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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?
Yes, a few tweaks but it looks largely the same. Beats me why they didn't just call it 4.1!
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
WTF slashdot? We get a link to a computerworld writeup about the new release, instead of the release notes and download link?
Because we need more UI changes for the sake of UI changes. In Firefox 6/Chrome 14 tabs on the side will be the new "thing". Firefox 7 will move the URL window onto the scroll bar to gain another 12 pixels of vertical space, since nobody actually uses the URL bar. By January 2012 Firefox 14 will have moved the Firefox button on top of the minimize/maximize/close buttons since Steve Jobs says nobody runs programs in windows anyway. By March 2014, we will have come in a full circle and both Firefox 65536 and Chrome infinity will both have tabs back below the address bar and old school square IE6 navigation buttons.
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
Parent post is a goatsex picture. Do not follow. slashgnome, you're an asshole of the proportions in that picture.
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.
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.
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
The only things that belong in the title bar are the close button, the dock button, and the zoom to max content size button on the left, the window title in the middle, and the toolbar button on the right.
Are you some kind of an Apple HIG fanboy? Is this a sub-cult of the Apple cult of some sort? The way Chrome does tabs halfway in the title bar makes perfect sense. This approach leaves more screen real estate for the content, while retaining the ability to grab the top of the window to move it around. Besides, Apple breaks it's own HIG quite often. iTunes, Mac App Store - those are the main culprits in the current version of OS X. And God forbid you from using the Address Book in Lion.
Signature has left the building.
Microsoft was throwing stones in a glass house. Their Siliverlight implementation has the same problem http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/676134/dos-vulnerability-in-silverlight-5s-3d-similar-to-webgl-dos-vulnerability
These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based upon the order I joined. -Homer Simpson