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Microsoft Exploits Firefox 4 Uproar, Beats IE Drum
CWmike writes "A Microsoft executive late Thursday used the furor over Mozilla's decision to curtail support for Firefox 4 to plead the case for Internet Explorer in the enterprise. 'I think I speak for everyone on the IE team when I say we'd like the opportunity to win back your business,' Ari Bixhorn, director of IE at Microsoft, said in a post on his personal blog. 'We've got a great solution for corporate customers with both IE8 and IE9, and believe we could help you address the challenges you're currently facing.' Bixhorn addressed his open letter to the manager of workplace and mobility in the office of IBM's CIO, John Walicki, who, along with others, had voiced their displeasure with Mozilla's decision to retire Firefox 4 from security support. In a comment appended to a blog maintained by Michael Kaply, a consultant who specializes in customizing Firefox, Walicki called Mozilla's decision to end security support for Firefox 4 a 'kick in the stomach.'"
Surely they can replace FF4.0 by FF5.0 without exposing their net to Chinese hackers.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Pretty retarded to stop supporting 4.0, yet continue supporting 3.6...
"We've got a great solution for corporate customers with both IE8 and IE9, and..."
...not.
That's where I broke into uncontrollable laughter. I mean come on, guys. Seriously? You expect anyone who actually works in corporate IT to buy this?
Seriously these companies can think of Firefox 5 as Firefox 4.1 if they want. I bet if they'd numbered it that way there would be no complaints. There's something about these whole number increments that have a magical significance to people.
Hardly surprising; businesses like some stability in their apps. You don't want stagnation, but you don't want to have to test and deploy entirely new releases every 3 months just to maintain a supported environment either.
I'm not sure Microsoft need to be worried about that particular market anyway because, as much as I hate to say it, IE is really the only browser that's suitable for use in a large Windows environment. It has ludicrously granular control available via Group Policy and updates can be deployed via WSUS without needing any user interaction or elevated rights. Firefox doesn't even offer an MSI installer, let alone any practical way to manage settings or control updates across multiple machines (but then Chrome, Opera and Safari are similarly lacking so they're hardly alone in that regard).
make Linux and Mac OS X versions so the appearance of lock-in is less obvious.
Because you cant centrally manage or update firefox. Unlike chrome, which has MSI's available and GPO's for administration. Firefox has none of these things. They have been requested for years but mozilla seems to not care one bit about firefox in the enterprise.
That is why we rolled out chrome this year to replace IE. MUCH easier than hand configuring, or coming up with some hack-solution to get firefox onto every machine in an easy to update, easy to centrally manage/configure way.
As to the articles point, does IE support adblock? noscript? Then why would any modern person use it?
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Over 10% of corporations in the US according to this report, use Firefox, and they aren't quick to update....
Do not click link! It is to goatse, luckily I am using FF5 + NoScript and it was blocked
I kept parsing "Microsoft Exploits" as a compound noun, it's just such a natural combination. I had to re-read the sentence 5 times, and it still didn't make sense until I read TFS, at which point I realized that 'exploits' was being used as a verb.
Microsoft gives IE away for free. The only reason they want to "win back your business" is to take advantage of vendor lock-in. I'm not seeing where this is good for the business, especially considering that the security fix for Firefox 4 is well-known and free (upgrade to Firefox 5).
You're right, they aren't quick to update, and that's exactly why this move by Firefox could be such a boon for Microsoft. Corporations like to test the hell out of software and then deploy it, after which they'll keep that version for months or years, updating only for security reasons.
So, a company currently on Firefox 3 may have been testing Firefox 4 for the past couple of months, with an eye toward deploying at some point a quarter or two down the line. Suddenly they get news that they won't even be able to get security updates for it. This means whatever work they've done on Firefox 4 is wasted, and they're skittish about starting work on Firefox 5 because that might get de-supported in a matter of months as well.
Enter Microsoft, who tells them they can move to IE and whatever version they go with (8 or 9) will be supported for a predictable length of time, and that length of time is measured in years. Since Firefox has suddenly become schizophrenic about their support cycles, it's in the business's best interest to work on moving toward migrating to Microsoft as soon as possible.
Firefox already barely has a foothold in corporate America, as you pointed out, and shenanigans like this will effectively kill that market for them.
According to the auto-update inside FF4, it changed to FF5 upon relaunch auto-magically. It still works the same as it ever did. *shrug*
Life is not for the lazy.
