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Mozilla To Remove User-Facing Firefox Version Numbers
MrSeb writes "A great collective gasp issued from tuned-in Firefox fans when Mozilla announced that it was switching to a Chrome-like release schedule for its browser. Now Mozilla wants to take things one step further and remove Firefox version numbers entirely — from the user-facing parts of the browser, anyway."
You can see the Bugzilla entry for this change, and keep up on Mozilla's reasoning and discussion through a thread on the mozilla.dev.usability newsgroup. Mozilla's Asa Dotzler explained, "We're moving to a more Web-like convention where it's simply not important what version you're using as long as it's the latest version. ... The most important thing is confidence that they're on the latest release. That's what the About dialog will give them."
Someone needs to let them know that they have a huge base of very useful, non-trivial plug-ins that people actually use, and they tend to break at least some of them with every update. We're still stuck on 3.6 waiting for the plug-ins to catch up because frankly they're more important to us than FF itself. And now the new hotness is your addons will just start being continuously breakable at any time?
... of users not liking the inane rapid development cycle --- try to hide the rapid release of versions from the customers.
Sure it works in a world where no change ever causes a regression its fine. In the real world not so much.
That's the problem here. Firefox's ever changing APIs which are always breaking add-ons. The Chrome add-on API is much more limited and as such doesn't need to change as frequently or as drastically. How Firefox thinks they're going to succeed by becoming a crappier version of Chrome is beyond me.
This is a really stupid idea.
If the user wants to hide the version number, someone will write an extension to do that. Quit dumbing down Firefox.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
First the version number is important so we bump it up a few notches. Now it's not?
I hope they don't write code while smoking whatever it is they are smoking before coming up with such ideas.
.....Let's get ready to ruuuummmbleeeee the flameeeee!!!
This is what Slashdot's users want and Slashdot just delivers!
The version scheming are the new holy grail of flames.
How do you know if the machine is up to date? And how do you avoid the dot zero releases? I've always said i'd wait for the dot one release of eternal life.
Now people will think their addons break at random. I doubt the typical user will ever look at about:troubleshooting
Mozilla needs to rethink a lot of things about addon support before pushing their new release and version philosophy any further.
Maybe the developers want me to have the latest version, but it's not always what I want, and above all, whether latest version or not, I want to know what I've actually got.
From my pov, this will ensure that I never go back to Firefox (after abandoning it a while back because of the memory leaks and denials that there was a problem.)
-wb-
After we've killed all the lawyers, I say we line up all the UI designers next. I feel they're not important.
Moz devs: "No, no. We need an add-on that shows the version number. Someone will write it."
User: "What version of FF is that add-on compatible with?"
Moz devs: "Yeah about that....fuck you."
Sounds like someone's idea of how they can make my life harder. Latest version of a browser? This will be a nightmare with QA & Test, let alone customers. I've got customers still wedded to IE6, and doubtless some still on FF 3.6.x. What about sites that rely on a lone IT tech to install on every workstation? How they hell can "the most recent" be handled then?
If I have to certify my product x, works with y browser then how can my clients truly know what version of Firefox they use?
Unlike IE updates the api changes every 6 weeks and so does the html rendering and everything else. It looks like IE is the only game in town.
I am beginning to like the browser more day in and day out. Even if your job is just a help desk job it is going to be a pain to figure out which verison of the browser the client is using. If I owned a tech support company I would be strongly in favor of telling the clients to only use IE or I wont support you. Just too much variation and this is an alpha/beta quality product as far as I am concerned. Truly stable products do not update every few weeks.
http://saveie6.com/
and I'll also be dumping Firefox from the list of "supported browsers" on the sites I release
"I've found this bug in Firefox ..."
"Do you run the latest version?"
"I don't know. I'm running the version my distro gives me."
"So which one is it?"
"I don't know. It won't tell me."
"Please update to the latest version."
"Well, I already have the latest version my distro gives me. If this is actually the latest version, I have no idea."
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
This sounds pretty bad. Mozilla must be way out of touch with serious FF users.
Many of us have found that it is necessary to stay at least one level behind what they've just introduced. And sometime it pays to stay way behind. We don't need an "out there" browser. But rather want a secure stable browser. Most of the "new features" seem to be promoting features that often end up leaving the user more vulnerable.
Would like Mzilla to get their feet back on the ground and stop this type of nonsense. Makes one wonder where MZilla's interests really are and/or who is paying them for this trend.
grumble grumble grumble
Why does Mozilla keep treating Firefox like it's something they need to apologize for? Firefox has the best add-ons out there, hands down. And it's been around for years. Why are they acting like Chrome and others are setting the standards now? Why do they act like they're in some kind of pissing contest with Google? Google is the one with something to prove here, not Mozilla.
Just knock it off and stick to your strengths.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'm going to start using his name for boneheaded changes done for "me too" reasons and decision by committee.
"Man, T-Mobile really Dotzler'd their unlimited plan."
I'm not so sure I'm entirely keen on this.
From an IT perspective, it's helpful to know what versions people are running. And, from a practical perspective, who the heck updates every single day?
This is like agile development and continuously running the steaming build from last night ... it seems to completely violate any notion of a tested, supportable version of software, and turns it into a thing that is completely difficult to nail down. It's just a constantly evolving piece of software. So if something was broken for a day or so, you'll never really know WTF it was.
Hell, having done QA and the like ... the version of the browser you're running is part of the stuff you need to know so you know what you support. You can't even begin to say your software supports Firefox if you can't say anything more than "well, whatever Firefox looked like in January, we know it works on that".
I've dealt with a vendor who pretty much does constant releases of their software (several times/week), and their idiot support people mostly won't listen to you until you're running the latest version. It takes me several weeks to promote a version through my environments to do testing and get approvals, and you think my production instance is running the steaming turd you released on Friday?? How do you expect I've managed to do that? By having no control whatsoever as to what is deployed?
I'm pretty sure that for some organizations, this is going to make it really difficult to use Firefox. I'm pretty sure that in at least one or two places I've worked, this would be a complete non-starter.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
From one of the posts in the group...
Microsoft Guidelines show version number in their About Box example.
----------
Excerpt from Mac OS X Human Interface Guidelines:
About ApplicationName
Opens the About window, which contains the app's copyright information
and version number.
----------
Excerpt from GNOME Human Interface Guidelines 2.2.2: ...contains the name and version number of the application, a short
Help About
description of the application's functionality, author contact
details, copyright message and a pointer to the licence under which
the application is made available.
----------
Could someone please post references to the relevant standards Firefox
will comply with after implementation of bug 678775?
...it's an addon write problem. Someone needs to let you and the other people around here know that a properly written addon that does not require changes (SPI calls it uses that are not changed between versions), that is hosted on addons.mozilla.org, are AUTOMATICALLY updated by MOZILLA to work with new version of Firefox. Do not blame Mozilla because addon creators are too lazy or don't care enough to update their addons properly, or take advantage of a service Mozilla offers them. Do not blame Mozilla because you are too lazy or don't care enough to unzip the addon, open the config file, and change the max version number yourself. This addon thing would be a *non-issue* if addon makers would either host their code on addons.mozilla.org, or take the time to run the compatibility software that Mozilla offers them that does exactly what Mozilla does to every addon they host.
There's a reason there is no "Disagree" mod...
Who cares? The chocolate ration has gone up to 25g this month. I know because Firefox tells me I have the latest figures.
But thats now coming to an end.
Firefox devs, you done goofed.
The only problem remaining would be getting the user to your website the first time. Possibly use of some sort of egg might be a solution.
it's simply not important what version you're using as long as it's the latest version.
It's vitally important what version I'm using. I want/need to be using the latest version that supports the plugins that I need to use and the services I need to connect to.
In the IT Network administration and engineering world, this move to rapid release has been nightmarish. Vendors were already months behind in rolling out support for prior versions of the browser, but since going to rapid release, vendor support has gotten far worse. Granted... most vendors seem to believe that no one uses anything but IE and Windows 2000/XP, but still. I've also found that the last version, 5.0, was horribly buggy - worse than any Firefox I've ever used. This rapid release move may well kill off the product.
