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Firefox 7.0 Beta Released
An anonymous reader sends word that the first Firefox 7.0 beta has been released. One of the big areas of focus for this version will be performance enhancements. One optimization "Reduces memory use and improves performance areas including responsiveness, startup and page load time, even in complex websites and Web apps." Another addresses one of Firefox users' long-standing gripes: "The JavaScript garbage collector works more frequently to free up memory and improve performance when you have many tabs open or keep Firefox running for a long time."
Next in few mins...Firefox 8 Alpha released and Firefox 9 Preview released... Do we need to clog up the front page with these articles? Gone are the days of version numbers making any sense in FF. We don't report Chrome versions do we?
This space for rent.
If the garbage collected collected leaks, they wouldn't be called leaks anymore.
This space for rent.
Yeah, but the point was you knew right away 3.6 was nearly identical to 3.6.1 (well, should be anyways) and was probably pretty similar to 3.5, but not to 4.0. Now, you have no clue if 7 represents a major change or just a bugfix without actually testing it. Hence, frustration for developers. Mozilla is basically giving them less information about what the release cycles contain, and for no good reason whatsoever. And that is why people complain.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
It's more that the beta for 7 comes out pretty much the instant 6 is released. One of the more interesting aspects of the Mozilla development process is that they essentially have a pipeline of four "releases" going on at once: Current (stable stuff, now 6), Beta (code being stabilized, now 7), Aurora (testing and major bugfixes, now 8) and Nightly (new feature work, now 9). When it comes time to do a new release, Current gets booted out, Beta and Aurora get promoted, and Nightly coughs up a build that becomes the new Aurora. It would actually be a pretty good system, except for the part where they forgot about maintenance releases and long-term support.
It used to be a tiny little box that would slide up in the corner of the screen. It would stay there for exactly as long as it took for your brain to register the presence of the link, and then slide away. Unless you were a ninja and/or sniper you had no hope of hitting the link.
Now a big, huge window flops up onto the middle of the screen WHILE I'M WATCHING A GODDAMN VIDEO. Half an acre of gray emptiness with two buttons and a line of text about the new version.
I hope with future versions that the entire screen will be blacked-out, mariachi music will begin to play in the background along with the sound of 5 or 6 crying babies, and a 5 minute marketing video plays while the new version downloads and installs. Oh! And I hope they start forcing the icon onto the desktop with each update, Adobe style; that would rock.
Really, why should I care about FF any more? They're killing us and themselves with all of these major version releases. As many others have pointed out, it's painful when dealing with web development, plugin usage, or even just to know what version is "latest". And that doesn't count all the pain with the major bugs that just languish while the UI is endlessly tweaked for no good reason (exactly why was the status bar removed?).
I'm sorry FF, but I'm sticking to the 3.6 series. As soon as that doesn't work anymore because of 1 OS upgrade too many, I'll stop using FF. If you can get things fixed and find sanity again before then, I'll stay. Otherwise, it's been a good 8 years we've had together.
You could use the super-secret Mozilla Add-on SDK
QUOTE: help ensure your add-on continues to work as new versions of Firefox are released.
Nobody seems to be mentioning this solution. Not even Mozilla.
At least in part because having Firefox auto-update the xpi to mark it compatible for a new version breaks when modules are signed.
So for those, the developer has to release a new package. And if your release cycle is 6 months (fairly common), and Firefox' release cycle is 6 weeks, there is going to be Problems.
Both users and developers aren't going to put up with it, and will leave. Which is exactly what we see happening now - it wasn't rocket science to predict this outcome.
This to me is such a fail, as most web devs need to be sure of the versions they are compatible with...
No, the "fail" is in that very chain of thought. Those web devs should not call themselves web devs since they do not understand the fundamental differences between the old media they used to work with and the new media, having to resort to web browser version to achieve what they foolishly are striving for.
At first I was not too keen on version number inflation, but thinking about it I couldn't care less. Actually, I find it good if it rids the world of people targeting web browser versions when they develop for the web. Target standards, not web browsers.
The only problem as I see is the plugins. That could be handled if Mozilla decided to create a stable API for plugin development and have version numbers on that API instead. This could even create a more stable browser with less unpredictability when multiple plugins are used. Another way, although more anarchistic, is to create a crowd sourced database of version compatibility between browsers and plugins, not having installers contain that information, but rather let us (the users) try it out and report.