It's Free Software. Mr. Kaply has everything he needs to start supporting it himself. Think of it as a business opportunity.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Part of the reason that I'm pissed off by this version a week crap is that plugins that should work no longer do, simply because they expect a version number. Google Toolbar doesn't work because of that. That's a serious WTF moment.
The Slashdot community's constant hating on Firefox 5 has profoundly disappointed me.
The vast majority of the comments I've read in the last series of articles have boiled down to "change is bad! I liked things the way they were!"
Really? As a community we've been reduced to that?
I thought we technologist folk were supposed to excited by technological progress. Where's the excitement over the addition of CSS3 animations? Where's the excitement over a fast release cycle leading to a more advanced rendering engine being delivered to users at a faster pace? Where's the excitement that the browser wars are back in full swing and that this competition can only lead to good things for developers and users alike?
I've never seen such a sad bunch of folks afraid of technological progress before in a community that is ostensibly supposed to be obsessed with technological progress.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
One way to win back my business is to make IEx behave EXACTLY like FF!. Then maybe I wont have to work extra hours when some little known "feature" in IEx decides not to work. One stop shopping for all your JavaScript and CSS needs!
So.. it was probably a bad decision by Mozilla to adopt Chrome's release intervals. Chrome is a fairly new browser, so big steps are expected. Firefox has been around however for a decade and users expect stability.
Interestingly enough though, the debate this inflamed is not a technical one. If Mozilla had called Firefox 5 Firefox 4.1 and forced (early adopting) users of Firefox 4.0 to switch to it, there would have been no outrage at all. The discussion seems to focus only on versioning numbers not on facts at all, what Microsoft exploits in their statement. So a translation by 1 version digit position makes people freak out? I wonder why I should care, this is just ridiculous. Surely Mozilla made a bad decision replacing minor with major version numbers. I just wish the discussion would be more technical not ideological.
Bah, didn't even notice the troll link. Too late on a Friday, I guess.
For the technologically confused, it's just a change in version numbering. That's all. 5.0 is essentially 4.1 (or maybe even 4.0.2). Nothing super-crazy going on. Sure, if someone *really* wanted, they can change the 5.0 to a 4.0.3 and feel all warm and fuzzy about 'stability'. The only real issue is the possibility that some extensions weren't properly updated to understand this. Any that aren't can be remotely updated by addons.mozilla.org, though, and anyone with the Addons Compatibility Tester extension can enable disabled extensions and report any issues directly to Mozilla.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Each company and such has a bizarre meaning to version numbers.
FF 5 IS the security update to FF4.
Much like Chrome goes up by major numbers.
Then you look at open source where things often start in the 0.01 range and every digit could be a new feature release.
A number of companies use major.minor.build however it really isn't as standard as you think.
Cisco ASA devices look like major.minor.build however new features regularly appear in the "Builds"
Juniper security gear has gone to a year.quarter. release numbering system
take your pick.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
I'm not a fan of Microsoft's designs of obsolescence, but after the past two FF revisions I hope somebody actually steps up and makes the other browsers realize they can do wrong.
I hope FF loses some market share. Stupidity should be punished in the business world. I don't personally care if it's Microsoft with IE, Google with Chrome, or Apple with Safari, or any other browser. I don't care about rapid releases. I'm against them, actually. In a business environment, rapid releases only muck up the works and makes life harder for the IT staff.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
*puts on foil hat* it's a Microsoft conspiracy, man.
It's not change is bad, it's needless change is bad.
If Firefox wants to be a cutting edge testing environment for whizbangs great, make that clear. If it wants to be used in production environments where long term stability and available time for internal test cycles trump access to whizbangs then this is bad.
We use firefox for everything, random websites with new versions of dancing cat videos, personnel apps like timecards, purchasing etc and monitor and control for instrumentation.
Don't really care if the new dancing cat video works, don't even really care if the craptastic PeopleSoft works, do care that monitor and control stuff works.
The only reason I'm hating on it is because it broke my plugins. Firefox has been using a specific versioning scheme for years and years, which all users and developers were used to. Then they start jumping the "major" version number, which breaks plugins that aren't updated as often, which causes users like me to not update. I like Firefox a lot, but unless the plugin compatibility issues that popped up are resolved sometime soon I'll have to jump ship to using chrome full time.
