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Mozilla Ships Firefox 5, Meets Rapid-Release Plan
CWmike writes "Mozilla delivered on Tuesday the final version of Firefox 5, the first edition under the new faster-release regime it kicked off earlier this year. The company also patched 10 bugs in Firefox 5, including one in the browser's handling of the WebGL 3-D rendering standard that rival Microsoft has called unsafe. Firefox 5 looks identical to its predecessor, Firefox 4, but Mozilla's made changes under the hood. Mozilla has denied copying Google Chrome's upbeat schedule but analysts have noted the similarities and pointed out the need of all browser makers to step up the pace. Because of the shorter development cycle, Mozilla called out relatively few new features in Firefox 5."
It seems this new schedule will create more work for plugin developers. My FF upgraded itself today to FF5 and I have plugins that don't work. FireGestures and VMware are two to start with.
Will this now happen every few months?
That's an admirable and sensible approach. What would be nice, too, is not to ship a product with all the new stuff defaulted to Enabled, a fault I continue to find with Microsoft and Google - "Hey, we like this new hack, let's foist it on our unsuspecting users and turn a deaf ear to them when they howl."
hey, that's dangerous talk there! We need thousands of new features, right now, and damn the bugs!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
We're at Firefox 5 already? Doesn't seem like five minutes since Firefox 4. Used to be that an entirely new version number meant it was definitely worth taking the time to upgrade, but at this frequency how do we know which are the important ones?
They still haven't fixed a glaring bug in how tabs work in the OS X version. Tabs aren't drawn correctly in the title bar in OS X, as Chrome does, but are on their own bar right below it. This results in wasted vertical space and just looks ugly.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
"but analysts have noted the similarities and pointed out the need of all browser makers to step up the pace." Uh, why, exactly? Be quicker about fixing bugs, sure, but why do we need whole version number replacements every couple of months?
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
> My FF upgraded itself today to FF5 and I have plugins that don't work, tom17
Why did you change the "Ask me what to I want to do" setting in Update. The option third down from "Automatically check for updates to:". And just under that is an option "Warn me if this will disable any of my add-ons"
Tools->Options->Advanced->Update ..
Yes, a few tweaks but it looks largely the same. Beats me why they didn't just call it 4.1!
I'll be sticking with Firefox 4 for a few more weeks, until I'm sure all my plugins have been updated. Also, I really can't see a good reason for Mozilla to start jumping versions so damn fast. It's not necessary!
The WebGL news is pretty depressing. Found this recently (explained here)
I'm still very excited about having a real drawing API in the browser to work with that's not tied to MS or Adobe. Guess it'll still be a while until this tech is ready for prime time (sigh, been waiting YEARS already).
It's not helping that MS is slinging as much FUD as possible. Claiming that IE is "more secure than Chrome or Firefox" is laughable, but crap like this is not helping our case to the casual observer.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
Frankly, I don't care what numbers they use for each release, I just make them to make it simple to keep up-to-date. What's good about Chrome is not the frequent releases, but the fact that I don't have to worry about upgrades in spite of the frequent releases.
One thing that is quite annoying is the calls I get from users who are being prompted to upgrade Flash, Adobe Reader, or Java. It makes it harder to train users not to install stuff and to take any system prompts seriously when they are frequently presented with these prompts. Another good thing about Chrome is that it includes Flash so that gets taken care of automatically too.
One of the worst offenders, I'm afraid to say, is VLC. I think VLC is great, but their upgrade process is very awkward.
Damnit, we need to get rid of this "rapid release" BS.
I've finally gotten 4 configured the way I like; and prior to that, I completely skipped over v3.
People don't want cutting edge web browsers. They want them to work, and they want them to look and feel the same for years at a time. Add support for new media types, tweak the rendering engine, but leave everything else alone!.
And that doesn't even consider how this crap breaks plugins... Literally half the plugins I currently run, I had to edit the install.rdf just to get around the damned version check (after which, they all work just fine of course).
Preliminary for june 2010-2011 here. Changes from May:
Chrome: +1.08%
IE: -0.25%
Firefox: -0.79%
After six months in the lead in Europe, Firefox is now again behind IE. They're backing on every continent except Africa (+0.2%). I don't think rapid-fire will work any better if you don't have the bullets.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
So they release a new version of Firefox and are are changing to a rapid release format? I say good for them, they step up production thus forcing all others to follow suit. Firefox has ruled and continue to rules the internetz.
