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Firefox 8.0 Released

Today Mozilla announced the launch of Firefox 8.0. The headline features this time around include adding Twitter as a search bar option, tab loading tweaks, and the default disabling of addons installed by third-parties. "Sometimes you download third-party software and are surprised to discover that an add-on has also installed itself in your browser without asking permission. At Mozilla, we think you should be in control, so we are disabling add-ons installed by third parties without your permission and letting you pick the ones you want to keep." Here are the release notes and download links.

383 comments

  1. You mean... by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Firefox 4.04

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    1. Re:You mean... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Exactly... I think the open source community should rebel on this and give their own normal version numbers to Firefox. Just because Google is doing it isn't a good excuse. It is stupid to wrap minor updates and call it a major release. While Google does this with their version numbers they are no so grandiose about it. But firefox makes it seem like a major release.

      I say we should all just just say Firefoxes proper version number. I think 4.04 is a little too far off. Perhaps 4.35

    2. Re:You mean... by Xanny · · Score: 2

      I'd call 5.0 a pretty big deal, since that was when they got the browser CSS 3 / HTML 5 compliant in full. I'd also consider 9.0 to be a big deal, since its a pretty big speedup to jagermonkey. But yeah, 6 and 7 haven't been much of anything but a few tweaks like greying the non-domain address and such. I have no idea why Mozilla thought doing the Chrome name scheme was a good idea. I have no idea why Chrome thinks it is a good idea. All it does is make every release irrelevant and makes it so you can't hype new tech in the browser because to every user it is just "oh, another version".

    3. Re:You mean... by Hadlock · · Score: 1

      At this point I don't really see the version of numbering it anymore. It's a stable product (...line) that isn't going to be replaced by a better, newer technology in the next few years. I hate to make a car analogy but you might as well call it firefox 11. as in, the 2011 model of firefox. just keep releasing small updates throughout the year and when you're ready to introduce some major plugin breaking features, then go ahead and announce firefox 12. I'm a windows user and can't be arsed to figure out what version I have. I only know what chrome version (13.x) i'm using because I was trying to bug test a plugin with a friend last week. web browsers are no longer version numbers, they're "out of date" and "updated".

      --
      moox. for a new generation.
    4. Re:You mean... by Desler · · Score: 1

      I'd call 5.0 a pretty big deal, since that was when they got the browser CSS 3 /HTML 5 compliant in full

      Ummm... what? Firefox 5 does not have full CSS3 or Html5 support. No browser does.

    5. Re:You mean... by MobyDisk · · Score: 1

      I was going to post the same thing! Only I would have said 3.8. Close enough: They need to stop this before we get to Firefox 27, sometime in mid December.

    6. Re:You mean... by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      But at least that would make sense. You get an idea on how current or out of date your browser is.
      Firefox 8 does that mean your firefox 5 is 3 years old or dangerously out of date?

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    7. Re:You mean... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's really closer to 4.4 than 4.0.4 or 4.04, although to be fair and maybe give this one the honorary 5.0 (it's been 7 months, too), I can appreciate the technical difficulty of that surprise-addon blocker. I don't know anything about it, but it seems like it would be difficult to fully block something from writing in something to your configuration if it really wanted to. If it can do that to a degree that only malware-level tactics could break, then that's pretty sweet.

      Really Adobe already jumped this shark years ago but at least they waited several months between releases for a PDF READER.

    8. Re:You mean... by EvilBudMan · · Score: 1

      Why don't they just call it "office 2013"? It has a better ring to it. Google also seems less buggy these days but not immune. I would be better of course that a native application would have less of these things going on than one that has merely been ported from a Linux build hence the sole remaining purpose for IE (internet banking).

      FireFox has become fat to say the least and using 8 for a version number sure wont help their cause.

    9. Re:You mean... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Firefox 4.04

      4.04, Firefox not found

    10. Re:You mean... by flimflammer · · Score: 2

      The way Chrome updates makes sense for Chrome because Chrome isn't really identified with its version number. It's silently kept up to date when a new version comes out. It's pretty easy to forget what version you're even using. Chrome has pretty much set standards on how the browser works in the front end and changes to the browser do not generally effect these things. Addons developed for Chrome back to extremely early versions of Chrome still almost always work fine.

      The opposite is true for Firefox. The constant tweaks to the browser has the potential to (and has) broken a lot of things. This rapid release schedule is much more problematic for Firefox, and I hope they stop soon.

    11. Re:You mean... by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 1

      What is the main result?

      Broken plugins and add-ons, for the couple of weeks it takes to realize the version changes nothing, and the dev swaps a string in his XUL.

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
    12. Re:You mean... by Moryath · · Score: 2

      I don't care what it's called in version number. But for the love of god would they build in SOME form of enterprise level control options?

      When your internal training websites break on this crap, but you can't lock out the updates and you have some ditz PHB in a corner office who insists "durr I gotta use Firefox 4 eberything bcuz my 18 year old son sez its tha best", you've got issues. And yes, I know the PHB is the issue, but HIM we can't fix. Firefox could easily allow for some simple group policy-level controls.

    13. Re:You mean... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      "MOAR RELEASES! Hurry! We might catch up with Chrome's versions before we lose all our users! FULL STEAM AHEAD!"

    14. Re:You mean... by Grishnakh · · Score: 1

      The difference with Google seems to be that they never trumpet their version numbers at all. Users just know they're using Chrome, and that's it. Heck, I'm typing this on Chromium on Kubuntu right now, and I can't tell you offhand which version this is; I'd have to look it up in the "About" selection. FF, OTOH, constantly makes a big deal every time they make a new release with a new, bigger number.

    15. Re:You mean... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No! We need Firefox 9000!

    16. Re:You mean... by donaggie03 · · Score: 2

      Better than a new release with an old, smaller number!

      --
      Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
    17. Re:You mean... by Grishnakh · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I have no idea why Mozilla thought doing the Chrome name scheme was a good idea. I have no idea why Chrome thinks it is a good idea.

      Chrome doesn't think it's a good idea, which is why Chrome doesn't do it. Try this: find a bunch of Chrome users, and ask them which version of Chrome they're using. Most of them probably won't know. That's because Chrome doesn't advertise its release numbers, they just push everyone to use the latest. It's only Firefox that's running around screaming about their version numbers.

      All it does is make every release irrelevant and makes it so you can't hype new tech in the browser because to every user it is just "oh, another version".

      Releases should be irrelevant for a stable product; users should just be downloading the updates and using them when offered so they have all the latest security fixes, but there's nothing to get excited about. I don't see Google screaming about every new Chrome release that comes out. If there's a big change in the tech somewhere, they might trumpet that, but they don't make a new version that's not obviously different from the previous version, then make some giant new press event out of it.

    18. Re:You mean... by BradleyUffner · · Score: 1

      Why don't they just call it "office 2013"?

      Office 2013 isn't a version number (or won't be when it's released), that's a Title. Office has always had a proper version number unrelated to the title. For example, the RTM version of Office was 14.0.6023.1000

    19. Re:You mean... by vlm · · Score: 1

      When your internal training websites break on this crap,

      Ahh theres the flaw in your logic. IF your internal training websites break because twitter is now a drop down search option, you've got big problems.

      --
      "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
    20. Re:You mean... by Microlith · · Score: 1

      I don't see Google screaming about every new Chrome release that comes out.

      Nor does Mozilla. They made a blog post. I just saw (seconds ago) the notice that FF8 was released. And this article, full of people bitching about it.

    21. Re:You mean... by tlhIngan · · Score: 2

      Exactly.

      With Chrome, the updates happen silently whenever you close and reopen it. With Firefox, the updates nag you to install them, and break stuff. Even worse is when UI behaviours change so now all of a sudden, muscle memory is broken. You then have to spend the next hour googling for a way to revert the behaviour.

      I suppose the reason in Firefox it's hated so much is the releases keep breaking stuff, while in Chrome things just seem to continue - if you like the UI, it won't change on you suddenly. Users don't need to care because things work.

      Chrome seems "stable" even if it's updating every day because users don't notice differences. Firefox seems "unstable" because users keep wondering why things change when they worked so well before.

    22. Re:You mean... by Moryath · · Score: 1

      It's more the other changes made behind the scenes in each update, thank you very much...

    23. Re:You mean... by BZ · · Score: 5, Informative

      > It's only Firefox that's running around screaming
      > about their version numbers.

      Screaming where? http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/fx/ doesn't say what version you're downloading. Updating from Firefox 7.0.1 to Firefox 8 never says anything about Firefox 8; the experience is exactly the same as the update from 7.0.0 to 7.0.1.

      > I don't see Google screaming about every new
      > Chrome release that comes out.

      It does it just as much as Mozilla does. Compare http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2011/10/chrome-stable-release.html and http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/11/08/mozilla-firefox-adds-twitter-search-and-new-features-that-make-web-browsing-easier/ which are both the official announcements for Chrome 15 and Firefox 8 as far as I can tell.

      What exactly makes the latter "screaming" while the former is not?

    24. Re:You mean... by icebraining · · Score: 1

      The Addons website already automatically updates the string in all addons which don't use binary components and pass an automated compatibility test.

    25. Re:You mean... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There were a bunch of new features along the way. You wouldn't have seen any of those in a minor release.

    26. Re:You mean... by The+Archon+V2.0 · · Score: 1

      And even if they did switch to year numbers for Firefox at least you wouldn't see a new major version every two months.

    27. Re:You mean... by lexman098 · · Score: 1

      Of course they're going to talk about version numbers in the "Google Chrome Releases" blog. Now compare these and see which one advertises the version number: http://www.google.com/chrome/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

    28. Re:You mean... by BZ · · Score: 1

      Yeah, that green button is the one place the version number still appears. It's not clear to me why it still appears there; last I checked it was supposed to be removed.

    29. Re:You mean... by BZ · · Score: 1

      One other note. http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/fx/ (which is the official Firefox download page right now) does not show any version numbers. Neither does http://www.mozilla.org/

      So it's just some sort of weirdness with the old /firefox/new page... Chances are, someone just forgot to update the script that generates the text there.

    30. Re:You mean... by BZ · · Score: 1

      And one more thing. If a "8.0" in small font on a webpage constitutes "screaming", we have very different definitions of "screaming". ;)

    31. Re:You mean... by lorenlal · · Score: 1

      At the rate they're going, they'll eventually just catch up to the year anyway... Let's see... Rounding today to roughly 85% of the year elapsed, and estimating a major release every two months (6 per year):

      2011.85 + X/6 = 8 + x
      2003.85 = x - X/6
      2003.85 = 6x/6 - x/6 = 5x/6
      (2003.85 * 6)/5 = 2404.62 = x

      Nevermind. I'm not going to see the great FireFox version/year junction. Unless someone masters keeping my head going... Living a life of quiet dignity.