If Microsoft had made it easy to support multiple versions of IE on a single Windows install, they might never have lost any corporate market share.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
I think most people are just pissed that Mozilla appear to be rather pathetically trying to mimic Chrome of late rather than focusing on improving Firefox where it actually needs improving.
MS cares so much about version numbering, that Windows 7 is actually Windows 6.1....
That being said, I find the decision by Mozilla to be equally stupid. 4 versions in seven years, and suddenly we jump to a new version every month? It's just odd.
... the last client of this guys is Sony? XD
Yea, it's look like a flame bait, but, do you belive in "Security Expert" in this days?
Perhaps Firefox should take a page out of Ubuntu's playbook, and offer a special LTS (Long Term Support) release that will receive back-ported security fixes for the next two or three years. That will give the IT departments and embedded systems manufacturers the long term stability they want, while general users and browser enthusiasts can continue to update their browser every three months.
Or they can do nothing, and continue to lose marketshare to Internet Explorer and Google Chrome when IT departments start adding Firefox to their unapproved/unsupported software lists. Their call, I guess.
Please tell me what "technological advances" Firefox 5 actually brought us. I am curious.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
in their ass.
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
I agree with you, on the whole. I thought the slashdot crowd consisted of individuals, not sheeple. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be the case. Or there is a true reason for it, but I don't see that (not enough to suddenly start hating FF).
This decision, however, is a truly bad one. Linux distributions that offer long term support won't be able to have security issue fixed upstream, meaning they will all have to fix the same issues for themselves. Or share patches another way. A fork of each maintained version maybe?
I've never understood that mentality in the IT world. Speaking as a web developer, if your personnel and timecard webapps don't work in a newer version of your browser, then your developers aren't coding them right.
Mozilla isn't gutting gecko with every release. They're fixing bugs, adding new markup, CSS, and JS features, and tweaking the UI. Unless you define "needless" as "useful things that people like" then I wouldn't exactly call those needless changes.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
If Firefox wants to be a cutting edge testing environment for whizbangs great, make that clear. If it wants to be used in production environments where long term stability and available time for internal test cycles trump access to whizbangs then this is bad.
Take a guess which one Mozilla cares about.
So there has been significant bitching and moaning among general audience web developers about Chrome and now Firefox going down the hole of throwing bugfixes and features and general overhauls all together and ensuring a very high risk for their web applications not working right after an update.
In large IT departments with internal web sites, this is magnified many times over. Generally internal web sites are constructed by people who are frequently not that good at it in the first place, and only part-time, and when done they move on. Companies don't want to see a lot of employee time pissed away churning on website code just because employees browsers are moving, so they usually mandate one browser (usually not to the exclusion of others). They want that browser to have fixes and maintenance, but they want the behaviour to stay absolutely still, for better or worse. IE6 is *still* alive in some places, though MS's actions have forced even most of those to move on. No one may give IE points for being an awesome browser experience for the user, but part of IT is doing what provides for minimal risk and best productivity even if the user hates it.
So we have Chrome which has always been fast and loose with overhauls, feature adds, etc, which gives IT people pause. Firefox and IE both had more 'traditional' models which suits that market perfectly. Now Firefox has declared they are chasing the tail of Chrome and suddenly, IE is the only major browser *explicitly* sticking to the model that many IT departments *really* need. It really pisses me off, because Firefox is threatening enterprise linux desktop by virtue of denying the last hope of mainstream experience with a measure of maintenance assurance.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Problem with major number updates, is that usually means compatibility-breaking changes. This is not the case with FF5, but in the corporate world, stability is measured by major numbers. That's why exists versions of linux that have "Long Term Support", and that's why usually even in corporate software, they skip even releases. Maybe for FF is not a big deal, since they don't aim the "Corporate users", but the "Home users".
There's a world of diffeence between a mid-size and entreprise size bussiness and home users. Home users can move dinamically and faster between versions of software and functionality. Not the same in the Big bussiness, and that's why Microsoft, Red Hat, Oracle still makes big money in the enterprise world: They know the meaning of the word "STABLE" and is a rule in a bussiness.
I think Mozilla Foundation would do quite a better work if they stick to the usual habit of major number = big features and big changes, if they want to survive in the enterprise world. For home users, it doesn't matter anyway.
