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Mozilla Foundation Releases Firefox 7
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has released Firefox 7.0. It hasn't actually reduced my memory footprint at first glance, but let's hope that the memory usage doesn't keep growing like it used to. We'll also see if it crashes less often than once every three days or so."
The initial memory use of Firefox should remain similar to previous releases, but at least the heap shouldn't grow infinitely as it does in previous releases.
When did I miss Firefox 6?
Now that FF changes versions every time you blink and each one has at best minor changes, why even bother posting the new versions here? It's like posting that the sun came up in the East today.
Maybe a story about the acceleration in market share loss FF has suffered since this rapid release BS started would be more interesting.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Are people still bitching about that? Since I'm usually putting my computers in sleep mode or connecting to VMs that are running 24/7 I am having Firefox running for over a month straight on a regular basis. Both on Windows and Linux. About the only time I have to restart Firefox is to apply a version update. I can't even remember the last time that I had it crash on me that wasn't the fault of something like Java or Flash. I would definitely catch all sorts of hell from my immediate family if Firefox was crashing often or causing slowdowns due to memory bloat and they don't even use NoScript. I'm not sure what people are doing to make Firefox bloat or crash but I'm willing to bet that the cause is add-ons and extensions that they've installed and not Firefox itself.
Actually testing the code wouldn't be in line with Agile methodologies. If you don't like the code, you'll just have to live with it until the next patch.
Once upon a time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and hired whole departments full of people to test and document a stable release of software before it went out the door; these expenses can be done away with by outsourcing QA to end users in the form of autogenerated coredumps, and the documentation to the end users by third parties hosting banner-ad-funded wikis and web fora. Sure, the product was more likely to actually work, but the unacceptable downside was that under waterfall, users had months between patches, and were consequently several weeks behind the hottest trends in masturbatory UX fashion design.
Agile's so much better than that stodgy old waterfall methodology, because with Agile, you're always on the upgrade treadmill, and only have to wait a few days for the next patch full of bugs comes down the pipe. You may not know what version of the software you're running, but at least you're always up to date!
To suppress the URL trimming functionality, set the 'browser.urlbar.trimURLs' variable in about:config to true.
It's not that it's not tested. It's just that what the Firefox designers want is now completely divorced from what the users want. This has been clear for me since the 'awesomebar'*.
I'm trying out Opera. I used to be a Firefox promoter, moving people off IE6 and onto FF every chance I got; but now... all the browsers seem like necessary evils.
*Not that adding the awesomebar was bad... but forcing the awesomebar, and eliminating the option to turn it off, was. That's the behavior that indicates a company is putting marketing ahead of engineering.
While it used to be true that people compared software by version number, and it certainly is for products that are still in the v1.0 (or maybe 2.0 even), how many people today really compare software by version number any more? Or even know what version they are using (especially of Chrome, which doesn't even advertise it unless you look closely), unless they are fairly nerdy? More relevantly, is there seriously a large group of people (I realize there is at least one person) who didn't use Firefox because it was "only" version 3? And more importantly, was it worth pissing of the very group of people who made your product popular in the first place (i.e. the techies)?
Software versions are supposed to have meaning. Major numbers are for important new features and UI overhauls, minor numbers are for minor features (or large technical fixes) and other small changes, and final digits are for bugfixes. I should be able to look at a version number and be able to estimate how much the software changed since another version. That has been the standard for years, and there is absolutely no reason to change it. Firefox has completely destroyed that. They didn't start it, true, but they also shouldn't have given away to it.
For commercial software, obviously, using the year as a version number makes quite a lot of sense (besides even just selling new copies every year), or for a driver (like AMD does). But for a browser? What sense does that make? Why bother? Why not just do what has worked quite well for years and use a proper version system? That is why people are annoyed at Mozilla. Because the change makes no goddamned sense.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
At least banks will let you use their web site because 3.6.x is tested.
v4 to Infinity? not so much.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Yesterday I started Firefox 6 and had it sitting just on the regular start page for a couple hours, with no other tabs open. Just sitting there, not doing a damn thing except showing the start page, it was using 50MB of RAM. Right now I have it open to a single tab and it's using 154MB of RAM and 226MB of virtual memory, so 380MB total. For 1 tab. I've seen earlier versions using well over 1GB of RAM at times, plus virtual memory. The memory usage seems to have slowed down the leaking and growing indefinitely large, but it still seems like a lot of memory.
But, considering that I have 8 GB in my computer, who gives a shit how much memory Firefox is using?
I'm going to go with "people who don't have 8GB of RAM". My gaming machine at home has 2, my work laptop has 1.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Because the change makes no goddamned sense.
It makes sense from a marketing perspective, obviously; and that makes the outrage even stronger. FF was a damn good browser; and it's painful to see it going in that direction. Most slashdot posters have experienced projects and products going astray when 'steering committees' start dictating design.
It's painful like seeing a great book being turned into a terrible film by focus-group driven studio executives.
Actually I'm pretty sure it is Mozilla's fault. It's not the addon devs who decided to go to this ridiculous rapid release schedule.
Addon devs are volunteers. Expecting them to update stuff several times more often because some people in the ivory tower think that releasing every couple of weeks is a good idea doesn't mean you blame the addon devs. You blame the clowns who are screwing them over.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
You do realise trolling is supposed to waste other people's time, right?
It just pisses everyone off.
We hated IE having 90% marketshare and was seeing the internet die to an MS only platform was frieghtening and killed the spirit of having it there for everyone. Firefox was a savior and a great fast product when it was new.
