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Firefox 6 Ships Next Week, 8 Blocks Sneaky Add-Ons
CWmike writes "Mozilla is on track to release Firefox 6 next week, according to notes posted on the company's website. 'On track with a few bugs still remaining. No concerns for Tuesday,' the notes stated. Firefox 6 includes several noticeable changes, including highlighting domain names in the address bar — both Chrome and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 do something similar by boldfacing domain names — and reducing startup time when users rely on Panorama, the browser's multi-tab organizer. Meanwhile, Mozilla said this week that starting with Firefox 8, Mozilla will automatically block browser add-ons until users approve them, which should put an end to sneaky installs."
It's really worrisome, because it seems to be part of a much larger trend, that of FOSS software in general going downhill, and basically self-destructing.
Just look at the situation with Linux desktops, where both Ubuntu (by far the most popular distro) and Gnome have decided to abandon their users in an attempt to woo ADHD teenagers who do nothing but play games and browse Facebook. The other big desktop, KDE, hasn't gone the dumb-down route like those, but it hasn't really improved much in 10 years either, pursuing a radical rewrite which doesn't seem to have really improved the user experience or improved reliability or performance, but instead offers memory-hungry features of questionable value, namely desktop search and indexing.
The mainstay for Linux/Unix graphics, the X Window System, is also being abandoned in favor of a system that doesn't have network transparency the way X does, eliminating one of the giant features that makes X so great. X is full of legacy cruft and really did need a rewrite to get good performance on modern hardware, but the Wayland people have thrown the baby out with the bathwater in dropping one of the most useful features of X, so pretty soon Linux users won't be able to run applications remotely any more, they'll have to do it like Windows users, using RDP, VNC, etc. where an entire desktop session has to be started up and logged into on the remote computer and opened in a new window. No longer will sysadmins be able to open multiple apps from multiple servers and have them all display on one screen together.
Now Firefox seems to be driving off a cliff too. Before long, we're going to have MS dominant on the desktop again, even though the "desktop" may be decreasingly popular in the home and mainly used in workplaces and for a small number of power users, developers, etc.; and Apple and other consumer device makers dominant for consumer/home markets, making tablets and smartphones that "the masses" use to access the internet.
It's quite sad, because Linux and FOSS had a lot of momentum there for a while, and seemed to be making great progress. But instead of just being happy with that, and trying to get all the important applications and infrastructure to a certain level of maturity and then just going into maintenance mode and encouraging the devs work on other projects to fill in other gaps that exist in the FOSS landscape, the developers just couldn't leave well enough alone, and had to keep reinventing the wheel over and over again, much like their proprietary counterparts where companies want to keep adding more and more features (bloat) so they can convince users to keep paying for regular "upgrades". Obviously, it's not like this with all FOSS projects; the kernel just keeps evolving and adding more drivers (which is a never-ending task with new hardware constantly coming out), openssh hasn't changed significantly in ages, nor has the bash shell, my favorite monitoring program gkrellm doesn't seem to have anyone trying to revamp it over and over, etc. But the big projects just can't seem to help themselves.