I hope Mozilla gets hurt enough by this to re-think what they are doing. Among other things, their quality does not seem to be improving as a result of their new numbering. FF4 has some notable regressions from 3.6, which are for the most part NOT fixed in FF5 (which has its own additional regressions). So I don't see FF5 as FF 4.1, but more like FF 4.0 beta 2, compared to the FF 4.0 beta 1 they released as "Firefox 4".
And I'm with others - I don't care how they number things, or whether FF5 is just a minor security update to FF4. But a minor security update does NOT break existing plug-ins, as FF5 apparently does. So they want to have their cake and eat it too, which means they are getting lazy, which means that Google and MS will eat Mozilla's cake instead.
Fortunately, the combined market share of Chrome, Safari and various mobile browsers - all WebKit brethren - means webkit market share is getting competitive with Firefox market share (or IE8 market share), so I may feel comfortable making Chrome my primary dev/test browser going forward. And good riddance to Firefox's massive memory overusage.
The Mozilla foundation needs to understand that their recent bad decisions have consequences.
I use Firefox, and have for quite a while. I've gone from a strong supporter and proselytizer to... less enthusiastic. It's still my first choice of browser, but just barely.
It was the Awesomebar debacle, and their refusal to include an option to turn it off, that first made me suspect they were headed in the wrong direction. Removing the status bar was a bad idea, and then this ridiculous botchup with versioning... sigh.
They have positives. They have the best plug-in architecture, and they aren't including patented/copyrighted codecs in the browser, which is good (although they should allow a direct interface to the underlying OS codecs, not simply forbid them from playing). Still, I was contemplating shifting over to Opera. Now, today, we learn that Opera is probably going to go to hell in the next few months.
At this point, I'm hoping that somebody will fork Firefox back at the 3.6 version, and take it from there. It needs to go in a direction the users want, and stop trying to force the users into a direction the designers want. If you stop listening to your users, they will leave. It's beginning to happen with Firefox.
Just to name a few...
- Almost 1000 bug fixes including fixes related to security and performance
- Improved performance of HTTP connection logic, canvas tag, JS engine, memory management, and networking
- More support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL, and canvas standards
- CSS animations
- Increased discoverability of Do-Not-Track header preference
- Better spell checking for some languages
- Better Linux desktop support
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Nobody hates firefox 5 for changing anything other then the version number. The problem with it is, it was minor tweaks under the hood that are identified by ad-ons as such a huge change that they won't try to adapt, and the simple concept of the numbering systems going up at this rate is silly, and downright crazy in the world of open source, in the open source a change to about 10% of the features, is normally considered a .01 increase, not a full version number. In the past version numbers were intended just to let people know a few little details are added, now it's an amp that goes up to 11.
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/5.0/releasenotes/
What’s New in Firefox
The latest version of Firefox has the following changes:
* 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
Sounds like the extensions you like were written poorly to me. All the ones I use still work fine.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
the original /. article that this article is linking to is FUD. CWmike doesn't bother to explain what becomes obvious upon reading the article. that by itself is a dishonest act of FUD. it's one thing to note that microsoft is taking advantage of the "furor of Mozilla's decision" and another to explain that that furor is simply angry confusion by r-tards who can't figure out firefox is copying chrome by blurring distinctions between updates and versions.
without the explanation, the posting of the article becomes an endorsement for the microsoft perspective that is admittedly trolling the ignorant public. if it weren't an endorsement the writer wouldn't use such flattering language like "to plead the case for Internet Explorer in the enterprise" -- that's like saying timothy mcveigh made a plea for political reform. microsoft is just using dishonest tactics to further confuse the easily confused, so either it's an endorsement or the writer is one of these confused idiots. i'm giving him the benefit of the doubt.
now, cue the trolls who think that by calling out microsoft i am somehow pitching for apple... do your worst, morons. i eat applescripts for breakfast and shit kernels of panic on your zealotry before my 2:30 coffee.
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
that's a bug fix not a major version. in any case, right now I'm sitting here in firefox with the browser using 340 megs of ram with one tab open. that's an operating system worth of ram being used while just sitting here. the other day after the update was out, java crashed firefox and took the OS with it somehow. there are huge gaping problems that are not being dealt with.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
maybe maybe not. firefox's new release schedule basically renamed minor bug fixes as major releases. they are not working any faster, they just changed how they name things more or less.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Tweaking the UI!? I'm sorry to have to be so blunt but by any definition the difference between 3.6 and 4.0 was more than a tweak.
