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Mozilla Firefox 6 Released Ahead of Schedule
BogenDorpher writes "Mozilla is currently on schedule to release Firefox 6 on August 16th but it looks like the final version has already been signed off and is unofficially available on Mozilla's servers."
Chrome it is. Webkit is the future.
Sorry Mozilla, but you missed the train.
Thanks for your interest in Firefox 6 We aren't quite finished qualifying Firefox 6 yet. You should check out the latest Beta. When we're all done with Firefox 6 it will show up on Firefox.com.
After all, it'll be out Friday..
Takes time to change that number from 5 to 6. Those hard-working devs has to
first delete the old 5, and then find the 6 on the keyboard, and then press the 6.
I'm exhausted just thinking about all the high-quality gruesome work they do for us.
Unfortunately six of the plugins I rely on (yes, those plugins that are supposedly the #1 reason to use Firefox over less customizable browsers) don't yet even support Firefox 5. Everytime that "update Firefox" box comes up, I check, find six plugins outstanding, and back out of it.
Update too fast and you will leave users behind.
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
I still don't understand why they elected to change to this system of releasing major versions every flippin month. The old system was working just fine, why can't this be Fx 5.5? And save v6 for when there are actually some major changes that deserve a major version.
Meanwhile most of the customers coming into my shop still run Firefox 3. Why are they releasing major versions so frequently, there's going to be a lot of people with very low Firefox version numbers that don't know they're 10 versions behind and wouldn't know how to fix that.
I was a long-time Firefox user, I even was part of Spreadfirefox.com and was a "Zealot" that managed to convert my Mom and brother to it and when I was at college I got the IT admins to install it back in the bad old days of IE6. But Firefox has lost its way. Its peak was 1.0 to 3.6. The memory leaks, the obsessive addon breaking, the theft of the status bar and ignoring its users and wasting 80 million dollars a year is the last straw. I uninstalled Firefox this week, and have switched to Chrome on my main PCs and Safari on my iPad. I might even go back to IE when Windows 8 comes out due to the promising platform previews.
Netscape died a horrible death, and Firefox seems to be repeating it. Hopefully enough concerned users fork the Firefox 3.6 code and "re-pheonix" it before it's too late.
They should really call it Firefox 1108, and release one per month. If that's too slow, they can just add the day too, Firefox 110816 sounds really advanced.
So what exactly is this pressing need to increment one major version number per release? Does a higher number make the browser somehow better? What is wrong with the old and familiar scheme of major.minor.build (or a form of)?
Looking up some differences between 5 and 6, I find the major version increment hardly warranted. I find this desire to catch up to Opera and Chrome in version numbers rather comical, how about we just increment major for every build? Hell, get rid of major and use build # as version: Firefox 2740.
When Mozilla actually releases something early instead of delaying everything.
Many companies that make software for the web usually have a policy of supporting browsers up to a certain version number.
I think Mozilla needs to have an internal version number that reflects the stability of the rendering API so this way companies
can have some sense of how compatible future versions of Firefox are.
Where I work at , we only support Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 . The project that I am on has software where there are a few rendering
issues and bugs that show up on FF4+, which we will not fix yet because our clients tend to be mostly IE users. And with
Firefox adopting Chrome's update schedule, it's very hard to pin down what version of Firefox to support since we don't
know what things will change, and don't have the luxury to schedule a block of time devoted to "beta testing" new versions
of Firefox, if there are changes to the rendering or javascript engine that break previously working code.
I thought the version numbers were rolling releases now? So doesn't the release of "6" just mean it's being released on the "5" stream?
I can understand companies not being in touch with their customers, but does Mozilla not even read tech sites like Slashdot? Every story about Firefox lately is filled with exactly how negatively people feel about this version number fiasco.
Chrome was able to get away with bumping version numbers because it was a very new product and nobody was depending on it yet. Even though they removed the "beta" tag surprisingly early on (for a Google product), I think many people STILL consider Chome as "beta".
On the other hand large corporate type applications were just beginning to support Firefox and depended on long term support of major versions. Well, that has just been stomped in the face. Sadly, from a corporate stand point the only browser that really seems stable, viable, and "corporate friendly" now is IE.
1. Memory leaks have been a major issue of recent Firefox development. Current FF 8 nightly builds use a tiny fraction of older versions, and they're extremely stable. This is accomplished by no longer caching previous pages (so if you go back, you'll have to reload from scratch.) I've got a cool 200 tabs open right now in a very old session and it's only using about 500 MB of RAM.
2. The status bar can be restored with this extension. Addon compatibility is likely to be more stable in the foreseeable future since most of the major architectural changes were around the 3-to-4 transition.
