Firefox 8 20% Faster Than Firefox 5

An anonymous reader writes "Thanks to continued improvements to start-up and first paint performance, tweaks to memory footprint and garbage collection, and the addition of a new 2D graphics backend called Azure, Firefox 8 is some 20% faster than Firefox 5 across all major metrics — and actually about equal with Chrome 14 on JavaScript and 2D rendering performance. Azure (which is new with Firefox 7) replaces Cairo, and instead of dealing with Direct2D and Quartz, it allows Firefox to deal directly with the Direct3D and OpenGL subsystems — resulting in a 20% speed boost under Windows, and probably even more under OS X."

Comments

First post

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post could've been here if you had a faster web browser.

Re:First post

[toriver]

Best first post ever.

Re:First post

[monkyyy]

only because it was the first relative "frist" post ever

What about Firefox 6?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know it's been said before, but this new release system is fucking retarded.

I'm this close to dumping Firefox on every machine I touch.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Wait: "This new release system" has resulted in a 20% speedup; but you are this close to dumping it because its version numbering scheme is inaesthetic?

I agree that the race-to-the-highest-number game is silly; but it is the silly, albeit visible, symptom of the FF team having a fire lit under its collective ass by Chrome. Arguably, while a lot of what gets full numbers really should just be point releases, FF's quality today is relatively better than it has been in some time. Are you really going to let the version numbers get in the way?

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? With automatic updates, what's the problem?

The way Firefox and Chrome are doing releases is just making releases not something you think about: instead of having Firefox 5 installed, you just have "Firefox" - It's kept up to date by default.

You obviously don't support an enterprise network.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[Anonymous Coward]

I definitely don't, and I don't want my personal convenience held back by some absurd corporate paranoia. Screw "enterprise networks".

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[Infiniti2000]

Agreed. I thought I was reading The Onion.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[Anonymous Coward]

HTML5 video is kind pointless if it's restricted to a CODEC that's about as good as what we had two decades ago.

I guess Firefox users will have to keep watching H.264 videos inside a Flash wrapper, nobody's going to do a special file just for them and Opera users.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[Joce640k]

Yep, it's just a number.

eg. I'm sure it went from 4.05 to 4.08 you'd be all "Yippee! A new version!!". The only difference is in your head.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[metalgamer84]

Correct, and it never will be until it can be administrated via group policy as IE can.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[Eraesr]

So you're going for the alternative.... Chrome 12? Internet Explorer 9?
Silly you.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[1s44c]

If you think the versioning system is stupid then why are you putting Firefox on every machine you touch? You want everyone to see how bad it is out of vengeful spite or something?

It seem to me that by putting it on every machine you touch that would get more people using it. I don't get it.

By 'dumping Firefox on every machine I touch' he means dumping it off, i.e. removing it from every machine he touches.

And he is right about the pain of this release schedule. I want a stable web browser to view webpages. I don't want to update it more than about once a year.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[1s44c]

Firefox isn't for enterprise.

No?

So what is?

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[brian6string]

Firefox 8: "The Ocho"

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[Joce640k]

"Options->Advanced->Update->Ask me what to do..."

History has shown that for most people, manual update doesn't work.

Plus... if you really are putting Firefox on every machine you touch then you should be grateful to them for saving you a lot of work every time an update appears.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[Penguinisto]

...yet those same "enterprises" happily support Flash (which does constant update demands), no?

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[rudy_wayne]

Firefox 8 has a version number that is 100% greater than Firefox 4. Now there's a big improvement for you.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[Tukz]

Tell that to the extentions that constantly break on new major version.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[Mitchell314]

And it is not the goal of Firefox to be for enterprise.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[Mitchell314]

Internet Explorer

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[compro01]

Addons hosted on addons.mozilla.org are now automatically checked for compatibility with new versions (by checking API calls used by the addon) and are bumped to show as compatible. If not, an email gets sent to the addon developer alerting them to the fact their addon is broken, and what exactly is broken about it.

This will start happening for the release of 6.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[gnarfel]

No, actually. We generally test a new version of flash against ALL internal apps using a regression plan.

Then we deploy.

It's amazing how much control you really can exert when users don't have local admin.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[VGPowerlord]

Tell that to the extentions that constantly break on new major version.

Also, tell that to Mozilla's extension approvers, who won't approve any extension marked as having a maxVersion greater than 8, and that was 7 up until a few days ago.

Granted, you could distribute your Extension through your own site instead of the main Firefox Add-ons site...

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[bistromath007]

How beautifully short-sighted of them. Throwing away the market share they were starting to gain against IE in favor of what appears to be street cred is so good for the Internet.

Meh, nonsense anyway. Everyone knows that real open source projects never have version numbers greater than 0.999

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[bsane]

Presumably your users don't have internet access then?

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[S.O.B.]

I think the problem now for enterprises is that with the new numbering scheme it's harder to differentiate between major and minor releases.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[phoenixwade]

Firefox 8: "The Ocho"

Then I dread the loudmouthed point five release.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[Errtu76]

Is it possible to check compatibility of installed extensions before your upgrade? Other than going to the homepage of each extension, that is.

If not, that would be a nice option:

"A new version of firefox is available. Checking list of extensions for compatibilty issues ... Done! From 10 installed extensions, the following are incompatible with the new version. Would you still like to upgrade?"

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[S.O.B.]

They likely do and could download all the updates they want but without admin access they can't install them.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[jorgevillalobos]

AMO Editors (extension approvers) don't reject add-ons due to having a maxVersion that is "too big". In fact, the only upper bound is the set of maxVersions that the addons site allows. You're probably right on 8.0a1 becoming available only recently.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[BandoMcHando]

Addons hosted on addons.mozilla.org are now automatically checked for compatibility with new versions (by checking API calls used by the addon) and are bumped to show as compatible. If not, an email gets sent to the addon developer alerting them to the fact their addon is broken, and what exactly is broken about it.

This will start happening for the release of 6.

"...are now automatically checked..."

"This will start happening for the release of 6."

Er... well which is it?

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[sarhjinian]

Even Chrome allows some kind of policy enforcement and scripted installation.

If Mozilla is hell-bent on mimicking everything Google does, they could at least copy those two. I mean, there's only been bug/RFEs open for years for them.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[sacridias]

So firefox 6 will be released 2 days before 7. 7 in turn will be release 1.23 days before 8, what I really want to know about is firefox 1357 which will be released in 187.45 days. I understand the decimals may be confusing, but as their version numbers start to grow, eventually (next month or two) they will be changing versions to be based on repository commits. They caved into the pressure of version counting, a big number means something big right???

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[Runaway1956]

I just use the add-on compatibility reporter. You can "force" compatibility with it. I guess it won't always work - but for me it has worked so far. Do a search on the addon page for it.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[jon_doh2.0]

For those who are not already aware, you can install the Addonn Compatibility reporter, to force all addons to work, no matter their version numbers.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[BitZtream]

It is now. It wasn't once before. At one point, version numbers had meaning, that is until marketing and people such as yourself decided it really didn't matter.

I've worked doing both support and development and for me, a version number is not 'just a number'. It tells me something about what I can expect.

The number should be as follows: major.minor.patch.build

A major version bump means there WILL be compatibility issues. API changes require a major bump. Massive UI/Feature changes warrent a major bump a lot of the time.

A minor version number means it probably won't break anything unless you have some dependency on a specific bug that has been fixed, which should be unlikely if you followed documented APIs and such. May introduce minor new features, should mostly be features that you missed on the release or where incomplete due to deadlines. Occasionally the 'heh, I forgot that obvious small feature that makes a world of difference' goes here, but for the most part this should be reserved for fixes that may accidently break compatibility.

A patch version number change means you shouldn't notice any difference other than a security/bug fix.
The build number is a unique identifier for the developer to reference internally as an exact point in time snapshot of the package. Thats the number that allows the dev to reproduce the exact same build.

With the exception of a major number change, all other changes shouldn't result in massive breakages, for instance a major version change is the only thing that should break Firefox plugins en masse, and it should be avoided if there is any possible way to do so.

I want to know what to expect from an upgrade, traditional version numbers help me at a glance determine my risk.

Firefox (and Chrome) is taking an approach that I could only describe as amateur and completely lacking of any experience of having to support someone elses software product. It indicates you (Mozilla) don't give a flying fuck about what happens to the people who use the browser or what their experience is like, just that they get their way.

And for the record, going from 4.05 to 4.08 generally would result in my response being something like:

Great, another Firefox release, wonder how much this one breaks?

The only people who randomly see a new version of software and get excited for no reason aren't relevant to this conversation. Normal people (the majority of us) have better things to do than worry about the latest release of Firefox. Anyone who does get excited needs to seek counseling.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[Lennie]

My guess is, it is now automatically checked and the developers should be getting emails soon ?

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[JordanL]

Is this really where Mozilla is at? Their shipped product is so incomplete that you need an addon to manage your other addons?

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[JordanL]

Because Mozilla basically told anyone who manages an enterprise network, "We don't fucking care about you. You know that handy version number system that used to differentiate between updates you can just install, and those you have to test? Well we blew it up! Now you have to test EVERY SINGLE UPDATE before it pushes! And by the time you've tested it, we'll have a new update! MUWAHAHAHAHAHA!"

I think the real version was a little less maniacal, but just as fucked up.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[Flammon]

You're about to dump Firefox because you don't like the way they set version numbers? Now that's fucking retarded.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[blair1q]

Damn this. I'm not upgrading until they put out Firefox Eleventy-seven.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[jcoy42]

I'm holding out for Lynx 2012

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[jellomizer]

Yes these numbers make knowing the version you are using useless. There is one thing to get rid of minor version numbers but to skip randomly is just STUPID. Just stop giving numbers. And we just have Firefox, no numbers, if it is out of date we will never know and will be happy in our ignorance.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention you are losing extremely important information that the classic versioning system gave us, which is why we had it in the first place...when there are gonna be major changes to the code. with the old system if it was a change from .01 to point 02 it was a bug fix, those rarely broke things and if they code was well written a change from .10 to point .20 rarely broke major things although their might be some minor niggles. It was the 1.0 to 2.0 you had to watch out for as THAT is what bit you in the ass.

Ultimately I think this move is gonna be a major victory....for Chrome The Google juggernaut will make even larger gains thanks to this dickish move and here is why: People tend to use at home what they learn and use at work and no admin with any sense is gonna touch FF now, and most importantly even little guys with not nearly as many people to support as an enterprise are now dumping FF because i don't know when they are gonna break extensions myself and my customers depend on. Finally let us not forget that most extension developers are doing this in their spare time and/or for donations an the crazy release schedule with the 'fuck you, jump on board or piss off" attitude is causing quite a few to spend a LOT less time worrying about the FF extension and instead working on Chrome.

Lets be honest folks, the extension framework was the only real selling point to FF anymore. Their GUI was becoming more of a Chrome ripoff by the day, in performance tests Chrome and Opera regularly stomped them, all that was left is the extension framework. So what do they do? Take a big old shit on the extension developers!

This is why I have switched and am switching my users to Comodo Dragon, based on Chromium. So far I have upgraded from Dragon 6 through Dragon 12 without a SINGLE extension breaking, whereas I lost about a third of my extensions going from 4 to 5, including those like the Avast site rating that helped my customers to avoid dodgy sites. The only extension I had on FF I don't have on Dragon is NoScript and as I understand it the Chromium guys are working on an API that will give NoScript the hooks it needs.

And sorry about the length but as someone who used Firefox before it was even called Firefox, and the Suite before that, this really saddens me. Mozilla has become the rebirth of Netscape, with an arrogant leadership whose code simply can't back up their arrogant attitude. So from me and my customers Mozilla so long and thanks for all the fish.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[dn15]

To be fair I'd say the new release system has nothing to do with browser performance. Whatever optimizations happened could have been done no matter what the version number is. :)

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[bonch]

It's not "just a number" to people who have to approve and test major new versions of software in an enterprise environment.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[Darinbob]

Why are we comparing version 8 to version 5? That's insane. The releases are so fast now they can't even measure adjacent releases to each other!

This appears to be a damage control sound bite; a way to reassure customers that their project mismanagement has an upside.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[Darinbob]

Paper 1.0

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[Darinbob]

Dumping Firefox because their project management is clearly lost and out of focus makes sense. 20% faster is no reason to ignore the dysfunction.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[hairyfeet]

Chrome/Chromium. Chrome has support for group policies and you can also get Chrome in .MSI format, although frankly you don't need .MSI you can use .EXE with AD as well.

While I work mainly with small business and home users I have begun switching them over to Comodo Dragon, based on Chromium. The Dragon doesn't break extensions, is fast, and has better security features IMHO like better SSL validation.