They have made all sorts of needless changes beyond that. But the stupidest most needless change ever was the "lets change the version number to 5 because they are meaningless, despite the fact that it will break addons for the less technically inclined. Yes I know there are workarounds but how many people really do that?
Heck, Firefox runs on Windows 2000. Can't say that about IE 9.
The lack of automatic updates from Firefox 4 to Firefox 5 may be a security liability, but it can't be as much of a liability as whatever causes IE 9 to require a version of Windows newer than 5.x.
Seems like the singularity is closer than I thought.
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
that is of absolutely no use to me when firefox is using 300 megs of ram with one tab open and still crashes whenever the Java plugin activates. those are big problems that are just being compeltely ignored.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Can you install IE9 alongside IE6 yet? If not, that probably makes IE a no-go for a lot of companies that rely on IE6 for shitty internal apps.
No, they aren't:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/06/10/2125227/Mozilla-MemShrink-Set-To-Fix-Firefox-Memory
I downloaded FF 5.0 from the mozilla site because I'm on Ubuntu 10.10 and there were still no repository with the new version. I unpacked it, run it and every plugin was working. I realized my addons should be working only when I read these posts on /.
Actually I'm quite surprised than nothing broke down. I've got the usual stuff, Firebug, Adblock, Web Developer, Stylish, Live HTTP Header, No Script, Greasemonkey and a few others. I checked the install.rdf files an none of them has maxVersion at 5.0 so they shouldn't be running.
Until there's an MSI installer.
I've got IE6 running on the "Windows XP Mode" in Win 7 (basically a WinXP VM). Thats only there because I still have to develop for the zombie platform. It's quite obvious why you can't run IE versions in paralell, and it's because, even now, they burrow their way into the operating system.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
That's true, and I'm not a Linux distro, but I think it might complicate deciding which version(s) of firefox is supported in a distribution. Normally, this is something like version X.Y + bug fixes. But now there will be no bug fixes for X.Y but they will instead be rolled into X+1 every time, including new features which have new bugs... Having bug fix releases without new features is really important, especially for security.
Yah, they have a team studying the issue rather than sitting down and duplicating a few cases and fixing the problems. Frankly, for one case, my personal opinion is they have a serious problem with their garbage collector. Part of the application I maintain has a control panel that ajax requests an image (bunch of graphs) from the server and substitutes it for the previous image. This allows us to do some pretty fancy drawing without moving a ton of data over the network. Leave that thing open and you can see FF's memory usage skyrocket over time. Strangely enough, IE doesn't seem to have a problem. Leave it open for a few days and FF is consuming multiple GB of memory. Closing the tab won't even free it.
A few months ago I started using FoxTab. When I upgraded to FF4.0 it still worked. But when I 'upgraded' to FF5 it stopped working (and tthere was no warning that Foxtab was an incompatible add on when I went to upgrade.
And now even though I disabled Foxtab add on, when I CTRL-T it does open a new tab, but does not make that new tab tthe current one. If it wasn't for the fact that all my passwords are in FF, I would be switching to Seamonkey.
FF5 should be spelt FFS
FF 5 totally kicks butt, even on the slowest application known to man, the Java version of Kronos Timekeeper, it is super fast. Large page loads take less than a second, on the Mac and FF 4 it takes 10s of seconds.
Linux and FF 5 - I'm lovin' it!
I'm not sure you understand how processes use RAM then. That 340MB may or may not actually be used. If you have memory to spare, it makes sense to allocate more to caching and loading as much as possible into RAM. Now, if it's using 340MB and your trashing due to being low on physical memory then that's bad, but if you are sitting there with 5GB free, why not allocate 340MB to load everything it can and expand it's in-memory cache?
For the record, FF5 for me has allocated 163MB privately (not counting shared libraries) with three tabs open privately. Closing two tabs reduced that by nothing, but why should it? I'm only using 47% of my physical RAM right now.
The Awesomebar is a debacle? Wow. Gee. For me, it's the only thing that keeps me using Firefox. I love the Awesomebar.
the Firefox plan all along by implementing such a scheme. "We need to cede some market share to Microsoft. Let's make a stupid decision or two."
That looks like a good description of Mozilla's current position. Personally, I think it's mad.
