefox should have taken 1/3 of the changes they wanted for 4.0, called them 3.7 or 4.0, and released them for beta quickly. Then taken the next 1/3 and made them 3.8 or 5.0. Then the final third and 3.9 or 6.0 (which numbering depends on whether you're in development or marketing, pretty much, but it really doesn't matter).
Instead, we're stuck with two Firefoxes - one that's a year old and is showing its age, and one that's so vastly utterly different in terms of UI and underlying infrastructure that you'll have people resisting the upgrade for at least six months.
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How about letting ME decide what I want to use the memory for. There's no reason why, with 3G of RAM, that I should have to shut down Firefox to launch mplayer full screen.
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Before you say that since it happens to you it must be my addons, it[1] happens with 1 tab open to about:memory in Safe Mode. The only thing left to do is try a clean profile, but if a dirty profile can make an idle Firefox eat all your ram that's still a bad bug.
1 - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=636791
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Except that javascript can hold references too right? And hence you lose the A in DAG - javascript on one tree could hold a reference to another tree, which in turns hold a reference back to the first tree.
Javascript itself is a non-trivial runtime engine, and likely a source of a lot of leaks.
Sure it's possible to have browser without any memory leaks, just like it's possible to have one without any bugs. Not very likely, however.
It's a nice idea, but it's not going to fix every memory leak. Even garbage collected systems have memory leaks. A web browser is far, far more complicated than you're thinking. One reason your idea won't work is that many objects are not owned by a single tab.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.