3. Firefox doesn't run on the iPad. Are you a troll, technically inexperienced, or in a state of reduced mental capacity?
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Everybody who still uses 3.6, raise your hand.
*raises hand*
So... 40 posts about how much better the support experience would be if they incremented it by 0.1 instead of 1.0, as if the bugs somehow know which digit was incremented. But, no comments about the actual browser? For example, have they finally reverted "tabs on top"?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
There is a great fork, Seamonkey. Runs on Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OSX, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFly (for the *BSD use their ports collection) . The latest version 2.2 came out 07 July 2011. Runs all the firefox addons I use, though you'd have to check the ones you like.
But this one goes to 6.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I hated 3.x. I stayed on 2.x until Chrome was released. Firefox 4+ has brought me an interface that I can stand again.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Go to hell Mozilla
Version number doesn't matter, just fix whats broken and stop messing with the interface THAT WORKS.
The old interface is cluttered and wasteful. Most people will say that isn't considered "working". If you want the old interface, make a few checkmarks under View and you're there. It's shocking that people on a site that's supposed to be for "nerds" do not know how to use GUI menus.
Obviously
... I would click it for almost every single Slashdot story. Firefox 6 has NOT been released. When Mozilla releases it, they will change the Firefox homepage. Being software developers, they know how to change their websites.
kthxbye
Did you try 10.7? Their interface is becoming inconsistent as well.
Or how many releases have to go by before it is supported again?
that is exactly what they are doing. 4.0 was the last major UI change and that is part of the reason it took so long to release it. There are no major UI changes until at least fx8 (to help add-on creators cope with the new rapid release schedule), and they are getting fixes out to the user faster then before. YOU are the one who is fixating on the version numbers, not them. The major version number (the first digit) does not symbolize major changes, but a stable release - which this is - only with fewer changes then fx2/3/4.
I don't think this should have been modded down, it sounds like a Firefox experience that is sadly going to become more common for average users.
Don't know if anybody even noticed, but Mozilla shut down Spreadfirefox.com (now it just redirects to a page on Mozilla's main site) just before they released Firefox 4. Admittedly, the community had already gone down the toilet and the site was mostly just collecting spam.
(also the poster said he started using an iPad with Safari, not that he had been using Firefox on it)
The thing I like about firefox is that you can completely rearrange the interface. For me every version has looked the same.. I don't really care what they do with the default settings.
bite my glorious golden ass.
Using Cent OS 6 at work. I'll just wait until they include a new version of firefox in their standard distro before I upgrade.
No. They're encouraged to, that's quite different. The stable API sounds like the way to go if you want to provide a good end user experience for add-ons, and it makes the most sense. The bleeding edge API is for testing.
3.6 is the last one me or anyone I know will ever use. They've jumped the shark.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
can you do that in 4? I havent tried to
The old interface is cluttered and wasteful. Most people will say that isn't considered "working". If you want the old interface, make a few checkmarks under View and you're there. It's shocking that people on a site that's supposed to be for "nerds" do not know how to use GUI menus.
It's shocking just how out of touch Mozilla has become. This whole "clutter" argument from self titled "UI experts" is just tiresome now.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
Fx displays mediocre performance for me with only 3 plugins installed. It has been doing so for a long time. I noticed a clear improvement in speed with v4 but I still get, out of the blue, constant whole window freezes for 10-30s - during which one core of my CPU spikes to 100% - especially if I have a few pages with Flash opened. I tried many tweaks to get around it but sooner or later the problem comes back.
I suspect that this is, to a large extent, Google's fault because the freezes appear especially on GMail, G+, Reader and Youtube. They must be pushing the envelope with the complexity of these sites, Fx seems to be unable to handle it and Google doesn't care anymore since they successfully positioned their own browser as the paragon of speed. Then again, I do use Google's site predominantly so maybe I would see the problem elsewhere.
I'm worried that this both perceived and factual performance problem will seriously hurt Fx. I've been using Fx and its ancestors for more than 10 years and I've never been so close to abandoning it. If I could have "Search With" for Chrome, I'm pretty sure I would start using it as my primary browser.
FF 5 added some good features, but it crashed more than any other version of Firefox.
*raises hand* It was the UI changes in 4 and on that kinda turned me off.
How strongly is that the case in FF6? I'm still using 3.6.