The very small IT department for whom I work for part time is not IBM, yet share some of the same issues. Like IBM we have users on Windows Mac and Linux. Like IBM we were not ready to update our users to Firefox4 before it was out of support. We have internal apps which have been developed by people who have left, and by contractors. Dotzler's answer of use IE, is impossible across our OS mix.
IBM's 500000 users are, to Asa, a fraction of a fraction of a %, but he's not just turning off IBM. Replicate it across many other businesses and it's harmful to Mozilla as a whole.
Chrome also follow this policy of upgrading everyone to the latest version, security updates, new features, UI changes all included. This was one of the reasons we didn't switch during the period before Firefox4 (when Firefox 3.6 lagged noticeably behind Chrome in speed). Now Firefox has an even shorter Eol, we might as well switch.
It's a shame there's no Open Source browser in the market for business use (even 12 months between release and EoL would do).
Firefox's market share is vulnerable at the moment, and I really don't think becoming more and more like Chrome will help them. As they remove the things they did differently to Chrome, why expect to compete against the heavily marketed alternative from Google.
Many of our non technical users were introduced to Firefox because we installed it on work machines. They often wish to have the same browser on home and work machines so use it there too. I don't think being so corporate hostile will help Mozilla retain share. Nor will building up bad will with those of us long term Mozilla supporters who are paid to support businesses.
For FreeBSD I'll consider what Microsoft has to offer.
Until then - Imagine some sand and they can go pound it.
Chrome is just as bad on my system. IE 9 uses the least amount of ram and the only version that doesny suck. Heavy graphical sites run smoothly and use more of the gpu compared to Firefox and chrome. Give it a try?
http://saveie6.com/
Is there a way to make a portable version of it using ThinApp or some such? Even with today's powerful PCs and gobs of disk space, it seems a waste to have a full VM just for a freebie, outdated web browser that made by the same folks who make both the OSes you're running.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Changing version numbers were a way for me to avoid updates until I had a chance to see if they completely ruined the UI with major changes. Now instead of just updating I have to research to see if it's "just a security update" or an "oh my god WTF" change that has me fighting the UI configuration to get it back to what I want it to be.
Same thing goes for releasing websites as a developer. Now that I can't rely on version numbers, how am I going to break down support and compatibility?
What are they thinking? Do they WANT to piss everyone off, or do they have their heads up their asses? If they keep this up, MS will be perfectly right to point out that they have kept a sane versioning system, and that it is kind of a big deal.
Competitors Compete. Film at 11.
OK kids, let's see if we can help JayJayAarh find the flaw in his cunning plan.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
EMC needs to be force-closed if IE9 is installed. This is a issue that was first discovered in March. Is that a feature?
"History is the realm of the true lie." A.Szerb
As a Firefox developer, I think there's a story here that's not being told.
Mozilla had the HTML5 history API ready in February 2010, but it wasn't released until a year later, with Firefox 4.
In contrast, Mozilla had CSS animations ready eighteen weeks ago. It was released as part of Firefox 5. This is the power of rapid releases: It means that improvements to the browser and the web platform get into users' hands much more quickly than the would otherwise.
Maybe you don't really care about adding new features to the web platform. You'd be happy just using Lynx. Who cares about all these new features, anyway? You don't want your browser to be able to play webm videos or show 3D graphics. That's just bloat.
And anyway, why should Mozilla be focusing on these features? Half of them get disabled (like Websockets), and the other ones you can't use because IE doesn't support them. And even if IE10 supports them when it's released who knows when, half the web will still be on previous versions of IE.
If you feel that way, it sounds like IE8 is the perfect browser for you. Please give that a try. In the meantime, we're not going to let you hold the web back from what it can be.
It's precisely this kind of pressure, both in terms of new features and improved performance -- rapid release doesn't mean we're focusing only on the former -- that caused Microsoft to take browsers seriously again and release IE9. This was a Big Deal, because now all major browser vendors ship a version which supports things like canvas and mathml. You might even be able to *use* these things on your website sometime in the next century, too; it's just IE6 through 8 that are holding us back.
On the flip side, if you care about Google not winning this set of browser wars, if you care about having a fast browser that isn't made by a data-mining company, you care about Mozilla keeping pace with Google's release cycle. It's hard enough to release a version of Firefox every six weeks which is as good as Chrome today. It's impossible to release a version of Firefox now that will be as good as Chrome is in a year.
