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

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: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.)