Try "about:support" in the URL bar.
It seems like the Firefox developers have missed the problem with their way of doing releases.
The problem is not how often they release/change version number. The problem is that they 4 times a year, make security updates which break existing add-ons. And they do this with only a few days for the add-on developers to add support for the newest version of Firefox.
So the moment they released Firefox 5 they said: You have to choose between running your existing plugins, or getting no security updates. (Yes that is the official release policy). And the same thing will happend when Firefox 6 is released.
No responses so far in favor of the idea... I'll toss one out:
1) No more coding some bizarre non-standard garbage code to a specific version of the software anymore. I'm looking at you, JAVA coders. And those guys still stuck in Internet Explorer 6 or whatever from 1999. You want it to work? Don't write to a browser version, write to a standard. I LIKE IT that it will be impossible to write for a browser version. I want a standards compliant browser, not version 12.345.2-19 of a browser and memorization of which sites require -20 and with can't work on anything newer than -18.
2) No more write it and forget it, never to be updated again. Updates will have to be a process not a project. You literally can't be bothered to test if your "xyz extension" is compatible with the latest version? Well, then we can't be bothered to use it anymore. That sound you're hearing is thousands of pure cruft addons getting flushed. Bye bye. Don't let the door hit you on your post-processor.
This is a business model change, and a wise one. Not a technical code change. I am no FF fanboy, they've done some really stupid things lately like "tabs on top". But this is actually a good idea.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Hell! No!!!!
What are they thinking about?
If they remove that, then they should have a display with a list and version of all components of Firefox available.
How am I going to figure out what kind of version I have when I arrive at a system I haven't touched before?
This is incredible dumb!
FF4 and FF5 already don't work with most of the web application in the company I work for (a little 'ol 300,000+ employee mega-corporation). Until future versions of FF guarantee backwards compatibility, (like, ability to toggle user_agent), I'm stuck using IE. Thanks Mozilla. See?
Did a large fraction of the FOSS developer community recently get hit with a Retardo Ray or something?
Caller: "My computer will not boot into Windows"
Support: "What version of Windows are you running?"
Caller: "Windows"
Support: "But what version of Windows are you running?"
Caller: "Windows"
Support: "..."
Did the Gnome guys take over Mozilla or something?
In case you haven't noticed, those making decisions these days, be it government (politics), big business, or software development, have all gotten serious cases of dumbtarditis.
I am getting real, real close to pulling Firefox from all the lab images. I am not interested in playing the support game with the "Major version numbers all the time," thing and I am far less interested in playing around with having to dig in to shit to find out if a copy is up to date or not.
Why do users care about the version number? It is totally meaningless to the vast majority.
I'm going to be in the same boat.
FF4 looked ugly. FF5? Never bothered with it. Now? Even less reason to care.
Looks like Mozilla has officially lost touch with their user base and will continue to hemmorage users to Chrome.
Looks like I'm going to be switching Opera/Chrome pretty soon.
Getting a little tired of the memory issues anyways.
With what versions is this extension compatible?
The stories and info posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only fools would take it as fact.
I just decided to switch to another browser... Not worth the fight anymore.
Exactly. Hide the status bar, hide the full URL, hide the version number. Obscuring things is apparently their new development model.
And how about the many extensions/plugins people use ? a lot of extensions didnt even make the transition from 4.x to 5.x yet. and you not only went berserk about releasing half baked crap one after another WHILE changing major version numbers, but now want to hide the version number from the users. so much for 'usability' -> more confusion.
Read radical news here
Version numbers have always worked for years. And now suddenly they collapse. What's happening?
What about plugins?
Could someone please post references to the relevant standards Firefox will comply with
RFC 9.402.001: Dicking around with vesion numbers and GUI behavior in lieu of performing actual work
Lets hear it for Firefox Vista ME
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
As a fan of Firefox pretty much since the conception.. I'm a little confused about what the developers have been thinking lately, and I'm wondering if someone can help answer a few questions.
Why does the interface keep changing?
Maybe it's because I'm not a teenager anymore, but I'm getting a little sick of having to re-learn programs every time I hit the "upgrade" popup (which also seems to be popping up more and more often).
Was firefox not happy being a geek niche product, and do they really need to capture the common idiot market?
Would somebody please think of the plugins!
Big, slow corporate IT departments won't like this. There tend to be a lot of constraints on version numbers, qualification of certain builds, and so forth. These are the same people who lock down the browser version so that they can keep things consistent and working.
In business environments, running "the latest" isn't always recommended. This is just a bad bad bad idea.
Oh for the love of God, Firefox admins, what's going on, does the sweet, sweet, wall candy taste good? Your Aunt Mom tell you you are a special little snowflake and never mind what the bad, bad real world has to say?
I love Firefox. I really do, but honestly, it's like they are trying to be as stupid as humanly possible. I'm getting sick of "my way or the highway" program developers breaking things and telling me that they've been fixed. Do you morons notice how your market share is shrinking? Do you notice that you're producing nothing but bad press these days and people are getting pissed off at you? So your answer to this is to get in everyone's face and tell them to suck it up or go away? What are you, Tea Party-ists?
I work in tech. I need version numbers to tell what the hell people have. "You have the latest version" lies all the time like a cheap rug.
Firefox - it's this type of attitude that got me to switch from Ubuntu, where they've developed the same attitude that negative feedback means they're doing the job right. Learn a lesson here or lose more market share.
Time to purge some MBAs from management, you bozos.
My Firefox 3 says everything is up to date in the about box.
STOP FUCKING IT UP YOU BLOCKHEADS!
no version numbers.. yeah thats real web 2.0 completely useless full of shit moronic and STUPID. ranks right up there with no url bar.
stop now. don't make go back to IE... :(
This picture needs to be updated to show Firefox instead of IE eating glue. IE may release slower, but they let enterprises choose a version an stick to it. They also do have "rapid releases" of the trident engine called Platform Previews but only give an update of the full browser every one of two years.
Chrome is the new Firefox, as in the little browser that geeks like and Firefox has become the derpy retard browser. I say that as someone who used Firefox since the early days until 5.0 when I couldn't take the memory rape anymore on a system with TWELVE gigabytes of ram.
Ha ha - that's very funny. April Fools day on Slashdot again. Ha ha.
Conservative, mod down for violating
n/t
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
... is why they went down the first time. Unless ma and pa kettle can determine what version they are on, they aren't going to be able to know if they are/are not on the latest version.
In a perfect world, coders would write perfect code and have perfect APIs that are used, etc. End Users would update each program they used upon using it (daily).
But we aren't in a perfect world and expecting it to be that way just shows ignorance on anyone suggesting otherwise.
Are their updates going to be incremental in nature or a whole download each and every time?
Like gstoddart said - this information is needed in supporting customers and products as well as testing.
Corporate America has change review on things taking place in their environment. This will throw kinks in that and will only serve to get Mozilla/FireFox ousted.
It is a lame idiotic decision.
This is just getting silly. Are those guys elected, appointed, hired by Google, or what?
So if the "About" box is only going to say whether Firefox is up-to-date or not, does that mean that it won't have any useful information at all when you're offline?
If the IT infrastructure team cannot control the version of Mozilla for their corporation, then there is no predictability as to what is working one day and what is not. This is not a problem for the typical at-home user, but corporations who have invested in Mozilla need to think twice about their options. May be they will all flood back to IE because that is the only browser that has a version number at this point.
So basically, the Mozilla Corporation's plan to deal with the bona fide corporate need for a stable codebase with long-term support is to stick its head in the sand and pretend that there are no releases anymore?
Way to go at killing the enterprise market for your product. And all this just so no one on your side would have to do that horrible boring 'maintenance' work anymore.
The fricking bug that makes it hang and sit (not responding) for 4-12 seconds at a time at random intervals on page loads once in a while? I am about to completely give up on it because of that. IT happens a LOT of slashdot, I would blame the poorly written CSS that slashdot uses (still get the jump to the top of page when you click on the commend dialog text box once in a while as well) but I've see it on Cisco.com as well as motorola.com
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Since it's pretty evident that you aren't looking at Slashdot or any blogs, what's the best way to contact them en masse? Would it be wrong to suggest that everyone who has an issue with what Mozilla is doing email the leads involved?