Exactly, and you can still customize your browser. The fact that you can't even change basic history settings in Chrome, let alone all the about:config tweaks in Firefox, has made me stay loyal to Firefox. If Chrome actually let you have decent customization and decent extensions, I might switch. But the complete lack of customization has stopped me from using Chrome.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Most of us don't want change for the sake of change. Change for the sake of change is -never- a good thing and just pisses off users. And it seems like everything is changing for the sake of change such as GNOME, Facebook, and now Firefox. At least with Firefox the UI is customizable enough I don't have to deal with the hideous new UI which you can't change really fore GNOME 3 or Facebook.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Upon installing, it says "Welcome to Firefox Beta". In "About Firefox", it doesn't mention anything about beta though. So I'm not exactly sure if this is beta. If it is beta, it's weird it's available by a URL that has no mention of "beta", no?
Talking of extensions (I believe the above poster is actually referring to extensions rather than plugins, plugins generally don't break with new versions), is there any easy way to determine whether or not my current set of extensions are compatible with a given version? I'm on Debian so all of my updates come through my package manager, and the 'easiest' way at the moment seems to be cross-referencing each extension (all twenty-six of them) with Firefox Add-ons, which tedious in the extreme.
Is there just some tool which can scan through my extensions and report back on which aren't marked as compatible with 6.0 or above?
The old interface is cluttered and wasteful.
When I needed the wasteful old interface to stop cluttering, I could hit F11 for a full screen view. Does F11 bring back the extremely useful clutter in FF4/5/6?
Have they fixed the freaking memory leaks issue yet? No? Hrmph, no thanks, Mozilla. FF5 leaks bad enough as it is, I'll stay with it rather than move up. If you want people to be interested in upgrading to your newest version, try fixing the bugs instead of just adding feature bloat or trying to make your browser score higher than Chrome on some benchmark.
What is a 64bit version going to be made available?
From the download folder:
We aren't quite finished qualifying Firefox 6 yet. You should check out the latest Beta.
From the Welcome page when you install the executable at the link provided:
You are now running Firefox Beta
Thanks for your interest in Firefox 6
We aren't quite finished qualifying Firefox 6 yet. You should check out the latest Beta.
When we're all done with Firefox 6 it will show up on Firefox.com.
Firefox seems to be spiraling out of control in the name of its own mission statement.
The reaction to the numbering scheme has been strongly negative. The enterprise mailing list was launched ostensibly in an effort to "communicate" with enterprise users and see what Mozilla could do to bridge the gap between the needs of enterprise and the state of firefox. The community has laid out the two simple concepts that have had us in enterprise either most up in arms or would most like to see. Those requests have fallen on ears that are either willfully sealed shut, or passively hoping that the status quo is gonna be ok. It's been a handful of the Mozilla team doing little more than trying to find new and creative ways to say "Enterprise doesn't fit our mission statement, so you can all just fork off" without coming out and saying it. We've said what we need, and the response has been a deafening "That's nice, we're gonna keep doing what we're doing."
I can't see a good future for Firefox at this point. 3.6 is starting to look more and more like Netscape 4.7 to me. The highwater mark before things began rolling back. They could have changed the world, but they seem hell bent and whiskey bound on sitting in their sandbox.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
I can understand companies not being in touch with their customers, but does Mozilla not even read tech sites like Slashdot? Every story about Firefox lately is filled with exactly how negatively people feel about this version number fiasco.
Chrome was able to get away with bumping version numbers because it was a very new product and nobody was depending on it yet. Even though they removed the "beta" tag surprisingly early on (for a Google product), I think many people STILL consider Chome as "beta".
On the other hand large corporate type applications were just beginning to support Firefox and depended on long term support of major versions. Well, that has just been stomped in the face. Sadly, from a corporate stand point the only browser that really seems stable, viable, and "corporate friendly" now is IE.
Hi, I'm a Firefox dev. Yes, we read Slashdot :)
There is a big tradeoff here, with downsides both ways. You correctly point out that some people are having problems with the new fast release schedule. That's a fact, and we are doing all we can, but the problems are hard (addons, enterprise users, etc.).
On the other hand, the alternative is to continue with a slow release schedule, which we feel has bigger problems and would annoy more users. For example, FF8 will have much better memory usage than Firefox 4. Releasing new versions quickly lets users get that benefit quicker - fewer users will have memory problems because we ship the fixes faster. As another example, when IE9 and FF4 came out, at roughly the same time, they had comparable performance on some canvas benchmarks (in which they outperformed all other browsers due to their being the only browsers to use Direct2D). Meanwhile Firefox has released twice (counting FF6 on next Tuesday), and as a consequence, Firefox users have better performance than IE users, simply because IE users are still on IE9 while Firefox users can run FF5 and FF6 which include a lot more performance improvements that were committed after FF4.