What someone hasn't explained to me though is WHY, why did they do this? Why when finally gaining share against IE and while facing the juggernaut that is Chrome would they purposely take a big old dump on their users and extension writers? It was the extensions that made Firefox and now they are jumping ship to Chrome/Chromium. When I first started testing Dragon many extensions simply didn't exist and now the ONLY extension I used on FF that doesn't exist for Dragon is NoScript and from what I've read the Chromium team is trying to work with the NoScript guy to come up with an API that will give him the hooks he needs.

So I just don't get it, what did they gain? They pissed on the enterprise which news flash, people tend to use at home what they use at work and admins aren't gonna touch FF now with a 50 foot pole, they pissed off the little shops and normal folks by causing massive extension breakage while at the SAME TIME pulling support for the previous version so we couldn't even stick with FF 4 until the extensions we needed got fixed, so what did they gain? Anything? Sadly IMHO Mozilla has become Netscape...an arrogant company without the code to back up the bad attitude. And we saw what happened to them didn't we?

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[Flammon]

Their project management is clearly in focus and doing the right thing. They're not breaking new ground here, the Linux kernel has been doing it this way for many years with great success. Google obviously thinks it's a good idea, they've been doing it with Chrome and it seems to work well for them too. I can't see why this new release cycle won't work for the Mozilla folks too.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[haruchai]

That's EL Ocho to you, gringo.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[toriver]

Because "if our plugins didn't fail to run because Firefox decided to throw version number semantics overboard, they would be running 20% faster" is not a good position to be in.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[toriver]

No, they are bumping major version numbers willy-nilly, in stark contrast to how the version number system worked previously. Both for FF and Gecko. Linux did not do such shenanigans until 3.0.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[compro01]

It's set up, but it only runs when a major version is released, which will happen for the first time when 6 comes out.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[jon_doh2.0]

Apparently. Lets hope its transitional.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[WorBlux]

8 is just the nightly build of 6. 5 is the stable, 6 is the beta, 7 is the alpha, and 8 is the probably won't work but if you insist, we'll let you try anyways. When 6 becomes stable, add in version nine and move all the descriptors one version up. For other projects it would be like comparing the latest stable vs the git tree or SVN repository.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[Scott Scott]

Paper 1.0

20% better than Rock 1.0.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[DaVince21]

No it's not, and yes they are. I could tell you why, but I feel that would be a waste of my time and something you're better off researching yourself.

Re:What about Firefox 6?

[robsku]

Good point - although if you have small amount of know-how (like how to extract text file from .xpi package, edit, put it back) you can easily get around problems limited to version numbering (but if the actual code is not compatible with new version then you have problem but that has nothing to do with version numbering).
Sure, I should not have to do such work but it's really only a minor nuisance.

Firefox 6 is already old-and-busted

[MetalliQaZ]

Firefox 6 is so out of date, my parents will probably use it when it comes out.

Re:Firefox 6 is already old-and-busted

[MetalliQaZ]

I'm wondering who these enterprises are. In my experience they all use IE, and old versions of IE at that. At my company, I am 100% sure that we would still be using IE6 if it was still supported by 3rd party tools. Instead, we have IE7...

Re:Firefox 6 is already old-and-busted

[s4nt]

IBM for starters...
"IBM names Firefox its default browser | Deep Tech - CNET News"
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20009387-264.html

Re:Firefox 6 is already old-and-busted

[houghi]

Perhaps they start with Fibonacci numbering.

Re:Firefox 6 is already old-and-busted

[silanea]

This has been coming up every time Firefox is mentioned anywhere on the web lately. Do all the businesses still run Firebird because they just have not gotten round to finish that full code review on Phoenix? I personally hate that version numbers race, but what is it to corporate IT, really? Mozilla clearly announced that the jump from 3.x to 4.x was the last one to come with a large swath of ground-breaking game-changing modifications and that further on the differences between major releases would be much more overseeable. FF 5 to 6 is not IE 6 to 7 or even 8 to 9. It is "just" an update. As was going from 4.0 to 4.1. Any business still running 4.0? No? Well, what did they do? They updated. Just as they will update from 5 to 6, and from 6 to 7. Releases come in faster, yes. But every single release has a much lower risk of breaking mission-critical things because a) the big architecture changes already happened and b) due to each release's much smaller feature set testing will be easier. Moving away from those big pile-ups of fundamental changes to a more structured break-one-thing-at-a-time-and-fix-it-before-doing-anything-else approach should indeed ease Firefox deployment.

Re:Firefox 6 is already old-and-busted

[JordanL]

Many sysadmins were able over the last several years to sell transitions to Firefox for the enterprise to their bosses all the way up the chain as a way to improve security and reduce maintenance.

This release schedule basically bends those admins over in front of their bosses and gives them... well, you get the picture.

The idea that Mozilla is basically saying "fuck the enterprise, we never cared about them anyway" is straight out of the land of Oz... They are needlessly making life very difficult on what was their most stalwart evangelists: tech-savvy sysadmins who were charismatic enough to sell a platform change to their organization.

Re:Firefox 6 is already old-and-busted

[Unequivocal]

Oblig http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/07/02/1335202/Google-Bid-Pi-Billion-Dollars-For-Nortel-Patents

For those confused

[Samantha Wright]

FF8 is the nightly branch, FF7 is the smaller-than-beta branch ("aurora"), and FF6 is the alpha branch. Mozilla hasn't suddenly started to number their versions geometrically, although that would be hilarious.

Re:For those confused

[loftwyr]

I was worried. I'm just downloading FF6 Beta and suddenly I'm 2 version behind. This isn't rapid release, this is TARDIS programming.

Re:For those confused

[d3ac0n]

this is TARDIS programming

So wait. Does that mean I get a sonic screwdriver with a new download of Firefox?

Re:For those confused

[DigiShaman]

I'm going to start calling FF Final Fantasy. The new and improved Final Fantasy browser 8.

Re:For those confused

[Abstrackt]

this is TARDIS programming

So wait. Does that mean I get a sonic screwdriver with a new download of Firefox?

No, it means you get a shower of sparks and your ass dumped in an awkward situation because you hit the wrong button. ;)

Re:For those confused

[vlm]

Mozilla hasn't suddenly started to number their versions geometrically, although that would be hilarious.

Try it and chrome will one up them by releasing Chrome .... google...

Should I quit this IT stuff and do stand-up comedy?

Re:For those confused

[Schadrach]

So, does that mean it has a 5 minute summoning animation??

Re:For those confused

[Talderas]

Well.... Final Fantasy 8 was the best of the series.

Final Fantasy 3 took forever for it to come out in the states.
Final Fantasy 4 was pretty good so I don't know why they ditched it.

I'm glad they're not paying much attention to Final Fantasy 7. That one has all the fucking fanboys.

Re:For those confused

[cpu6502]

I don't care what the "reasoning" is - this is just ridiculous versioning. At this rate in 2020, we'll be using Firefox 153. It will be confusing for the users.

The whole purpose of the point system is to separate major changes from trivial changes. 4.01 is a bug fix. 4.1 is an upgrade. 5.0 means you gave your program a whole new look (or possibly a complete rewrite).

I'm still using Firefox 3.x and hearing they are now on version 8 makes me think the MARKETERS have taken over Mozilla, instead of the persons who have brains .(i.e. engineers, programmers).

*
*formerly drunken fratboys in college.

Re:For those confused

[Idbar]

I thought that FF4 was a mistake (it didn't take too long in the market) and they were actually following Fibonacci version numbers.

Re:For those confused

[impaledsunset]

No, no you got it wrong, Firefox 8 = Firefox 5 + Firefox 3. It will be released together with Firefox 8.7 (Firefox 8 + Firebird 0.7)

Re:For those confused

[Miseph]

Also, his children may have time heads. Whatever that is.

Re:For those confused

[Tanktalus]

Yes, because a normal crowd wouldn't notice the difference between google and a googol . Your IT friends, er, coworkers, should at least snicker at the faux pas.

Re:For those confused

[gstoddart]

The whole purpose of the point system is to separate major changes from trivial changes. 4.01 is a bug fix. 4.1 is an upgrade. 5.0 means you gave your program a whole new look (or possibly a complete rewrite).

Apparently people who agree with that (like me) are old fashioned and haven't caught up with how the young, hip kids are numbering things today. I'm told that major and minor versions are so passe, because apparently this is how Google counts versions of Chrome, so all of the cool kids are doing it too.

However, having spent the last 15 years or so in the software industry, I have to say, I think these integer version numbers are incredibly stupid, and don't convey any meaningful information.

The fact that they're supporting a version now for about 3 months or whatever it is ... well, that's going to make life hell on IT departments. The places I've worked, it takes months longer than that to get it into production. I've even seen vendors nowadays who are doing almost weekly releases of their software, and won't deal with you if you're not running the latest ... the problem is that if you run a production system that requires a higher level of stability, the process to promote something to production is way longer than that release cycle.

I don't want the steaming turd that is a weekly build ... I want something which has been tested and has demonstrated itself to be somewhat stable. I sure as hell don't want the latest build because some guy decided to add a new feature and expects me to upgrade my production system to try it out for him.

Re:For those confused

[jdgeorge]

I dare you to explain to someone, in person, the difference between speaking the word "google" instead of "googol". I imagine it goes like this:

"But when I said the O-L googol, you knew I meant 10^100, instead of the name of an information search company, right?"

Re:For those confused

[alci63]

Maybe they should just take the Tex way : make the version tend towards Pi. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_versioning#TeX

Re:For those confused

[jorgevillalobos]

The idea is to eventually implement silent background updates, so you won't even know which version of Firefox you are using. It will just be "Firefox".

Re:For those confused

[decep]

this is TARDIS programming

So wait. Does that mean I get a sonic screwdriver with a new download of Firefox?

No, it means you get a shower of sparks and your ass dumped in an awkward situation because you hit the wrong button. ;)

Ah, then it truly is a Quantum Leap.

Re:For those confused

[gstoddart]

The idea is to eventually implement silent background updates, so you won't even know which version of Firefox you are using. It will just be "Firefox".

I can guarantee you that at any sufficiently large corporation, Firefox will cease to exist if they go that route.

Because the moment one of these 'silent updates' leaves several thousand users dead in the water, and someone in IT gets chewed out for it ... the next step will be to block Firefox from desktops so they don't have to support it. It's not the people who are ultimately responsible for maintaining an environment who make these decisions.

Same will go for vendors ... if you can't tell me a version of the software you're saying has an issue so I can try to run that version and repeat your issue, I am forced to decide that Firefox is something I can support. If your software could break and die at any point, I'll just short circuit the process and get rid of it.

And, even on my desktop machine, I'm not sure I'm willing to accept something which is constantly changing and doesn't have a definable version number.

I'm afraid despite people claiming that "standards will fix this", or that we should just get used to big integer version numbers this is only going to lead to making headaches enough for IT people that they just eventually pull the plug and say it's too much hassle.

Re:For those confused

[asa]

I don't care what the "reasoning" is - this is just ridiculous versioning. At this rate in 2020, we'll be using Firefox 153. It will be confusing for the users.

No, you won't be using Firefox 153. You'll be using simply "Firefox". Version numbers are for internal project tracking only. The released product is simply "Firefox". If it was done for the MARKETERS, wouldn't you expect Firefox versions to advertise their version number? Well, they don't. Have you even looked at any of the latest versions to see that?

Re:For those confused

[mortonda]

but... what we really need to know is... does it go up to 11?

Re:For those confused

[Zaatxe]

Oh, thanks heavens... I started to worry that I had REALLY overslept...

Re:For those confused

[Runaway1956]

"And, even on my desktop machine, I'm not sure I'm willing to accept something which is constantly changing and doesn't have a definable version number."

I'm sure that you're posting from an AMD Socket 7 machine, running Windows 98, right? Or, did you get a mainboard that supports enough memory to run WinXP?

Stop your moaning - everything is constantly changing. Your hardware, your peripherals, you operating system, your software, your codecs, your media - every damned thing. Firefox and Chrome are both on a fast paced update schedule. Live with it, and adjust - or go back to Internet Explorer, where you've been stuck for the last decade anyway. And, just stop your moaning. You and people like you are wasting bandwidth and valuable time posting this nonsense to the web. Guess what? More than 99% of the people in the world just don't give a damn.

Re:For those confused

[Beelzebud]

Yeah because Firefox 153 is so much more confusing than Firefox 1.53. Get real.

Re:For those confused

[ibwolf]

I don't care what the "reasoning" is - this is just ridiculous versioning. At this rate in 2020, we'll be using Firefox 153. .

No, if they do it correctly (as Google already is doing it with Chrome), by 2020 you'll just be using Firefox, version numbers will be irrelevant.