    32. Re:You mean... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think you meant Firefox 2.1.4.

      (Check the Gecko versions for before 5.0 Firefox, to see version numbers that fit the actual amount of change in the browser much better. Firefox 4.0 was Gecko 2.0. And for comparison: Mozilla 1.0 was Gecko 1.0, Firefox 0.1 was Gecko 1.2b, Firefox x.0 was Gecko 1.(6+x))

    33. Re:You mean... by Andrewkov · · Score: 1

      They have to do this, they are still behind Internet Explorer 9.

    34. Re:You mean... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      4.00 - 4gb ram
      4.01 - 5gb ram
      4.02 - 6gb ram
      4.03 - 7gb ram
      4.04 - 8gb ram

      Almost time for a new laptop.

    35. Re:You mean... by RCL · · Score: 1, Funny

      Firefox should be rebranded as FireAsaDotzler 1.0

    36. Re:You mean... by RCL · · Score: 1

      And this is bad. I remember the anticipation of Firefox .0 releases: 2.0, 3.0, 4.0. Now... there's no fun in seeing Firefox 8.0 being released. They lost their identity, willingly. I am no more interested in following progress in FF, if there's any.

      BTW, I do not use Chrome/-ium either. Never liked this unconfigurable "kiosky" browser that had its own ideas about how GUI should look like.

      These two lost their minds. Now I'm back to classic browsers like Opera, who actually values its heritage. And I value my memories of running Opera 3.0 back in 1990s.

    37. Re:You mean... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ah yes, Opera which is releasing a version every 6 months instead of every one and a half months. I'm not sure what'll happen there. On the one hand I'm irritated that Google/Chrome started this stupid perpetual beta craze that has sucked the web into a thrashing sea of workarounds, on the other hand, Opera is now hopelessly behind the curve on most web tech, approaching IE level (well, IE9 anyway).

      At least Firefox is capable of rendering SVG animation in a background-image - when I try that in Opera it can't even do a static frame of it correctly, the image tears and streaks on scrolling.

      If it was just SVG animation, I could deal, but their CSS is overall subpar and the browser that I used to constantly file bugs against until I got tired of their opaque bug reporting process.

      And I'm still waiting on CORS support for Opera's new WebGL, and their javascript speeds are 3 times slower than Chrome and Firefox.

      On the other hand, Opera has a kickass about:cache page and is probably the one thing it is still useful for. More convenient than checking /proc under Linux, and really no replacement under Windows.

    38. Re:You mean... by Threni · · Score: 1

      I could never afford Opera, and had to make do with the free, superior browsers.

    39. Re:You mean... by arkhan_jg · · Score: 1

      Chrome updates silently in the background - you launch it, and you might notice a new feature, but otherwise it's almost always entirely seamless that you've been updated since you last closed it; extensions silently update too.

      Firefox goes "NEW VERSION! NEW VERSION! UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE!" and then you have to go through the rigmarole of clicking and downloading it, going through the install routine (or updating via repository on certain distros), clicking through prompts all the way. Then you get to play the 'which extensions got broken THIS time?' game.

      And that's on my home machine. At work, that means I get to play 'build the new package deployment package' (seeing as firefox STILL doesn't officially support MSI), checking to see if the silent install options have changed - again - then push it out to the clients via wpkg. Of course, we could give the students local admin rights so they could install the update themselves when it nags them...

      We are seriously considering switching to chrome - complete with silent MSI installer, and non-admin updates - as a straight swap for firefox. Or there's always IE9. Ech.

      --
      Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
    40. Re:You mean... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      stop screaming at me!

    41. Re:You mean... by hairyfeet · · Score: 1

      I'd just be happy if they'd figure out what they broke after the 3.0x branch and please please PLEASE undo it? because through 3.0x I could play SD video fine, even on a nettop. after 4.0 it started getting stuttery, after 5 it was simply unwatchable. You launch a video in new tab and the CPU is slammed to 100% and pretty much stays there until i close the link or use downloadhelper to download the video (thus allowing me to close the link).

      In the latest Dragon, chrome, and opera i can still watch SD video just fine, I also NEVER have the CPU slam to 100% and stay there, even on launch or while having multiple tabs open. With FF it really seems to like to bitchslap the CPU and on anything lower than a P4 3.06Ghz at least from what I've seen, its so hard on the CPU it'll actually make the machine itself jerky, like the screen isn't updating. I just downloaded and launched the new FF and WHAM, slam the CPU for about 5 seconds, then launched a video WHAM BAM the CPU stayed slammed until I closed it. Again with the others I just don't see that, I even disabled all my add ons just to see, no dice. It doesn't seem to like having tons of bookmarks in folders either, it gets real jerky when I try to go down the tree. same bookmarks in the others? No problem.

      I'm really starting to wonder if its Gecko. If the engine simply can't take all the stuff that's been done to it and its time for a rewrite. The chromium based like Dragon may use more RAM because they have a separate process per tab but it doesn't feel slow or jerky or bloated. A single SD video doesn't make the entire browser slam the CPU, or even make the whole OS jerk, but with FF it does, at least for me.

      This isn't some "yay everyone else, FF boo!" as I really miss FF and want it to get better. I even downloaded and tried the Pale moon fork hoping that stripped of the cruft and having it optimized for SSE it would be better. it was a little but not enough to matter. so I really do hope that things get better, that they have some new guts they are working on that will blow webkit and presto away, but so far i'm just not seeing it, which is why I've been switching my users to Dragon when they complain.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    42. Re:You mean... by BZ · · Score: 1

      > Firefox goes "NEW VERSION! NEW VERSION!
      > UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE!" and then you have
      > to go through the rigmarole of clicking and
      > downloading it,

      Have you actually tried Firefox recently?

      Firefox 7 downloads the update in the background. If you happen to restart the browser withing 12 hours after that, the update is installed and you're done. There's a prompt during the install (one-time, just in this release) for disabling the likely-crapware third-party extensions installed on your machine. If you don't restart within 12 hours you get a notice that there is an update already downloaded and that you may want to restart to apply it.

      At no point do you have to "click and download" the update. It just happens.

      That all assumes that your Firefox is installed in a location you can write to, just like Chrome's automatic update behavior assumes that Chrome is thus installed, of course. If your Firefox is installed in a system location by your distro, say, then the Firefox update stuff is just disabled and it'll get updated as part of your distro's package updates. Again, just like Chrome when installed via a package.

    43. Re:You mean... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It's not Firefox 8. It's Firefox. This particular update just happens to be labelled 8. They have done away with consumer-oriented versioning, as has Google with Chrome. What version of Chrome am I using right now? oh, I'm using version 15. Where's the slashdot article for that? Oh there wasn't one... So why with Firefox? Because the people submitting it, editing and approving the submission all know it will generate page views, a heated discussion, etc.

      Just get over it already, for fucks sake.

    44. Re:You mean... by cavebison · · Score: 1

      Releases should be irrelevant for a stable product

      iOS anyone? Even when it comes to ubiquitous personal devices like phones, there are always reasons to know what version you're running. Sometimes it's just marketing, sometimes you need to know your old iPhone won't run the latest iOS, so it's time to upgrade. Or not.. sometimes it's about choice. Information is good.

      It's only Firefox that's running around screaming about their version numbers.

      What rock are you hiding under? IE 9, Photoshop CS6, Office 2010 (that's a version number, not the same thing as Office 2007), iPhone 4S, iOS 5, HTML 5, Windows 7, Android Cheese on Toast (or whatever) etc. ad infinitum.

      What have you got against version numbers, so people know what technology they're using? It's quite relevant these days, what with computers and all.

    45. Re:You mean... by syousef · · Score: 1

      Firefox 4.04

      I don't care what it's called.

      It has AWFUL Bar, which requires extensions to (partially) turn it off.

      It still can't print a long page without truncating unless you hack it.

      I'm sick of Mozilla's bullshit and very close to ditching the browser.

      --
      These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
    46. Re:You mean... by RoLi · · Score: 1
    47. Re:You mean... by RoLi · · Score: 1

      For Firefox it's also more like "change for change's sake"

    48. Re:You mean... by cbope · · Score: 1

      Umm... the FF GUI has not had any major changes since... well a long time now. What exactly are you referring to? I do not have a lot of "stuff" broken by a FF update. What kind of add-ons do you have installed? I run relatively few add-ons, and I like the idea that FF8 pops up the add-ons window after updating itself and gives me the option to re-enable any add-ons that it has disabled by default.

      Seriously, I don't get all the FF hate on /. lately. Sure, some of the older 4.x-5.x releases were questionable and buggy but since FF7 it has been extremely fast, stable and memory-efficient. I like the new changes and the direction the FF developers are taking. Chrome never really clicked with me, although I use it occasionally. I use Opera far more than Chrome, but FF continues to be my go-to browser of choice.

    49. Re:You mean... by RoLi · · Score: 1
    50. Re:You mean... by thsths · · Score: 1

      > That all assumes that your Firefox is installed in a location you can write to

      Which, by default, it is not. So you say Firefox only works as design if you fiddle with the installation details? That would seem like a pretty major flaw to me.

    51. Re:You mean... by ameen.ross · · Score: 1

      Like what? I presume your talking about a website? In that case whoever built it is to blame, because standards compliance is essential for interoperability. And last time I checked, the web was designed from the ground up to be inter-operable.

      --
      $(echo cm0gLXJmIC8= | base64 --decode)
    52. Re:You mean... by ameen.ross · · Score: 1

      AFAICT upgrading an addon to a new version of Firefox is often enough just changing your maxVersion entry in it's install.rdf. That said, I can see why it's problematic that one would have to do this every few weeks, because a new version of Firefox comes out. This hasn't got much to do with Mozilla's new versioning scheme, it's rather that the new scheme exposes a problem in the design of the compatibility checker. I think it's too simplistic.

      --
      $(echo cm0gLXJmIC8= | base64 --decode)
    53. Re:You mean... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're talking about Firefox updates, like they were long term stable releases.

      FF7 was the latest minor update, a few weeks ago. The latest major FF release was FF4. It changed around everything.

    54. Re:You mean... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The latest changes to the UI was less than 5 months ago, and also 3 months before that. That's not exactly what I really consider a "really long time".

    55. Re:You mean... by Xest · · Score: 1

      The 4 frontpage Slashdot stories that have been shoved in my face since Firefox 4 came out?