WTF slashdot? We get a link to a computerworld writeup about the new release, instead of the release notes and download link?
I can't believe this rubbish. All this is doing is confusing users, causing more work for admins and developers - and for what? To keep up with the Jones' release schedule?
Software is made better by working hard, testing, bugfixing, testing, bugfixing, testing... not by artificially increasing version numbers because time has passed.
Debian, please, please, please, don't *ever* adopt this type of release schedule. I feel like you're the last honest software development team out there I can depend on to *know* that software is stable when you actually release it.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Ubuntu has long term support versions alongside with the rapid twice a year releases. Any way we can see something like that in browsers? Like FF 4LTS, supported for a couple of years with no new features except bugfixes and security updates.
For one, they'll be pressure from developers to output new products that are actually better from usability standpoint (quicker startup, smaller footprint, less clutter), since they'll be competing with their own earlier attempts.
Now there are plug-ins that cause memory grabs but that's a different group of developers.
Anyhow you can see for yourself, just type about:memory in the address bar to check where memory is used.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Firefox 4 hasn't been out long and if Google keeps with the browser support schedule. Starting August 1st they won't support Firefox 3.6 anymore. I am all for getting people to upgrade but it seems like they'll be dropping support for Firefox versions pretty fast if Mozilla can keep up with their rapid release schedule.
Since the version numbering scheme is total nonsense anyway (this is hardly a major change over 4, it's more like 4.1) why not just leapfrog over everyone and call it Firefox 14? Then Chrome will have to play catchup!
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
From my understanding, Mozilla Corporation gets most of its funds from Google. I get the sense that Firefox is being setup to fail with Google Chrome being the main beneficiary.
If they break adblock and noscript- I'm moving to another browser.
I'm sure there are critical addons for other people.
I also must have a portable app version.
I went to FF4 on one browser at home and it BROKE my F5 plugin required for work.
No update yet.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I mean, are they just changing their numbering scheme, or actually doing more work ?
'coz if numbers magically become features, windows 2000 becomes much better than WIndows 7 ?
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Geeks may use Firefox incidentally, but their target audience isn't geeks. Their target audience are the parents and grandparents of geeks, along with the non-geek friends of geeks.
No. The product they are selling is the default search engine setting, and their target audience is Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo.
"His name was James Damore."
Parent post is a goatsex picture. Do not follow. slashgnome, you're an asshole of the proportions in that picture.
Of course Chrome - what I assume to be in your mind the "geek's choice" does everything you raged about in your post. Bugs, pointless versioning, etc.
But it's okay because they're the new kid on the block. Until a new browser comes along that is. Then Google can be the evil company producing a terrible browser that only luddites and non-geeks use.
".... And it might stop some of the free tech support I have to provide."
If people think you'll fix things for free they won't lift a finger to help themselves. I hate to say it but I even charge family a non-trivial amount, just to tip the scales towards them trying to figure the solution out themselves. It's not a great solution but I got sick of spending my whole weekend fixing the same problems over and over and it gives me a bit of beer money.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
They changed their numbering scheme.
Firefox 5 is basically just Firefox 4.1
I believe they plan to have Firefox 6 out by the end of the year as well. Three "major" versions per year.
So Mozilla gets funds from Google because they have Firefox, therefore they want to sabotage Firefox to stop receiving funds? Great logic.
If Firefox fails, why would Google continue to pay? And if Firefox keeps above Chrome, why would Google stop paying and risk Mozilla changing the default search engine to Bing or DDG?
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Damnit - I'm still waiting for the release of Fox Force Five!
The WebGL is buggy and most of Mozilla's demo's wont run and the aquarium webGL experiment does not render properly.
I downgraded back to Firefox 4.01 and the problems went away. I have an ATI 5750 with the latest drivers under Windows 7.
The good news is Microsoft's IE fishtank demo topped 60 fps just like IE 9 with DirectWrite enabled. I am going to wait until 5.01 before I upgrade.
http://saveie6.com/
Firefox is starting to prove more and more recently that they're too focused on trying to "win" and copying all the latest trends.