Re:For those confused

[jorgevillalobos]

Sufficiently large corporations should know how to configure Firefox in their employees' machines so that they are not automatically updated until they decide to. For example, I know IBM is currently using 3.6 and was in the process of certifying 4.0. While the default behavior in the future will be to silently update, it shouldn't be difficult for large businesses to stay on a specific version they know they can support.

It will be a problem because only the latest versions will get security updates, though.

Re:For those confused

[Samantha Wright]

It might. They're planning on making it automatically update invisibly, like Chrome, but there could very well be an 11 before they get there.

Re:For those confused

[Chris Mattern]

The new and improved Final Fantasy browser 8.

I still don't understand Junctioning web sites. Can someone explain it to me?

Re:For those confused

[BitZtream]

You'll be using simply "Firefox". Version numbers are for internal project tracking only.

Then why display them at all? Why do we know there is a Firefox 8?

If it was done for the MARKETERS, wouldn't you expect Firefox versions to advertise their version number?

So you're saying that it isn't used for marketing purposes ... like the model year on a car isn't either I presume. If it wasn't used for marketing purposes why change it? Why not stick with what everyone else is used to and what ever other commercial software package uses already?

If it was JUST an internal reference point we wouldn't be having this discussion, but what happened is marketing learned of version numbers a few years back and decided to twist that for themselves/against others and piss off everything that uses that internal reference number for something meaningful ... to which the mozilla team has removed any useful meaning.

When I do development, you get major.minor.patch.build as the version, build is just the revision id from the source control system ... basically the same number used by Mozilla now. They started using the build number as a major version number basically.

If the version number wasn't being used for marketing, we wouldn't say 'Firefox 8 is faster than Firefox 5 .

Re:For those confused

[tlhIngan]

So, does that mean it has a 5 minute summoning animation??

That would be an improvement! (Assuming you meant "startup time" by "summoning animation"...)

Re:For those confused

[Chris Mattern]

No, you won't be using Firefox 153. You'll be using simply "Firefox"

No, in any professional context, you'll be using IE. Or maybe Opera. No one who depends on his software for a living is going to put up with uncontrolled, unknowable versioning.

Re:For those confused

[cjb658]

Maybe they should use the nVidia/ATI numbering solution:

Coming soon: Firefox 8800 GTX

Re:For those confused

[dwandy]

yes, but on ver.8 the animation runs in 4 minutes.

Re:For those confused

[mpe]

I don't care what the "reasoning" is - this is just ridiculous versioning. At this rate in 2020, we'll be using Firefox 153. It will be confusing for the users.

Or maybe they could just start picking numbers at random.

The whole purpose of the point system is to separate major changes from trivial changes. 4.01 is a bug fix. 4.1 is an upgrade. 5.0 means you gave your program a whole new look (or possibly a complete rewrite).

Thunderbird has also suddenly gone to 5.0. Probably less than the change between versions 2 and 3 though...

I'm still using Firefox 3.x and hearing they are now on version 8 makes me think the MARKETERS have taken over Mozilla, instead of the persons who have brains .(i.e. engineers, programmers)

Was there ever a version 6 of Firefox..

Re:For those confused

[gstoddart]

I'm sure that you're posting from an AMD Socket 7 machine, running Windows 98, right? Or, did you get a mainboard that supports enough memory to run WinXP?

No, dipshit. I'm not saying I don't want things to move forward, I'm saying I don't want this to reach a point where there is no version number and that Firefox continuously updates itself, which is what the poster I replied to suggested -- that there would be no version number, and constant updates.

You can feel free to run whatever the hell you want, and be a smug asshole about it. But, as someone who actually works in a large organization supporting things that affect literally thousands of users, I'm just pointing out that for organizations like the ones I work for, having something which gets a new version every 2-3 months, and no support for older versions is a huge problem ... this new trend is going to make certain kinds of software much more difficult to support.

Software which is a rolling target makes for a lot of troubles in terms of supporting systems ... one of the projects I'm working on is bumping up against an initiative to roll out new Windows 7 desktops to something like 6,000 people in two countries. We need to be building desktop images now for a deployment in about 8 months or so ... if half of the software we installed became unsupported in that process, we'd be forever upgrading components and re-doing regression tests, because we can't risk having the actual business of the corporation grind to a halt because something didn't work. Environments like this have policies that require a huge investment in resources and testing to make damned sure that things work. And, they have extensive procedures in place to ensure there are no outages.

IT is there to support business, and doesn't get to tell the company that they need to change the way they do things ... the tail doesn't wag the dog, and people who think it does get an awful rude surprise when they discover that the people who do the things that actually make the money don't like to be told they need to upgrade their components every 3 months. To them, it's merely plumbing that is supposed to work.

So, please, take your snide tone, and your seven digit ID and fuck off. You obviously haven't worked in the industry long enough to have more than a passing clue about how this could pose problems for other people.

You and people like you are wasting bandwidth and valuable time posting this nonsense to the web. Guess what? More than 99% of the people in the world just don't give a damn.

Oh, the fucking irony. Before you go around whining about the bandwidth that the rest of the world is wasting, why don't you read the crap you type?

Re:For those confused

[Rockstar Rich G]

It's fibonacci! FF5 -> FF8 -> FF13 -> FF21 (all released within the next month)

Re:For those confused

[mpe]

I don't want the steaming turd that is a weekly build ... I want something which has been tested and has demonstrated itself to be somewhat stable. I sure as hell don't want the latest build because some guy decided to add a new feature and expects me to upgrade my production system to try it out for him.

Especially if those new "features" are on by default. Even worst if things you are using start disappearing at random.

Re:For those confused

[electrosoccertux]

my friends and I didn't figure out how good junctioning could be until disc 3.
Up to that point, we simply summoned the most powerful GFs over and over until we won.

Re:For those confused

[Unequivocal]

On the other hand, in parts of the Federal gov't the outsource support contracts say that users are entitled for support on versions "no less than one version behind the latest version." This genius clause gives us support for Vista where I work, but we can't upgrade to Win7 (tho when Win8 comes up we can jump to that and then sit there until Win10 - awesome idea huh?). Anyway, if companies change their version schemes, like this, it means we'll get newer software sooner. Bizarre, but nevertheless, offers me a little bene.

Re:For those confused

[Ant P.]

...whatever.

Re:For those confused

[Darinbob]

Because all the kids who think they understand engineering keep sputtering "versions don't matter anymore!"

Re:For those confused

[Darinbob]

Then you have no ability to stick with an older version if that's your preference. Forced and mandated upgrades, follow the leader, salute when told to. I bet these guys upgraded to Vista on day one also.

Re:For those confused

[Darinbob]

We have control when things change though. Stuff that does change constantly typically changes in well defined manners. For instance a Windows security update will fix security holes and not provide new features, new performance changes, or an updated UI. My virus scanner has regular virus definition updates, but I expect that and want that. My browser should not update unless I tell it to and I know what the updates are. If there's an important security hole than I expect to see a security patch and not a mindless "upgrade to latest fluid version" response.

The problem is not that things are changing but how they're changing and how they expect the users to behave.

Re:For those confused

[Runaway1956]

I wonder if Mr. Lower Six Digits is just to damned old to adapt? Or maybe he just needed someone to vent on, and he feels better now that he's used half of his obscene vocabulary?

I SPECIFICALLY addressed your statement about your DESKTOP machine - presumably your personal machine. I made no mention, whatsoever, of the difficulties of pleasing your corporate masters.

As for Enterprise support for software - I really don't give a rat's ass. You're talking about the same morons who sank tons of money into applications that could only be used with IE6. If you have taken on the job of trying to please the brain dead, I have to wonder if you weren't an evil sumbitch in a former life, and karma has now caught up to you. Maybe you pillaged a few towns, and ate the orphaned babies?

Re:For those confused

[Darinbob]

This is also not just a problem for IT. It's a problem for any home user with a clue.

Re:For those confused

[Darinbob]

If version numbers are removed, they'll still be replaced in some manner. As in "Firefox April 1 2013 crashes on me but it was fixed by Firefox April 2 2013 but then Firefox April 3 2013 changed the order of menus and now Mom is confused."

Re:For those confused

[Darinbob]

Soon it will just be called Final Fantasy, without any version numbers. People will say "Final Fantasy was the best!" and be answered with "You loser, everyone knows that while Final Fantasy had better graphics the game play was much better in Final Fantasy."

Re:For those confused

[gstoddart]

Or maybe he just needed someone to vent on, and he feels better now that he's used half of his obscene vocabulary?

Sonny, I haven't gotten anywhere near half of my obscene vocabulary, and wouldn't waste it on you.

As for Enterprise support for software - I really don't give a rat's ass.

Well, then maybe when you're all growed up and have a real job and no longer live in your mom's basement, you might understand what people have to do in the real world to keep systems running and what that entails. In the mean time, you go ahead and keep being a snot nosed kid who thinks his 2 years using Linux qualifies him to be knowledgeable about everything else going on in the world. In the mean time, the grown ups are trying to have a conversation.

Run along now, I think your mommy is calling.

Re:For those confused

[Runaway1956]

"all growed up" "sonny"

Ever look at my nick? See the date? You don't have to call me "Sir", but unless you're older than dirt, you don't get away with those juvenile comments, either. You can get away with calling me an asshole, but that would be "Mr. Asshole" to you. Certainly not "sonny".

Re:For those confused

[gstoddart]

Then stop acting like you're some smarmy little teenager who thinks he knows how everything in the world works.

Actual grown ups are usually far less likely to start their posting to someone being quite so confrontational and closed minded.

You want a sir or a mister, you need to earn it. You act like a punk, you get treated like one.

Re:For those confused

[Rob Bos]

Grow up. When you want to deploy software to hundreds or thousands of machines, you have to be pretty sure that you won't get paged in the middle of the night because someone's favourite web page doesn't work, or because FF broke a plugin that hasn't had an update yet.

It's not about the version numbers, it's about having stable point releases that we can rely on. FF's new release cycle doesn't give us any assurance that their newest version is simply a maintenance update, or introduces new features that could cause serious issues.

I work at a university library, and the staff here are big fans of Firefox, but it's my job to make sure that I don't roll out software to them that causes problems for them. If I just roll out every .0 version, I am being irresponsible, and if the Mozilla people roll out .0 versions every month instead of putting out bugfix releases, it causes me a major headache.

Re:For those confused

[gilgongo]

I don't care what the "reasoning" is - this is just ridiculous versioning. At this rate in 2020, we'll be using Firefox 153. It will be confusing for the users

Why? I'm using Chrome version "12.0.742.112 (90304)" and don't give a crap as long as it keeps working (and is updated without me having to do much).

Re:For those confused

[Stephen Williams]

If you mash the Square button while it animates, your JavaScript runs faster!

-Stephen

Re:For those confused

[Rob Y.]

FF5 left me dead in the water already - hangs up withing minutes of starting (even with all extensions disabled). I could care less about the version number, but I'd really like the new version to work, especially since it downloaded and installed itself automatically on top of my working 4.0. I'd love to go back to 4.0, though I don't see a 4.0 download at mozilla.org.

So not only has Mozilla resorted to hyping their version numbers, they're also foisting beta-quality code on users who just might want to stick with what's already working. And FF4 was working fine for me (once I re-did all my UI customizations to work again after they were broken by the new tabs-on-top UI changes).

Re:For those confused

[gordo3000]

can you name a single corporate piece of software that has broken because the web browser was upgraded? I can't, not since sites started being standards compliant and not worrying about internet explorer. And those are all internal.

If you have so much trouble running a desktop rollout when the web browser upgrades, you should probably think about quitting and going somewhere not full of incompetence (or you are a source of the incompetence, both are equally possible).

Here is the easy solution so you don't have to complain and stick your users with a POS browser:
have IE and firefox on there, where IE is used for those few shitty times when you absolutely need a POS browser because you have coded for non-compliant browsers. That is what we used to do in my firm, and then some idiot in IT got all huffy about how firefox wasn't "proper" and how some internal sites couldn't be run on it (you know, the sites that people access 5% of the time for one off purposes) and we lost a useful fast web browser.

How about compared to 3.6?

[Anonymous Coward]

20% faster than Firefox 5? That's about about 80% slower than Firefox 3.6, right?

Re:How about compared to 3.6?

[Randle_Revar]

5 is faster than 3.6

Re:How about compared to 3.6?

[edxwelch]

You mean for you it's faster. However, I found upgrading from 3.6 to 4.0 it became noticably sluggish. I'm sure 4.0 and 5.0 are indeed faster in artifical benchmarks.

Re:How about compared to 3.6?

[perryizgr8]

true, 4 and 5 feel much sluggisher than 3. i can't even scroll smoothly through a long page. it scrolls nicely for a few seconds then jerky scroll and then smooth again. irritates me to hell.

have they fixed

[Lumpy]

the random mysterious lockups? there are times about 4 a day that firefox locks up to any responses for a few seconds. Most of the time on Slashdot, but I have seen it on MSDN and other sites.