    56. Re:You mean... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Have you actually tried Firefox recently?

      Firefox 7 downloads the update in the background. If you happen to restart the browser withing 12 hours after that, the update is installed and you're done

      This is untrue. This morning,I was presented with a "Firefox 8.0 is available. Download?" huge prompt covering 80% of my screen and then I was forced to wait through the download, and then run through the entire upgrade process, including 2-3 screens disabling various extensions that would break.

      Firefox upgrades are far from silent.

      My folks are refusing to use Firefox because of these prompts and prefers IE, as there are no "weird prompts".

    57. Re:You mean... by jez9999 · · Score: 2

      FF continues to have major GUI changes like the removal of the status bar, the forced minifying of toolbar icons, the moving of tabs into the titlebar by default, and the uglification of the theme, on a regular basis. They're also planning on inflicting a 'Home tab' on users in the near future, because the UX team want to turn Firefox into a 'platform' or something to distinguish it... from a web browser, presumably.

    58. Re:You mean... by rjstanford · · Score: 1

      And everybody's plugins complaining. And the Mozilla product nagging you to upgrade. But apart from that, no, its not obvious at all.

      If its a minor upgrade, it should just happen (based on enterprise-settings). If its a major upgrade, it should be there when I, the user, want to make the change. The trouble is that we used to differentiate between those with major and minor version numbers. Firefox no longer has that differentiation, and no longer internally understands the differences.

      --
      You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
    59. Re:You mean... by rjstanford · · Score: 1

      Releases should be irrelevant for a stable product

      iOS anyone? Even when it comes to ubiquitous personal devices like phones, there are always reasons to know what version you're running. Sometimes it's just marketing, sometimes you need to know your old iPhone won't run the latest iOS, so it's time to upgrade. Or not.. sometimes it's about choice. Information is good.

      Hence the useful differences between major versions (iOS 4 vs iOS 5) and minor versions (do you even remember what the last point release of iOS 4 was?) - a difference that Firefox has blurred to the point of unusability. Were there really 5 major, product-changing releases between the last point release of FF3 and the current release of FF8?

      --
      You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
    60. Re:You mean... by _0xd0ad · · Score: 1

      I've noticed that FF seems to update itself okay, but downloading the updates manually to transfer to a computer that can't access the addons site occasionally gives me addons that are incompatible with the new version (until I manually get in and change the max version in the xul). It's very annoying.

    61. Re:You mean... by Acaeris · · Score: 1

      At least since 7.0, Firefox installs in the users local profile by default (AppData/local). I presume you can change it to work off the roaming profile instead but I've never needed to so haven't looked it up.

    62. Re:You mean... by Bengie · · Score: 1

      Funny how almost every other web page out there doesn't break between versions. You sure it's a "FireFox" problem?

    63. Re:You mean... by TheLink · · Score: 1

      I switched to Firefox 7 a few weeks ago, and recently it basically said "Time to upgrade to Firefox 8 and by the way following extensions/plugins might stop working".

      There's a prompt during the install (one-time, just in this release) for disabling the likely-crapware third-party extensions installed on your machine.

      What you call crapware extensions are the only reasons why I'm still using Firefox instead of Chrome!

      What real benefit does Firefox 8 give to the users for all these hassles? Twitter searches? WTF.

      I really didn't notice many big improvements when upgrading to 7 from Firefox 3.6 (which I was running before). It was still slower than Google Chrome for many sites. Supposedly the memory management is better, but it is still far crappier than Google Chrome in _practice_, since with Chrome even if though chrome may be eakier or its extensions/plugins leak memory, if you close the offending tab/window the memory is freed up. You can reopen a new window, and even go back to the website without having to log in again. That does NOT happen with Firefox and from what I gather it is NOT going to happen any time soon.

      So turns out I wasted my time upgrading from 3.6 to Firefox 7. I did it because some people here said I should upgrade before grumbling about Firefox.

      Should I now waste my time upgrading to Firefox 8? And then Firefox 9 when the developers next change their underwear?

      I do appreciate the work done on Firefox, but the Firefox developers need to realize that if their browser becomes a stable and robust platform (than can tolerate "crapware" extensions), then it has a higher chance of retaining or even gaining market share, all without the Firefox developers having to add features themselves - the 3rd party developers can add the features (even stuff like Twitter search ;) ). If you keep breaking extensions you are no longer a stable platform.

      Let me repeat for emphasis, the only reason why I'm using Firefox instead of Chrome is because of those "crapware third party extensions". I bet that is true for many Slashdotters here.

      --
    64. Re:You mean... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      I agree with you about the UI changes, but there is another big problem: legacy APIs and code. The add-on system needs am overhaul desperately but there is no way to fix it without breaking all the existing and often extremely badly coded add-ons. My own one, TabsOpenRelative-Mod, is a good example - it patches the tap opening API call directly because that is the only way to get the required functionality.

      You can't do that in Chrome and they have been very careful to only make APIs official once they are certain that they are secure and won't go away.

      Firefox is in the same position as Windows XP was, and the only solution is to release Vista. Seriously. Vista was so hated because is broke a lot of stuff, nagged the user constantly and was slow. Breaking stuff was necessary to cut out the worst app behaviour. Nagging the user was actually designed to encourage programmers to re-write their apps to avoid annoying their users. It was slow because it sandboxed and virtualized everything to provide compatibility for older apps.

      A few years later Windows 7 comes along with more legacy code removed and less user irritation and all is well again, better than XP in fact. We need Firefox Vista, if only so that we can get to Firefox 7.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    65. Re:You mean... by BZ · · Score: 1

      So your real problem is with the behavior of the Slashdot editors, then? Fine, but don't blame Mozilla for that.

    66. Re:You mean... by BZ · · Score: 1

      > What you call crapware extensions are the only
      > reasons why I'm still using Firefox instead of
      > Chrome!

      Are you actually using Firefox because of extensions you yourself did not install but that came bundled with other software? If so, I'm curious: what extensions?

      Note that "third party" extensions are precisely the extensions I describe above, not the ones you install yourself.

      > What real benefit does Firefox 8 give to the users
      > for all these hassles?

      Over Firefox 7? The main ones are less memory usage, better standards support, some new web features, better performance. For some reason those are judged as not making good press copy or something, so people report about UI tweaks like the twitter thing instead.

    67. Re:You mean... by TheLink · · Score: 1

      If that's what you mean then I find your question irrelevant, and your original remark misleading- because the firefox prompt doesn't distinguish between bundled extensions and extensions you install yourself.

      --
    68. Re:You mean... by BZ · · Score: 1

      Last I checked, there were actually different prompts for those two cases. Is that not the case in the final Firefox 8 release?

    69. Re:You mean... by TheLink · · Score: 1

      Whatever it is, I got a prompt saying that an extension that I want to use would be disabled if I upgraded to 8.

      I don't see why it should matter so much whether the extensions are bundled or self installed, and whether there are one or two different prompts.

      All that seems relevant to me is whether the next version of Firefox is worth upgrading to or not. The only reason why I still have Firefox installed is because of the extensions. If they don't work, then it's not worth it. I can always launch Google Chrome if I want a browser that is fast and can return memory to the OS without me having to close everything.

      --
    70. Re:You mean... by Hank+the+Lion · · Score: 1

      Whatever it is, I got a prompt saying that an extension that I want to use would be disabled if I upgraded to 8.

      Would it be disabled because it is incompatible, or because you did not install it yourself?
      In the latter case, you can just enable the checkmark before it, and continue using it.
      Many programs install, if you don't pay attention, extensions that you may not be totally happy with ('Ask'-toolbar, anyone?)
      Firefox now disables these by default, but gives you the option to keep them enabled if you want them.
      I find this a useful feature.
      On the other hand, there may be extensions that refuse to load after a major version number change, That is a pain, but in many cases, this will be remedied quickly.

    71. Re:You mean... by EvilBudMan · · Score: 1

      Well there you go. Can you think of a better name and better yet Microsoft is not using it.

  2. slow down cowboy! by Thud457 · · Score: 1

    I have Firefox fatigue.

    --

    the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

    1. Re:slow down cowboy! by gargeug · · Score: 1

      Seriously. All this article is making me feel is dread knowing a new barrage of requests to update firefox will soon be arriving, and I will have to ignore them for a few weeks so I don't lose any of my add-ons. I'm not a software developer, but I'm pretty sure dread is not a feeling developers should be striving to instill.

    2. Re:slow down cowboy! by MachDelta · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Try it anyways.
      I just upgraded and all of my plugins are working just fine.

      Firefox's biggest problem isn't anything technical - it's that once they DO fix an outstanding issue, no one seems to recognize it. And IMO it would be a crying shame to kill a competent browser because of bad PR.

    3. Re:slow down cowboy! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Firefox's biggest problem isn't anything technical - it's that once they DO fix an outstanding issue, no one seems to recognize it. And IMO it would be a crying shame to kill a competent browser because of bad PR.

      They've brought that on themselves.

      Firefox 4: The release that took away the status bar.
      Firefox 5: The release that broke all your extensions, just after you'd installed the one that got your status bar back.
      Firefox 6/7/8: The releases that talked about taking away the URL bar, the part of the URL bar that told you whether you were using http:/// or ftp:// or version numbers.

      Not a single Fx release has touted stability as the main feature of the release; all the buzz is about whatever angel-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin issue that the Fx UX team deems important that month.

      Disclaimer: I may have gotten my controversies wrong up there, but that's because I run 3.6.24 by choice. I'm not interested in a cheap copy of Chrome's UX. I'm even less interested in a development team that says "It works fine without extensions, so if you install extensions to replace the features we took out, don't blame us if it leaks RAM like a sieve". Fuck 'em.

    4. Re:slow down cowboy! by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 1

      Seriously. All this article is making me feel is dread knowing a new barrage of requests to update firefox will soon be arriving, and I will have to ignore them for a few weeks so I don't lose any of my add-ons.

      Lose them no more, young Jedi.

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
    5. Re:slow down cowboy! by RCL · · Score: 1

      And IMO it would be a crying shame to kill a competent browser because of bad PR.

      They deserve it. Firefox should be renamed as FireAsaDotzler. You know, that "community coordinator" that said that .com (and apparently .edu, .gov, .mil) users were never a priority.

    6. Re:slow down cowboy! by perryizgr8 · · Score: 1

      my problem with ff is that my decent laptop grinds to a fucking halt and the battery lasts only an hour when i run ff. otherwise its a decent browser. but then so is ie9, and it doesn't suck up all the juice of my lappy.

      --
      Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
    7. Re:slow down cowboy! by bahstid · · Score: 1

      IE9 is not a decent browser. If it was 2007 maybe, but its lack of compatibility with modern web standards makes the whole IE family a massive ball and chain holding back web progression. Please see if any of the other 'alternative' browsers give you better power consumption. IE is not the solution. For anything.