This is not why I picked up firefox.
Suggestions on good alternatives? (other than IE and chrome)
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
I'm sorry, but the rapid release cycle does make a lot of sense. Firefox as a whole is relatively speaking not very buggy. It certainly is less so than IE or Safari (at least I don't hit any noticeable Firefox bugs on a daily basis but Safari regularly crashes [windows] and IE dev tools have so many problems that they are nearly impossible to use).
New features/enhancements/fixes used to be implemented on trunk, with a "bake" time needed to make sure that they didn't degrade the product. Now they are done in their own branches and tested in isolation from each other then merged into trunk (now called mozilla-central) when it is felt that they are ready. This lets the end user (you) get to see new features faster than you would have before, without worrying about bugs from other things which needed to be included before, but had nothing to do with the feature which is finished.
I think the good points of this new development schedule outweigh the bad, and the bad points that have been discovered so far can all be minimized with a bit of effort. Good:
1. Faster features to end users.
2. Less bugs introduced due to being able to decide not to include features right up until the moment something is actually released.
Indifferent:
1. Firefox is just as difficult to manage for a domain's worth of users as it was before this change; the only difference is that it is likely to be major version number increases instead of minor version number increases whenever a new release comes out. However as you pointed out, nobody cares what the difference is.
Bad:
1. Addons need to be managed more by their respective authors to keep them up to date with the latest version of firefox. Last time I checked AMO didn't accept setting the maxver property to a version greater than the current major release. Something might need to be changed here.
When I type about:memory, all I get returned is No other information available and nothing reported for Value.
Where is the promised x64 version for Windows?
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
You are running FF5.0 or newer right?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
The amount of bugs is a function of the amount of changes and the amount of time spent testing them.
Unsurprisingly, there are less new features than in FF3.6->FF4.
This is why I haven't upgraded SM2.0.14 to v2.1 because of extensions/addons. I am fine with v2.0.14. I will wait for v2.0 to be unsupported and v2.1.x to be stable and ready. I hate upgrading and breaking things. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I'm certainly considering going back to version 4... ever since the update half my plugins don't work, and I've lost some of what I thought was basic built in functionality (for example when I right click on a picture, "view image" is no longer an option)
Between lost features and lost plugins I've seen a few steps backwards but none forwards with firefox 5 over the previous firefox 4
Thanks for the clraification
That's sadly demagogic then. I guess in a couple of years they'll increment version numbers by ten at a time, and declare victory ....
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I like the fast release stuff. What I don't like are the version numbers, but they will get bored of it eventually.
Other than addon concerns (which, lucky me, no one broke this release) and the senselessness of removing non-major releases, we get updates more often. I like that.
I was considering an update to Firefox 4 but I was expecting the major bugs and issues to be ironed out before upgrading. I guess I'll just stick to Firefox 3.6 while I can and nothing is too broken and then move to Chrome when Firefox 3.6 is considered too old and Firefox 42 continues to be a piece of crap trying to (badly) mimic Chrome. I wish the Mozilla Foundation I knew back then, which released Firefox 1.5 and made a revolution, would come back.
I don't charge family, but I do my best "Nick Burns" impression whenever I get called on to fix something for the nth time (where n > 1) unless they demonstrate that they did what I showed them last time and it didn't work.
I think they'd prefer I charged them. But it works!
In case you're wondering what's actually new:
- Added support for CSS animations
- The Do-Not-Track header preference has been moved to increase discoverability
- Tuned HTTP idle connection logic for increased performance
- Improved canvas, JavaScript, memory, and networking performance
- Improved standards support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL, and canvas
- Improved spell checking for some locales
- Improved desktop environment integration for Linux users
- WebGL content can no longer load cross-domain textures
- Background tabs have setTimeout and setInterval clamped to 1000ms to improve performance
- Fixed several stability issues
- Fixed several security issues
Your first mistake is thinking that Mozilla is primarily about selling a product to start with....
Firefox as a whole is relatively speaking not very buggy. It certainly is less so than IE or Safari (at least I don't hit any noticeable Firefox bugs on a daily basis but Safari regularly crashes [windows] and IE dev tools have so many problems that they are nearly impossible to use).
So you've clearly never used any of the browser you mention for more than 30 seconds ...