Another major issue is new web standards. For standards to evolve quickly, browsers need to ship new versions with new implementations of those standards. Firefox and Chrome are now leading that, by releasing every 6 weeks. As one example, both support the new (safe) version of web sockets. That pushes the web forward, letting developers use it quicker, and eventually let all of us benefit from those new features. Chrome began this push, and I think Google was right to do it, and Firefox is joining that.
Is the new release schedule perfect? Of course not. It has problems for both browsers doing it, Chrome and Firefox. Both are probably not seen very favorably among enterprise users. And Firefox has some additional challenges, what with transitioning a previous release schedule to this one. But still, both Chrome and Firefox feel it is worthwhile. So again, I realize that there are problems. But overall I think the fast release schedule of Chrome and Firefox is a good thing.
I still do. I upgraded in my other personal computer, and I didn't like the interface. It slows me down and didn't add anything I wanted. I am constantly thinking that I must upgrade and switch. Firefox has something that Chrome does not, my empathy. Forefox was the first browser good enough to enable me to switch from IE, and easy enough on corner cases to make me want to always use Firefox (Original IE Tab). So marginal improvement of other browsers that do not have the empathy I have for Firefox are just losers (until/if Firefox makes a big mistake).
unfinished: (adj.)
I tried FF4, but quickly upgraded to FF3.
I tried FF5, but quickly upgraded to FF3 again.
Since, imho, the user interface of FF3 is superior to its successors, I consider going back to version 3.6 an upgrade!
I've got no plans to try FF6+ at all, until I read some good reviews convincing me the UI will indeed be an improvement wrt FF3 instead of a worsening like FF4 and FF5.
It's shocking just how out of touch Mozilla has become. This whole "clutter" argument from self titled "UI experts" is just tiresome now.
Go use a netbook and you'd see when GUIs are cluttered and wasteful. It doesn't take a "GUI expert", it takes experience with a variety of devices and common sense.
I have posted a lot on the issue. Firefox 3.6 is seen as the last "good" version by a large amount of users (Check how many posts about people staying on it, plus market share reports show a lot of 3.6 users).
People don't want to have to use extensions and hacks to get back their status bar or themes, so they rather stay on 3.6 or switch to a web browser that listens to its users.
There are people who have supported Firefox back when it was Phoenix/Firebird or even plain old "Mozilla" and feel that since 4.0 that Firefox has been hijacked by developers who are not listening to their users. The same impression is with GNOME 3 which even Linus himself has decried.
The solution is so simple, just offer the status bar without extensions, by including it in "Menu, view, status bar". Opera, Safari IE9 includes status bars as OPTIONS. The next thing is to keep rapid release for features, but don't needlessly break the extensions and don't exaggerate the version numbers.
Remember Slashdot users supported Firefox in the early to get us off IE6, but it looks like Firefox will become the new IE6 if the developers don't listen to the user base who made Firefox successful in the first place. Hopefully Mozilla will come to its senses when Google Stops giving them funding and they will have to actually compete for donation money again.
Out of curiosity, I've tried rearranging the interface mostly as it was in 3.6.
http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/597/ff5.png
It is visually different, but that's what themes are for. You have no reason to stick to an old browser like 3.6.
Regardless of what you guys think you're doing, the Firefox community basically sees you guys as shitting all over our faces, and we're not interested in playing this dirty game.
Open source projects that mistreat their users like this don't survive. Look at pre-EGCS GCC. Look at XFree86. Those are two good examples of open source projects where the developers starting dumping load after load of shit upon the users.
My understanding is that some of the Firefox developers are still in their teens, so if you're one of them, let me just explain what happened to the aforementioned projects. Basically, the users fled. In time, EGCS replaced the initial GCC effort, eventually being renamed to GCC. Xorg absolutely crushed XFree86.
The same is likely going to happen with Firefox. It may not be apparent now, but things can change very quickly. Firefox could easily find itself with down to just 1% or 2% of the market within a matter of months, if these shenanigans continue.
LOL. Firefox is really a fork of Seamonkey.
And Seamonkey came from Netscape.
That's bullshit and you know it. This "cluttered GUI syndrome" started well before anyone was using netbooks or touch screens.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
I know they keep making harder to find out how to put it back the way it was.
I get fed up of playing "hunt the toolbar" with each new version.
I swear, it's like every release, someone at mozilla has said "right: which of the features that made our browser popular can we get rid of this time?"
Am I really the only one who'd jump at a chance to run 1.2 or thereabouts with modern security updates? A genuinely lightweight browser, everything easy to move around, and all the complicated stuff in addons where it belongs. First browser I get that does that and still lets me install equivalents to adblock, noscript and cookie safe, and I am so abandoning Firefox.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Mod parent up!