Specifically Alexander Limi (User Experience Lead) and Asa Dotzler (Product Lead)
More than once I've asked someone not technically inclined what version of whatever software they're using.
And more than once something similar to the following has happened.
"Hey mom, what version of Firefox are you using?"
"I don't know, hold on... uh.. where do I.. oh. Found it. 3.6.19"
If you want to know about Firefox, you click on the fraking thing which says About! People have a concept of versions. If someone knows what "Windows 7" is and that it's different than "Windows XP", they won't be confused about seeing a version. And if they're using Firefox and don't know how version numbers work, you really don't have to worry about them looking at the About dialog. People know about versions, they see it in real life every single day. Microsoft Office 2010, Windows 7, Droid 3, iPhone 4. Oh, what year is your car? 2005? Sweet.
I wish somebody would take FF 3.6 and create a fork. The FF developers have lost their marbles.
Is there a fork yet that has the 3.x UI, but with only the latest security and rendering stuff updated?
If I wanted the chrome look, I'd've just switched to chrome, but that's not what I want, and now I don't know anymore what browser I should use, because they're all the same, and they all look like crap...
Kaetemi
There seem to be some projects that actively resent the idea of version numbers having meaning. Maybe they don't want to be "constrained" by what they can and can't do based on major/minor version updates, or maybe they just don't want to keep track of it all - I'm not really sure.
To me, version numbers are a way to communicate something about a project to users. "Oh, it's a patch release? That should be relatively small fixes and fairly safe. A minor release? Cool, some new features or significant changes to look at. A major release? The file format changed and the GUI got rewritten - going to need some eval/retraining on this one."
There are reasons for this rational, structured approach - when you have users in the Real World, they need time to prepare for major changes. Your software is probably doing Real Work, and cannot be simply yanked and upgraded without first ensuring that it will continue to do what it needs to do.
Developers may resent this, but it is an utterly inescapable reality. Critical tools cannot be casually changed - there MUST be a testing and validation period. Patch releases with minor/security fixes allow for relatively quick and simple deployment of truly essential changes without the major upheaval of EVERYTHING changing. Eventually you do need to make the jump to the next major upgrade, but surely Debian stable is proof positive that users need controlled, gradual change? Relativly stable periods between major changes are ESSENTIAL for a controlled computer environment, and it's hard to blame those who are saying the new Firefox approach is automatically disqualifying it from their networks.
Of course, there's also the point that developers with limited resources don't want to have to keep backporting code to older versions of browsers and work around issues that should have long since been restructured away (and have, in newer versions.) This is actually one of the better cases for commercial support of FLOSS - a company being paid to ensure older versions work can do the grunt work that the open source volunteers aren't going to want to spend time on.
Perhaps Mozilla could think about offering a paid service that maintains and supports particularl version numbers of browsers and have their "unversioned" open source browser with all the latest changes be the default, if this is a resource constraint issue?
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
wow, this asa dotzler is a complete cock. look at him getting all butthurt and turning into a bugzilla nazi just because he's in love with a stupid idea that is almost universally panned by anyone exposed to it.
removing the version number from any local software is completely idiotic, and almost guarantees that firefox will remain a personal-use browser and nothing more.
version numbers DO well fucking matter more than "you DO or DO NOT have the most recent version". what happens when FF version XYZ break an app/page etc? How do you revert? how do you know what to revert to, what to avoid, what to embrace? this is an absolutely idiotic idea, and this Asa jerkoff is practically fucking married to the idea.
I love these CS assholes that act like they're the first one born on earth with a brain. lets replace this circular wheel with this square one, because I'm 100% positive that I'm brilliant. we'd call it wheel 2.0 but version numbers are sooo 2010.
To hide Firefox, install other browsers instead.
have all gotten serious cases of dumbtarditis.
THIS! exactly THIS!
and Yes I have notice that it seems that almost everyone in a position of power lately have become complete retards.
Good ideas innovative ideas forward thinking... None of that exists lately. It's all changes for the sake of trendy change.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
No one wants to hide the version numbers. The only people who care about version numbers are those that need them, which is about .01% of the Internet's users. The rest of the population only needs to know if they have the latest software. The number 5.01 means nothing to them. So us .01% can write an extension and suddenly there is a lot less confusion, which is a good thing.
Sure, but if I get a user report "This doesn't work in my Firefox" then I want to know what version they're using so I can attempt to reproduce, and I don't want to have to talk them through the hoops they have to jump through to find out.
Just exactly what is the problem that we're fixing by doing this?
Have the Firefox developers gone entirely mad? I thought their rapid release schedule was stupid, but this is just plain asinine. No, in a perfect world, we would all be happiest and more productive if we were using the newest version, but we don't live in a perfect world. New versions introduce new bugs, they break addons, and, even if the new version is completely bug-free, it may not play nice with a Web site that has problems with its content or Web server.
And, as someone else already said, IT departments aren't going to like this. It's not that they're inefficient or resistant to change, but, when you're supporting several thousand desktops, you have to make sure that shiny new release isn't actually a polished turd or that it won't break something else. If something goes wrong, it may be easy to fix a problem if you're only concerned with a few machines, but what happens when that update you just pushed out to 3,000 desktops has a show-stopping problem you never saw coming? And yes, it happens. Just ask HTC about the disastrous update to the HTC Thunderbolt that caused the phone to start randomly rebooting, sometimes several times a day. I have no doubt the update was tested, and both they and Verizon were confident it was ready for deployment. Well, it wasn't. Bugs, often serious ones, can get by the most stringent testing.
Someone at Mozilla needs to put the brakes on this harebrained idea immediately, if not sooner.
I think you meant that as a joke, but seriously. Has there been a major management shake-up at Mozilla recently? Has their mission statement changed? Because it seems like somebody over there has decided that it's no longer enough to maintain a significant piece of the pie - significant enough to help guarantee that the web remains based on open standards.
They seem to be in full-on competition mode, now. Competition for what? If it's to remain relevant, so that their original goals remain relevant, I guess that's fine (though why do they think they're heading for irrelevance?). And copying the good bits of Chrome (and even IE or Safari) is fine too. But arbitrary changes in versioning? Mozilla's versioning scheme used to mean something. Minor updates (no API changes) vs major stuff (expect to wait a few weeks for all your extensions to become available again). The new scheme will doubtless have both kinds of updates, but no (easy) way to know which is which. Why would they want to do that? Aren't there better ways of encouraging users to update than hiding what the update does? Mozilla already can autoupdate within a major version. Do they really think it's safe to autoupdate between major versions? Mozilla's extensibility is it's greatest strength, but it does make major updates more difficult. That's no reason to force updates that are guaranteed to break things.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Why quite obviously - only with the "most recent" version since that what everyone will be running. Either they have the most recent, or they cannot contact the update server - in which case they "have the most recent". You have to love our new version number obfuscating overlords.
They already took out the close button, and Ctrl+W doesn't close it (unlike other Ff dialogs, e.g. Preferences), so if your WM doesn't slap pointless (for correctly-designed apps) chrome on dialogs, you have to resort to key combinations you don't remember because you never use them (or wmctrl -c, etc.)... Oh, I guess "Esc" closes it, and you're supposed to just magically know this keystroke you don't use for closing any other Ff dialog is the right one.
Now it won't contain any useful information, either -- I guess once you realize that, you'll have no reason to open it, so you won't need to close it.
Fascinating titbit about Ff's handling of "px", "pt", "inch", "mm", etc.: confronted with an array of pixel densities from ~20 (big-screen TVs) through 75~100 (desktop monitors). ~125 (laptops, crappy phones) to 200~300 (high-res desktops, modern phones) PPI, and various viewing distances, there's a logical solution. You can define physical units (pt, inch, mm, etc.) as having an arbitrarty scale factor (related to viewing distance, mainly, and allowing 1:1 reproduction if set to 1), and another scale factor for pixels (because some webpages break when a pixel is not 1/96 of an inch), providing reasonable defaults and letting unhappy people set things to suit themselves.