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No, Firefox would be the geeks choice, didn't think that part was hard to understand since I didn't mention any other browsers and was refering to how they were pissing off their target audience of geeks.
I don't find Chrome that impressive either, its annoying on many many levels, and for as you said, many of the exact same reasons as firefox. It is obviously managed about 6-7 billion times better than firefox since it actually functions as a decent browser.
I've yet to run into a chrome bug, not saying they don't exist, just that I don't see them. Meanwhile I can start any version of firefox in the last year and spot bugs before the first page loads.
Google DOES actually appear to fix bugs ... FF says 'YEA WE FIXED 10 BUGS IN 5 and added new features' ... 10 bugs eh? Well considering you just added a few thousand new ones because you rushed shit to market, let me just tell you how excited I am that they only added 3990 instead of 4000 new bugs to their bug tracker, thats awesome ... lets look at how much people cared about the bugs they fixed ... none. Awesome, good job guys, really doing your job.
FF is essentially trying to copy Chrome anyway, the difference is, Chrome has direction and people forcing it to get in that direction since Google wants to make some cash ... Mozilla on the other hand has a bunch of old developers who do whatever the fuck they want when they want how they want and if it doesn't suit them, they don't do it, but they keep taking a paycheck for it. So instead of a usable browser we get absolutely retarded shit like a new theming engine! ... cause they never could be bothered to fix the buggy ass implementation they already have.
Mozilla doesn't fix bugs. When they find them, their solution is to reinvent the wheel, poorly, with more bugs than before, and to try and impress people by saying 'look we made it so much better!!!' while ignoring the fact that while its so much better, its still not even up to Microsofts standard level of crap, and they'll repeat how they made it better for a few revisions and its 90% faster, but still slower than anything else by miles.
Much like Netscape, they can't write code for shit, and if you've seen the Mozilla code base, you'd realize they can't write code for shit. We used to use Gecko for rending HTML in our apps across multiple platforms ... used to use it ... then I got tired of being high all the time since I couldn't stand to deal with their crappy mess of software any other way. Again, webkit delivers the better solution, not because its 'better' overally from a technical perspective, but because its better in that its actually useful in reality, not in theory, if you sleep with the right mozilla developer and pay him enough to fix the documentation and/or bugs so their code works outside of one tiny little environment with 9 billion dependencies.
Yes, I'm ranting, but having dealt with Gecko embedding over a 3 year period, I believe I have a solid technical knowledge of the code base and how it compares to others like it ... I can't understand why ANYONE would write code for it or embed Gecko without getting paid far more than they are worth.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
To disable the annoying extension compatibility check:=
create a new boolean called "extensions.checkCompatibility.5.0" then set it false
Credit: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/837443
The mistake is yours.
"His name was James Damore."
about:memory
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I don't think you understand who you are talking to. Secondly as a non-profit selling Firefox is not a primary goal. It is then ends to a mean of promoting open source and open standards on the web. https://www.mozilla.org/about/mission.html
These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based upon the order I joined. -Homer Simpson
Not experienced these problems, honestly. I even still have "view image" in Firefox 5.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Still waiting to see if they've fixed the serious leak in 4.0.1...
I have a lot of tabs - around 80 or so... and when FF 4.0.1 was freshly started it ate about 400MB of RAM. Do some surfing but essentially leave the same tabs open overnight results in perhaps 600-700MB usage after 24 hours and a few days later 1.2GB usage has been seen. Still mostly idling... What's up with that?
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Then I wish I knew what was wrong with mine...
I used to do this with other applications when I had problems... Considered backing up your bookmarks, passwords and such over Firefox sync and then uninstalling firefox and wiping your firefox application data directory and making sure the firefox program files directory was deleted, then reinstalling and resynching the data back?
That would restore Firefox to a 'clean' condition and likely resolve any issues caused by conflicting extensions and settings.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Why don't they just call this version (5) something like 4.3?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
From a testing perspective, this is a real PITA. If you are testing web applications and need to define what browsers you are compatible with (and do testing on) for a future release, this can cause lots of headache. Let's say I have a release scheduled to go out in September. What release do I test against? 4 - it's not supported. 5 - it may not be supported by Sep.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Good luck managing version compatibility of the plugins.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.