"While you may not think it affects you now, I think you will soon see things like banking sites that go back to only supporting IE"
The sole reason why IE owns 90% of the market in Asia is because of banks using activeX. If banks and other corporate institutions only support IE then we are back to square 1 again and this will harm everyone.
6 is basically 4.0.0.0.2, and I can change my style back to 3.6ish on 4-8 (nightly).
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
"This is accomplished by no longer caching previous pages (so if you go back, you'll have to reload from scratch.)"
Um...did they remove the caching completely? If so, that's not progress. It was a great step forward when they added it.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Nope, GNOME 3 can be heavily customized as well, even to look like 2.x to a degree.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
If you work for Mozzilla, I would like to make a suggestion.
Consider an Enterprise Edition of you product where you can do something like Firefox Enterprise 4 with fast releases like release 3, release 4, etc. This way you can still have agile development but can milestone it with corporate support and the plugins will not break. The customer can choose which release to upgrade. A year and a half later you can put put out Firefox Enterprise 5 release 1, ... etc.
Or call it Firefox professional if you want more people to use it. They can select in the options menu whether they want a later release or not.
In many ways it is what Redhat does with Redhat Enterprise Linux and Fedora. Fedora code eventually enters Redhat Enterprise after 2-3 years and users are free to choose one or the other. Or that is an idea as well. It wont increase development costs as Firefox Pro is simply Firefox 4 and each release in it is Firefox 5, and 6.
Face it, it doesn't matter if html 5 and css 3 is the coolest thing ever! If 20% of users use older more mature browsers that are 5 years old like IE 8 then no webmaster will use it. Then who looses? The advantage then for using Firefox is gone because no one uses the cool things you do to your browser because they have all switched back to IE so why choose Firefox?
My biggest fear is that places like banks will only support IE and once that happens ActiveX and other things will come in and force everyone else to use IE like in Asia. That would be terrible.
Just an idea and I do not know how much of a pull you have, but I would advise you to bring it up fairly quickly before you loose corporate clients forever. They are leaving fast.
http://saveie6.com/
No, they didn't, and that was a bit of an overstatement. I think some things expire according to staleness, though, and there have been a few occasions where backing up through a form submitted by POST resulted in the browser fetching the page via GET without mention of any of the POST headers. If you want to know the actual and intended status of things, here might be a good place to start researching.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
...to get me to IMMEDIATELY switch to Chrome.
Way to go Mozilla. I was a faithful zealot until recent developments made your development schedule run like Charlie's Chocolate Factory.
properly speaking, forked from the Mozilla Application Suite, as was firefox
I for one like the new version, and I like the rapid release cycle. I also don't use a ton of plugins and extensions. There is nothing stopping people from sticking with older versions.
I guess I just don't fully understand the animosity. It is after all a FREE product.
Enjoy your useless adblock
It is the "instant" gotta have it now" mentality that people from their teens to their 30's have these days. Heck, get a bunch of kids around an old fashioned ice cream churn and tell them they have to turn it for about an hour before they can have ice cream...they'll say screw it, and go to an ice cream store. People can't wait anymore, no patience, no manors, rude, in a hurry. Kind of like the old bull & the young bull sitting on top of a hill overlooking a heard of cows below. Hey old man...lets run down there and screw a couple of those cows. Old bull says, yeah, or we could slowly walk down there, and screw em all. Personally, I'll wait a week before I update, if anything else (bugs in a x.0 release), I want my plugins to NOT BREAK. Hopefully, after a week, the ones I use will be signed to work with 6.x
Is Chrome any better in this regard? Honest question. I've heard others talk about it having a rapid release schedule (before Firefox moved to one). And how do Chrome and Firefox compare on UI changes per release?
My mother uses Facebook and plays Bejeweled on it. Recently, there are massive lag times of a few minutes for some actions, such as sharing points. This lag isn't there with Firefox, and many of my mother's friends who play use Chrome. I installed Firefox on my mother's laptop, from this page here, but apparently that is the version four installer, and Firefox is nearing its version six release...
Rather than trying to customize Firefox 4 to look like Firefox 3 on my mother's PC, I told her the user interface (I gestured to the top area of Firefox we had open on her PC) would look a little different. It shouldn't affect anything my mother does to have the interface look a little different. Thanks to Firefox's interface becoming more Chrome-like, if Chrome is any better with memory use than Firefox, the day might come when I'm installing Chrome rather than Firefox for my mother.
Never read the word "fork" until now in all those comments. Free software, what are we waiting for?