If you don't care about any of this stuff, by all means, pick a version of IE and get your security updates for 10 years. Microsoft has the resources and the will to do that kind of thing. Mozilla doesn't.
Dear Firefox Devs,
Maybe you shouldn't have changed your version numbering scheme purely for marketing reasons as it seems to have bitten you in the ass.
Minor versions should be .x or .0x. When someone releases 4.01, nobody bitches that 4.00 is no longer supported... it's not too late rename Firefox 6 to Firefox 5.1 so we don't have to deal with this in 3 more months.
Cheers,
Jeremy
The problem is IE. It didnt follow standards. In the past ms would do things like get a good unix and cripple it on purpose. The result is many xenix/sco apos would not be ported to solaris or were ported and left it behund. No doubt mses strategy is the same with IE. The pure anguish of cross porting made IE a standard overnight not to mention ms prefers us to use win32 client apps and has a vested interest agaisnt the web. Our bosses mixed with the recession trained us to only look at sales as good returns on investments and nosing down I.T. As costs centers. Business not only no longer favors I.T. But hates it as we enter the accountants as gods age in management. So new releases =bad as they dont bring in new sales or customers. Sad indeed and these same companies still use the aweful IE 6 and 7.
http://saveie6.com/
Well, for all the howling, FF4 forced itself up to FF5 on our systems. No glaring UI overrides, or silly things. But ONE thing stands out head and shoulders above all else - FF5 starts in SECONDS. FF4 was starting to take a "little while" back there (granted we like some hefty plug-ins), but Firefox5 loaded itself AND the plugins in next to no time. IE and Micro$oft can trumpet till they're dead (hopefully real soon), I will never use their crapware again.
After 11 years of IE6 and still having this disease on my back, all I can say is
SHOVE IT UP YOUR *****
Most of us are still left with the dirty taste in our mouths from the years we were stuck with basically just IE5. We'd typically end up from time to time spending time on carving out malware with a spoon and largely because IE would just load them all up without a second thought to any webpage you visited. After Firefox came out it became clear that that wasn't a requirement for browsers much like the use of Ad Block in Firefox made all the internet ads go away some half a decade ago. To go back to IE will always seem like a step back. It would be like if some modifications made dial up internet go as fast as cable. You could swear up and down that it was true, and it might even be true (save the obvious issues with information theory and the max capacity for the analog channel) but it would *still* feel like we were downgrading even if most of us don't have land lines anymore.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
I mean, the speed with which all my extensions were patched tells me that either open source developers really are ridiculously better than in-house enterprise devs, or the changes weren't that big.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Microsoft, if you want us to take your browser seriously start with proper png support and learn to render DIV properties like every other browser. Stop changing your rendering methods at every major revision number and allow certain things to run automatically instead of making it blocked by default with a bar asking the user if they want to run it. I'd go on but I don't want you guys to have too much on your plate for a decent browser.
If it does not free the memory when you are closing the tabs, then when? If it keeps it there for a bit longer in case it's needed later, by using a scheduled memory cleanup, that's fine, try that and see if it's the case though I doubt it. But be sure that it does not work like you imagine it should. If another application needs the memory that Firefox is not releasing, Firefox WON'T know. It will only know there's a shortage of memory when it tries to allocate more and the OS says "no can do".
Unfortunately Firefox wanted to outplay IE by releasing this as a major version upgrade. The number game is important and I am sure they felt threatened by the IE9 release which is a huge step up for Microsoft. People might not care about the version but companies regard version upgrades as a huge matter. Minor upgrades are just routine upgrades to the IT infrastructure. But when it comes to major Version upgrades you start getting management involved who then decide where to take it. Besides switching to Version 5 for no apparent reason as there are no major upgrades to the browser, they are now dropping support for 4. This is a sad, sad time for Firefox. It is a stupid move trying to out-smart the competition. They played it so well for such a long time. But you do not want to piss off the corporate world. This is how Microsoft became so popular in the first place (Active Directory, Exchange, IE.6 etc - they are long lasting).
Get out! Enjoy Camping and the Great Outdoors - Camping Tips
Good thing I use SeaMonkey, then. The slower development cycle makes it more stable.
Oh it isn't just that, it is the fact that for YEARS IT guys in enterprise environments have been practically begging Moz for .MSI files and GPO support, and the lack of which on top of this frankly dickish move of just pulling the plug on FF 4 so soon after release of FF 5 means Firefox simply is unsuitable for a corporate environment.