    8. Re:slow down cowboy! by perryizgr8 · · Score: 1

      ie9 is actually compatible with more or less the same amount of html5 standards as ff.

      --
      Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
    9. Re:slow down cowboy! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      http://people.mozilla.com/~prouget/ie9/ie9_vs_fx4.html

      And that's Firefox 4. In past year, situation has changed even further.

      Hell. Let's take JavaScript. Setting aside how Microsoft if not faked, then poorly optimised to the test for SunSpider...

      Here's my personal browser tests:
      http://m8y.org/tmp/kraken.xhtml

  3. Now with 50% more bugs FREE!! by M4n · · Score: 2

    I liked it better in the old days when all we had to deal with was huge memory leakage

    --
    In space no-one can hear your vuvuzela.
  4. No With Even More Suck! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I don't know what happened, but it looks like these guys have lost their direction.

    Adding a metric shit ton of features no one asked for or cares about and incrementing the major version number every other day is not a viable alternative to bug fixes, performance issues and memory foot print.

    I hope some one forks them. We need a good browser like Chrome, but with less Google.

    1. Re:No With Even More Suck! by binarylarry · · Score: 1

      Chrome-ium?

      --
      Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
    2. Re:No With Even More Suck! by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      Safari?

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    3. Re:No With Even More Suck! by flimflammer · · Score: 1

      So you want Chromium, then.

    4. Re:No With Even More Suck! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Adding a metric shit ton of features no one asked for or cares about

      Actually. Opt-in plugin enabling was programmed in because IE9 does it.

    5. Re:No With Even More Suck! by Tarlus · · Score: 1

      Iron?

      --
      /* No Comment */
    6. Re:No With Even More Suck! by SiMac · · Score: 1

      But without rapid release, apparently.

    7. Re:No With Even More Suck! by reub2000 · · Score: 1

      Except there aren't a metric shit-ton of changes being added, unless you count playing with the address bar to be a major change.

      For a while it seemed like Arora was going to make a great slim browser. I'm not sure if it's still being actively developed, seeing as there have been no releases in the last year.

    8. Re:No With Even More Suck! by CyberDragon777 · · Score: 1

      Well Aurora is a pretty nice browser :)

      --
      We both said a lot of things that you are going to regret.
  5. Don't bother by DesScorp · · Score: 5, Funny

    Firefox 9.0 will be out next week.

    --
    Life is hard, and the world is cruel
    1. Re:Don't bother by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm on the aurora channel. FF9 is nice!

    2. Re:Don't bother by flohuels · · Score: 1

      I expect Firefox 9 to come out when clicking the submit button for this comment...

    3. Re:Don't bother by dmacleod808 · · Score: 2

      I am on the Nightly channel. It does crash every once in awhile, but I get a lot less "Firefox is running but not responsding" after I have closed the browser.

      --
      There Can Be Only One...
    4. Re:Don't bother by The+Grim+Reefer2 · · Score: 1

      I expect Firefox 9 to come out when clicking the submit button for this comment.../quote

      Actually I thought Slashdot was a little slow with this story. I was prompted about the update earlier today and installed it w/o restarting Firefox. After installing a program that needed the computer to be restarted, I finally shutdown Firefox. Then some time later This story came up on Slashdot. Perhaps they should change the tag line from "News for nerds..." to "History for nerds..."

    5. Re:Don't bother by davidbrit2 · · Score: 0

      Firefox 9.0 will be out next week.

      And the release schedule is accelerating so rapidly, Firefox 10 will be out before the end of this week.

    6. Re:Don't bother by zAPPzAPP · · Score: 1

      When their update frequency breaks 2.6ghz, it's time to get a new pc, so my cpu can keep up with the counting.

    7. Re:Don't bother by MMC+Monster · · Score: 1

      Exactly how much "Firefox is running but not responding" are you expecting when you're not running the browser?

      --
      Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
    8. Re:Don't bother by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Don't even say that. With the way things are going, they will then have three versions to maintain. Just about everyone I know uses 3.6 solely because of the UI. I can see a similar splinter happen when they introduce the new UI in version 9. Then, they will have three camps to maintain. Oh well, that is what you get for not listening to your users (last I saw the stats put it at >1/3 of Firefox users were on 3.6 or older).

    9. Re:Don't bother by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Okay, it was moderately funny the first time, but this is at least the fourth time I am reading something similar under a Firefox article and it does not strike me as ha-ha anymore. I wonder why.

    10. Re:Don't bother by Mr+Z · · Score: 1

      That explains why I saw Firefox 11 yesterday, then.

    11. Re:Don't bother by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And will include headline features such as adding Bing search as a search bar option, a new default icon for new tabs, and the default disabling of add-ons installed by third-parties, again.

      Seriously, if they keep that last one out of any future updates should I assume they fixed third-party software's ability to install add-ons without my permission? If not, why would it no longer be an issue, or why is it one now?

      I actually wouldn't mind Mozilla disabling third party add-ons with updates if it wasn't for the rapid release of new updates, it would get old quick, regardless of how much sense it makes to do it.

    12. Re:Don't bother by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      My Firefox will soon go to eleven.

    13. Re:Don't bother by RoLi · · Score: 1

      The sad thing is that I'm not sure weather you are joking or not.

    14. Re:Don't bother by korgitser · · Score: 1

      We need to look into the future or it will bite us...
      What will happen after Firefox 95? Will it be Firefox 98 or Firefox NT? Will there be a Firefox XP? Okay, no one will bother with Firefox Vista, but when Firefox 7 comes out, I will give up on computing.

      --
      FCKGW 09F9 42
  6. Re:Mozilla's misplaced priorities by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    POKEY THE PENGUIN , is that you?

    Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!

  7. To bad it isn't 3.x by what2123 · · Score: 2

    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.23) Gecko/20110920 Firefox/3.6.23 - Enough said. The latest version/series that actually matters.

    1. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by amicusNYCL · · Score: 1

      Is Firefox 3.6 the new IE6 that people refuse to upgrade from?

      --
      "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
    2. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by theweatherelectric · · Score: 1

      Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.23) Gecko/20110920 Firefox/3.6.23 - Enough said.

      It could be that enough has been said, but it's unclear what you're saying. The latest version of Firefox runs faster and is more capable than Firefox 3.6. There's no downside. You really should try Firefox 8. If you're still too fearful of Firefox 8, then wait until Firefox 9 is released and try it. Firefox 9 brings big improvements to the JavaScript engine.

    3. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by Desler · · Score: 2

      Firefox 9 brings big improvements to the JavaScript engine.

      Yeah! It'll run that synthetic benchmark 5 nanoseconds faster! Rock on!

    4. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Firefox 3.6 runs on Win7? I'm surprised.

    5. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by theweatherelectric · · Score: 1

      Yeah! It'll run that synthetic benchmark 5 nanoseconds faster! Rock on!

      No. Comparing Firefox 9 to Firefox 7.0.1 on my system the SunSpider benchmark isn't much changed but Firefox 9 runs the V8 benchmark about 40% faster and the Kraken benchmark about 100% faster. Very much more than 5 nanoseconds. Broadway.js (an H.264 video decoder implemented in JavaScript) runs about 130% faster on my system in Firefox 9. Try the Broadway.js demo. It's interesting to consider that implementing video codecs in JavaScript may be practical sooner rather than later.

    6. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by edxwelch · · Score: 1

      It may run synthetic benchmarks faster, but real world permormance is a lot slower. I noticed a huge performance improvement when I downgraded to 3.6.

    7. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by RCL · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I personally will not upgrade from 3.6 (on my Windows machines at least) just because of plain stubbornness. I strongly feel that Mozilla as a whole and Asa Dotzler in particular need to be somehow punished for ignoring "LTS" (including corporate and academics) users altogether. I am all for "spread the Firefox hate" campaign.

      Call me a troll, but I was a loyal Firefox user since late 2003 (it was called "Firebird" then)... until they started to push versions upon me, destroying binary plugins and losing their identity as a stable browser in the process. Now I'm a Firefox hater.

    8. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by Dagger2 · · Score: 1

      It's the new XP -- that is, the last version before they started "improving" the UI.

      Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100914 Firefox/3.6.10

    9. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      Firefox 3.6 is dying according to some stastics unlike XP. It is true FF 3.6 stayed high until July but most users have switched to Chrome or IE if they have not upgraded.

      I recently reinstalled FF 3.6 and let me tell you I could feel its slowness and age compared to FF 6, Chrome, and yes even IE 9. It is clunky and no longer updated and while better than FF 4-7 it still is not great compared to the competition.

      I have heard FF 7 and higher is much better, but I will wait and see. With 6k active bugs I hate to say it is more like IE 6 in that it is a piece of **** than that people wont upgrade and love it blindly. I do not mean this trolling at all. It is a sad day when IE 9 performs faster with less ram than FF 6.x and earlier.

      There are still Windows Updates for IE 6 believe it or not at least which is why corporations love it thinking that means it is just as secure as something more 21st century. Sigh

    10. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The latest version of Firefox runs faster and is more capable than Firefox 3.6.

      Does it show the URL in the status bar when you hover over a link to make sure it's not Goatse? (Oh, wait, the Fx UX team doesn't think I need a status bar.)

      This 3.6.24 instance consumes less than 500MB of RAM. It has 80 tabs open, and is about three weeks old. Explain to me why I need to "upgrade"?

    11. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      Try another browser?

      I reinstalled FF 3.6 for kicks after a restore. I could feel its age and clunkiness compared to Chrome and even IE 9 believe it or not. There are more stable browsers each with their own strength and weaknesses. I forgive those who correct mistakes as I am using IE again which I wanted to burn on fire for years as well as Chrome. Chrome is fast and easier to read text, while I find IE 9 to be smoother GPU assisted rendering and fast scrolling. I have a nice video card and it shows. Chrome updates flash automatically and has more plugins than IE which is nice to setup for Grandmas or yoruself if you are lazy and stuborn. :-)

      If FF starts focusing on closing the 6000 open bugs I will start using it again. But I prefer a little more outdated browser that is more secure and graphical but that is just me.

    12. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by amicusNYCL · · Score: 1

      Is Firefox 3.6 the new IE6 that people refuse to upgrade from?

      It's the new XP -- that is, the last version before they started "improving" the UI.

      So then the answer is "yes". The "I refuse to adapt to change" crowd gets a new poster boy.

      Do you think you'll still be using Firefox 3.6 in 10 years? If not, then what's stopping you from upgrading now? Would it be easier to adapt going from XP to Vista to Win7 to Win8, or from XP straight to Win8?

      --
      "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
    13. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by 0123456 · · Score: 1

      So then the answer is "yes". The "I refuse to adapt to change" crowd gets a new poster boy.