Or you can be like Ff, define an inch as 96 "px", and offer a single scale factor for "px":actual pixels. Which means on my 200-PPI desktop monitor, I can have proper image rendering (load a JPEG, it fits to window, or click it to zoom 1:1 and scroll), but then all text specified in points is tiny. Or I can have text rendered lifesize (set pixel scale = 200/96 -- theoretically accurate pt/inch/mm layout), and then when I view a JPEG, it's scaled up 200+ % -- sucks when hunting wallpaper for a 3840x2400+1902x1080 dual-head system, since anything the right size is either compressed to fit (can't see detail), or zoomed to 6+ screenfuls! Or if I have text rendered about 2/3 to 3/4 actual size (which I usually prefer -- high-res means I can fit more info on screen, and still crisper than 1:1 on a normal screen), and images are "only" blown up 50% oversize, resulting in nice grid artifacts where every second or third row is doubled!
I CAN'T be trusted with two separate controls to enable 1:1 pixels for graphics rendering and ~160 DPI for text rendering, because that might break some crappy webpages, and the brave Firefox team has stepped up to protect me from those sites' mistakes no matter what I might actually want! If I want proper use of my $1000 monitor, too fucking bad, sucks to be me!
(To be clear, I don't mind their lie that "1 inch = 96px, everywhere" as a default -- I understand, ugly as it may be, it's a compromise that works best for most people on most websites. What I do mind is not giving the minority for whom it doesn't work best any control at all! They're just pulling a major GNOME here: all choice is bad, because it might confuse someone, and what's best for most people oughtta be good enough for everyone!)
So WTF, Ff? Why do you hate users? And people with 200 DPI monitors? And administrators (re: major version spamming)? Or a better question: who the hell don't you hate?
I don't understand why people get into such a huge fuss about changing the fecking version number, it's probably the most inconsequential part of the entire browser?
Ok, so some plugins break, but they break anyway during updates, due to interface changes; it takes only 1 minute of Google searching to find out how to forcibly re-enable any plugins that got disabled (and if you've customized Firefox with a lot of plugins, a Google search is hardly beyond your capability).
I have only encountered problems with a handful of plugins thus far, and these were obscure rarely-updated ones which were easily replaced with one of the multitude of duplicate plugins out there.
Any issues with plugins during updates will also soon disappear as both the browser and plugins adjust to the new update cycle.
I can more understand complaints about the UI changes (even though I prefer the more minimalist UI myself), but this is a massive, much greater amount of moaning about (almost) nothing.
it's simply not important what version you're using as long as it's the latest version. ...
Not all of us WANT to run the latest version. Not all of us WANT to update every time you push your supposed "latest and greatest".
This, next to Linux, is the clearest example of Rule #1 of IT: Never let a programmer program your application.
This constant push to have "shiny" shoved down everyone's throats without regard to what the end user wants must stop. People have no idea what they're running now so your dictatorial forcing of upgrades does nothing to make people feel comfortable with the software they're using.
Maybe YOU want to have the latest version, but I don't. And as is said on here on a daily basis, once it's on my machine, I'll do what I want with it.
It looks like it's time to move to another browser and stop suggesting people move from IE to Fx. Congratulations you arrogant pricks, you've jumped the shark.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Mozilla Corporation gets most of the funding from Google, and so it's no surprise that Firefox is becoming more like Chrome.
Are many of the influential people involved with Firefox development Google employees? And/or many Google die-hard fanboys? If so that alone explains much of it ...
As to what the end game is?... Firefox, while keeping its branding / look, becoming a Chrome clone? -or- Firefox simply being made redundant, and eventually killed off, by getting most Firefox users over to Chrome - from anecdotal reports, people are switching in droves.
What gets me is where are the FORKS? ... if big corporations and developers rely on Firefox, why aren't any forking recent versions of it? Imho, 3.6x would be a fantastic fork point, and improve on that.
F*** the business users. The whole auto update feature is why we don't deploy chrome to our workstations, the is not testing with auto update. FF was the best alternative to IE, if they follow this model we will ban FF for use here and be strictly IE since its release cycles are long enough we can test all of our applications before deploying it.
OK, it's pretty well established that a lot of people don't like this new approach to Firefox versions (or lack thereof). Among (many) other issues, how are website developers supposed to test against various versions of the browser to make sure things work? (Uh, yeah, your website didn't work with Firefox version Tuesday and Thursday, but I didn't see the problem on Friday...)
If we don't like it, what options are available?
Fork it - difficult to do successfully; replacing the supported development currently done on the codebase is probably impractical unless all the support moved to the fork. Also total loss of brand name recognition, since the firefox name and logo couldn't move with a fork.
Use something else - Opera isn't open source, so while it's a good practical alternative to have around it's not something to bet the farm on. Chrome is at least based on Webkit, but it also isn't fully open and has similar versioning issues. Also, the Firefox plugin ecosystem would be hard for a lot of people to give up.
Negociate a truce - if the Mozilla devs don't want to maintain releases, perhaps the various Linux distributions and corporate users with an incentive to see stability return could pool some development and financial resources to maintain a stable version of Mozilla's web browser (my vote would be Mozilla Gibraltar) that would protect corporate users from the churn and ensure things like major/minor version API compatibility. Firefox can plow ahead at full speed, but have a team of developers taking Firefox's work and more carefully fitting it into a more traditional framework. If Mozilla were willing to "bless" such a browser while not having to constrain their Firefox development style to satisfy the requirements of corporate IT and more cautious users, perhaps it would be workable all around?
Backporting fixes to older software versions does take work and is usually less than exiting (wow that was crappy code, now how do I make it do this new thing without gutting it?) so perhaps it might be reasonable to set up a mechanism where those who want that work can vote with $$ to make it happen while still being an "official" Mozilla browser?
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
They are totally missing the boat with this change. I use to work for the government and now work for an industry that maintains a seperate secure network that is not connected to the internet, ever. This is common practice with the military and government agencys as well.
Removing the version number will make it difficult for us to verify what version of software we have on machiens, especially when we are trying to verify compatibility with unconnected systems.
Currently we use Firefox exclusively on all of our *nix systems. We will discontinue using it if we are not able to glee useful information from it quickly and easily.
And the people who have to troubleshoot when something doesn't work. Because when I say "do you have the latest Firefox" and they say "I have no idea", then what?
Mozilla needs to stop thinking that their browser is facebook, and start realizing that it's a serious piece of software.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Is asking the user to type About Colon Support that much more difficult that asking them to click through the menu system to find About Firefox? Plus Copy all To Clipboard is a lot more useful than making them find the version number in the About Firefox dialog.
https://input.mozilla.com/
I want to see every single feedback about how they've fraked up the version numbers.
The one after the next one.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Someone's feature is another one's bug. Things like getting rid of the normal menu. Okay some people like the simplification, other people see it as an extra click every time they want to get to the menu they want. Sure there shortcuts for most things, but a lot of them are different between apps and who can remember 10+ shortcuts for each app they use (I can't)? Nothing stops them from dropping shortcuts or changing what they map to either. Heck ctrl-v could be changed to paste to tweeter in a future version and you wouldn't know it until it happened. FF is also going to auto-update and not even give you a "What's new" page at startup of the new version. So they are going to push these updates on you and not even tell you what version your running or what the changes were. Crazy.
What versions of firefox are vulnerable to exploit A?
Oh, from the latest-one to the latest one but not the latest one.
Which desktops are running which versions?
I think they all have the "latest one"
So are we vulnerable? What's our risk?
*shrugs*
Is asking the user to type About Colon Support that much more difficult that asking them to click through the menu system to find About Firefox?
Yes. Tech-illiterate users understand menus, they don't understand typing... heck, they may even know that every piece of Windows software they've used has an About box on the Help menu.