Sadly for Mr IE guy many aren't too happy with them either, with their refusal to backport IE to XP which BTW is STILL under support. Now since I have seen DirectX 10 running on XP I take their "its impossible" with a big fat spoonful of salt and if it is impossible they should have released a stripped down version or compatibility shim for XP.
So I'd say the big winner of all this will be...drum roll...Google! IIRC Google offers .MSIs and allow control of Chrome through GPOs, so that fixes the FF problem, and so far they haven't seemed like they are gonna abandon support for XP anytime soon, so that fixes the IE problem. IMNSHO the IE team has already lost the consumer market as I haven't seen a PC with IE as default in...God, it must have been at least 2 years now? it has literally become that old joke, that IE is "the browser you use to download something better".
And while that something better used to be Firefox for my customers after seeing the memory and CPU hogging getting ever worse I've switched my default builds to Comodo Dragon, but those that are bringing in their PCs for the first time nearly always have Chrome. It used to be Firefox by a large margin but in the last year I've seen FF installs dropping like a stone and Chrome everywhere and that pron bug* was the final straw for a lot of my holdouts.
So while I wish the IE guys luck, anything that makes IE more secure is a good thing in my book, frankly I think they've missed the boat. They let IE rot for too long and by the time they got back on the ball people had moved away and they simply aren't coming back.
*.-For those that haven't run into it yet there is a nasty XSS bug going around that will load Yahoo Mail Beta and spam your address book whether you are currently logged in or not. So far it seems this bug only affects FF, and somehow they manage to get around ABP as well, but it doesn't seem to affect Chrome or the Dragon, nor can it get around NoScript. It took me forever to figure out how a machine without an infection was sending spam but after tracing his steps through the history yep, XSS bug. So if your friends that use FF and also have a Yahoo Mail account start sending you emails that consist of no text but a single link to some random address, now you know why. They were looking at teh titties and got their address book spamed by the XSS bug.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
on an OS with no concept of package management. Even Apple has finally figured this out.
I've never really understood the whole fixation of making everything a web app.. When they work, everything is dandy.. but every single one I have used.. (and I use about a dozen of them on a daily basis) let's me down every now and then... what's sad is many of them don't need to be served up by the web, a local copy on my machine would do the job.. I don't think it's necessarily a bad coding issue with us.. but just the whole combination of IE and webservers, and databases, and throwing in java here and there to boot, you just have too many points of failure.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
I am the IT Manager of a mid-sized Health Care company of about 150 employees. I am currently preparing to switch all our users from using IE to FF (with IE Tab Extension for IE-Only sites/applications). Why? The feature-set of FF is far more standard and is MUCH MUCH faster for just about everything we need to do with our custom-built in-house and web-based business partner applications. For all our internal stuf, we will continue to test with IE to make sure it is as least marginally usable, but, we're not going to worry about the worthless performance of IE any longer. Trust me, it is not even a competition. FF and Chrome both are orders of magnitude faster in every way (actual use). You don't need a stopwatch to see it either. You just need to use it. The difference is DRAMATIC. Testing and deploying new version of FF every 3 months will be absolutely zero problem. Anyone who finds that challenging, should probably be in another profession.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
. For example, our company uses Remedy,
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
There's no way I can tell what kind of changes are in a release without the version number telling the whole story. Too bad they don't have some kind of document like "Release Notes" or a "Changelog" or something. Then we could know exactly what was changing and be sure to do some appropriate testing before rolling out.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
So it seems that Mozilla and Google are the ones that don't understand version numbers... Of course people will have the wrong idea if you go against versioning conventions. Why are they trying to defy them? There is no improvement, it's not a better way of doing it. So why?
Twinstiq, game news
If it does not free the memory when you are closing the tabs, then when
I would guess very little memory is needed for each tab, so closing a few will make little difference. At least, little memory compared to the core browser, it's addons, various code engines, etc.
maybe maybe not. firefox's new release schedule basically renamed minor bug fixes as major releases. they are not working any faster, they just changed how they name things more or less.
Worse than that, since major releases are so frequent, your minor bug fixes will get bundled in with major browser changes, making it difficult or impossible to separate the two for those who need browser stability but also bug fixes.
OK kids, let's see if we can help Rakarra find the flaw in his cunning plan.
Help stamp out iliturcy.