I'm still trying to get all my extensions working in 5!
Firefox 3 theme for Firefox 4+ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-3-theme-for-firefox/ and Winestripe Realfox 4 (makes Firefox 4+ look like Firefox 1.5) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/winestripe-realfox-4/ There's also Pale Moon http://www.palemoon.org/ , which keeps the status bar and tabs below location bar by default. Anyways, Firefox's 4+ GUI can be reverted almost totally to the old style with a few clicks.
Enterprises and users who don't like the fast release pace could try SeaMonkey http://www.seamonkey-project.org/
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
You can grab a nightly 64 bit version meanwhile https://nightly.mozilla.org/
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
Just use a time_t datestamp and give up the completely bogus version numbering.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Firefox is getting close to the day where Google stops donating ... er advertising with them to the tune of millions a year (http://techcrunch.com/2008/08/28/mozilla-extends-lucrative-deal-with-google-for-3-years/) . At the end of that, they're going to be sitting in a version hole compared to their benefactor's product which is now a direct competitor. It seems to me, FF is doing whatever is necessary to make themselves look competitive when all of their opponents a) own the browser space on their own devices, b) own an OS or two that supports that browser natively and c) can get away with it because they all have monopolies in their own spaces but which all fall under a single general computing umbrella that makes them seem less like an overall monopoly.
Mozilla is in an extremely unenviable position of looking old and outdated because of any kind of real mobile support, behind in version numbers compared to ALL other browsers (ie9? Opera 11.5? Chrome 1.5 billion?). I remember when Firefox defiantly announced that they wouldn't support the iPhone when even Opera was able to make it work. Do I use Opera on my iPhone? No. Does it remind me that Opera is still relevant in the mobile space? Yes.
Mozilla is starting to remind me of an aging child star. This version thing is just them acting out to get attention. There's no reality shows for old browsers though, so they'd better start figuring out how to ingratiate their plugin developers or their only supporters are going to start writing Chromebug (Whaaaa? http://blog.getfirebug.com/category/chromebug/) and Ubiquity (Nahhh...hey! https://github.com/cosimo/ubiquity-chrome/)
It's not too late. Firefox could still release its own tablet (http://www.tomsguide.com/us/firefox-mobile-firefox-fennecomb-android-tablet-ipad,news-11489.html) - but they're going to have to do it before the money starts running out and that's going to require community support, plugin developers and everyone that they're alienating with these most recent moves.
I can understand companies not being in touch with their customers, but does Mozilla not even read tech sites like Slashdot? Every story about Firefox lately is filled with exactly how negatively people feel about this version number fiasco.
Just search for "thunderbird tabs" and you'll soon come across a HUGE thread on the mozilla forums where dozens of people are complaining about the monstrosity which is tabs in thunderbird. Of course not ONE comment from any Mozilla developer.
And you know what the weirdest thing is? I also got fed up with Firefox and Thunderbird. Kept using version 3 for a while but gave up and moved everything to SeaMonkey. Last week I pressed control-t by accident in SeaMonkey while reading my e-mail and suddenly discovered that it too supported tabs in the mail client.
Yet in such a way that it didn't got in my face for nearly 4 months before I accidentally discovered that it was supported. I still don't use this feature, not my point, but why can SeaMonkey come up with a non-intrusive way to add tabs and Thunderbird cannot ? While its all build under the Mozilla umbrella.
Madness, that's what it is IMO.
It's shocking how your argument can be immediately turned right back on you - with the addition that you aren't actually delivering a browser, just talking out of your ass.
So no chance of all the add-ons working then.
I'll stick to the previous version
Actually no. I am right and you are wrong. You just have to think farther than "I like firefox" vs. "I no longer like firefox".
At first their decisions were motivated by a need to gain market share, now that motivation is no longer prime. They only need to keep what they have -and that they will likely do no matter how many users get pissed off. They have crossed a tipping point and they know it. You can actually see the hubris behind their reasoning whenever they explain it (or defend it as anonymous cowards on /.)
Also, delivering or not delivering a browser is completely irrelevant to my assertion, and to speak to your underlying premise, it's not like firefox is an effort dominated by volunteers "scratching an itch". They are paid, many are paid well, and they are paid indirectly by their users.
That means I get to bitch. Deal with it.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
I don't know about everyone else but the inflation of the major version number is making me less confident in Firefox. It appears to me they are confusing the use of version and subversion number and sub sub version numbers. What happened to the old days when they increased the major version number no sooner than a couple years? Maybe it's time to get away from version numbers and use release dates instead.
