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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."
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.
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 would suggest mentally normalizing the version numbers into release dates. Keep a list in your head, or on a wall, and then you can judge outdatedness more cromulently:
Now, you can truthfully ask yourself "How outdated is this user?" rather than the bogus proxy question "How many versions behind is this user?"
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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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For example, have they finally reverted "tabs on top"?
So right-clicking somewhere in the toolbars to bring up the toolbar context menu and unchecking "Tabs on top" (which I actually like a lot, thankyouverymuch) is too much to ask?
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
The other issue is that Chrome doesn't tie compatibility to version numbers. When I update Chrome I don't get a box telling me it is disabling half my extensions/apps. For the most part, everything just works. So, the number is just a number.
Mozilla's problem is that they assume extensions don't work after major version changes, which basically imposes arbitrary breakage. So, the number isn't just a number in their case.
6 is released, 7 is in beta, 8 is testing (Aurora), 9 is trunk development (Nightly).
6 weeks later:
7 is released, 8 is in beta, 9 is testing, 10 is trunk development.
etc.
We both said a lot of things that you are going to regret.
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.
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.
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So now I only have 2 plugins left not supported by FF4, should I upgrade to FF6? My bank also keeps saying FF4 is unsupported (only supports IE6+ and NS and FF3). Hmm, at this rate FF is going to lose users.