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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."
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.
I used to encourage Firefox use in my shop... I gave my users the choice of IE and Firefox, and back when IE had that huge list of old unpatched holes, I told my users that I preferred FireFox if they were so inclined.
I've taken FF off of the approved list. The upgrades are coming too fast, and breaking too many things (mostly plugins, as the parent poster noted).
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
The problem is that Chrome and Firefox 6-week updates can and do change functionality and break internal APIs. Regardless of whether those browsers raise the major version number, addons can break.
Chrome deals with this by having a limited addon API that does remain stable. This limits what addons you can write for Chrome, but it does make 80% of addons possible and with less upgrade hassle.
Firefox is moving to allow that approach with the jetpack SDK. However addons that don't use that SDK are relying on internal Firefox APIs, and the power and flexibility that that gives does mean they are at risk for breaking. Note that Mozilla's addons website will automatically check the code of addons hosted on it for actual API incompatibilities, and auto-mark as compatible addons that are not at risk. So a lot of addons 'just work' because of that. But still, some addons do rely on changing APIs, and some addons are not hosted on addons.mozilla.org, so the authors need to manually update them.