1- take a perfectly working version numbering scheme
2- mess it up to try and look like Chrome, come with all love Chrome for its sexy, round version numbers. And for nothing else.
3- get rid of version numbers entirely rather than admit you're idiots,lose face, and backtrack
4- enjoy the entertaining confusion about updates, addon compatibility, features, security....
5- watch your userbase exodus to saner pastures
6- ???
7- Profit ! (for Google)
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I downgraded back to 3.6 because 4 was using twice as much memory to do the same thing. Now they want me to let them auto-update my browser constantly? My work machine is resource constrained. Just because version 15 runs great on their machine doesn't mean I need to be running their latest memory leaks next day. This move seems really stupid to me.
Dumbing down? I call this "the retarding cycle":
10 Anything you do for others will cause the lower end of the Gaussian curve to complain about it being "too hard".
20 If you are insecure in yourself, you will make it "simpler". Which always also means loss of efficiency. So it will be harder for the rest. Who won't complain, since smarter people are used to solving things themselves and also: Dunning-Kruger effect.
30 Now, because people generally have to think less to achieve what they want, they can allow themselves to become dumber. This will cause the whole Gaussian curve to shift down.
40 GOTO 10
But here I suspect the problem is actually that they are TOO secure in their (delusional) views.
But maybe the two just meet at the other end of the circle. ^^
Well we figured that out when Asa said "we don't care about corporate users."
At this point I'm not sure they care about anybody except what sounds neat in their echo chamber morning meetings. They sure don't care what their users want.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Oh, one more thing -- don't bother pointing me at NoSquint; I have it, I'm using it (text zoom = 160%, full page zoom = 100%, and Ff's own px/pixel zoom at 1:1), but it's not a solution, since it only scales text (not layout dimensions that are also in pts, frequently causing text to not fit where it should), and scales all text even if specified in pixels (potentially breaking text meant to fit with e.g. inline images), though the latter's a smaller problem. And every page that breaks under it (including the /. front page) is a reminder that Firefox hates my high-res screen.
OTOH, if you know any extensions that actually fix it right (permitting decoupling of px and mm/inch/pt), by all means mention them -- I don't think it's possible without patching the source (which is now on my list of weekend projects, TYVM), but if it is, I'd be grateful for an extension to set it right.
Before:
Updated version:
This is offensive. You are giving a bad name to real retards.
Exactly. Hide the status bar, hide the full URL, hide the version number. Obscuring things is apparently their new development model.
Should just hide the webpage too, in case the users might get upset about something they see.
Somebody has already said this, but seriously, this doesn't fucking work. Unless you have firefox installed in your userspace (freak) then you aren't going to be able to upgrade every time they decide it'd be fun to release an update in a lot of cases. Take, say, most linux distros. The version in the release repo is probably going to be 6 months behind a lot of the time, and you're just going to tell everybody in that situation that they *have* to upgrade or things might as well not work? There is a reason why software for the last god knows how many years has had working, solid releases which are meant to do what they are supposed to for a decent amount of time instead of everybody running off subversion. What if I happen to like an older version and they change something? How happy do facebook and twitter users look about having changes forced upon them without the opportunity to stay on an older working release? I don't know why the hell they are doing all this. Firefox got all it's users by being solid, secure, lightweight and not pulling this kind of shit. I'm pretty sure people don't want their browser randomly changing when it decides it's time for an upgrade, they just want it got right first time and left like that. I know you developers need something to do and just doing security and bugfixes is boring but taking a decent, working piece of software and upgrading it for the hell of it isn't helpful. I'm probably with the rest of the world on just wanting windows 2000, firefox 2.0 and the original facebook, with a few years worth of bugfixes and security patches.
Firefox was born out of dumbing down what is now seamonkey, so endless mindless dumbing down is hardly unexpected.
The discussion thread link is pretty illuminating reading. It shows just how disconnected from what people actually want FF to work on these guys have become.
Why does the UI team want to remove something from Help > About that exists in basically every program there is (and is a standard on basically every major OS)? Because they think they're cool. That's why. Don't like it? You're not cool.
They need to fire Asa and the entire UI team over there. That's the only way they'll stop the bleeding of users that is going on now. These guys are completely out to lunch and are just wasting effort chasing their own tail instead of doing things that users are actually asking for.
Oh well. At one point this was a great project, now it's just a dysfunctional one. That's what happens when you get management heavy and management gets spooked about market share. They try to take shortcuts instead of simply improving the product.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Should just hide the webpage too, in case the users might get upset about something they see.
I believe that's coming in Firefox 10: it's a way to resolve about 3,000 rendering bugs with one simple fix.
Mozilla's Asa Dotzler explained, "We're moving to a more Web-like convention where it's simply not important what version you're using as long as it's the latest version."
The system administrators of that web site can see exactly which version of the software is installed, and it is extremely important. Just like we, end users, need to be able to do when we manage the software installed on our home computers.
The reason you don't see the version number of the platform software on a web site is because you are interacting exclusively as the end user, not the sysadmin. For your home computers, however, you are both the end user and the sysadmin. Sysadmins need to know version numbers.
Microsoft made the same mistake recently claiming that the openness of the underlying software in a cloud service is irrelevant because the end users do not care. The fact that the cloud disentangles the end user and sysadmin roles does not mean that either no longer exists, nor that those roles have been disentangled on the home computer.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Except that you don't win a competition by being a bad copy of your competitor.
People who want something like Chrome will use Chrome. Making FF into a bad clone of Chrome doesn't encourage people to use FF, it just drives away the users who didn't want a bad Chrome clone.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Asa Dotzler / Mozilla Corp. = easily the most clueless technology-oriented individual supposedly in charge of things on this planet :O
And to think, this is the guy who was quoted saying "Respect your users or you will lose them."
Mozilla Firefox v4.0+ has been one long disrespect-everyone-rama...
I think they are making a big mistake. I see it coming, they are gonna do too much and that will ruin what is so great about firefox.
I like Top Poker Sites
Mozilla/FF was awesome back when IE6 was getting far too long in the tooth, but IE9 is looking better and better. Just the constant mandatory FF restarts are becoming an annoyance. At least with Microsoft updates, a reboot will install everything in one go, whereas FF constantly nags for a restart in the middle of a browsing session. If you have a couple dozen open tabs across several windows, that often take several minutes to come up, and not every site deals with session restore all that well, either.
As other said, having to police up addons that are broken by the constant version changes gets old fast, too.
Why don't we fork FF already? We don't need the Mozilla folks.
Doesn't this defeat the purpose of the rapid release cycle? I understand that the idea is so that they can get major features out quicker, but there's no reason they couldn't do that anyways and just change the sub-version number. Rather than 4.0, 5.0 and 6.0, we could just have 4.0.0, 4.0.1, and 4.0.2 or 4.0.0, 4.1.0, and 4.2.0 or something.
Firefox was born out of dumbing down what is now seamonkey, so endless mindless dumbing down is hardly unexpected.
No, Phoenix, which became Firefox (after briefly experimenting with flight) was born from the idea that if you took all the bloat and tie-in apps out of what was then Mozilla/Navigator, you'd get a really fast browser. It was supposed to be a super-lightweight browser that did one thing and one thing only: browse web pages. That's why the extensions system was written; to keep the cruft out of the core browser.
Somewhere along the way (I'm thinking around the time of the "Awesomebar", though some would argue it was sooner) that philosophy got lost.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
I don't know why, but the "dumb dumb dumb dumb" piece from South Park just plopped into my head. I can see cases beyond just the end user (who aren't all dumb by the way, some know what they're doing) who would want/need that information in a useful manner. Support teams often ask their users for the browser version so they can help to solve problems. QA teams test with specific browsers, and knowing the version is important if a regression pops up for their site/software later on so they can try to isolate the cause. It seems like more wasted work to remove it than to just leave it in, while there are bigger problems to be solved.
There's a an old Joel on Software article called Fire and Motion and in the second half he talks about a similar phenomenon:
For what it's worth, I don't think Mozilla are quite in this situation as they are producing new features too...