      Ah, yes. It's not that the new UI sucks, it's that we 'refuse to adapt to change' unlike the so uber-l33t "change at any cost" crowd.

    14. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by theweatherelectric · · Score: 1

      Does it show the URL in the status bar when you hover over a link to make sure it's not Goatse? (Oh, wait, the Fx UX team doesn't think I need a status bar.)

      Yes. When you mouse over a link the URL pops up at the bottom of the window. This page may help you: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/what-happened-status-bar. Your complaint isn't a valid one.

    15. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by smellotron · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Do you think you'll still be using Firefox 3.6 in 10 years?

      No.

      If not, then what's stopping you from upgrading now?

      The tendency of the developers to mess with the UI means that I expect to weigh the value-add of the new features against learning whatever has changed in the new release. If nothing is bothering me now about the previous release, then I don't want to bother with this calculation. I have more important things to do with my life, like post on /. on threads bitching about web browsers.

      Would it be easier to adapt going from XP to Vista to Win7 to Win8, or from XP straight to Win8?

      I skipped Vista and had no problems with Win7. Back in the day, I wish I had skipped ME. I also skip non-LTS Ubuntu releases. Frankly, I hate OS upgrades on my personal machines.

      "I refuse to adapt to change"

      You're painting with broad, inaccurate, and needlessly offensive brush strokes there, buddy. Software exists to Get Shit Done, so change is not intrinsically good. If a new version of my web browser helps me to Get More Shit Done Faster, then I'll download it immediately. If a new version of my web browser instead destabilizes a tiny part of my life without improving my Get Shit Done Benchmark, then why should I adopt it at all?

    16. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by smellotron · · Score: 2

      Very much more than 5 nanoseconds.

      I think you're focusing on the wrong part of the GP's post. Those sound like impressive improvements for synthetic benchmarks, but unless they translate into similarly impressive improvements for UI responsiveness for real sites, it doesn't matter to the average user.

      It's interesting to consider that implementing video codecs in JavaScript may be practical sooner rather than later.

      True, but that's not an argument for updating your web browser today.

    17. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by Dagger2 · · Score: 1

      So then the answer is "yes". The "I refuse to adapt to change" crowd gets a new poster boy.

      I feel that a lot of the changes are outright bad (like moving the link hover URL display from the status bar to a tooltip -- which displays just above the now-empty big blank space in the status bar. How does that make any sense?). These are the changes I refuse to adapt to.

      Do you think you'll still be using Firefox 3.6 in 10 years? If not, then what's stopping you from upgrading now? Would it be easier to adapt going from XP to Vista to Win7 to Win8, or from XP straight to Win8?

      The great thing about Firefox is that it's open-source and its interface is easily malleable; I'll upgrade off of 3.6 just as soon as I've finished fixing all the things that irritate me in "Firefox Vista". In a similar vein, I don't expect to move to Windows 8 at all. If things get bad enough on XP that I'm forced to upgrade, it will probably be to Linux, where I have control over my UI.

    18. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by petermgreen · · Score: 2

      Does it show the URL in the status bar when you hover over a link to make sure it's not Goatse? (Oh, wait, the Fx UX team doesn't think I need a status bar.)

      While the status bar has gone the main information that used to be displayed there (hovering over links, page load progress etc) now pops up in one of the bottom corners of the window (usually the bottom left but if you move your mouse to the bottom left the notification moves to the bottom right. So it's not really that big a change for normal web browsing.

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    19. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by perryizgr8 · · Score: 1

      i like the new ui better than that of 3.6, but i still use it. because it does not periodically freeze up. nor does it constantly suck 10% of my cpu.

      --
      Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
    20. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by perryizgr8 · · Score: 1

      its you who needs to try 3.6 again. feel the responsiveness! and i've not encountered a non benchmark website that does not behave well on 3.6. upgrade to 3.6 and suddenly your laptop runs cooler, runs longer and ff responds consistently. no features are missing, almost all extensions work.
      there is no downsides, only upsides.

      --
      Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
    21. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hey, some of us want to run privacy-invasive browser-based OSs, and we can't transmit our personal information fast enough without those nanoseconds!

    22. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by 0ld_d0g · · Score: 1

      Well I use both 7 and Vista and at this moment there is very little difference between Win7 and Vista. You just think 7 is better because drivers have improved since and people are writing their applications to not spray random crap in system directories/requiring administrator privileges.

    23. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by RoLi · · Score: 1

      So then the answer is "yes". The "I refuse to adapt to change" crowd gets a new poster boy.

      Do you think you'll still be using Firefox 3.6 in 10 years? If not, then what's stopping you from upgrading now? Would it be easier to adapt going from XP to Vista to Win7 to Win8, or from XP straight to Win8?

      That does not make the slightest sense.

      I'll upgrade when I think the advantages outweight the cost and disadvantages. Fact is that Firefox 3.6 is doing everything I need, I don't know of any feature in Firefox 7-8-9-whatever that I really want and I've been burnt with the old "the new version is faster"-lie too often.

      Yes, I will probably try a new version because AND ONLY BECAUSE I want optimizations and performance. But I'm not really looking forward to it, so I will wait until the potential benefits outweight the costs and hassle.

    24. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by LordWabbit2 · · Score: 1

      I couldn't agree more, now that the driver issue is sorted out (mostly - some legacy crap still won't run). I was an early adopter of Vista and liked it a lot. I do agree though that it was more of a resource hog than xp, but I have always maintained a decent gaming rig and did not really notice any performance issues when changing to Vista.

      --
      There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
    25. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > There's no downside

      Three of my addons have been disabled since I migrated to 4.x and above. One additional one went last night with the FF8 release. There most definitely is a downside.

      You can argue that this is the fault of the developers of the addons, however the fact remains that functionality can be lost by upgrading and this *is* a downside. That Mozilla appear to have stopped security updates for the 3.6.x line also is a cause for concern.

    26. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by Tom · · Score: 1

      You're painting with broad, inaccurate, and needlessly offensive brush strokes there, buddy. Software exists to Get Shit Done, so change is not intrinsically good. If a new version of my web browser helps me to Get More Shit Done Faster, then I'll download it immediately. If a new version of my web browser instead destabilizes a tiny part of my life without improving my Get Shit Done Benchmark, then why should I adopt it at all?

      Amen.

      For all I care, they can shove all of the interface changes for the past two years where the sun don't shine. Most I try to ignore, some I actively undo (which total and utter idiot came up with hiding the http:/// in the address bar? Do you never copy&paste URLs from there, you nutcase?) and I can not think of a single one that I liked.

      But boring stuff like better HTML5 or CSS3 support - that doesn't give you headlines, and it isn't sexy, and probably not as much fun to code, but it actually improves this browser thing that you may have heard about, this "web page display" function that's included in Firefox, and that some people actually - imagine that - use.

      --
      Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
    27. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Agreed.

      When Chrome was new, a colleague was working on a treeview control in HTML and Javascript. He tested with several thousand treenodes, and we all expected Chrome to be faster, because that was one of the main arguments for Chrome. That it was so much faster doing javascript.

      IE finished the test in a couple of seconds.
      Firefox in about ten seconds.
      Chrome: Half a minute.

      He did some more tests, and we ended up with the conclusion that Chrome is fast as long as you stick to pure Javascript. Touch the DOM, and it's a completely different story.

      Great for Javascript benchmarking, not for much else.

    28. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by theweatherelectric · · Score: 1

      I think you're focusing on the wrong part of the GP's post.

      It was the only part of the GP's post.

      True, but that's not an argument for updating your web browser today.

      Luckily, I didn't advise him to update his web browser today. I advised him to update his web browser on the 20th of December i.e. around about when Firefox 9 will be released.

    29. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm really happy to hear I'm not the only one that won't upgrade. The next time I upgrade will probably be AWAY from Firefox.

    30. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by amicusNYCL · · Score: 1

      Everyone else replied with rational, logical arguments, so I guess I'll just respond to you. You make me feel like Superman for my ability to switch between Firefox, Chrome, and Opera without getting confused by the interface changes. If only there was some way that you or the community could change and customize the UI yourself, or even release your own version. That would be a nice feature. Maybe the Firefox team should look into the ability to customize the browser. Maybe you could suggest that to them. That way we wouldn't hear the vocal minority whining every time they release an update.

      --
      "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
    31. Re:To bad it isn't 3.x by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Lucky you! It always consume 10% of the CPU, no matter how many tabs, plugins and scripts are running? That is a dream come true!

  8. Firefox 8.0, now more unstable than ever! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    New changes:

    * Memory requirement increased from 4GB to 6GB (for up to four tabs).
    * Tab limit before crashing increased from 2 to 4.

    1. Re:Firefox 8.0, now more unstable than ever! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I currently have 33 tabs open and my current FF memory footprint is 900MB. This particular Firefox session has been running for about 3 weeks, although I hibernate this laptop every night. On my home computer my Firefox session has been running well over a month, I have about 40-60 tabs open at any given time. I can't see it at the moment, but it typically sits at around 1.2GB of memory. If you're actually having the experience you claim to be having, I think the problem is you, not Firefox.

  9. That's it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There are not that many features from the last version of 7.0 (even including those in the release notes). These release numbers boggle the mind. I was hoping this nonsense would stop once they caught up to Chrome; however, now it looks like Chrome has started this nonsense (or maybe they did it the whole time, I didn't pay attention until recently). Eventually, I hope they just switch to years or dates instead of the now meaningless version numbers.

  10. Re:Is Analingus the new Cunnilingus? by M4n · · Score: 1

    Making good use of your browser I see

    --
    In space no-one can hear your vuvuzela.
  11. Negative comments by frodo+from+middle+ea · · Score: 1, Insightful
    What's with all the negative comments ?
    My initial impression seems to be, this is very fast as compared to 7.0.1. Good work Firefox team, some of us still appreciate your hard work.

    Now only if my company would switch from the horrible HP Quality Center to Jira, I would be set.

    --
    for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
    1. Re:Negative comments by PRMan · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Easy, we are tired of our add-ons being disabled with every new "major" release even though they work just fine, thanks. Also, FF is so needy with all it's "update me, update me" nonsense. Leave me alone and let me do something other than attend to you.

      I switched to Chrome with NotScript and haven't looked back.

      --
      Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
    2. Re:Negative comments by bobcat7677 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The instability and other issues mentioned by others have spoiled many people's opinions about Firefox. For many of us, a new version just doesn't matter because any improvement would be too late to matter. Ironically, just this morning I personally reached my final level of frustration and decided to quit using Firefox for good. Having a new version to play with is not enough to make me try it again...mostly because I have completely lost faith in the ff dev team in general. Chrome has been my primary browser of choice for some time (not because of any love for Google, but because it works fast and reliably for me). Safari is my new secondary browser now that FF is going in the rubbish bin.

