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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.
As a web designer, they're turning my hair white with all these versions. Not so much that we need worry about things becoming incompatible, etc. but it's spreading out the userbase, which is just inherently more difficult to ensure cross-version identicality.
It's always confirmation bias!
Not in the summary is an opt in feature that will report your memory use (presumably along with what pages you are on and extentions you are using) back to Mozilla so they can finally put the "but FF using 2 GB of RAM on my machine" bugs to rest, either by fixing them or by dispelling the myth depending on which is the case.
If the garbage collected collected leaks, they wouldn't be called leaks anymore.
This space for rent.
Firefox 7.0 has already reached end-of-life at the time of this posting...
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.
If the releases are that close together, just keep it in development until they get in all the bugs and features in. No one likes to upgrade every month.
Speaking only for myself, I only like to upgrade when there (a) are compelling reasons, and (b) it's feasible.
I use a plugin which is security related and thus signed, and there will never be a new version available at the day of the launch. If there isn't a new version before the next release, it means that in order to upgrade, I will have to hunt down the new version in archives, and install it that way.
With other companies having release cycles of 6 months or a year, there's no way they can keep up with Firefox. So Asa D. has pretty much forced many of us to look elsewhere.
Yes, I see the upgrade popup for Firefox, but I have to ignore it because upgrading will break my plugins. It's only a source of irritation.
The supported distro I am on is at version 3.6.18, and there is no newer version. So why do I get the irritating pop-up at all?
In Windows (in a VM), I am at FF5, and get a pop-up telling me that I should go to version 6. Sorry, I can't, until the plugins I need are signed for FF6. So why do I get a pop-up? Just to irritate me?
I'm using other browsers more and more now, because the direction Mozilla is going in now is best described as the direction of the divine wind. Sorry, I don't plan to be aboard.
From the big Bugzilla thread about version numbers earlier this week:
Effective expiration, lack of bugfixes, and rapidly replaced by newer versions with bugfixes? By any practical definition, there is no stable version. They're all betas from here onwards. The whole notion of a release isn't that it's bug-free, but that it's supported for a reasonably-long period of time.
Pining for the days when The Glorious MEEPT!!! graced SlapDash with his wisdom.
and add unit tests for the purpose of validating your code (instead of finding something wrong with it, which once upon a time was the purpose of tests).
Anyone doing unit tests properly is both validating their code and finding something wrong with it. If you're tests don't do both, you're doing it wrong.
So what if it's free. How does that make it above criticism? That's got to be one of the lamest excuses for trying to stifle criticism of something. If you're just going to whine and complain when your users complain about stuff, then why even release something for users anyway? Why not just keep it as some internal tool so the devs can circle jerk in peace? That seems to be what Mozilla wants now.
My FireFox has updated itself to 6.0 now and my humble plugin-requirements still work. I use NoScript, AdBlock+, BetterPrivacy and DownloadHelper. So you will at least be able to surf the web with reasonable security. As soon as the plugins starts breaking, I'm going straight for Chrome. I don't know much about Chrome these days, I last used it 3 years ago. How is the stance with plugins on Chrome now ? If there are still no plugins, do you at least have the equivalent functions of the plugins i mentioned above?
Can I light a sig ?
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.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
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.
What do you use instead? That's been my big problem - the plugin libraries of other browsers are no where near as extensive and a lot of the functionality I use daily just isn't there.
Plugins used daily:
- Snap Links Plus ---- a few upgrades and this should replace traditional highlighting in a browser
- QuickDrag ---- removes the need to do ctrl+click to open in a new tab
- Adblock Plus ---- simply hiding ads isn't enough for ABP, it must stop them from downloading to preserve the precious 20gb of data transfer/month I have
- Element Hiding Helper ---- for those few pesky ads you can't block from downloading
- Modify Headers ---- this one is gold
- FireFTP
- Canadian English Dictionary
- IE Tab Plus ---- for those pesky active x controls (not used daily but useful)
- Morning Coffee ---- how else would I open all my favourite sites at once? certainly not with the "dialpad" or whatever that monstrosity is called
- Chatzilla
- about a dozen different web development tools from Firebug to Live HTTP headers to MeasureIt... just too many to mension
There's just no option that does all that... at best I might be able to do it across 4-5 different programs if I dropped some of them. Slowly though they are no longer supporting 3.6 and I won't upgrade due to the numerous issues from their release model to their UI and so on... eventually I'll have switch to another browser because neither 3.6 nor 7+ will be worth using.
It was good while it lasted.
I think some hacker redefined Mozilla's $version as an INT.
Money for nothing, pix for free
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.
Version numbers these days are more about marketing than informational content. Based on no knowledge of the politics of the decision or any formal statements issued to the contrary, it really seems like someone signed off on a corporate plan to bring Firefox version numbers up to match or exceed IE version numbers.
At least, that would be the best explanation for it that comes to mind. It's really weird for tech people to see, but it may help convey the relative maturity of the browser to new laypeople.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!