The problem is that they are mixing methodologies... Web Apps don't have version numbers, This is fine, as when you access a Web App you are getting the latest and greatest that you can can on that site. But for the browser you should know if you are lagging in versions and you may have a good reason to lag. As this is software that is on Your PC, no someone else that you are using as a service.
OK fine Google Chrome doesn't do this... So what It doesn't been Google chrome is right, or Google knows all. The reason why people like chrome is because it is fast and light... Not because of some insane versioning scheme.
They liked Firefox in the Past Because it was fast and light... It has gotten slower and heavier (mostly due to Google raising the bar).
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The entirety of the rationale for this is in the bug's comment 3:
Ass Dotzler and co have no real reason for doing this which they can communicate to others. They can only browbeat others into submission with titles.
Again, from the newsgroup, when someone said "I see little to no benefit by removing it (other than 'let's remove something else from the UI)'" Asa couldn't cite any real benefits but instead pulled rank to say "I'm more important than you, so there":
Because disagreeing with something Asa says and failing to comprehend that "DO AS I SAY, FOOLS" is sufficient reason for any change makes one a "troll."
I plan to "upgrade" my FF 5.0 with the latest 3.6.x version and hope that either Dotzler and the rest of those pushing pointless changes which are detrimental to the community are shown the door soon or that major corporate backers start a fork.
no.
How about you don't give users the "true" version number, but you still give them a number that gives them their approximate build and feature set. For example, you can have Firefox 4 and keep releasing versions as Firefox 4 (but have "About Firefox" tell you the exact bug fix version). Now every one to two years, after they make major additions, they can up the version number, to Firefox 5, for example. If there is an ambiguous case about upping the number, you can go to 4.1 or 4.5 instead. This would be helpful because then you won't go up to silly high numbers very quickly.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
My only regret is that I have dumtarditis
Today's Slashdot quote is
Firefox, you need help.
From an IT perspective, automatic updates are only as nice as the shit they don't break. "Well if those lazy web and add-on programmers were better, our upgrade would not have broken them..." Really? How Microsoftian of you Mozilla. The reason for version disparity: How many corporations with more than 10 computers can honestly continue using Firefox if the version is "the latest as of 20 minutes ago" and keeps breaking shit every time it updates? A lot less than now to be sure. We don't use chrome for this exact reason, it doesn't work with every add-on and website that we use. Sure you could blame the add-on or website developer for --something that used to work with the older version of firefox--, but is it really important who pissed on the rug the most, when the pissing contest just makes the room smell of pee? I guess Mozilla's response is, "It's not our rug, what do we care?"
Bad Firefox I like this not. It is often useful to know the version number, for awareness of bugs, and getting addons to work. Also, what's the point of the about window if not to tell you the version number? That is the only reason I have ever clicked help/about on any program ever. I am probably overreacting but this kind of cozying up to most technophobic users is what made me leave Ubuntu and then gnome. I'm seriously considering jumping from Firefox.
I understand your concern in expressing this lazy coding up to versions rather than using reflexive APIs. That thinking only helps in ideal conditions where everything is perfect. Since we all know and expect bugs in any software release, then deleting version numbers means that now we have absolutely no "legal" and simple way of BLACKLISTING a release of firefox when a bug is found.
Tomorrow this functional equivalent to having a risky firefox nightly at your corporate desks grows a logic bomb affecting all ssl or e-commerce transactions. So we'll all end up using hacks to steal the internal version number, (which we ALL know is never going away for dev sanity's sake). Then IT tries to trigger a downgrade to yesterday's version. But, how does IT do that if OFFICIAL download links no longer show any trackable version number? For the average multi-PC joe at home, how do they know which copies to uninstall, and what installer to replace their bombed version with?
How do you even look it up on the official website when the only other option is going to oldversion.com if your corporation won't laugh at you for using those unofficial builds? Pray that you're NOT downloading some trojan to deploy to hundreds of machines. Anyone disagreeing with those use cases, fails to understand why the corporate world has clung so hard to IE6: even if it's bad for all of us, the identifiability and usability of version number 6 provides a powerful witness about the corporate AND user-land power of the blacklist/whitelist story. IE6 is still number 1 in China. http://www.liveside.net/2011/03/16/as-microsoft-releases-ie9-ie6-still-dominates-in-china-heres-why/
Like the FAFSA (federal student aid form) site that does not recognize any version of firefox beyond 3.6. So in that case who is the idiot? FF for running any with the version numbers or the feds for not updating their site. Well when the version number just goes away I will have no idea why certain sites won't play well with FF. Back to safari for me.
Last(?) week, Firefox on my Mac laptop updated for 5.0.1. I wanted to make sure that I got the update on my Windows desktop, so I opened up the About box. It claimed I was up to date on 5.0. I assumed something was wrong with the update check. I had to search around a bit before I was able to determine that it actually was working properly, and 5.0.1 had been a Mac-only fix. (That's another problem: it's becoming harder to find things like release notes.)
Basically: Mozilla gave me incomplete information, and I wasted a few minutes trying to chase the rest of it down. And now they want to give me even less?
And further more, rabble rabble rabble. They took er jerrrbs!
No version numbers. "Nothing matters but being on the latest version." I gotta see this.
*gets comfy*
We're still stuck on 3.6 waiting for the plug-ins to catch up
There is no justifiable excuse for this.
I think that's what we're saying: I have a number of important features that I use: flashblock, NoScript, TabKit, and a few more. I use the platform that supports them. If that's not your current offering (e.g. IE or FF5) then there's no point in my using your platform.
That logic is exactly the same as the logic behind operating system choices: I really don't give a rat's ass how gee-whiz your new and wonderful BeOS clone is if I can't use it to run the applications that matter to me, because I choose platform software for its ability to support the tasks I want to perform, not because it's all shiny and has the newest buzzwords.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Asa Dotzler [:asa] 2011-08-15 13:28:35 PDT
I relinquish this bug to the mob. Have fun.
version number will still be available from the help menu by selecting 'Troubleshooting Information'
They seem to be in full-on competition mode, now. Competition for what?
Certainly not Internet Explorer's market, or they wouldn't be raising a middle finger to every corporate sysadmin in the world.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
OK, so what if I'd quite like to continue using Gecko and the XUL/JS extension infrastructure, but ditch the Mozilla Firefox dev team headed by Asa Dotzler, one of the world's biggest jerks?
What are the alternatives out there?
Is SeaMonkey any better with regards to versioning? IceWeasel? Some other fork of Firefox?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
The version field with eventually just report "Firefox is up to date; this is the latest version."
signature is pants
...there's no version number on a tombstone, after all.
is Tea
Thats what they are smoking.
Similar brain dysfunction occurred to those Republicans who formed the Tea Party
BTW you are supposed to drink it, not smoke it.
Fork It
I'm giving up on FF.
Not so much because of the version number thing itself, which is relatively minor since you can still get the version number pretty easily.
The straw that broke the camel's back is the developer's comments in the discussion group linked to in the OP. I've been truly hating the UI direction that FF has been taking lately. It's made FF more difficult to use and substantially uglier. That discussion, however, has made it plain to me that this trend will not only continue, but accelerate. And this version number move is the first step in doing their best to force users into the latest version of FF -- which is without question not where I want to be.
I, for one, won't continue to use FF because it's become a product that actively irritates me when I use it. Worse than that, the developers have a clearly antagonistic and paternalistic attitude that is not only insulting but gives me zero confidence that the user interface will ever be actually improved or at least made nonirritating.
Oh, and constant behind-the-scenes updating? That's never a good thing. I don't allow any other software to do this, and I'm not going to make an exception for FF. Which means I need ready access to version numbers, despite the dev's assertion that they're only needed for debugging.
Bah. I'm done.
Hmm. What a nice bugzilla entry. That reminds me: if I want to report a bug about Firefox in FF's bugzilla, what do I fill in the "Version" field?
The version that was updated 20 minutes ago on 15th of Aug 2011 on 11:10pm" ?
Be careful what you you wish for
Many Firefox extensions can be hax0red to work on Seamonkey. See here.