    3. Re:Negative comments by MobyDisk · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The sanity of the Firefox team is under question as of late. From what I can remember:

      * Incrementing the major version number with every slight tweak is annoying.
      * Worse yet, the reasoning behind it is stupid. They just want their version number to be big, like IE.
      * Major feature creep: they keep talking about the browser as an OS, and 3D acceleration, and stuff that has no purpose in a browser.
      * The long-standing issues about Firefox are being ignored: primarily memory and performance.

    4. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Oh for fuck's sake. This again? Firefox uses less memory then Chrome as it goes and as of late works just as fast. Version numbers are unimportant! Nobody gives a shit that Chrome is 14 (or 15 or whatever) now, but if here it's a problem. Look, the only diffference is the number. The updates are still the same way. And since FF9 you won't even notice them - silent updating like in Chromium.

    5. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      How is creating a whole project specifically to address memory issues "ignoring"? Your last point is bogus.

    6. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I respectfully disagree with memory and performance. The recent updates have cut my average memory usage by about a quarter for long browsing session and now it rarely spikes above 350MB on an 8GB system. Opening times have decreased significantly for me. Similarly I have not been affected by this third party addon business. The addons that stop me moving to Chrome are always updated to keep up with at least the beta channel. Notably noscript and similar privacy tools. The ideas about 3D acceleration have been around for a long time and Mozilla aren't the only culprits. Utilising the GPU does help significantly for some HTML5 demos. For most people the complaints are unfounded. I will continue to use Firefox :)

    7. Re:Negative comments by 9jack9 · · Score: 1

      I was a longtime Chrome user having been a Firefox user years ago, before Chrome. I switched to Firefox because I got tired of having my every mouse-click tracked by Google.

      Here's the thing about Firefox. I like it. I think it really rocks. I'm running eleven add-ons and I'm happy.

      And, yeah, the Firefox updates come quickly, but the Big G updates Chrome pretty frequently too.

    8. Re:Negative comments by ohnocitizen · · Score: 1

      Firefox deserves a lot of praise for finally putting in some protection against malicious 3rd party plugins. We've been asking for it, and they are delivering it. It also looks like they are working on speed improvements (hopefully outside of javascript, as most speed complaints seem to stem from the interface rather than the rendering engine). But you are so so right. As long as Firefox is an unstable mess (where an unstable plugin can down the whole browser, and without any plugins it still has issues running under Linux), it will continue to bleed users.

      - Posted from Chrome.

    9. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      mostly because I have completely lost faith in the ff dev team in general. Chrome has been my primary browser of choice for some time

      Just filed my first bug against firefox and in under a week it was fixed and part of Nightly. The Firefox developers are doing an outstanding job. Their JavaScript engine is now generally speaking twice as fast as the latest V8. Their hardware acceleration is top-notch, and so on.

      From your description it sounds like you are experiencing choice-supportive bias ie you feel a need to disparage Firefox to justify your choice.

    10. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      * The long-standing issues about Firefox are being ignored: primarily memory and performance.

      http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/09/firefox-7-arrives-with-reduced-memory-footprint.ars

      * Worse yet, the reasoning behind it is stupid. They just want their version number to be big, like IE.

      God, shut up, you moron.

    11. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Worse, this time during the update I got a new dialog window informing me that (if I understand the confusingly worded blurb) some add-ons that had been installed by third-parties would be disabled automatically unless I re-enabled them, while others I could choose to disable. I can only imagine the puzzled look of the average user when faced with a dialog with a dozen checkboxes on it in different states, asked to choose which they think they need.

      Firefox updates didn't used to be too bad, you just clicked okay and off you went. Then our add-ons started breaking because of this needless rapid major version cycle. Now you get configuration screens that could easily break functionality if mishandled.

      I'm a long-term fan of Firefox, but the update process has become a farce IMO.

    12. Re:Negative comments by kripkenstein · · Score: 4, Informative
      Hi there, I'm a developer at Mozilla. Some responses to your comments:

      The sanity of the Firefox team is under question as of late. From what I can remember:

      * Incrementing the major version number with every slight tweak is annoying.

      I understand that this annoys some people. But both Chrome and Firefox do it now, and benefits and detriments are well known. It's not a perfect approach, but it does have its advantages. I don't think both Google and Mozilla are 'insane' ;)

      * Worse yet, the reasoning behind it is stupid. They just want their version number to be big, like IE.

      The main reason for Chrome and Firefox doing this is to get improvements faster to users. Rapid releases allow that.

      Mozilla also has the reason that it is following Google's lead. Google started with this version numbering scheme, and not inventing a new one is better for everyone - less confusion.

      * Major feature creep: they keep talking about the browser as an OS, and 3D acceleration, and stuff that has no purpose in a browser.

      That is a long discussion, for sure! But this is nothing to do with Firefox. All browsers are including 3D acceleration (well, except for IE) and other OS-like features. Google is even pushing native code in the browser (which I think is taking things too far).

      * The long-standing issues about Firefox are being ignored: primarily memory and performance.

      We are working very hard on those issues. If you try this release, I think you'll see significant improvements on both issues, and there are even more in the pipeline for the versions coming up afterwards.

    13. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      *thumbs up*
       
      Jira is awesome!

    14. Re:Negative comments by bertok · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Oh I don't know, how about ignoring the need for MSI installers and Group Policy support for seven fucking years?

      Every time there's an article in Slashdot about Firefox, there's at least one highly voted comment from someone complaining about Firefox being basically unmanageable on a corporate network.

      I'm not talking about some massive effort to resolve complex issues like performance or memory, which have hundreds of subtle causes that have to be chased down and individually fixed. Creating an MSI requires simply an open source toolkit and a configuration file for the build process. For Active Directory Group Policy support, only a text file is needed and some minor tweaks to configuration parameter loading. The main installer doesn't even have to change! Just have an "enterprise downloads" section on the webpage.

      The solution is simple and quick, it would massively increase the potential market for Firefox, but these feature requests will not be implemented. Not now, not ever, just no. The Firefox team doesn't do icky and boring technical stuff. Instead, they spend their valuable time on important things that clearly a lot of people need, like 3D graphics in the web browser.

    15. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Plugins is a bit odd. They've had plugin process isolation like Chrome even in Firefox 3.6. If you're using Firefox for Android, the latest alphas also have process-per-tab.
      https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis
      I found this out when trying a WebGL demo. Apparently WebGL is the new way to create crashes.

      Hell. The only thing bringing down Firefox these days for me is my having force enabled WebGL on this video card with its sucky fglrx driver, and that crashes Chromium too (actually, Chromium crashes a lot more often on WebGL, and even on those fairly innocent javascript demos like those from emscripten that *don't* use WebGL - not sure what's going on there. V8 being fragile I guess).
      Well, luckily WebGL crashing isn't horribly frequent. Seems related to how long compiz has been running.

      Haven't had a plugin crash on my Linux machines in, well, years? I can't remember the last time.

      You can try about:crashes if you are getting some, and link the world to them.

    16. Re:Negative comments by BenJury · · Score: 1

      > * Incrementing the major version number with every slight tweak is annoying.
      > * Worse yet, the reasoning behind it is stupid. They just want their version number to be big, like IE.

      Why, just why does this matter?! Whats the difference in going 5, 6, 7, 8, instead of 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 1.8? None. It makes no difference at all. If it annoys you so much, just knock up an addon that puts a decimal point in from of the release number....

      Frankly as a geek, you should know integer versioning is far more efficient than some floating point number, so you should be all for it.

      --
      Blatant Advert: Android Apps!
    17. Re:Negative comments by bobcat7677 · · Score: 2

      No, I really liked firefox's features and was loyal user for a very long time. Chrome has quite a few quirks, but has proven itself dependable for me. And like most users, I want something core to my workday like a browser to JUST WORK. I don't have the time or patience to be troubleshooting bugs and filing bug reports on it. My wife is even less forgiving: she doesn't have the time, patience, or wherewithal to be filing bug reports. And she is even more dependent on her browser to get her work done and make money then my job. No, quite certainly the perception and experience drove the decision in this case. Yes, the ff dev team is very active...but then maybe that is the problem? A code base that changes all the time is by definition not stable.

    18. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      [quote]I understand that this annoys some people. But both Chrome and Firefox do it now, and benefits and detriments are well known. It's not a perfect approach, but it does have its advantages. I don't think both Google and Mozilla are 'insane' ;)[/quote]

      There is no advantage. Your version number is suppose to communicate something to the user. A major version change means you have something new and significant. A minor version means you are making a small tweak or minor refinement. You are basically getting rid of minor version numbers which means you've basically broken this numbering scheme. This does nothing but give users less information. I've never seen any good argument for this, and I've looked really hard. There isn't a good one, either, it's just stupid and everyone here knows it.

      Chrome gets away with it because no one expects Chrome to be robust nor did anyone really care what version it was. It was like a child that didn't know better. Firefox is now mature (whether the FF team likes it or not) and should act like a mature product. The improvements made to it, as far as I can tell, don't warrant major version changes.

      Firefox has now reverted to a stupid version scheme and I hope someone forks it to bring back some sanity.

    19. Re:Negative comments by bobcat7677 · · Score: 1

      I don't know what is causing the issues. But both my wife and I rather consistently had issues on 4 different machines running three different versions of windows and has just gotten worse with each new version of FF we got. We don't run much of anything in the way of plugins, and our usage patterns and sites visited tend to be very different. At the same time I can run Chrome all day long without issues and it meets me needs equally well if not better. So why should I spend any valuable time to give FF another chance?

    20. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Right, it's nice you get new features out to the people quick. But, how does incrementing a different number help with that? You can't rapid release with minor versions?

    21. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We are working very hard on those issues. If you try this release, I think you'll see significant improvements on both issues, and there are even more in the pipeline for the versions coming up afterwards.

      Too little, too late. This should have been done before Firefox left 3.0. That it took SEVERAL YEARS to get around to this extremely severe problem is why I dumped Firefox. Permanently.

    22. Re:Negative comments by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      I'm not using Chrome either. I don't mind patch releases but I don't need new features every month.

      At the very least make your older browsers easily available for download! Support FF 3 and 4 but with security patches. Give your customers a choice.

    23. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I recently "up"graded to Firefox 3.6. Best move I've made in a long time. Sane UI, everything works... it's great! Seriously. Annoying features gone. Happy features back again. Try it. It is like the opposite of a burglar coming to your house -- when you keep discovering bad things for days after -- but with Firefox 3 you keep discovering good things you thought were lost and gone forever, or even forgot you once had, until you discover to your delight you have them back again.

