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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.
After all, it'll be out Friday..
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!!!
When Chrome finally fixes text-shadow rendering on Windows and doesn't act like a lazy dog when you set background-size: cover on a fixed background image, let me know. On that day, you just might be right.
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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.
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.
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
3 cheers for the good old days of browser monopolies!
But this one goes to 6.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
the relevant sarcastic question would be "And how many applications used by millions of pissed people have you released again and again, jacking up the major version number in rapid succession"
you have clearly not been following development. --> https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Firefox_6_for_developers
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.
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.
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?
Yes, Is It Compatible? does this.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
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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I agree a corporate-friendly version is important. It's a lot of time and effort, though - Red Hat does it well, but then that is exactly Red Hat's prime mission, supporting a rock-solid OS for a long time. It might be possible for Mozilla too, but it would be a lot of effort, which worries me.
I'm not too worried about IE cornering the enterprise market, though. For one thing Apple laptops are getting very popular there. Also enterprise users are starting to do more and more browsing from smartphones and tablets. And Google is pushing Chromebooks into that market (but I have no idea if they will succeed). So overall I still think Mozilla should do more for enterprises, but regardless IE will not dominate that market more than it already does, banks will want people to be able to visit them from iPads and Android phones and MacBooks.
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.