Some days it's so pervasive I switch back to Chrome.

Re:have they fixed

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you reported this bug?

Have the developers confirmed it is a Firefox bug?

Have you taken any steps to confirm this isn't a localised problem on your system?

Seems to me if Firefox locked up this much everywhere then more people would be complaining...

Re:have they fixed

[Robert Zenz]

I have the same problem with google.com, CPU usage suddenly hits 100% for a few seconds. But that only happens on my Natty machine, and even only under my user account...which leads me to believe that it is a configuration problem, because it also happens with all plugins/addons disabled.

Re:have they fixed

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Half the Internet has reported that bug.

It's often caused by having a page in one tab doing something slow (loading from a slow server, lots of JS, something like that) and locking up all the other tabs because they aren't properly independent in Firefox.

Someone will be along shortly to bleat about how this will be fixed in Firefox 15 or something, because apparently it's now OK for anything that is mentioned in a footnote on a roadmap to be announced as if it's an existing feature in production builds, even if in reality it remains unproven and several months away from release at best. Don't believe me? Take a look at the subject of this discussion.

Re:have they fixed

[bertok]

Feel free to explain to me how that's possible on a system with 12 GB of memory, while Firefox is using 700MB, and I have no other applications running.

And before I forget, I have an SSD, so I often don't even notice it when applications really do start swapping. Nonetheless, on one of the faster desktop PCs money can buy, Firefox freezes regularly.

It's doing it right now, pausing for a about 500ms before responding to keystrokes every 10 seconds or so.

It also does it on my work laptop, which has 8GB of memory, and also has an SSD, but on that it can be worse, freezing for 3-4 seconds at a time.

Re:have they fixed

[smash]

Oh, and i reported it to the Chrome team a couple of months back and it is fixed in Canary already. I haven't posted it to Mozilla because i found the 5 year old open unattended, duplicated bug-report that people are already still waiting on a fix for...

Re:have they fixed

[aix tom]

>Have you taken any steps to confirm this isn't a localised problem on your system?
I tried, but whenever I have taken the time to confirm it, I'm two versions behind and they don't accept the bug report.

Re:have they fixed

[jones_supa]

It's often caused by having a page in one tab doing something slow (loading from a slow server, lots of JS, something like that) and locking up all the other tabs because they aren't properly independent in Firefox.

By the way, is this true for Chrome, too? It's said to be parallel but by my experience (on a dual-core system) some other busy tab can quite efficiently jam the current one I'm browsing.

Re:have they fixed

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

As far as I can tell, neither Chrome nor IE has suffered from this to anything like the same extent for literally years.

Re:have they fixed

[GigaHurtsMyRobot]

Then why the hell are you still using it? You are aware that Google makes a browser called Chrome, right? It kicks all kinds of ass.

Re:have they fixed

[larppaxyz]

5 years? That is nothing compared to this KMail bug opened in 2004 : https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77862

Re:have they fixed

[jawtheshark]

I had Firefox freeze up on my Ubuntu 10.04LTS machine regularly. Firefox turns "gray" when it happens, I can use the rest of the system. I first thought it was Flash-related, so I disabled it. That didn't fix it to my surprise. Googling a bit, some people suggested killing the profile. I did one step less, I cleared everything that is cached (Tools-Clear Recent History-Everything). That fixed it. The freezing is totally gone now.

I must admit that I have moved this profile from computer to computer, within different versions of Firefox (and probably even from when it was called Phoenix) and never bother to clean cookies or cache.

My guess is thus, that it is possible under certain conditions that the cached items are corrupted and impact on the performance of Firefox. It also makes it extremely hard to find, as basically, someone with the problem should sumbit their profile to the developers so they can look into it. That's surely not going to be me.

Re:have they fixed

[Lumpy]

Yes.
Yes.
Yes.

in fact a TON of people have reported that bug and it's been there for 2 major version now.

Re:have they fixed

[Lumpy]

really? I have 16 gig of ram. so that means that it's caused by a Firefox memory leak.

Re:have they fixed

[hedwards]

I'm not sure where the fault for that lies, normally I eventually get a dialogue asking if I want Firefox to stop running scripts on a particular page. Other times it never gets that far before I give up and kill the process.

Re:have they fixed

[isorox]

It's often caused by having a page in one tab doing something slow (loading from a slow server, lots of JS, something like that) and locking up all the other tabs because they aren't properly independent in Firefox.

By the way, is this true for Chrome, too? It's said to be parallel but by my experience (on a dual-core system) some other busy tab can quite efficiently jam the current one I'm browsing.

I tend to find it's DNS that causes the jam-everything problem. If your DNS is slow to respond, everything grinds to a halt.

Re:have they fixed

[bertok]

Stop guessing, or blaming my system for what is clearly a flaw in the application.

I just tested it: I watched the firefox.exe process in task manager while pressing a key until it 'glitched'. It did 0 bytes of I/O activity, so it can't possibly be my hard drive.

Re:have they fixed

[Runaway1956]

How many times, exactly, have people bitched about Slashdot being broken? People EXPECT that kind of thing on Slashdot!

As for a Microsoft site, I wouldn't know. I just presume that anything with "Microsoft" in it's name would be broken. And, no, I'm not going to risk my computer by visiting MSDN to see if it works for me. Linux is pretty impervious to malware, but I ain't taking it to Microsoft anyway.

Re:have they fixed

[BitZtream]

Probably your SSD is one of the original/cheap ones that is really bad and locks up the system bus for a half second doing writes.

Which would still put it light years ahead of traditional hard drives in every measurable way.

A slow, needs TRIM'd EVERYWHERE SSD will still run circles around a great spinning platter disk any day, a SSD that needs TRIM'd is just not as fast as one that has been TRIM'd, but it is by no means anywhere near as slow as a traditional drive.

Re:have they fixed

[blair1q]

I get similar effects on RH5. Generally the disk is spooling at the same time. Probably shitty garbage collection.

Re:have they fixed

[metamatic]

By the way, is this true for Chrome, too? It's said to be parallel but by my experience (on a dual-core system) some other busy tab can quite efficiently jam the current one I'm browsing.

Not my experience on OS X or Linux. Chrome tabs run as separate processes. I've never seen one manage to stall the others.

Re:have they fixed

[kimvette]

Like the anon coward that some fanboi modded troll, I'll second "half the internet has reported that bug."

I've reported it, and I got told it is my system. Er., right. One Vista Ultimate system, one Windows 7 Pro system, and SuSE linux on several systems (on different unconnected networks) all exhibit the same symptoms, and the problem didn't go away after blowing away the profile directories, and even clearing the prefetch files on the Windows boxes.

The problem starts happening sporadically, but once it does occur, it occurs more and more often. What happens is the app pins one core at 100% utilization, the application becomes very unresponsive, and if you install a Firefox Restart extension, anywhere from one to five minutes will pass between hitting "ctrl-alt-r" and the application actually terminating and restarting.

Firebug is not the issue, nor is Google Toolbar, nor is Web Developer Toolbar. It's not lack of RAM, nor a corrupt profile, nor an extension (it will eventually occur on a completely empty, new profile and once it starts it occurs often). The problem is Firefox. It's a real bug, and unfortunately I don't think any end users are going to run a debugger to capture a trace. I certainly am not going to - I have my own work to do. If Firefox had any sort of logging mechanism for tracking this stuff, I'd gladly capture a few logs and submit them, but it doesn't so I won't.

But to mod people down because you disagree with them, or call them liars because they report this very common problem with Firefox is just plain stupid.

Re:have they fixed

[kimvette]

The closest thing to that bug that I have experienced in MSIE is hitting shift and control while clicking the page reload button. That would completely lock up MSIE6 and on a non-SMP/non-SMT system it can freeze Windows itself because MSIE would hog so much CPU. But, that's a corner case that I happened upon by chance, and I haven't tried it in recent MSIE versions. (just tried it now in MSIE9 - bug doesn't exists. I doubt it even exists in a patched MSIE6 any more)

Re:have they fixed

[Teun]

firefox.exe?

Heathen go forth!

Re:have they fixed

[hairyfeet]

Nope, in fact i'm typing this on my netbox at the shop, which is a 1.8GHz AMD Sempron CPU with 1.5Gb of RAM, and even with such a weak CPU I can launch a video tab in the background and get NO lockups with Comodo Dragon (Based on Chromium). Sadly I can't even use FF on this machine anymore because simply launching ANY tab will cause a 100% CPU spike that will last up to 45 seconds on a static page and Lord help you if it has any video element. You literally can't use FF on this machine anymore and considering that it is faster than most netbooks that is truly sad. I don't know what the Chromium guys did but it NEVER loses responsiveness.

Whatever the Moz devs after the 3.x branch frankly screwed the pooch as it was the last truly well working version on all boxes IMHO. frankly one shouldn't need a multicore with gobs of RAM just to load a webpage or watch an SD video and the fact that no only does FF not work well on less than an HT 3.0GHz P4 but it seems to seriously gobble memory (try launching FF and then walking away and leaving it on all day and see how much mem it uses without even surfing!) is simply inexcusable

I personally think it is the Gecko engine. I think they have tried bolting multi process features that the engine simply wasn't designed for like the plugin container and it simply can't handle it. But all I know is even on a slow low power CPU like this I'm using practically no CPU except when watching flash and even then it rarely hits above 35% and even after leaving Dragon on for the past 3 days the amount of memory I'm using is a paltry 198Mb of RAM (Use About:Memory to check any Chromium browser's memory state. you can even launch the same tabs in FF and compare the two with the feature) and that is a BIG difference compared to my exp with FF 5.

If you haven't tried Comodo Dragon give it a spin. Better security features, better speed, and NO lockups!

Re:have they fixed

[bill_mcgonigle]

As far as I can tell, neither Chrome nor IE has suffered from this to anything like the same extent for literally years.

Yeah, Firefox has had a single-threaded UI forever, and it's apparently too hard to fix. Google saw this and made Chrome use a multi-process model instead (the unix way).

There's talk about Firefox going to this model too, but they've been talking about a threaded UI since at least 2001 (holy crap, that's a decade), so talk is cheap. As I said, apparently too hard, so one would expect Firefox to wilt on the vine before its UI becomes parallel. May even be cause and effect.

Re:have they fixed

[smash]

kmail isn't run by a significant portion of the internet...

Re:have they fixed

[perryizgr8]

chrome and ie have long had truly separated processes for tabs and plugins. and it shows. there are no random slowdowns in either of them.

Re:have they fixed

[toddestan]

Try looking at the Resource Monitor. You'll see the the blue line (activity) shoot to 100% while the green line (I/O speed) drop to zero. Or at least that's what my SSD did before I ditched it and went back to spinning rust.

Re:have they fixed

[toddestan]

Spoken like someone who has never used one of those crappy SSDs. I have, and those drives can cause the current application and even the OS to appear to freeze from anywhere from a fraction of a second to several seconds for even a trivial write. Sure, they can be fast at other times, but in the end I'll take the slower, but more consistent performance of a hard drive than something that infuriatingly locks the computer up at random times.

Re:have they fixed

[sr180]

I have noticed this on one of my machines, and tracked it down (in my case) to a pause when ever Flash is loaded. It only happens on one of my machines, and its damn annoying..

Re:have they fixed

[Robert Zenz]

I've tried that, unfortunately without luck. But thanks anyway.

Wow, talk about version inflation

[Fnkmaster]

You fools are only benchmarking Firefox 8!! Well I benchmarked Firefox 14 and it's plus 10 faster than Firefox 4.

I appreciate the benefits of rapid versioning and release cycles, but really, this is ridiculous.

Re:Wow, talk about version inflation

[kpainter]

You fools are only benchmarking Firefox 8!! Well I benchmarked Firefox 14

Boy, are you behind. I just downloaded Firefox 17 and it blows Firefox 15 out of the water!

Re:Wow, talk about version inflation

[DaftDev]

Forget that, I am using Firagafox 51 for a more-potent browsing experience.

Re:Wow, talk about version inflation

[Gideon Wells]

Hey, Firefox devs saw what wasn't working. IE had near stagnant growth and hated for it (among other things). People seemed alright with Chrome's constant cycle. So they are taking it to the next step. Log Scale version jumps. By this time next year Firefox will be gaining version numbers per second.

Re:Wow, talk about version inflation

[RandomFactor]

You fools are only benchmarking Firefox 8!! Well I benchmarked Firefox 14 and it's plus 10 faster than Firefox 4.

It needs to go to plus 11

Re:Wow, talk about version inflation

[ginbot462]

I got it ... but, I wasted many hours of my life to be able to instantly recognize it.