    24. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, who knows, maybe it *is* a plugin. Despite plugin containers, some *do* cause bugs.
      Heck, Microsoft was infamous for its unstable and vulnerable .NET plugin for Firefox.
      And, yes, virus writers did target Firefox with their hooks, those caused a ridiculous number of crashes when I was browsing the server about:crashes links to.
      Fortunately Firefox 8 does warn about 3rd party plugins and addons now, and disables them by default.

      But, without you actually, oh, firing up one of those Firefox profiles you are dissing and pasting a crash link from about:crashes, this is all just random speculation, and will have to stay that way.

    25. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Mozilla also has the reason that it is following Google's lead. Google started with this version numbering scheme, and not inventing a new one is better for everyone - less confusion.

      Yes, less confusion...thats why you used the new one invented by Google.

    26. Re:Negative comments by Isaac+Remuant · · Score: 1

      Unfortunately, many people have set their opinions and that's where they will stay.

      The bad thing is that they just can't keep themselves from trying to convince everyone how bad Firefox is and how it terribly broke their addons. After, they claim to switch to Chrome (as if you were forbidden from using more than one browser) but don't cite how chrome's extensions do the job of the alleged dead FF addons. They even cite addons that have worked for a while (eg: FF 6 onwards).

      I regularly use Firefox, Chrome and Opera (FF being my main browser though) and have IE and Safari just for testing and I think the feedback loop between all of them is very interesting. The other four have even made IE a much more decent browser than what we had come to expect (although you still need to deal with some of it's drama.)

      The version number is lame but also a somewhat understandable marketing issue but people keep pretending it's a a complete deal breaker to their use of Firefox (how?) and forget all the things Mozilla stands for.

      Anyway, thanks for Firefox & Thunderbird.

      --
      "Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
    27. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The version numbering system does not bother me. But it does bother me that FF tends to disable plugins with just about every release. I think it would be better if intended changes could be listed on an easy to find source that developers could look through and determine if it will effect their plugin. On top of that let a few revisions pass before you make any significant change to the way the API works and possibility warn users a few versions in advance that changes to a specific API may break a plugin. That way users have time to bug developers and keep plugins working through more updates.
      I am still a FF supporter and I still use FF as my main browser. But if you keep breaking the plugins I regularly use then you may loose me as well.

    28. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      So let me see if I understand this correctly.

      A number of perfectly legitimate complaints get raised by users comparing recent versions of a popular web browser to earlier versions of itself, expressing specific desires and outcomes, and the official reasoning for the unpopular and unwanted changes from the developer is, "but Google does, too!"

      Is that about right, or am I missing something?

      Hint: People like Firefox because it ISN'T Chrome, or Safari, or Internet Explorer.

    29. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

      Fuck you. Fuck your idiotic release schedule, fuck you for breaking my add-ons just so you can pretend you're keeping up with Chrome. Fuck the entire Mozilla Foundation for turning the only open source browser with any promise into an utter piece of shit. "Working very hard my ass," some of those memory leaks have been around since 4.0. Incidentally, notice that decimal? You could have MADE POINT RELEASES JUST AS FUCKING RAPIDLY AND NOT BROKE ANYTHING. That's where you're entire dumbass argument falls apart. The only, the _only_ justification you have for doing it is that "Well, that's what Google's doing so we're going to suck their dicks from now on!" Well when did the Foundation become about licking Google's boots and emulating their every move, hmm?

      I'll be using Chrome from now on and I won't be looking back, and it's because of people like you. People like you are the fucking poison of the Mozilla Foundation, you and Dotzler both, and you're the reason that I would never install a piece of software coming from your camp of fucking clueless marketroids again. Now go back to your fucking Mozillanazi mailing lists and stop pretending like you give a shit about what the community thinks. The only thing you're worried about is shoving your nose up Google's ass as far as you can get it without having your empty fucking heads submerged. We've moved on. I hope the project's funding dies up and Google cuts you off. I hope you lose your fucking job and Mozilla disappears into the past where it fucking belongs.

    30. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      MSI is bad technology that MS refuses to fix.

      Trust me, I've had to deal with the fallout of some of its bad choices.

    31. Re:Negative comments by petermgreen · · Score: 1

      Thing is if a plugin can install itself it can probablly also add itself to the "enabled plugins" list.

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    32. Re:Negative comments by perryizgr8 · · Score: 1

      its because of firefox's refusal to fix bugs and instead adding a crapload of new features (that work too slow to actually matter) that has hurt me a lot. i have to freaking use ie9! and ff 3.6 when i get fed up of ie. i think someone should buy up mozilla and burn up their hq, making the employees watch as all their life work is destroyed. only then will justice be served.

      --
      Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
    33. Re:Negative comments by perryizgr8 · · Score: 1

      is there actually any difference in cpu usage?? no?? then its the whole project that is bogus, not the gp's last point.

      --
      Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
    34. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Should have done what Patrick did for Slackware back in the day. When the others were not incrementing by .01, he just jumped from 4 to 7.

    35. Re:Negative comments by perryizgr8 · · Score: 1

      I understand that this annoys some people. But both Chrome and Firefox do it now, and benefits and detriments are well known. It's not a perfect approach, but it does have its advantages. I don't think both Google and Mozilla are 'insane' ;)

      lol! person accused of being insane says he's not!

      Mozilla also has the reason that it is following Google's lead. Google started with this version numbering scheme, and not inventing a new one is better for everyone - less confusion.

      you know what would have been less confusing?? yeah, not changing the versioning scheme in the first place. but who'd think of that, right?

      That is a long discussion, for sure! But this is nothing to do with Firefox. All browsers are including 3D acceleration (well, except for IE) and other OS-like features. Google is even pushing native code in the browser (which I think is taking things too far).

      you are a fucking DEVELOPER at mozilla???! ie was the first browser to have fully accelerated browsing. no surprise that you guys ruined a great browser. i guess there's no hope left now, with people like you working their asses off.

      --
      Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
    36. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I understand that this annoys some people. But both Chrome and Firefox do it now...

      Mozilla also has the reason that it is following Google's lead...

      All browsers are including 3D acceleration (well, except for IE) and other OS-like features. Google is even pushing native code in the browser...

      Ahhh, that makes it much clearer now -- Mozilla is doing it because Google is doing it.

      If I wanted Chrome, why wouldn't I just download Chrome?

    37. Re:Negative comments by Rockoon · · Score: 1

      The last time the Mozilla team started playing fast and loose with version numbers was when they skipped Netscape 5.0 and went straight to 6.0.

      We all know how THAT turned out.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    38. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The main reason for Chrome and Firefox doing this is to get improvements faster to users. Rapid releases allow that.

      Are you seriously arguing that the exact same code releases would have gotten to users later if you has called them 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4 instead of 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, and 8.0?

      Google started with this version numbering scheme, and not inventing a new one is better for everyone - less confusion.

      Mozilla did invent a new version numbering scheme which makes no sense, and the users are rightfully reaming you for it. The entire software industry, including Mozilla, has followed the same versioning scheme since the 1980s:

      • Major releases: will break third-party software and require retraining users.
      • Minor releases: include significant improvements in functionality and are fully compatible with the major release.
      • Point releases: bug fixes and minor changes in functionality.

      and your argument is that following the same version scheme as every other programmer in the world would be "inventing a new one". Instead you implicitly tell everyone that you've spent years making major changes to the browser and everyone is going to have to adjust their expectations of what Firefox is supposed to do. Then two weeks later you implicitly tell everyone that you've spent years since that last release making major changes to the browser and everyone is going to have to adjust their expectations from the last time of what Firefox is supposed to do.

      Then two weeks later you implicitly tell everyone that you've spent years since that last release making major changes to the browser and everyone is going to have to adjust their expectations from the last time of what Firefox is supposed to do.

      Then two weeks later you implicitly tell everyone that you've spent years since that last release making major changes to the browser and everyone is going to have to adjust their expectations from the last time of what Firefox is supposed to do.

      And you wonder why the users don't respect you.

    39. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      firefox 3 fully updated still beats RAM usage without a doubt when using multiple tab... How can a company go backwards??? My only guess is by adding/changing some new feature that honestly does not give any noticeably true advantages than what FF3 already offers.

    40. Re:Negative comments by _xeno_ · · Score: 1

      Google started with this version numbering scheme, and not inventing a new one is better for everyone - less confusion.

      But not "no confusion," I note. Like what would have happened if you hadn't bothered changing the versioning scheme for absolutely no useful benefit. (Yeah, sure, there are benefits, they're just not, well, useful. At all.)

      That is a long discussion, for sure! But this is nothing to do with Firefox. All browsers are including 3D acceleration

      Ah, yes, the 3D acceleration, which is presumably the reason Firefox now visibly tears when you try and scroll through pages. And the reason I have to remember to close my browser before using any 3D games. Oh, and it screws up font rendering on Windows, so that's a bonus too.

      We are working very hard on those issues. If you try this release, I think you'll see significant improvements on both issues, and there are even more in the pipeline for the versions coming up afterwards.

      And you'd be completely wrong. At best, I have seen no improvement in Firefox since - well, ever. It's stayed about the same. Right now, Firefox is using 30% CPU for no reason I can figure out (apparently writing a comment takes a lot of processing power?) and nearly 550MB of RAM. That's about what I recall Firefox 3 using.

      Literally the only reason I still use Firefox these days is for NoScript and AdBlock Plus. Their Chrome counter-parts aren't quite as good. There's certainly nothing about Firefox itself that keeps me using it.

      --
      You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
    41. Re:Negative comments by kripkenstein · · Score: 2

      There is no advantage. Your version number is suppose to communicate something to the user. A major version change means you have something new and significant. A minor version means you are making a small tweak or minor refinement.

      A major version number often signifies potentially incompatible changes, while minor version numbers keep stable APIs and functionality. In that context, Firefox and Chrome bumping the major version number is correct: These 6-week updates are quick, but they do change functionality in ways that break stuff (that is, websites render differently, potentially wrongly).

      I do agree there are downsides to this numbering! But I am just saying it has a certain logic, and advantage.

    42. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why can't you implement a geek-mode in the options?

      When disabled, all marketing stuff (including inflated version numbers and shiny 3D GUIs) are just as flashy as some in the Mozilla team wants. It can also hide lots of the current settings (such as which SSL-standards to support, which default programs to use, etc).

      When enabled, the settings menu is extended with options such as:
              * more granular settings for javascript and similar technologies (perhaps site-based, like you do cookies now?)
              * a "Screw Google" checkbox that, when selected, disables everything related to google
              * maybe a better GUI for about:config? (not shiny graphics, but maybe one that includes the documentation about each option?)