Switched to Chrome a few months ago and never looked back. Firefox is still slower than Chrome; I don't know about the rendering, but the UI is a lot snappier with Chrome, even on older (5-6 years) machines. Firefox new numbering breaks plugins on a regular basis. I don't really see what's the point in using Firefox anymore.
It sounds like Linux is not too damned good then. Maybe you should refuse to run an OS that lets software make it act like Windows.
Did they fix the F6 behavior? In previous versions, when you pressed F6 it selected the address bar. In 5.0 it did something else (seems to do something useless with frames) and I could not find the about:config item to fix it.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Hello, Well, it's good to have some explanation from a FF dev. On the one hand, it is good to see that the FF is pushing the cutting-edge technology forward; but, on the other hand, it is also true that we have a huge proportions of the users who do not care about these cutting-edge improvements. They want to see the FF working, same as it did before with their older versions! In light of this, may I suggest the following: STOP auto-updating the browser! Instead, push the auto-update after a sufficiently long time the new version is released. It will make sure that most of the extensions have caught up to the new release. You may use some script to check the incompatibility of the currently installed extensions. If many extensions are incompatible, don't push the auto-update, yet. However, you may use a small update notification icon that describes something like this: New version of the browser is available: m/(m+n) extensions are compatible; n/(m+n) extensions are not compatible. You may also include the names and short description of the compatible and non-compatible extensions. If you have any security update, you can also state it clearly in the update notification. If all (well, most) the extensions are compatible, push the auto-update. Otherwise, leave the update issue on the user. To make the above system functional even with non-mizilla-hosted extensions, you can require the extension devs to provide a method, so that the FF can check if they have updated the extension to be compatible with the new FF version. The above method would also give the stability-concerned users some relief.
Hallo.
I used to avoid them as well, for reasons lost in the mist... but somehow FF5 or so suddenly went into a big cleanup mode after shutting down on my home machine. ("FF is still open .... "). Total showstopper because of my habit of close&speed-reopening the browser after a task. So I drifted into some of the FF spinoffs like Pale Moon to buy time.
However someone's comment that they are indeed working on the memory footprint bit is mostly true, so I grabbed a nightly just now and I think it or another one will fix that problem. So maybe to get the "old feel of a nice set of features per release" I might just park on this Nightly, let the world turn, then "one day wake up and install FF8". By then the Nightly will prob be FF11 or something.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Hello,
Well, it's good to have some explanation from a FF dev. On the one hand, it is good to see that the FF is pushing the cutting-edge technology forward; but, on the other hand, it is also true that we have a huge proportions of the users who do not care about these cutting-edge improvements. They want to see the FF working, same as it did before with their older versions!
In light of this, may I suggest the following:
STOP auto-updating the browser! Instead, push the auto-update after a sufficiently long time the new version is released. It will make sure that most of the extensions have caught up to the new release. You may use some script to check the incompatibility of the currently installed extensions. If many extensions are incompatible, don't push the auto-update, yet.
However, you may use a small update notification icon that describes something like this: New version of the browser is available: m/(m+n) extensions are compatible; n/(m+n) extensions are not compatible. You may also include the names and short description of the compatible and non-compatible extensions. If you have any security update, you can also state it clearly in the update notification.
If all (well, most) the extensions are compatible, push the auto-update. Otherwise, leave the update issue on the user.
To make the above system functional even with non-mizilla-hosted extensions, you can require the extension devs to provide a method, so that the FF can check if they have updated the extension to be compatible with the new FF version.
The above method would also give the stability-concerned users some relief.
"1. Memory leaks have been a major issue of recent Firefox development. Current FF 8 nightly builds use a tiny fraction of older versions, and they're extremely stable. This is accomplished by no longer caching previous pages (so if you go back, you'll have to reload from scratch.) I've got a cool 200 tabs open right now in a very old session and it's only using about 500 MB of RAM. "
That's great, it's just a shame it's too late for me, as just last week FF5 managed to completely lose my ~200 tab session which was the final straw.
It's nice they've finally realised this is an issue, but for 3 years of memory leaks and slow downs it's just too little too late. It used to be great, then it became bearable, but still better than the alternatives. Now it's just shit.
Requiring a 3rd party addon to restore a basic staple UI element? No I'll pass thanks.
Just curious, but I always see people say they have over 100 tabs open at a time in these threads. How do you manage all of them? At what point is it simply not useful to open one more tab? Are you actually frequently looking at each of these tabs? I find over 15 tabs to be annoying at best. I just have trouble understanding how you're actually using the software. Are they spread out over multiple windows at least?
That version jump sounds about right. One version for Nightly, one for Aurora, one for Beta, and one for release. Hmm. It might actually be FF12...