Re:Wow, talk about version inflation

[Mitchell314]

Pft, you still using that ancient Aleph naught version? The new Firefox Aleph 1 can do multi-multitab browsing. :P

Re:Wow, talk about version inflation

[jacksonyee]

I'm giving up my mods on this thread to post this, but I simply couldn't resist jumping in with Buzz Lightyear's

To infinity... and beyond!

Personally, I think we should just start going to build numbers for every project. Having Firefox 76,326,358 would certainly take care of that annoying Chrome rivalry. ;-) Then perhaps geometric sequences, Taylor series, quantum dynamics... software versioning would never be the same again!

Re:Wow, talk about version inflation

[lpp]

Nah, Google will just start using Googlebids as their versioning scheme. (With one Googlebid being equal to version pi-billion for any other browser). That'll make short work of the browser VERSION wars (to heck with the browser wars).

Re:Wow, talk about version inflation

[Archangel Michael]

I'm running Firefox Infinity Edition ..

Re:Wow, talk about version inflation

[guanxi]

I appreciate the benefits of rapid versioning and release cycles, but really, this is ridiculous.

Why don't people say this about Chrome? The response to the numbering is a bit confusing.

Re:Wow, talk about version inflation

[ArsonSmith]

It'd be amusing to see Chrome switch to a X.x versioning scheme and see if the fallout is the same.

Re:Wow, talk about version inflation

[demonbug]

Pfff. Firefox Infinity is where fun is at.

Yeah, but the hardware requirements are a killer.

Re:Wow, talk about version inflation

[the_B0fh]

And Firefox69 for with automatic default "incognito" or secure browsing?

Re:Wow, talk about version inflation

[uvajed_ekil]

6, 7, 8? Bah, that's nothing. Slackware is up to 13.37 and they only skipped a couple of numbers. Thanks Mozilla, you're not confusing average users one bit!

Re:Wow, talk about version inflation

[davros74]

Ironically, Slackware jumped to 13.37 to match the 2.6.37 kernel series and then Linus bumped the Kernel to 3.0. So the next Slackware is 13.0.0, 13.0, 13.3, 14.0, 14.3? Who knows. Maybe Patrick will have to go back to Slackware 3.0!

Re:Wow, talk about version inflation

[Darinbob]

Because not many people use Chrome, at least not in business. It would probably be even more frustrated with Chrome than Firefox. This is a case of Mozilla copying a competitor without first figuring out that the competitor is doing it wrong.

Re:Wow, talk about version inflation

[perryizgr8]

because chrome actually works. those guys fix bugs and don't waste their time on pointless ui changes when there is a huge memory and cpu usage problem. firefox gets this response because instead of focusing on actual improvement, they keep changing pointless things like version numbering.

random bugs in rendering abound...

[johnjones]

simply because they split the rendering... surly it would have been better to test it and leave a "compatibility " view there ?

and what about support for PowerPC ?

regards

John Jones

Re:random bugs in rendering abound...

[perryizgr8]

even apple itself does not release new software for powerpc and you expect mozilla to do it?

Re:random bugs in rendering abound...

[toddestan]

I'm fairly confident you'll be able to use the latest Firefox on PPC for quite a while, provided you wipe OSX and install Linux.

Upcoming Legal Battle with Microsoft

[jmacdonald]

I wonder how long it'll take Microsoft to sue them for using the name "Azure".

Re:Upcoming Legal Battle with Microsoft

[Lennie]

Why ?

The people at Microsoft thought it would be a good idea to name their product/service after a color, sure.

Then that is really Microsoft's own problem.

http://blog.mozilla.com/joe/2011/04/26/introducing-the-azure-project/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_(color)

While we are on the Mozilla and naming problem. Google named their browser Chrome, even though the Mozilla already named part of their browser Chrome.

So, seems people just name things what they want.

Re:Upcoming Legal Battle with Microsoft

[shutdown -p now]

The way trademarks work, it's normal to use a generic word as a trademark, provided that it's not an obvious description - "Apple" is a perfectly valid trademark for a hardware/software company, for example. By the same logic, "Chrome" is a valid trademark for the browser, and "Azure" is a valid trademark for a cloud service.

iOS browser does this from day 1

[whiteboy86]

Apple's browser is built on OpenGL and GPU accelerated, nice to see Mozilla finally recognizing this vastly superior technology.

Re:iOS browser does this from day 1

[Mitchell314]

Aye, but Firefox has to deal with the challenge of running on a lot more systems. Also, I think all cocoa applications on Macs run on top of OpenGL anyways. :P

Re:iOS browser does this from day 1

[hedwards]

You do realize that it's a lot easier to do that if you control the platform, right? I realize that it's popular to badmouth Firefox around here, but you can't just do something like that in a software product that spans at least a half dozen different OSes and has 20%+ market share. It just isn't that simple, you have to get it right on all the various OS machine combinations or you get all sorts of bad press for being buggy. And if you don't you get a lot of idiots complaining about how you're not moving quickly enough. It's ultimately a no win situation for them.

Re:iOS browser does this from day 1

[FooBarWidget]

Only CSS transitions with scale()/translate()/rotate()/etc, as well as scrolling, are GPU accelerated. Everything else is not only rendered in software, it's also literally 10 times slower than on a desktop computer. I presume that Firefox's GPU acceleration goes a bit further than that.

Re:iOS browser does this from day 1

[gr8_phk]

Cairo has an OpenGL backend already, so it gives you some of that benefit already. Dumping anything without OpenGL for a 20 percent performance boost seems silly to me.

Re:iOS browser does this from day 1

[Ant P.]

Yes, nice to see Mozilla finally acknowledge KDE's browser engine is years ahead of their own.

Firefox 6 & 7?

[assertation]

What happened to them, I'm still on 5 :)

Re:Firefox 6 & 7?

[Millennium]

From what I can tell, Mozilla seems to have four versions of Firefox being developed and/or maintained at any given time:

Current - Whatever is currently released. Only bugfixes usually get ported to this release. Currently FF5.
Beta - Feature-frozen and reasonably stable, but not quite ready for prime time. Will be the next release. Currently FF6.
Aurora - Feature-frozen, but not stable. Early QA happens here, though it gets more fleshed out in Beta. Currently FF7.
Nightly - This is where the new feature development happens. Currently FF8.

When it's time for release, everything gets promoted: when FF6 is released, FF7 will become Beta, FF8 will become Aurora, and new development will start on FF9.

I kind of like the idea of putting new code through two entire cycles of public testing. All the same, I do wish that Mozilla would add a Long-Term Support cycle every few versions, akin to Ubuntu's LTS cycle, that people could count on to be supported for more than just a couple of months.

It is true that sane IT departments upgrade their browsers regularly, but not all IT departments are driven by sanity. This is a sad fact that Mozilla needs to account for, and there's a tested model out there that isn't too dissimilar to Mozilla's own. They should seriously look into adapting the differences.

Re:Firefox 6 & 7?

[jrumney]

You can keep your blinking text and ad-serving plugins. I'm sticking with NCSA Mosaic.

Re:Firefox 6 & 7?

[GNious]

Current - Whatever is currently released. Only bugfixes usually get ported to this release. Currently FF5.
Beta - Feature-frozen and reasonably stable, but not quite ready for prime time. Will be the next release. Currently FF6.
Aurora - Feature-frozen, but not stable. Early QA happens here, though it gets more fleshed out in Beta. Currently FF7.
Nightly - This is where the new feature development happens. Currently FF8.

FF5 - Current version - Keeps complaining that google's javascripts are crashed
FF5 - Current Beta - Almost as eager as FF5 to complain about google's javascripts

So far I have not seen any differences worth mentioning - They both seem to hate Google

Re:Firefox 6 & 7?

[vlm]

Essentially a copy of Debian development:
Stable
Testing
Unstable
Experimental

Someone should make an ISO standard for naming, or a design pattern for standardized naming, or similar.

Re:Firefox 6 & 7?

[GigaHurtsMyRobot]

So, 3 versions from now it will be 20% faster.... isn't that kind of a let-down? I saw the headline, it seems to be presenting it like it's an amazing feat.

Re:Firefox 6 & 7?

[PIBM]

Lynx is where the fun`s at!

Re:Firefox 6 & 7?

[SEE]

Five versions, because 3.6 is still getting maintained. 3.6.18 came out when 5 did, and 3.6.19 is scheduled to come out at the same time as 6.

Re:Firefox 6 & 7?

[demonbug]

FF just pushed me ("Strongly Recommended") to upgrade to Firefox 6. My favorite part is after the upgrade installs, then it runs a check to see which of my plugins are compatible. Hmm, you think maybe it would be a useful feature to run the check BEFORE doing the upgrade so then I can make an informed decision about whether to upgrade?

Re:Firefox 6 & 7?

[blair1q]

Aurora

Makes me wonder if these guys are Asimov fans.

Re:Firefox 6 & 7?

[Darinbob]

But in another sense incredibly different from Debian. Debian does not release rapidly, they're well know for being absolutely sure everything is stable before a release even if this takes a very long time. Debian also has security patches, which Firefox will no longer have. Debian allows you to use the latest Stable release or a prior Stable release, both of which will be supported. Debian also uses version numbers because they're not clueless.

And so this means that....

[ctrl-alt-canc]

...I will have to wait for Firefox 20 just to have a browser that is 100% faster than Firefox 5 ?!?

Re:Oh well

[Dynamoo]

I'm still on 2.0! Works for me (most of the time). Perhaps the more conservative approach of the Seamonkey project will make it more attractive for corporates?

Ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have any idea how it complicates Web contracts? We used to be able to say "your website will be compatible with current version-2 of the browsers" but now that would be ridiculous. We'd never be able to deliver since we would be stuck in a infinite testing loop.

We'll have to start writing "your website will be compatible with Firefox 5" and by the time we deliver Firefox 12 will be available. I guess we'll have to add a clause about how Microsoft, Google and Firefox are all teenagers who compare their peni- I mean version numbers to feel good about themselves.

Apple aren't being childish with the whole issue and using sane version numbers. And Opera has been out for quite a long time, though they do seem to be jumping into the version bandwagon as of late.

Re:Ridiculous

[migla]

Could you state a date before which the browsers are compatible? Something like this:

-"Ahoy, sweet customer! We will make sure the product is compatible with $LIST_OF_BROWSERS released before $MONTH $YEAR

Re:Ridiculous

[DahGhostfacedFiddlah]

How does version number affect this at all? If AwesomeBrowser 1.0 is out, how can you state that your website will work with AwesomeBrowser 1.1? Or 1.0.0.0.0.1, for that matter?

A version is just a number. As usual, it's the changes behind that number that you should be worried about.

Re:Ridiculous

[the_B0fh]

You are supposed to be standards compliant. Once your contracts ask for things like HTML5 compliance instead of "must work in IE version 6.031534" you'll be far far better off.

Re:Ridiculous

[Xugumad]

I'll code to the standards if you can find someone who will accept validator output as an excuse for why their site doesn't work. Realistically, the best you can do is code to the standards as they're implemented and then work around any bugs/differences you find.

Re:Ridiculous

[Lennie]

If you are doing Web contracts, that sounds a bit like public websites.

Euh.. it should just work with the browser the user is using to visit the website.

Re:Ridiculous

[springbox]

Maybe it's time to revise the contracts based on these new realities?

Re:Ridiculous

[DahGhostfacedFiddlah]

I'm not sure that was ever a realistic expectation for browsers though. They need to juggle so many standards that some are bound to be at different states of development within a major version.

Would you have developed a website on Netscape 4.7 and claim it was "Netscape 4 compatible"?

Wow, as fast as Chrome?

[outsider007]

So the FF team is patting themselves on the back for being as good as the number 3 browser? They might as well start digging their grave holes.

Re:Wow, as fast as Chrome?

[PriyanPhoenix]

No, they're patting themselves on the back for rendering as fast as the fastest rendering browser.

Benchmarking should always be against the best candidate in any given category, irrespective of the competition's relative marketshare overall. Anything else is disingenuous (not that it stops companies from doing it). Complaining that they're NOT comparing themselves to IE is just absurd.

Re:Wow, as fast as Chrome?

[Mitchell314]

Chrome (2008) came into the game much later than Safari (2003), Firefox (2004), and Internet Explorer (ca 2000 BCE). Furthermore, their market share is neither indicative of the technology present in the browser nor it's speed.

Re:Version 8?!?

[Goaway]

Their competitors like... Chrome? Who introduced this version numbering system in the first place?

Firefox 61

[jabberw0k]

By my calculations, if Firefox had started this version numbering scheme with its start in 2004, we would now be running Firefox 61.

If they Mozilla had adopted it in 1998, this would be Firefox 113.

Bonkazoids.

Re:Firefox 61

[Njovich]

I think when they started out they just used a different browser name every version?