Without Firefox we would not be able to browse the web on our phones or Ipad as sites would still to this day only work with IE 6 & 7. IE 8 would never come out, as MS admitted it was to play catchup.
If IE takes over again it would be a return to 2004, where those of us who ran Linux back then had to dual boot to Windows to fill out job apps and goverment paperwork on the so called "open" web and that was insane.
So Firefox does something so stupid and insande that it turns the tides backwards after so much work and then makes us look incompentent at work when we have just finally got Firefox in our corporate images of browsers is offensive.
I do not care anymore. I run IE again because it is the best browser again on Windows 7 if you have verison 9. I do not like to, but Chrome's UI is too minimal and lacks too many features for me. If Firefox fixes the bugs and slows releases again I would consider going back.
http://saveie6.com/
I am typically onboard with the software purists, but in this case I disagree -- I like the new numbering systems! Well, not exactly the number systems, but the development strategies they imply. For a piece of software that you write once and remains relatively stable, the major/minor/bugfix method is acceptable, because you very rarely do major design changes.
In something like Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird, and their ilk, the distinction of when exactly a major version number should be bumped becomes a little less clear -- one UI update is deemed slightly more important than another, and all of a sudden you have a major version jump instead of a minor one. With rapid release schedules, the idea is that the changes from one release to the next will /all/ be small, but after a while if you compare e.g. FF 3.18 vs 3.1, they will be nothing alike, so why should they share a common major version number?
Moving to a Year/Month (e.g. Thunderbird 11.09) system I think is overall much cleaner for software releasing on a rapid development cycle.
Aikon-
There is a much better programming methodology...
I've never seen an SDK make such a big fuss about absolutely nothing and never felt my time so pointlessly wasted, and I've seen plenty of SDKs in the past 20 years...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
It isn't as rosy as it sounds, at least in my general experience (practice always deviates from theory right?).
The theory is you write your unit tests first, and then code until you pass. In practice two things go wrong:
1) You make a mistake writing unit tests (I have seen many times where *only* buggy code could pass the incorrectly written unit tests).
2) Passing even a well-conceived unit test inspires overconfidence. I have encountered more than a few people who honestly believe passing all unit tests as an automated part of a build process was sufficient and no human testing was required.
In short, sure, officially it endorses testing, but really only speaks much to automated unit tests and less to actually taking the time to let some users dig in and do nothing but make sure those users validate you did the work correctly.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I love the awesome bar. It's made my browsing faster and more efficient.
That is why people are annoyed at Mozilla. Because the change makes no goddamned sense.
It does make sense. Back in the bad old days when they were going 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, etc., it showed that they weren't improving very fast. Now that they're jumping ahead (4, 5, 6, now 7), it shows they're improving rapidly, and will soon be almost as good as IE (9) and Opera (11).
Opera goes up to 11, and Firefox needs to work hard to make their browser go up to 11 too. It'd be even better if Firefox went all the way up to 12. That would completely blow away IE and Opera. Just think how cool that'll be. When you see someone using IE9 (or 10, if it's up to that by then), you can tell them "You should switch to Firefox. It goes up to 12!!"
Since people compare software by version number, one is at a competitive disadvantage in number software sensibly. FF7 would be FF4.3 were it not for chrome, why not call it ff 2011.3 and be done with it.
How about everyone get over the version numbering already and enjoy the new features in this free browser? That'd be great.
The memory usage is now much better than Chrome. Speed is improved. None of my add-ons broke. We finally have text-overflow: ellipsis (long overdue!). WTF, people. This is a good thing, not a bad one, and if all you can do is complain about the damned version number, you apparently need to go get a life.
Here's to FF8 in 6 weeks, with improved font rendering and the compatibility assistant! (and a big preemptive SUCK IT to those of you who will inevitably complain about the version numbering and release schedule). If you like yearly release schedules, please switch to IE.
It obfuscates the distinction between content and control. URL goes one place, search terms go another place. I don't want it searching from the URL box any more than I want it searching from my login screen. When MS introduced Clippy, everyone hated it. But when Mozilla does the same thing, everyone gets creamy. Ridiculous.
Oh sure, that would be great... except for two things:
Websites like Google expect you to update to the latest version, and will often lock you out if you don't.
Websites, like Banks for example, won't run if you use a browser version they haven't tested -- in Firefox's case that's 3 versions ago.
So basically there no fucking way to win. Or, more precisely, there's no fucking way to use Firefox across all the web any more -- so what is the point?
And that's completely ignoring the broken add-ons, and the fact that many people choose not to upgrade Firefox because they don't like the GUI changes on recent versions.
There's a reason I didn't use Netscape. There was a reason I actually bought the Firefox t-shirt 5 years ago too. But now, Firefox is just Netscape that updates its versions at an absurd and dysfunctional rate. It's now completely worthless as a browser because you can use it on less websites than you could when it was version 0.86.
Goodbye Mozilla, you clearly never learned one fucking thing from the Netscape disaster. You just never fucking listened to anyone who actually used your software.
> Websites, like Banks for example, won't run if you
> use a browser version they haven't tested
Where are you finding these banks?
I've been using Mozilla Suite and then Firefox nightly builds (not releases; clearly not tested by any banks) for about 10 years now, and in that time I've dealt with at least 5 different bank websites. None of them locked out any browsers. One had a sniffing bug that detected "Minefield" as "IE" that caused a date picker to not work and refused to fix it, but that's about it.
Yes, users can choose another browser. Is that really all the choice that the FF developers wish to extend to their users? This "take it or leave it" attitude was one of the reasons that I quit using Gnome. The next feature that Firefox forces on you might be one that you don't like.