The version number is still available in about:support (or about:troubleshooting maybe). The version number is still there, just not on the about dialog.
My copy of this page has not one, but two adverts for "Chrome, by Google for Linux". Google offering the carrot where Mozilla offer the stick.
So they moved to a faster release rate so they could show off numbers as big as Internet Explorer and Chrome... and now they remove numbers altogether to the end user? What the hell was the point of all that? Was is the point of any of these two changes?
I wonder ... should we also remove seat-belts from the cars? They are generally useless (except in troubleshooting situations).
Especially given our lean economic times where sysadmins are busy as hell. I agree that the additional responsibility of trying to track versions could be quite cumbersome.
Really? This is insightful?
Tools, Options, Advanced, Update, choose "Ask me what I want to do" instead of "Automatically download and install the update."
Was that really so hard? What is it with Slashdotters and the basic inability to figure out how to use something as simple as a web browser?!!
The FF team disagrees. They think the bigger problem is with enterprises stagnating on antique browsers.
... which has a saner development cycle. Also: Mozilla, I'm disappoint. You guys seem to have an acute case of Chromitis concomitant with some me-too-itis, being-cutting-hedge-at-all-costs-itis and we-know-what's-better-for-our-users-itis. I keep using Firefox because your latest antics don't affect me, but not everybody can afford that. I hope you come to your senses soon or that some group forks Firefox.
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
it's simply not important what version you're using as long as it's the latest version.
How do I know?
The version field with eventually just report "Firefox is up to date; this is the latest version."
Which will be a static text field. Yay for progress! We get a little dumber with every iteration.
It is, which is why there is still no proper equivalent of AdBlock Plus or NoScript in Chrome, and at the rate things are going there never will be.
Really? I have an adblock in Chrome and it works great -- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom
Not sure what I am missing from the firefox version, but I see no ads so it works great as far as I am concerned.
I also found this adblock Plus http://adblockplus.org/en/chrome
Sure sounds that way what a fuckup possibly the best browser going is about to be completely by some nobhead that aint got the first idea heading towards the old addage "all the gear no idea"
I don't get it, I use a fair amount of addons and most of the time they are working fine when there's a version change. Every now and then there's one or two who stop working right, but then I just go grab another one doing the same thing. Sometime it's a matter of a few days until a new compatible version is released and I can live without for that time. But most of the time it's the occasion to discover a better one, still being actively developed and supported. Seems to me the whiners about addons compatibility are just lazy and would rather spend their time crying than going to dig the addons site.
That's it, I'm quitting the browser.
I am a stoopid microbiologist who uses Firefox daily but is concerned about where it is heading. My stupid question is, since Firefox is open source, can the good coders of Slashdot fork the code and make a "new" browser along the lines of the old Firefox? If so, please do it. For humanity. I mean, I see all the pent-up anger in this thread. Surely some of you can band together and start a new project.
...insane?
Posts like Parent are perfect examples of why people shouldn't ignore funny modded posts. It's pure insight.
The FF team disagrees. They think the bigger problem is with enterprises stagnating on antique browsers.
Well obviously every website you go to has been rigorously testing their site for at least 6 months against the code Mozilla released this morning.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I have a dozen installations that report "Firefox 5.0 is up to date" and another dozen that report "Firefox 5.0.1" is up to date, all at the same bloody time! The only way to get a 5.0 installation to report 5.0.1 is to download the latest full installer from Mozilla. So, do I really need to go update my 5.0 machines manually or are they somehow internally running all the 5.0.1 patches and still reporting 5.0? Maybe they are getting an old status page from my proxy server. I finally decided it was faster to to just reinstall than troubleshoot the mess. I get through that and already 6.0 is here. At least I still know that they are planning to screw me with a new version tomorrow. Given such a screwed up versioning/update system, they now want to drop version numbers entirely. WTF!
Despite adhering to standards, the compulsory major upgrade to FF5 has meant I can only do my taxes in IE.
https://e-services2.ird.govt.nz/secure/login.html
I had a big post typed up about deploying and supporting Firefox in a university where webapps are critical for both student and staff, but you know, screw it. If it wasn't for the fact that I just made the system image for this Fall a few days ago I would pull Firefox out. I don't know what's up with this ridiculous "I know better than the users" behavior that's pervading more and more large open source projects, but it's turned me off of adopting Linux for my own desktops, and it's made me lose faith in Firefox. With the rapid release cycle, UI changes, and now this (which no other browser that I know of does), I might as well just recommend Chrome to people. At least it won't leak memory.
(Yeah, I'm pissed off. You know how hard it is to get large organizations to adopt open source software? Screw Firefox.)
I think Microsoft may have something to say about this. (I want a small, [$7 digit] referal fee for this one.)
My wife has about 10 websites that she frequents that don't support anything above FF3.6. IIRC Chrome stopped being supported around Chr6 on most of these sites. IE is supported up to IE8.
This is the same thing you see with all the add-ons.
Please fix this Mozilla. I hate having to explain to my wife how to check the supported browser page for these sites, now I have to show her how to check the FF version as well (which certainly won't be supported for what she intends to use it for anyways)?
Geez... and Firefox was one of the few cool things my company allowed on the desktop. From a patch management perspective, there's no way they're going to just let it be the "latest" version.
This shit is really starting to get on my nerves.
- A Browser is more adaptable, in general more up to date with new technologies and probably easier to develop/maintain by focusing on smaller steadier releases.
If you accept this then you should also accept:
- With frequent releases, you don't want regular users to be constantly be hassled with updating their browser / add ons and flashing a new version number in their face, especially when there isn't much difference between versions.
And in general, the version number of a browser is just confusing and irrelevant to regular users.
this shit is funny?
or maybe you should keep your code clean enough that it'll work on anything released in the last 5 years or so. quit abusing javascript and you shouldn't have compatibility issues.
For anyone concerned about tech support situations, the troubleshooting URL about:support will stay. Initially I was concerned about this as well, but it's not THAT serious.
Have you already dumped Chrome?
Software As Service, People!
What version of Google Maps and Gmail are you using right now? How about Google Calendar and Picasa? What do you mean you don't know? Can't you tell?
No you can't. All you know it's there, it works, it's the "newest" version you know off because of the new stuff showing up since the last update day.
Experiment Freely Developers
Firefox is following the same ideology here due to Google developer's influence. Let the developers strip the version numbers from the user experience part and us geeks will know how to tell in the about:support pages.
Let them mold and reshape our browser, hold the GUI and switch it up as much as they want. Remove the buttons, change the address bar, remove the protocol and domain suffix, strip the status bar, remove the menus, do whatever they want to experiment on trying to find the best user interface out there. Use us users as your test subjects and experiment to find out what works and what doesn't. Let the browser evolve forcefully because the users won't let new things to be tried on them peacefully without complaints.
Nobody is forcing anyone using Firefox to upgrade, stay at the latest 3.6.x release or 5.0.1 release or whatever if you don't want to participate. Let you organization standardize on a release. Nobody from Mozilla is forcing you to upgrade due to licenses, registrations, expiration, or mandatory upgrades, use whatever you want.
Microsoft Office Ribbons vs Toolbars
I heard all the moaning and groaning about Microsoft Office Ribbons versus Toolbars and I reserved my judgment until I tried them. Now that I use them and learned where all the options are I see them as a great and welcomed improvement and I'm looking toward the new Windows 8 having the Ribbon interface instead of toolbar icons. The ideaology of the Ribbon removing the duplication of the menus and toolbar icons is a logical one and add that the context sensitive color highlighted ribbons that appear when editing different elements such as tables, pivots, images, etc. just makes so much sense to me and makes my editing a breeze.
Weak up people, embrace the future and leave the old interfaces behind. Firefox developers, thread on and try new things!
I use Firefox for the addons. If the addons break, I have no reason to use Firefox.
Firefox has been dumbed down ever since it was forked from Mozilla. That was, in fact, the main point of forking it: to provide a stripped-down browser that was easy to use. If you want a powerful, configurable Mozilla-based browser, then use SeaMonkey, which was the continuation of Mozilla. (Ironically, it has the additional advantage in recent years of not being bloated like Firefox.)
the problem of people posting without logging in.