Re:Firefox 61

[Tukz]

No, it was Firebird for quite some time, untill they got forced to change it in 2004.

Re:Firefox 61

[impaledsunset]

Now that's just wrong, software should be versioned using powers of two. I always compile my own Firefox changing the version to 10384593717069655257060992658440192 manually in the source.

Re:Firefox 61

[defaria]

That's FF 1.1.3 to you buddy!

Re:Firefox 61

[hedwards]

They always have their various nicknames for new releases, the only actual name changes were die to name conflicts, hence the change from Phoenix to Firebird to Firefox.

Re:Firefox 61

[Blink Tag]

And it was Phoenix before that.

Having been through those early name changes, one of my favorite early extensions was "Firesomething" ... it changed the name of Firefox on every launch.

Re:Firefox 61

[Flammon]

What version would Chrome be at? I'm using version 14 right now. What about Windows when it jumped to version 95 or was that supposed to be 1995 and then to 2000 and now back to version 7. The version numbers don't mean very much when they jump around like it does with Windows but at least with Chrome and Firefox, you know that the bigger number is a newer release. More numbers just means more granularity.

The new Firefox development model is about a steady stream of new features, more evolutionary than revolutionary which I think is great because in the end it will be a better fitted and more stable product.

Re:Firefox 61

[antdude]

I wonder which software has the highest version number and how old it is. Does anyone know? :)

Re:Firefox 61

[perryizgr8]

by that logic, shouldn't firefox 5 be 32(=2^5)? how did you arrive at '10384593717069655257060992658440192'?

Re:Firefox 61

[yarbo]

less version 443

Re:Firefox 61

[antdude]

Wowser. Thanks. ;)

Great... yet another version of Firefox to support

[leonbev]

We just got our web site rendering correctly under Firefox 5, and now there not one but THREE new versions in beta that we also need to test with.

Just a quick note from the web developers and web site QA testers around the world to the Firefox development team... you're really starting to piss us off.

Too late. I already switched to Chrome.

[stevegee58]

Chrome is way faster and way smaller. I doubt I'll ever go back to FF at this point.

Re:Great... yet another version of Firefox to supp

[CoolCash]

Wait until FF automatically disables your plugins because the next "Major" version isn't supported. I am not sure if this is fixed yet, but it has cause me to set all my browsers in our company not to automatically upgrade due to a needed plugin.

Do not make much sense right now

[kai_hiwatari]

Firefox 8 is not even in the alpha. It will change a lot by the time it reached the users. So, i think there is no point in statements such as "Firefox 8 is 20% faster than firefox 5".

Re:Do not make much sense right now

[Anonymous Coward]

It'll be alpha on Friday, beta on Sunday, released next wednesday and discontinued next friday.

Re:Do not make much sense right now

[Darinbob]

This is why it was posted as anonymous. This really seems to be to be astroturfing, someone from Mozilla pretending to be Joe User trying to make you feel good about a minor speed improvement so that you forget about the awful mismanagement. That is, if people actually want to see version 8 they may overlook the fact that they're already up to version 8.

doesn't matter; I'm using chrome

[jsepeta]

google owns me

When will they add per-tab processes?

[Bloodwine77]

Chrome and Internet Explorer (as of version 8) support per-tab processes. That is the one major feature I would like Firefox to implement so that if a page's JavaScript or Flash goes bonkers it doesn't take down all my tabs.

Also, Google is changing the way their accounts work in a few weeks that will prevent users from being able to access multiple Google accounts in the same browser. I am not entirely sure on the particulars, but wouldn't per-process tabs work around that to allow us to have multiple Gmail accounts open? I think Google is going to have some sort of optional tool or setting called multiple sign-in, but i'd prefer the browser itself had a means of segmenting sessions.

Re:When will they add per-tab processes?

[FedeTXF]

If flash or other plugin hangs, Firefox does not hang since 3.6. Chrome is uses much more memory just because evey tab is a process, so reducing memory footprint and making every tab a process are in conflict.

Re:When will they add per-tab processes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully never. Opera doesn't use per-tab processes either. Why?

1) It scales horribly. Open 400 tabs in Opera. Now try in Chrome. GOOD LUCK!
2) It's not 1:1. After so many tabs Chrome starts grouping them under a process so your machine doesn't explode.
3) Due to #2, you're not as protected as you think you are.

Better idea: Make your browser and plugin architecture more stable. When you crash, make recovery fast and resilient. Allow you to recover all of your tabs with ease, and even better -- find a way to detect problematic tabs if there are multiple crashes and prompt you to "disable" them upon next start.

Re:When will they add per-tab processes?

[psyclone]

Totally, multiple logins in the same browser are all about cookies. You can launch separate FF profiles (which are separate processes) from the command line; that allows two or more "windows" with separate logins to the same sites. Try: firefox -ProfileManager

I believe there are also add-ons that help with this in a single window+process, but I doubt they have been updated to these future versions. (There is an about:config option to aid in the add-on version checking. See the previous /. story on FF version numbering for many solutions.)

Re:When will they add per-tab processes?

[PastaLover]

Hopefully never. Opera doesn't use per-tab processes either. Why?

1) It scales horribly. Open 400 tabs in Opera. Now try in Chrome. GOOD LUCK!
2) It's not 1:1. After so many tabs Chrome starts grouping them under a process so your machine doesn't explode.

Your #1 and #2 are a bit contradictory. I've just opened 400 tabs in Chrome. what was it supposed to prove? (haven't tried Opera, but then I prefer browsers with render engines that actually work)

Re:Oh well

[jank1887]

no. Why? because it's called seamonkey.

64-bit support

[ad1c]

I've been on the "Nightly" branch (8.0a1 at this writing) for the last couple of weeks (Win 7 Pro 64-bit). It's the only native 64-bit release, and crashes/hangs far less often than Firefox 4/5 ever did. I'm disappointed that Mozilla *still* won't publicly release native 64-bit binaries for Firefox, so I'll stay on the Nightly update path as long as I can. I only have 1/2 dozen add-ons, and they seem to be working fine.

Re:64-bit support

[aardwolf64]

I'm using both Firefox 6 and 7 (Aurora) on my Mac (though not at the exact same time...), and they're both running as 64-bit processes. Are you SURE that the corresponding Windows versions aren't running in 64-bit? That doesn't sound like something Mozilla would do...

Re:64-bit support

[BZ]

The 32/64-bit situation for Mozilla right now is the following:

Linux: both 32-bit and 64-bit builds are available and supported starting with Firefox 4. Default download is probably 32-bit.

Mac: On 10.6+, the browser runs 64-bit by default and the plug-in process runs 32-bit. On 10.5, both run 32-bit due to OS-level bugs in 64-bit support.

Windows: Only 32-bit builds are supported. 64-bit builds exist, but are somewhat buggy. Shipping them involves fixing those bugs and addressing the issue about not being able to run 32-bit plug-ins in a 64-bit browser. On Mac, if you noticed, the solution is to use the built-in support for fat binaries and just ship both sets of code, using the 32-bit code for the plug-in process and 64-bit for the rest of the browser. Windows doesn't have such built-in support, so a similar solution would require some nontrivial work (and would of course about double the download size, unless the plug-in process stops being a copy of all of Gecko).

So long story short, 64-bit on Windows will happen, but it's not as simple as "flip the compiler switch".

Re:Too late. I already switched to Chrome.

[TheReaperD]

I tried switching to Chrome again but, like the last time, the extensions weren't half as good. Even the ones developed by the same teams as FireFox! From what I understand it is the difference between the two browser extension APIs that is causing the problem. So, I'll stick with FireFox for now.

At least it's not roman numerals...

[Kamiza Ikioi]

FFIX would be really confusing.

pfft FireFox 8

[equex]

I am already using version 21, its the pre pre pre alpha pre beta pre pre gamma delta pre RC pre build, I'm so bleeding edge I have to buy tampons at the store. My insurance company wont even insure my computer because all my software are practically from the future.

Re:pfft FireFox 8

[jafac]

lol haw haw haw!!!

Re:Version 8?!?

[Abstrackt]

The difference is that Chrome was doing this from day one so people could just accept it as a quirk; FF had an established system and changed it for no great reason, imho.

Re:Great... yet another version of Firefox to supp

[omnichad]

Must write some really convoluted CSS/HTML. I've never really had something render differently in Firefox 3.6 vs. 4 or 5. If it renders in both IE7 and IE8 AND any version of Firefox, it will render in just about anything modern.

Re:Oh well

[LordNimon]

Seriously. I wish they would change the name. I'm embarrassed to tell people what browser I use because the name is so stupid.

Re:Too late. I already switched to Chrome.

[vlm]

I tried switching to Chrome again but, like the last time, the extensions weren't half as good. Even the ones developed by the same teams as FireFox! From what I understand it is the difference between the two browser extension APIs that is causing the problem. So, I'll stick with FireFox for now.

My web browser is adblock plus, flashblock, noscript, xmarks. Also firebug. They define my "internet experience". I currently use firefox as the backend, as long as the backend stays out of the way of adblock and noscript, and cooperates with xmarks, I'm pretty happy. If chrome makes a better backend for my addons, then I'll switch to chrome. Not till then. All I need is a working, configurable ad blocker, flash blocker, JS blocker, and bookmark syncer.

Re:It better be, IE9 does a better job atm

[ledow]

"animations for the websites I design"

Spotted your problem right there.

Azure?

[syntap]

I'm sure Microsoft will have no problem at all with that. At least with "Cairo" is was a decade+ year-old internal product name of Microsoft's they used.

So will Firefox 8's Azure graphics engine make performance with Microsoft Azure cloud apps better? Firefox version confusion plus product name confusion should be fun.

Re:Azure?

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

I'm still wondering why Microsoft named their "Cloud" platform after the color of a cloudless sky...

("The emperor has no clouds"?)

Re:Great... yet another version of Firefox to supp

[diegocg]

Your fault. Why would a web developer care about supporting beta versions right now?

Re:Oh well

[the_other_chewey]

My poor little SeaMonkey is only up to 2.1. Somebody obviously needs to get their sh*t together!

Well, SeaMonkey 2.2 has been out for three days now...

Re:Great... yet another version of Firefox to supp

[Merk42]

What issue(s) have you come across that made you need to rewrite for Firefox 5?

As another web developer myself, I'm genuinely curious

Re:Oh well

[just_another_sean]

Damn! They're getting to be as bad as the people behind Firefox!

Rendering

[pr0nbot]

Most of the comments have been about the version numbering...

I'm curious about the change to rendering. It seems to me they're saying, "these OS layout engines (Quartz et al) are too slow - we'll just route around them". Understandable, but it's kind of a shame that they'll presumably be re-solving a lot of the problems that Quartz et al deal with (e.g. are they going to do their own font rendering?), and I wonder why their concerns can't be addressed by altering Quartz.

I'm not criticising the decision, I'm just curious as to the reasoning that goes on when such decisions are made. (I'm always interested in the practical examples of why those lessons they drum into you at university about the myriad benefits of code reuse, standing on the shoulders of giants etc don't really pan out in the real world.)

Is the job they're doing fundamentally different? (such that rendering via Quartz was the wrong idea in the first place)
Is there some key component that fundamentally could not be in Quartz? (maybe, embedding videos or somesuch)
Is it that Quartz isn't open source (or Apple cooperative enough) and so Mozilla can't realistically get them to fix it in a sensible timescale?
Is it that they'd have to do this with all the vendors, which isn't feasible?
Is it that abstracting on top of different vendors' APIs turns out to be too much of a headache? (maybe a pure-Quartz implementation would be as fast as the OpenGL version but it's all the Mozilla layers above Quartz that are sub-optimal?)

I wonder if their rendering engine will be released as an independent library that Gnome/KDE etc could incorporate if they wanted to.

Re:Rendering

[jesser]

I'm curious about the change to rendering. It seems to me they're saying, "these OS layout engines (Quartz et al) are too slow - we'll just route around them".

Precisely the opposite. It's our previous abstraction layer that's too slow, and we're replacing it with a thinner one, starting with the easier things like Canvas. See Introducing the Azure project and Azure vs Cairo.

Re:Rendering

[BZ]

Actually, Quartz might end up getting used as a backend for the Gecko-internal Azure API on Mac at least for a bit (just like Direct2D will be on Windows). See http://blog.mozilla.com/joe/2011/04/26/introducing-the-azure-project/ for some discussion of the tradeoffs here. There's some discussion about why it might be preferable to use a GL backend instead of Quartz on Mac (long story short, a GL backend is needed anyway for Linux and Android, and at that point it might make more sense to use it on Mac too so you don't have to maintain separate Quartz code).

