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."

Comments

Happy FF8 user here

[David Gerard]

I'm using FF8 alphas on the Nightly channel, which is part of the Moziila PPA in Ubuntu. It's fantastic. It uses way less memory and is way faster. It's also way stabler than nightlies were when I was running Moziila nightlies in 2001, and they were pretty good even then. The only downside is extensions that haven't caught up. If you're clear for those, I heartily recommend it.

Ability to install out-of-date addons

[Bloodwine77]

I'd rather they add some easy way to let users install addons that say, "Does not support Firefox x.x". They can put a big disclaimer/warning/alert to make sure the user knows what they are doing, but with the Firefox rapid release schedule I am tired of having my addons break because of version string issues.

One example is the Stylish addon. I am using the Firefox 6 beta in Ubuntu 11.10 alpha and Stylish refuses to install due to the version string. The addon info says it supports Firefox 3.6 - 6.0a2 (key part being "6.0.a2"). That tells me that it should work in later alpha/beta version 6 builds.

Firefox really needs to address the issue of how addons determine whether or not they are out-of-date. The browser version is no longer a useful metric for that.

Enough with the version number inflation!

[_xeno_]

I suppose it's no surprise to anyone who's been paying attention to Firefox development for the past several years, but for fuck's sake, listen to your users and stop with the version number inflation!

Seriously, what makes this a Firefox 6 and not a Firefox 4.2? What new features does it add? Apparently the only really "stand-out" feature is graying out anything that isn't the domain name in the useless-bar. I mean, Awesome Bar.

(Seriously, I like the concept, but I've had quite a few instances this past week where instead of finding "the page I was just on five minutes ago" it does something like "page 3 of this article you read two months ago" with no hint of the URL I'd opened literally ten times already that day. Awesome. Here's an idea, can Firefox try and fix it to make it useful? Like sort based on number of times a page was viewed, counting reloads, so that typing the URL to a forum doesn't find page 2, 3, 4, and 5, but never page 1 because I don't click on the page 1 link enough, I just reload the forum?)

But back to the version number issue - quick, how many people know what version number Chrome is up to off the top of their head? Anyone?

How many people using Firefox 5 here have literally forgotten that they're using Firefox 5, because the last really major update was Firefox 4? I still think of it as "Firefox 4" because it looks identical, and have to be reminded that they've inflated the version number for no useful reason.

Seriously, stop blindly aping Chrome! If you're going to copy something Chrome does, try and understand it! For example, take removing the status bar. Chrome will expand the little URL popup that replaced the status bar if you continue hovering a link. Firefox 4 and 5 don't. And for some reason they randomly switch between left-aligning it and right-aligning the popup. And for fuck's sake, why don't you just expand the popup to fill the entire horizontal width of the window?! I've got the room to display the entire URL! Why doesn't Firefox bother doing so?!

But kudos for aping (poorly) the feature in IE 9 that warns when third party addons have been installed and gives you the option of not using them. It's nice to know that you're going to go ahead and do that after crying about how it's impossible to do, even after IE had launched with that feature.

Re:Enough with the version number inflation!

[_xeno_]

Did you just write a whole essay on an arbitrary and meaningless version number?

It may be arbitrary and meaningless now but it didn't use to be.

It used to be that a move from Major->Major meant that there would be large changes and there's a good chance addons would break. Changes to minor versions might break addons, and patches shouldn't.

Now, who the fuck knows? The number's meaningless. No one cares about Chrome's version number, because it's meaningless.

Firefox's version number used to convey information, and now it doesn't. They've taken something useful and made it useless.

I actually just scrolled up and read your line bashing the AwesomeBar. Great. How many years has it been now? And you still don't understand how it's used or why it's useful?

Really? It's supposed to find infrequently read sites? Or sites that you've only read once? Because before it finds Slashdot, it finds some random article I read months ago.

Before it finds a website that I had repeatedly had to go back to over the course of a day, it found page 2 of some article I read a month ago. Actually, it found several random articles that had nothing to do with the site I was trying to pull up. Enough that scrolling through the entire list meant that, despite the fact I'd opened it, say, five times already, it wasn't on the list. At all.

And I can guarantee you the thing with me trying to reopen a forum only to find that the Awesome bar found nothing but either page 2 or beyond and random threads on the forum happened. Despite the fact that I'd bookmarked the forum. I thought that was supposed to promote it to the top of the search, but apparently not.