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I used to be a 30-tabs-in-two-windows type of person, but I increased my tab usage dramatically when TabCandy (now Panorama) was added to the Nightlies. I keep one tab group open for every major task, and type fragmentary URLs in the address bar to switch between them. The system's not perfect, and I've noticed that sometimes when I set out to do something purposeful I'll end up nearly duplicating a tab group in a separate window, but it keeps a lot of slowly-progressing activities and reference sites close at hand. This sort of practice is made somewhat easier by Firefox's tendency to not load old tab groups in the background after an application reopen until they're actually accessed by the user; until then they're just thumbnails, titles, and URLs.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
What's the matter with the mozilla devs? Why must users tout broken and useless crap in their browser? How much money are they getting paid NOT to disallow users from uninstalling crap from their computer. WTF.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
"... leaving us with not so viable alternative - the Opera."
I've been a happy Opera user (Linux and Windows both in the past, but now Windows mostly) for over 10 years - used to have to buy it, but well-worth its low price back then. FF is dirt slow on my old XP machine and IE8 seems equally slow; I only boot them up when a financial web site uses browser-specific pages. (For example, at work, I was one of the few Linux users and our electronic timecard system only worked in IE, so I purchased Crossover to run IE - booting up into Windows just to fill out my timecard was a non-trivial option, as has already been hashed out by work users in the recent "boot time" discussion.) I haven't been bitten by the Chrome bug since Opera has been lean and mean for all these years and I haven't found any need to change to a new browser.
First thing I do on a morning is scan through my favourite news sites- BBC, Slashdot etc. and check the headlines that are interesting, I open each in a new tab that sounds interesting.
I tend to program at work in 30minute time slots, then take a 5minute break, during those breaks, at lunch time and so forth I'll have a look through the news tabs I opened up. Sometimes I wont bother to read more than the introductory paragraph if the story isn't as interesting as it seemed, other times I'll read the whole thing.
Some days I open up more stories than I can read, other days I read more stories than I opened. Sometimes I have 200 tabs open, other times I manage to eliminate all but maybe 10.
It's not just news stories, sometimes I open tabs to read later that contain longer articles, and you can't get through these in 5minutes. These tabs tend to hang around for weeks, sometimes months before I get round to reading them. If they've been there too long, like, 3months+ and I get round to it, I'll just bookmark them into a "To read later" folder.
Sometimes also if I'm looking for a solution to a problem on Google and there's say, 8 useful posts about my problem on the first page, I'll open up all of them, then sometimes read the first one, find it solves the problem and get on with what I was doing, forgetting to close the other tabs, but I usually notice them again within a day or two and just close them.
So some of it the answer is that I simply don't manage it well- i.e. those I forget to close immediately. But much of it is that I basically hoarde useful pages in tabs, and eliminate them bit by bit.
It's not hard to work through the tabs to find what you want- click the tab dropdown to the right of the tabs and anything with a BBC or Slashdot icon or whatever is a quick story to eliminate in my 5 minute breaks!
I am one of those that can have 100+ tabs open.
I middle click / ctrl-click to open new tabs for future viewing. I'm basically using it as a queue (I have actually been looking for a queue plugin, but didn't find any). Most of the time, I am on the leftmost tab, or close to it (pages with lots of links sometimes get moved to the left of my active tab, and wait until I have closed all the tabs to the right).
When I close a tab, I continue on the one just to the right of it. New links get opened to the far right, so it becomes a FIFO structure.
The 100+ tabs is usually reached when I start at a page with lots of links to pages with pictures. So I can open 10-20 tabs containing pages with pictures, each with 15-20 thumbnails, and when I go through those pages, I open new tabs with the pictures the thumbnails pointing to. 10 pages with each 20 thumbnails gives 200 pictures. Not all of them are worth opening, but 100+ is likely.
Why I don't right click on thumbnails and choose "save link target as"? Because then I would have to go through them later to decide which ones are keepers. With them waiting in tabs, I can quickly see if a picture is a keeper or not, and only the keepers get saved.
A queue plugin, putting the links into a queue when middle clicked, and opening new tabs when old ones are closed (with a few (5-10) always open, to make switching fast) would be an alternative solution, but last I checked it didn't exist.
BAD and hackable
Looks like they've gone with graying out all of the URL except the domain name, which seems popular these days. Too bad it's dreadful. I mean, it's not hard to find the domain name in a URL. But when you gray it out, it makes the rest harder to read. So if, like me, you occasionally manually change a URL for whatever reason, it's a pain. Or if you /do/ care whether you're using http or https. Hopefully it's changeable...