Re:Rendering

[GigaplexNZ]

Is it that Quartz isn't open source (or Apple cooperative enough) and so Mozilla can't realistically get them to fix it in a sensible timescale?
Is it that they'd have to do this with all the vendors, which isn't feasible?

It's essentially these two. In the real world, code reuse is only practical if you have sufficient control over the code you are reusing.

Re:Rendering

[bjourne]

Cairo always was too slow, even when Firefox first started using it in 2006. Not slow as in fixable slow by improving the code. Slow as in

user: "this cairo library slows down rendering 5x!"
cairo developer: "no it doesn't!"
user: "yes it does!"
developer: "please provide a benchmark..."
user: "ok"
developer: "bad video drivers!" / "faulty benchmark!" / "edit this config file and try again!" / "go pester someone else, it's fast enough for me!"

The curious reader may check out the performance related cairo threads from about 2005-2008, of which there are many. Wouldn't surprise me if cairo is still slower than the gdk routines it was supposed to replace over six years ago.

Re:Rendering

[zippthorne]

That's too bad. Firefox 5 on Mac looks a *lot* better than Firefox 5 on Windows...

Re:Rendering

[chris_7d0h]

Rendering faster is cool and all, but for me Firefox 3 and now 4 .. I mean 5 is fast enough.
What I really yearn for is tab isolation. Are you guys doing anything to remedy the problems which surface once you open many tabs ?

The only reason I started using Google Chrome is because FF would simply stall once 30-50 pages were opened in tabs. I'd love to continue using FF due to it being far superior to Chrome in all regards but two; scalability and memory management. That chrome allegedly renders pages faster than FF isn't even in my radar of important factors when choosing between the two browsers. Scalability however is.

Re:Rendering

[jesser]

We're doing as much as we can to reduce those problems while Firefox is still single-process. For example, we recently started throttling timers in background tabs and added a sane web animation API. More and more internal APIs are asynchronous or interruptible. We've also reduced memory use quite a bit with Firefox 7; I think we use significantly less memory than Chrome in common cases now.

At the same time, we're also working on process separation. It looks like it will be ready to play with, perhaps even an option, in a few months. I don't think we'll enable it by default until we're comfortable with the tradeoff between memory use and responsiveness/stability.

And we're also working on a new programming language that could make it safe and sane to use "tasks" (likely mapping to threads) rather than processes, so we don't have to deal with that unhappy tradeoff :)

Re:Rendering

[BZ]

What's bad exactly?

Generally speaking, the goal is to not change the way things look, just draw it faster...

Re:Rendering

[jesser]

Does that mean the goal of Rust is to become part of Firefox at some point?

Yes, the hope is that parts of Firefox will begin to be written in Rust. I heard a rumor that we might replace our HTML parser first. (Our current HTML parser has one of the weirdest build requirements; it's written in a custom subset of Java that can be source-translated into C++.)

I had always wondered why Mozilla would suddenly become interested in writing a new programming language out of the blue

As opposed to digging deeper and deeper into our unhappy dialect of C++? ;)

Didn't seem like the sort of organization with so much excess resources to throw around that it would be useful to start spinning up such a thing

We're doing pretty okay on money for now :) Putting together a language research team doesn't compete directly with much of the other stuff we're doing, except maybe JS engine work. It's a long shot, but if it works succeeds, it will be worthwhile many times over.

instead of, say, buying more build slaves

IIRC, we were limited there by datacenter power or space. We recently got space in a data center in Phoenix, which should help a lot.

We were also limited there by trying to use the same hardware to test Firefox's performance on all desktop operating systems, which meant using a specific version of the Mac Mini for everything. And using the same hardware for both performance testing and unit testing. We're going to change that.

Re:Rendering

[gordo3000]

no no, put on your jobs-ophile glasses and you will notice that when quartz has a pixel become blue, it is a richer, warmer, more beautiful blue than when any other product does it.

Even worse

[Mathinker]

Actually, I get a "download firefox 8" from some domain called en.softonic.com, God only knows if that download includes an "extra little present"...

PowerPC is for game consoles

[tepples]

A representative of Mozilla Corporation has stated that Mozilla Firefox is intended for home use, not business use. (I can go look up the previous Slashdot story about this if you want.) What computing product marketed for home use A. is still manufactured in 2011, B. uses a PowerPC CPU, and C. does not require that all software be digitally signed by the device manufacturer?

Re:PowerPC is for game consoles

[The Moof]

If I remember that story correctly, it was one dev putting his foot in his mouth, and other devs were forced come out of the woodwork to essentially say "he doesn't speak for the entire Mozilla organization." The jist I got from the story is there's a divide among Mozilla's community about whom is the browser's intended market.

Re:PowerPC is for game consoles

[tepples]

If I remember that story correctly, it was one dev putting his foot in his mouth

Still, when I hear "PowerPC", I think of pre-2006 Macintosh computers and video game consoles. How long does Apple plan to keep providing security updates for Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)? I seem to remember than Mozilla dropped Windows 9x support around the time Microsoft stopped providing security updates.

Re:PowerPC is for game consoles

[Lennie]

I don't know, but it is pretty much the only kind of mainstream OS which has problems with handling IPv6 properly:

http://fud.no/ipv6/

Re:PowerPC is for game consoles

[Darinbob]

He was the Firefox product manager. Thus a bit more clout than a random Firefox dev. Makes sense really, engineers are often face palming over things that product managers say.

Not all addons are on AMO nor in pure JS

[tepples]

Anonymous Coward wrote:

If your addon is on addons.mozilla.org

Does addons.mozilla.org offer private hosting of bespoke addons used by a single company? Does addons.mozilla.org offer hosting of addons whose use requires payment? Or is addons.mozilla.org intended solely for addons intended for public use at no charge?

they've begun automatically testing addons for compatibility

I seem to remember reading that any add-on incorporating a native code component will automatically fail the test.

Re:Not all addons are on AMO nor in pure JS

[mpe]

Does addons.mozilla.org offer private hosting of bespoke addons used by a single company? Does addons.mozilla.org offer hosting of addons whose use requires payment? Or is addons.mozilla.org intended solely for addons intended for public use at no charge?

A couple of additional issues. Have Mozilla ever sorted out the problems with updating global addons? (Or even installing them in the first place...) This is an HTTPS site, thus can't be easily cached.

Re:Great... yet another version of Firefox to supp

[tepples]

Why not just code valid xhtml or html5 to begin with?

Presumably because some ad-viewing or paying customers still use Internet Explorer 6 or 7. Or possibly because some CSS properties have changed from -moz- to unprefixed in a recent version of Firefox.

Much improved Memory management

[timmans]

I have always had problems with Firefox streaming my 20 cameras through Zoneminder from my server. Invariably the whole machine would lock up within 2-3 minutes because Firefox was using up 90%+ of my 4gb RAM. I have just installed Firefox 7.0a2 and I have been streaming the cameras now for about 20 mins and Firefox is only using up 240mb. If this is any indication of where they are heading, then I think they have cured one of Firefox's largest issues - memory hogging.

64-bit flash on Windows

[Aggrajag]

Hopefully Adobe updates Square as it is still at version 10.1.

Re:64-bit flash on Windows

[bill_mcgonigle]

Hopefully Adobe updates Square as it is still at version 10.1.

Well, they finally committed to a 64-bit release on Linux this year, so yeah, Windows ought to be up soon.

Re:64-bit flash on Windows

[Aggrajag]

Didn't take too long: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer11.html

Once again, time to get a new browser.

[JustAnotherIdiot]

Preferably one that doesn't break my plugins every month. Thanks for the great use Mozilla, but I'm jumping ship to something that's more stable/supportable.
So that leaves out both Chrome(terrible plugins in comparison to Firefox) Firefox(batshit insane update schedule) and IE(...do i need to explain this one?)

Suggestions, slashdot?

Re:Once again, time to get a new browser.

[Lennie]

Have you considered Opera ?

Re:Once again, time to get a new browser.

[JustAnotherIdiot]

I have not, but I'll look more into it now, thanks for the suggestion!

Re:Once again, time to get a new browser.

[perryizgr8]

i think ie9 and chrome will both work nicely for you. ie9 is a bit faster than chrome at things like opening, tab management, etc but rendering speed looks to be identical. ie9 has this built in feature called 'tracking protection' which is quite nice. but chrome has loads of addons that work very nicely, and it has almost all the major addons firefox has (adblock, ghostery, noscript, etc).

Re:Once again, time to get a new browser.

[JustAnotherIdiot]

Did...did you even /read/ my post, or did you just read the subject?

Re:Once again, time to get a new browser.

[perryizgr8]

i did read the whole thing. i still can't figure out what i'm missing?

Re:Once again, time to get a new browser.

[perryizgr8]

got it. sorry. i'm a bit slow sometimes ;)

Re:Once again, time to get a new browser.

[JustAnotherIdiot]

Quite alright, happens. =P

You dudes are behind the times!

[GarryFre]

My version of FireFox wrapped around to -1 and the benchmark speed, and features make it indistinguishable from Vista! We've just wrapped our bloat.

wait until they reach version 127

[Anonymous Coward]

Then it will load the pages you want next week before you even know you're going to want them and before they're even created. Now that'll be speed. (of course, it will play hell with the lotteries. :-)

In related news ...

[PPH]

... Slashdot UI developers make significant advances in bringing Firefox 8 performance right back onto its knees.

Re:In related news ...

[shutdown -p now]

Screw performance, how about making things work to begin with (like, not opening parent comments when left-clicking on the reply textarea)?

Re:Great... yet another version of Firefox to supp

[Piata]

Uh.... I haven't noticed much difference in rendering between FF 4 or 5. If you follow the standards, your website should work in all versions of Firefox unless you're expressly using something that older browsers don't support. This isn't IE where rendering randomly changes with every version.

Re:Great... yet another version of Firefox to supp

[GigaplexNZ]

It's not just about the different versions behaving differently. Even if the browsers all supposedly behave the same, they still have to put in the testing efforts to prove that the browsers behave the same with their site.

20% faster

[partyguerrilla]

And the memory management still unaddressed, still a big deal, still pretending it doesn't happen. Way to go, Mozillafriends!

Re:20% faster

[asa]

Nope. Memory usage in the Firefox Aurora channel (less than 12 weeks from release) is down between 30 and 50 percent and un-used memory is cleared much faster. Way to go making assertions without doing your research.

Re:Version 8?!?

[brim4brim]

Or Opera which doesn't have a ridiculous version numbering system.

i am still on ff 4...???

[hesaigo999ca]

what a minute, i just downloaded 4.0.12 , now we have 8....wtf?
did someone change the way builds were being done, or is this a ploy to get clicks on the link, or is FF trying to bring the versions as high as IE ....???

Re:i am still on ff 4...???

[Lennie]

No to make version numbers irrelevant.

Mozilla gave you the finger

[anss123]

Well, Mozilla gave you the finger a few slashdot articles back. They don't do corporate, stick to Internet Explorer for that.

Firefox a cause of Technological Moral Panic

[cruff]

When I saw "Firefox 8" in the title, I fell into a panic. What happened to 6 and 7? People weren't meant to upgrade their browsers to new major version numbers weekly! No one could possibly survive that pace, their mouse buttons will burn out at the furious pace necessary to install that often! Think of the effect that has on the women and children!

Re:Firefox a cause of Technological Moral Panic

[blair1q]

What I want to know is what happens to the 1136 minor versions between releases of Microsoft products.

Obligatory Dilbert?

[cicuz]

This is how I feel

Re:Great... yet another version of Firefox to supp

[AvitarX]

Any standard coding should have included both the prefixed and non-prefixed rules (as they were added).

I actually like CSS3 PIE for that reason, it forces one to use the non-prefixed rules too (it's a shame that IE9 doesn't support gradients without using a canvas though, and doesn't work in CSS3 PIE either).

Firefox 8 vs Firefox 1?

[ohnocitizen]

I wonder how Firefox 8 stacks up against Firefox 1? Back when the goal was to create an efficient, stable, fast browser.

Re:Firefox 8 vs Firefox 1?

[asa]

You can download it and see. In my testing, Firefox today kills Firefox from back then in performance. JS is about 30 times faster. Start-up is about 5 times faster. Rendering is much faster. UI responsiveness is way ahead. It's a slam dunk. Go get Firefox 1 for yourself and give it a try.

Re:Linux performance

[asa]

The author of this article only reports performance numbers for Microsoft's Windows OS and Mac OS X but fails to report the actual performance under Linux. Pretty pointless article with such limited numbers.

Pointless because it's only relevant to 98% of Firefox users? It would it be nice if every website reviewing Firefox has 6 machines (or VMs) so they could report on win32, win64, Mac32, Mac64, Lin32, and Lin64? Actually, make that about a dozen different OS versions. Win XP, Win Vista, Win 7, Mac OS X 10.5, Mac OS X 10.6, Mac OS X 10.7, Linux âz will all give different performance scores.