Of course, I wouldn't need to reopen it if Firefox hadn't randomly decided not to restore my tabs, but that's a different issue...

Re:I'll rather wait for FF7

[_xeno_]

Can you skip version 6, or are they going to pull another asshole "Firefox 5 is EOLed because v6 is out" like they did to Firefox 4?

Or do you mean you're sticking with Firefox 3.6? Because that seems like a good idea these days, at least until they figure out that their "rapidly release schedule" isn't actually helping anything and is just ensuring that no one gives a shit about new Firefox releases any more.

Re:Bugs, memory leaks, and poor performance.

[djl4570]

I'm probably pissing in the wind responding to an AC but here goes anyway. I've used Firefox since it was Phoenix 0.6. I've run Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox on Windows 2000 Pro, Red Hat/Gnome, on Pentium III and Pentium 4 systems. Firefox has always had an appetite for memory but I've never observed the kind of consumption you describe. I've loaded the high res HST image of the Helix Nebula with the intent of breaking Firefox and it didn't break. It just used seven hundred meg and wow, none of the memory leaked, it was all released when I closed the tab. I've opened two dozen posts on /. in separate tabs. I've opened a dozen tabs on a dozen windows and every time I closed them most all of the memory was released. So prove it. Download Sysinternals Process Explorer or something comparable for your OS and show us a screen shot that documents this claim.

Re:I'll rather wait for FF7

[jonadab]

> Google only supports the last 3 versions of a browser.

There's an extension called User Agent Switcher. Setting it to mimic a recent version of Firefox causes problems for some reason, but if you set it to mimic a recent version of Opera, suddenly everything works just fine. (Disclaimer: I haven't tested this with every single feature of every single Google service in existence; but it works with everything that I *have* tried.)

Twitter no longer works with Firefox 2 as of about a week ago (ever since they made the Big Stupid Change that puts acres of whitespace between adjascent tweets), but I haven't managed to find a browser that the new version *does* work with (and, being a web developer, I have like fifteen different browsers installed for testing; you'd think they could manage to support at least of them, but no), so phooey on Twitter.

> And when will Mozilla stop screwing around with the UI?

When pigs fly, I think. As near as I can tell, user expectations got changed over from something that Firefox wanted to meet to something that Firefox specifically wants to break, sometime around version 1.5. The gratuitous UI changes were minor at first (little things like the first round of changes to how bookmarks work), but the growth rate of their significance appears to be geometric: if rearranging the order of the standard buttons (back, forward, reload, stop -- not that the stop button in Firefox has EVER worked correctly) wasn't new and interesting enough for you, hold on to your seat, because in version three we're completely altering how the location bar works, and then version four changes the whole top of the browser window around so much you won't even recognize it.

Soon we'll be doing away with the tired old "back button" concept, ranking the pages in your history by their *popularity* (as determined by other users), and presenting them visually as part of Panorama. Also, "scrolling down" will be replaced with "zooming in", which you can do with multi-touch trackpad gestures, and manually-created bookmarks will be phased out in favor of assigning ratings (one, two, three, four, or five stars) to the items in your history, which informs your search results when you use the Awesomeness Bar. The bookmarks toolbar will obviously be going away, and also bookmark keywords, and the tab bar will be merged into the Awesomeness bar as well, so instead of having a bar of tabs that you can switch to, you can just use the Awesomeness Bar to search through your open tabs just like you would search through your history.

(Am I just being stupidly absurd? If you'd told me in 2000 about all the changes in Firefox 3, 4, and 5, I'd have said you were being stupidly absurd. I mean, really, getting rid of the menu bar? Putting the home button clear over to the right of the search box? Integrating bookmarks with history? No browser maker could EVER think those would be good ideas. Oh, wait. They did.)

unHappy FF user here

[chargersfan420]

The only downside is extensions

I've been loving Firefox for years, but this fast release schedule is driving me nuts. Every time a new "major" version comes out now, at least one or two of my extensions break. The first one to go (on FF4) was Ubiquity, which still isn't fixed, and the stupid thing about that is Ubiquity is a Mozilla Labs extension. It's pretty sad when their own damn extensions can't even keep up, let alone 3rd party stuff.

So, back to your point about extensions being the only downside, honestly, do we use Firefox for any other reason? I could have ditched FF for Chrome or even IE9 (shudder) but it's the extensions that make Firefox so awesome, and that's what's suffering the most with this bullshit release schedule.