First of all, listing "supported browsers" is sooo 90s!
Second, if what you support depends on what you like or approve of... that says a lot about the importance of the site, eh?
The barn should be red. No white. No red!
As true as that may be, they are being myopic and egocentric on the matter. The fact is, the browser is the interface, not the application. The applications are what people run and the browser is how users get there. If the application is broken in some way (whether or not it is the fault of the browser is irrelevant) then the system needs to be fixed in some way.
In a perfect world, the applications developer(s) would fix it. But that isn't always the case.
While this problem is particularly prevalent in applications written for MSIE, this problem should never be considered to be exclusive to MSIE.
I was going to ask this as well - does Seamonkey share this behavior? B'cos if it doesn't, it's a viable alternative for corporations that want a settled release. Originally, it was an absolute lookalike for Netscape Communicator 4, but apparently, they've given it some of the customization of Firefox, such as personas. Also, which versions extensions work w/ Seamonkey? Also, about Iceweasel that someone mentioned - who would be maintaining the security fixes for that? Debian?
You're saying that any person who writes software is automatically required to provide lifetime support of said software?
I like that idea.
If even the dev abandons it, give me one rationalization or justification why the users shouldn't follow their lead and also abandon it... The dev probably quit for a good, well informed reason, and if the user knew it, they'd probably run for the hills too.
If even the devs no longer care what kind of unpatched security holes might exist, users should not be able to use it at all, unless they go to the effort of overriding it, in which case when/if they shoot themselves in their foot, they fully and completely deserve it.
Furthermore, I would consider it a feature to be informed if software I'm responsible for is no longer maintained.
Very simply - the original developer - may have been anyone - a college student, who in his spare time, wrote an add-on, and got it working on Firefox, say 3.0, and made it available. No complaints, so he assumed it was AOK. Later, his semester over, he went on to maybe join a startup, or a band or some other hobby of his.
Now, if in a subsequent version of FF, say 4.0, that add-on broke, how or why is he responsible? He wrote his app using the published guidelines, and if FF is so damaged that they look @ version# and then decide whether to let that app work or not, it's the fault of FF. Otherwise, why should the add-on break in a new version of the browser? The browser should have a super-set feature so that nothing breaks, except maybe an old OS that it's not designed to work w/.
Now, they want to get rid of publicly facing version#. If so, why have them @ all? Just go to 3.7, 3.8 and version 6 which should be coming out next month should be 3.9. But don't have any add-ons see this - just support whatever they need in order to work as designed.
This is just setting us up for the awesome day when we're running a program to access the cloud (what program? that information is not facing the user) and we use firefox's cloud navigator to access content. YIPPEE!!!
Aside from Opera, you can always go to Safari as well. Wonder whether Seamonkey supports the same range of add-ons.
Does Konqueror support either Flash or HTML5? How about Epiphany? My problem w/ my version of Konqueror was that it didn't support Flash.
Seamonkey, while a potential alternative, may not be good for people disgusted w/ the Mozilla team. But the FF problems haven't caught up w/ them - yet! Well, Iceweasel started off just b'cos of the FF logo, but why not use that opportunity now to base the latest Iceweasel on FF3.6, and then do what's needed to support as many add-ons done to date? Support this version w/ the fork, and as someone pointed out above, freeze the versioning, since it's well enough, and have newer add-ons as the only innovation to it. Granted the brand name is lost, but Firefox too was nothing when it got spun off from Netscape. Incidentally, is it possible to get the Netscape name back from AOL, since they've stopped using it since goodness knows when? Also, Flock disbanded recently, or else, it should have been easy to take their code and have it run by the Iceweasel team. Incidentally, Flock would have done great in an enterprise environment, given how rarely they updated. Only problem - their very limited support for add-ons. But yeah, it would be great if the FOSS community could get back the Netscape brand. If FOSS is that important, consider both Epiphany or Konqueror, depending on your UI. They follow the conventional unix-like versioning schedules, so use that. Might want to have an add-on model that it can use that will be version independent.
Frequent release cycles drive me crazy.
In a past life I was the IT department for a large university department. 300 computers, 11 versions of *ix, 4 versions of windows, 2 versions of Mac.
Firefox and Opera were blessings: They worked on nearly everything.
As an IT guy, it's about control. My job was to make sure that everyone else could do their job. One of the things we do is keep users from shooting themselves in the foot. So in the interest of keeping their environment stable, we do NOT let users upgrade their own machines. (Some profs insisted on having admin rights to their own computers. Most of them were competent, so they were islands on their own)
Every application I supported required me to follow some list or usenet group to monitor for significant changes. Something that required a frequent upgrade was a real pain, even with ssh scripts to roll it out.
When an application is a 'leaf' -- when it doesn't have an API that other people write to, frequent changes are just barely tolerable. When a application deliberately promotes add-ons then anything that changes the existing API for the add-on writers needs a lot of careful consideration before releasing to the public.
Currently at home I've got 3 OS's Mac Snow Leopard, Win XP, and Linux. Firefox is running at version 3.6 because of Tabkit. FF changed the API in version 4, and Tabkit hasn't changed to catch up.
I updated to Firefox 5 (I think) on my Mac, and found scrolling to be annoyingly stuttery, even on apparently simple pages. After much searching on the web, I finally found the installer for Firefox 3, and upon downgrading, everything worked perfectly again. I've learned my lesson about trusting Mozilla to provide correct, working code in the latest versions.
If they do move to an era where Firefox automagically always updates to the latest version, I'll stop using it.
I've been using FF a long time... sad to see it go, but I think it's time to move on.
how do you ever expect to give or receive proper IT support?
I'm not an FF dev, but I bet they are hoping to strike a contract with the webpage makers of the world. The name of the contract would be "HTML Specification 4.01", and maybe eventually 5.0.
Because, you know, I also didn't rigorously test my C code when the most recent point release of the gcc came out. Some people do, but most of us don't. Heck, did you know that some people don't even bother to recompile their applications when they do an apt-get upgrade? Golly, how does any software ever work.
I agree with you, I just don't see it as the problem that you do. Do you think that all applications should be recompiled and rigorously re-tested when Apple updates OS X from 10.6.01 to 10.6.02? I don't think very many people do that. The platform generally comes with an implicit promise of general stability. If you don't trust the promise, that's fine, but I don't think it's reasonable for people to pretend that tomorrow's nightly build is going to be completely different and break everything versus today's nightly build.
What version are the going to start with?
This thicket of updates that are being foisted on us... What is this all about? Who are these updates for? Is it the users...or the corporations that benefit financially from the exploitation of user information? My guess is that a great many of these "updates" do not benefit users at all. They are stuffing spyware into what used to be ligitimate software.
Firefox used to be the cat's meow, now, it's the cat's rear end... I'm going shopping for some fast simple browser that gives me a modicum of privacy again.
-Johnny the Greek
You put your finger right on the problem: it's a PHB-quality idea.
Every single one of my add-ons died today. Holy hell.
What's amazing to me about Firefox is that it has leaked memory like crazy for years, and it still does.
They "fix" it constantly, but have never fixed the memory issues, they just get worse.
Hitting 1.5GB of memory usage as I type this, and I've only been running for a day.
Yup, I keep scratching my head since the whole point of Firefox was to have something lean and mean. Talk about mission creep...
The rot at Mozilla Central started when Mozilla released the alpha quality Thunderbird 3. It auto updated itself without first directing users to the "What's new page" so that we could check if we really wanted to update. TB3 was buggy and slow, introduced UI changes that many didn't like/want and broke the Lightning calendar plugin. Even worse, the Mozilla developers insisted that because we liked tabs in Firefox we'd love them in TB3. I ditched Thunderbird at that point.
It is a remarkably refreshing revelation to find out that this style of arrogance towards your customers, typified in the past by Microsoft, has nothing to do with your software being open or closed source. It has to do with the fact that organisations forget that their user base, their market, is built on mutual respect and not on an immutuable right to exist.