It's not pointless to be incomplete. It's difficult to be complete.

- A

Too early

[R2P2]

Firefox 8 is still pretty far from release. I wonder if it will get even faster as they continue to make improvements, or slower as they realize the speed came from bugs.

Re:Version 8?!?

[Runaway1956]

"Nobody" obviously doesn't include anyone who uses a Cyrillic langauge. Are you that naive, or are you that prejudiced? More likely, just xenophobic, and unaware of what is happening outside your own little circle, town, or province.

Firefox Infinity

[Lawand]

You're still discussing Firefox 8? Oh well, I guess only cool guys like me use Firefox Infinity. Goodnight lameos.

Compatibility views bad / PowerPC support dropped

[Sits]

This is what MS were forced to do with IE and it causes major issues because it encourages people to write to particular versions. It means people are inclined to do things like only target one browser ("your browser is unknown because it is too new"), it gives them another reason to only support old versions of code ("well my users can use compat view") rather than update their code and it makes browsers harder to write because you can't drop old code and potentially have to keep adding more and more engines to support all the old quirks. I gather this is one of the reasons why HTML5 no forces authors to signal which version of HTML they are targeting...

The last official version of Firefox 3.6 to support PowerPC Mozilla has not supported PowerPC (or 10.4) since Firefox 3.6.

Re:Great... yet another version of Firefox to supp

[Randle_Revar]

You are doing something wrong on your website. Rendering differences, aside from new parts of html5 that have been added, should be pretty minimal between 3.6 and 5.

email

[ThatsNotPudding]

If not, an email gets sent to the addon developer alerting them to the fact their addon is broken, and what exactly is broken about it.

Of course, the email will only render correctly in beta 11.32a of Thunderbird, but any developer worth their own salt would already be on that version.

Re:Great... yet another version of Firefox to supp

[mpe]

my company is planning a move away from mozilla because of the user installable plugins / add ons - why oh why under the home directory.

You can install them with the program and available to all users. It just isn't well documented and apparently can't be done via the regular GUI.

Fibonacci numbers

[roguegramma]

I guess Firefox stable releases will now be numbered in Fibonacci numbers, 3, 5 and now the next one 8. Next "stable release" after that will be 13 ;-)

It all makes sense, the more complex the software gets, the more hidden releases you need to improve it ;-)

Version Numbers should be release dates

[scarboni888]

I could never understand why version numbers weren't simply the date of release. For example if a 'final' version of FF were released today it would be:

Firefox 2010.07.11

The other version schemes have all been useless to me since they don't tell me much of anything whereas the date a product is released happens once and only once, will never happen again, and tells you exactly how old the software is without any further research.

Re:Version Numbers should be release dates

[perryizgr8]

like windows 98 and 2000?

Firefox 8???

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox 8??? I've only been out of town for a week and they've gone from 5 to 8???

6.66 increase pmvn

[owlstead]

That's a 6.66 increase per "major" version number. Sounds like sombody sold something to get this speedup. Probably the deal included the version number scheme.

Firefox 3.6.18

[roxteddy]

Just sitting on the platform at 3.6.18 waving at the Firefox train as it accelerates into oblivion. (sigh)

Time for an ask Slashdot

[JumpDrive]

I think it is time for an ask Slashdot. It appears that Firefox developers are going to ignore users requests to stop this numbering and release scheme. Which leaves a number of corporate and general web developers in a lurch.
I used to work for a web development company and it was always a pain to keep or get web-sites working with various versions of browsers.
With Chrome I would have told customers , "Hey, if it happens to works with Chrome that's just great, but we can't continually test against new versions of Chrome".
Now I work for a medium size company and we have limited the number of browsers our internal web interface will work with. Currently it is with Firefox. But now it appears that we are going to have to move away from Firefox. I hate to go back to IE but it appears that is where we are heading.
Sorry Firefox, but we can't just keep regression testing at your whim.

So maybe it is time for someone to ask, what is the recommended browser for corporate use?

20% faster

[rossdee]

and 100% incompatible

After the problems I had upgrading to FF5 , and at least now having most of the add-ons back working, I won't be upgrading anytime soon.

Firefox has more versions than Herbergers has sales...

I hear that one of the upcoming features will be control of the major functions by thought. But you have to think in Russian

I see that Thunderbird 5 is out, (whatever happened to Thunderbird 4 - it never 'surfaced ) But a working Email program is even more essential than a browser so I won't be upgrading that either.

I think its time for a new Poll

Now that FF is F'd what browser are you sitching to?

    1) Opera
    2) Chrome
    3) Chromium
    4) Safari
    5) I have to use IE (company policy) you insensitive Clod
    6) Seamonkey
    7) If Lynx is good enough for CowboyNeal, its good enough for me

Re:Great... yet another version of Firefox to supp

[Darinbob]

Because what's beta today will be the official release tomorrow. Mozilla is on an incredibly fast release cycle now. If you wait until the next release is out before you test it there will be another release out before you've finished testing.

Dumping Chrome and Firefox because of numbers?

[kripkenstein]

I know it's been said before, but this new release system is fucking retarded.

I'm this close to dumping Firefox on every machine I touch.

I think it's silly to dump both Chrome and Firefox because of their release systems (which are identical - both release a new major version number every 6 weeks).

I guess you can use other browsers than Chrome and Firefox. But those other browsers release new versions with new features very rarely. Is the *version number* enough of a reason to not use Chrome and Firefox? I don't think so - even though I thought it was silly when Chrome started with it, and when Firefox decided to do it as well.

but is it better?

[samantha]

Firefox ever since 3.x something has been sucking more and more on my Mac. It eats tons of CPU after being up even a short while and stops responding. Various addons break on each of the numerous releases. Even Safari now has better characteristics on the Mac. Chrome is working fine and fast becoming my browser of choice. That it is fast until it bloats or otherwise screws up is not an improvement.

What confuses me of all this...

[Windwraith]

I know versions 7 and 8 are being actively developed...what about version 6? I never hear anything about that. All changes seem to go to either 7 or 8...I am a bit confused about version 6, indeed. I am tempted to skip it entirely since it doesn't seem to have anything worth it. And we will have to wait for version 7 with the "5.1" that is 6. That will be infuriating for those with versionitis like myself.

Re:What confuses me of all this...

[Windwraith]

Oh my, self replying because I actually tried Aurora (7) and it's actually...good. It's fairly stable so far, (although never got a firefox crash before except in Minefield(4.0a) so...), it preserved all my Panorama setup alright (100+ tabs), most addons are labeled incompatible but still work (including ImgLikeOpera, the addon I can't go without), memory usage is down 100mb from my average (it was around 350mb all the time before this), and it starts up quite fast compared to 5. Some stuff feels snappier as well. Definitely a step in the right direction...

That still leaves 6 as the most unexciting release ever. 7 is what should be shipping as 6 even if it takes one extra month or two. (let's ignore how silly the versioning is and just focus on features here)

Re:What confuses me of all this...

[perryizgr8]

i love the idea of panorama, but it lost 50-60 of my tabs cumulatively when i had upgraded to ff4. and then it also got horribly slow for me. and stupid design like resizing only from one corner made me to ditch it in favor of the much more stable tree style tabs. but i'd love it if moz devs eliminate all the bugs in panorama and make it a bit faster. it will change the way i browse ;)

Re:What confuses me of all this...

[Windwraith]

I was skeptic at first, and I used tree style tabs as well (combined with bartab to prevent all tabs from loading at startup, but it's now a default function!), and I grew used to it, it's like workspaces.
I hear you on the tab loss and it happened to me as well, but it hasn't failed since then for me, so from my experience I recommend you give it another try. (If not, tree style tabs still are a stylish choice).

Ok...

[multimediavt]

I hear a lot of griping about versioning in the comments, but nobody talking about why Direct3D is faster than Direct2D at rendering non-3D objects. The Quartz/OpenGL thing makes sense as Quartz is on top of OpenGL and it would be faster to bypass it, but if Direct3D is 20% faster than Direct2D why would anyone even bother using Direct2D at all, for anything on Windows? I would assume Direct2D is *NOT* built atop Direct3D in the API structure, as that would not make any sense at all. Seems odd to me... Anyone have an answer that isn't sarcastic?

community, sharing, SNR

[Onymous Coward]

You can help raise the quality of online discourse.

Rise above the bait. Do your part to keep things civil.

Re:Version 8?!?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Chrome was doing this ... FF ... changed it for no great reason

See, you just contradicted yourself.

Re:Version 8?!?

[perryizgr8]

how is not using a crappy browser xenophobic?
opera can't even display lots of sites properly. even ie has more html features and performance than opera. give me a few good reasons to use opera over other browsers.

Re:It better be, IE9 does a better job atm

[perryizgr8]

ie9 cheats to get that animation advantage. it uses directx and your gpu is actually rendering the web page.

Re:Firefox 7 is already quite fast.

[perryizgr8]

I usually use Aurora (Firefox 7 at the moment) and it is notably faster tan Firefox 5.

Also, the consumed memory is MUCH better (and you can trigger manually the garbage collector in the new about:memory). Quite an improvement for us users with 1 GB only in Windows 7.

don't you think you should upgrade your ram now? i don't think windows 7 actually 'runs' on 1gb ram, maybe it walks, or limps.

Do the math

[cavebison]

Firefox 8 about equal with Chrome 14?
How can version 8 be as good as version 14?

Seriously, we're in danger of the average person thinking that one day, to the detriment of software development in general. Madness.

Re:Version 8?!?

[Runaway1956]

Alright - I thought EVERYONE knew this, already. Go visit stat counter something or other - link: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-RU-monthly-201006-201106

I really don't have time right now to help you further - but play with that statcounter thing, and you'll find that among Cyrillic language speaking people, Opera pretty much rules. I've played with it in the past, but to be perfectly honest, I HATE those damned charts. I'm color blind, and can't read the damned things easily. Looks like Firefox leads in Russia, with Opera second, IE third, Safari fourth? Quite different from the United States, and the rest of the English speaking world, right?

Here's the global usage stats - IE is below 50% now. Last time I looked, they were still over 60%. Sweet, if you ask me. But, even the global stats are very different from the Russian Federation.

Go, play, investigate. Choose some countries in Eastern Europe that use the cyrillic languages, and I'm certain that you'll find that Opera leads the pack. It certainly did several months ago, and I can't imagine that anything has changed.

The xenophobic bit I was referring to, is that you, like most other people - especially Americans - simply can't imagine that other people do things differently. Because IE rules the US, with Firefox running a distant second, and Chrome running a close third, we tend to ASSume that to be the case with all the rest of the world.

Opera is really not a crappy browser. In fact, it's pretty good. It's just not what I want to use. What I really want, is Chromium, with all the add-on capability that Firefox has. In the meantime, I alternate between Chromium and Firefox.

Have fun with statcounter!

Re:Great... yet another version of Firefox to supp

[Billly Gates]

It should work fine as the rendering part is mostly hardware acceleration. The layout engine is unchanged. You do not freak out when each version of Chrome every 6 weeks is out do you? Chrome now makes up 20% of the North American market according to g.stat as of this month too.

Use standards and you are pretty good with layouts from IE 8 upwards, and keep the demonic scripts for IE 7. There will be much celebration when IE 7 finally goes away below 5% and can be ignored.

Re:Version 8?!?

[gordo3000]

wow, you are absolutely wrong. I am american, just checked the site, and ran most slavic language countries. Belarus was the only one where Opera had major pentration. Any particular reason they should be considered? For most countries, it was Firefox, with Chrome and IE splitting the diff. Opera was some meaningless 4th.

are you sure your color blindness didn't have you confusing firefox's orange with Opera's red on the site? I think you confused the two browsers is all and I could see that happening (had a boss who was color blind and his spreadsheets and programs had really weird colors).

Re:Great... yet another version of Firefox to supp

[jwhitener]

I don't get this, are you not coding to standards? Or attempting to implement some really cutting edge stuff?

Re:Version 8?!?

[Runaway1956]

You could be right, Gordo - it's possible I read the current chart wrong. And, it's quite possible that the statistics have changed. But, I'll refer you to this article, from 8 months ago, at which time Opera did lead the other browsers in Russia:

http://confidential.pokerstrategy.com/A_Russian_Opera

About a year ago, I already blogged about the browser landscapeand which browsers our visitors use. Since then, the trend continued - in surprising strength:
  Internet Explorer reduced its share from 40% (2008: 53%) to a mere 15%
  Opera climbed to #2 - from 15% to 19%
  Chrome skyrocketed from not even 4% to now 14%
In Russia - where a lot of our visitors come from -, Opera even is the leading browser (at least amongst our audience) with a share of 39%, ahead even of Firefox' 35%.