      There's many more geeky features that would be nice, but you get my point. In my experience, many geeks just want a standards-conformant browser that they can rely on without so many bells and whistles.

      If you did this, I would never leave FireFox (except if the OpenBSD team did their own CSS3-compliant browser) :)

    43. Re:Negative comments by kripkenstein · · Score: 1

      Hiding the version number with an option sounds dangerous - how will people file bug reports? Replacing the version number likewise.

      A GUI for about:config? No geek needs a GUI :P (proud Linux commandline user here ;)

      Anyhow, if you don't like some of the shiny features, you can disable them. Or you can create an addon that disables them. We could add an option to disable "shiny stuff", but we would have a hard time agreeing on what is shiny and what isn't (your list is different from mine, for example). But the point is that anyone can customize the browser however they want.

    44. Re:Negative comments by smellotron · · Score: 1

      Frankly as a geek, you should know integer versioning is far more efficient than some floating point number, so you should be all for it.

      As a geek, you should recognize that (version) 1.8 is not a floating-point number, but a tuple of integers.

    45. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The main reason for Chrome and Firefox doing this is to get improvements faster to users. Rapid releases allow that.

      No, automatic updates allow that. Changing the major version number for no good reason is insane. Yes, both Google and Mozilla are insane!

    46. Re:Negative comments by cstdenis · · Score: 1

      A GUI for about:config? No geek needs a GUI :P (proud Linux commandline user here ;)

      Built-in links to the documentation site would be nice.

      Anyhow, if you don't like some of the shiny features, you can disable them

      No, you can not. That is the problem.

      --
      1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
    47. Re:Negative comments by Waccoon · · Score: 1

      A lot has been said about the rapid increase of version numbers, but that's not the real problem.

      Problem: people don't want to update Firefox because they don't know if their extensions will work.

      Solution: allow the updater to check if the extensions are compatible with the new version you are trying to install. If Firefox can check if extensions are compatible with the currently installed version and can check if updates to said extensions are available, why can't the updater do the check before an update?

      Firefox: Great news! All your extensions will work!
      User: Great! Now I can update with confidence.

      Think about how many political and PR issues would be solved with this one little feature. It can't possibly be that difficult to implement.

      Have the managers at Mozilla lost their creative edge?

    48. Re:Negative comments by ElusiveJoe · · Score: 2

      I don't think both Google and Mozilla are 'insane' ;)

      Yes, they fucking are. Not companies as a whole, but some of their people close to the top are clearly incompetent, trying to save their asses by proposing "trendy" features. They do not care about the product, only about getting the promotion.

    49. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Bro, if a browser can't support WebGL then it's a shit browser. Sorry.

    50. Re:Negative comments by L4t3r4lu5 · · Score: 1

      You've pretty much proved the GP's point; You've taken a slender, fast, and efficient browsing experience and added the bloat which put me off your competitors for so long, for no other reason than "they're doing it, therefore we should".

      I used to use Firefox as my main browser, with IE for pages which were broken (and this was very infrequent). Now that addons are broken every month, JS execution is much faster in Chrome, and I don't particularly want to have three browsers installed on my system, Chrome has replaced FF, and I think a lot of people have done the same.

      Take back development to where it should be; Concentrate on making the browser fast, sleek, and efficient, not bloated and resource hogging like the others.

      --
      Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
    51. Re:Negative comments by RoLi · · Score: 2

      I understand that this annoys some people. But both Chrome and Firefox do it now, and benefits and detriments are well known. It's not a perfect approach, but it does have its advantages. I don't think both Google and Mozilla are 'insane' ;)

      If I wanted Firefox to be like Chrome, I would use Chrome.

      If you try to get 100% of users you will end up getting nobody. In other words: Do things differently than Chrome when it is about things that "are not perfect, but have some advantages".

      The main reason for Chrome and Firefox doing this is to get improvements faster to users. Rapid releases allow that.

      Breaking extensions is not an improvement. I understand that they have to be broken sometime, but that should be maybe very 5 years or so, not 5 times a year.

      We are working very hard on those issues. If you try this release, I think you'll see significant improvements on both issues, and there are even more in the pipeline for the versions coming up afterwards.

      I will wait for a LTS-version.

    52. Re:Negative comments by BenJury · · Score: 1

      Which would be harder to parse and store and a straight int32?

      --
      Blatant Advert: Android Apps!
    53. Re:Negative comments by Xest · · Score: 1

      "These 6-week updates are quick, but they do change functionality in ways that break stuff (that is, websites render differently, potentially wrongly)."

      Right, which demonstrates why getting changes to users quicker is stupid, because you're effectively saying "Well, we've basically just decided to break stuff more frequently".

      This is why software historically has stuck such breaking changes in together in a single large update, rather than releasing them regularly as updates. It makes it a nightmare for the enterprise if they're having to fix stuff you break every fucking month, even worse when Mozilla has put absolutely no real effort into enterprise support in the first place.

      Breaking stuff often isn't something to be proud of. It's something to be ashamed of. That's why Firefox is losing ground again now.

    54. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't think you realize how your attempts to follow Chrome are coming across.

      Once it was a choice between Chrome and Firefox. Some people wanted something new and different, while others wanted to stick with the established UI and add-ons that made Firefox so popular.

      Now it's becoming a choice between Chrome and a Chrome-knockoff. The people who wanted something new and different aren't going to hop back, and the users who stuck around have less reason to stay each and every day. When the 3.6 line hits EOL, I suspect I'll be jumping ship.

    55. Re:Negative comments by Tom · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Mozilla also has the reason that it is following Google's lead. Google started with this version numbering scheme, and not inventing a new one is better for everyone - less confusion.

      What was wrong with the old one? You know, major and minor numbers, increase the major number only on significant, major changes? Add a third number for bugfixes and cosmetic updates?

      They've thrown out a perfectly good numbering scheme because some dofus in marketing has read a psychology book too many and convinced himself that "bigger == better" will convince the minds of more consumers.

      I understand that this annoys some people.

      No, you don't. This doesn't annoy people, it actively pushes them to change the default browser that they've been using for a decade. You are losing your most loyal users. I hope you remembered to list that under "detriments", and you have something more valuable under "benefits", though I can't imagine what that would be.

      As little as a year ago, I'd be telling anyone who uses anything else that I'd recommend Firefox. Today, I shut up unless they use IE, in which case I tell them to use any other browser of their choice.

      --
      Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
    56. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      u mad?

      Seriously, though, why hold back? Make another post where you really tell them how you fell. I don't think you quite got the message through in your last post. Put some emotion behind it!

      Or, in short: Fuck off, and use whatever you like.

    57. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The thing that absolutely grates on me with the new upgrade scheme is that it breaks plugins. Important plugins. Because I'd rather have the plugins than the new tweaks, I'm still using FF 5 and have no plans to upgrade until the plugins I use are compatible.

    58. Re:Negative comments by kripkenstein · · Score: 1

      You are correct, that would be a great feature! It is being worked on, but it actually is not that easy to implement. Hopefully it'll be released soon.

    59. Re:Negative comments by homes32 · · Score: 1

      * Worse yet, the reasoning behind it is stupid. They just want their version number to be big, like IE.

      The main reason for Chrome and Firefox doing this is to get improvements faster to users. Rapid releases allow that.

      explain to me why you can't do a rapid release cycle with a meaningful version system instead of incrementing only major version numbers? is there some standard somewhere that requires you to update the major version number for every release if you are using a rapid release cycle? because I'm failing to see how incrementing the major version number gets improvements out any faster.

    60. Re:Negative comments by kripkenstein · · Score: 2

      Breaking stuff often isn't something to be proud of. It's something to be ashamed of. That's why Firefox is losing ground again now.

      Firefox isn't losing market share - it's been flat for a while. (So, growing in absolute numbers, but not in percent of the market as it grows.)

      Chrome is also doing these fast updates that break websites, but is growing in market share. So the issues are more complicated here I think. I do agree though that breaking stuff is bad! Both Firefox and Chrome are doing their best to avoid that, but with rapid updates, it's impossible to avoid entirely.

    61. Re:Negative comments by kripkenstein · · Score: 1

      Chrome (and later Firefox) bumps the major version number because these rapid updates do change functionality and potentially break things. So this is technically the right change to make, even if it seems odd due to the speed of these releases. If only the minor version number were updated, the complaints would be "things broke with a minor update!" - and those complaints would be justified.

    62. Re:Negative comments by Xest · · Score: 1

      Chrome is gaining and Firefox isn't because Chrome brings performance and features people actually want even though it breaks things, whereas Firefox just breaks things and brings crap people don't want whilst managing to remain a massive memory hog.

    63. Re:Negative comments by _0xd0ad · · Score: 1

      Third-party plugins are supposed to be able to install themselves.

      Third-party plugins are not supposed to add themselves to the "enabled plugins" list, and doing so would probably be a quick way to get their plugin added to the plugin blocklist.

    64. Re:Negative comments by Bengie · · Score: 1

      why would you have to close your browser before playing any 3d games?

    65. Re:Negative comments by _xeno_ · · Score: 1

      Because if I don't, the area behind the window where Firefox is will tear. (Actually, it will lag behind the rest of the display by several frames.)

      I suspect that this won't happen with games that claim the entire GPU to themselves. But in every modern games I've tried, even when fullscreened, Firefox will slow them down and create artifacts if you leave it running.

      --
      You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
    66. Re:Negative comments by GerryHattrick · · Score: 1

      I haven't really understood this thread, as Firefox works very well for me. So I looked at Help | About, and yes, it does say '3.6'. Can't we have a LTS guarantee?

    67. Re:Negative comments by MPAndonee · · Score: 1

      Having your browser update itself, and then finding ALL of your add-ons (which you, yourself installed, such as ADBLOCK) broken, sucks big time. Having that happen repeatedly, sucks big time. Yes, I understand their reasoning for doing it. But the Mozilla developers, need to let me choose and pick if I want to go from 6.0 --> 7.0 --> 8.0. And if during these upgrades I want my add-ons to be broken. Some of them work fine, once I turn them back-on. Their process of releases IS WRONG. I am now switching to CHROME and am not looking back.

      --
      Nothing to see here -- move along now...
    68. Re:Negative comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Agreed on the actual effect. I switched to Chrome, partly because of this inane release behaviour, and partly because of Firefox's waning performance.

  12. new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by ClioCJS · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I finally bit the bullet. After making probably 50 tweets complaining about various firefox crashes over the years.... I switched to Chrome even though they don't have a zoom plugin as good as NoSquint. (I compute exclusively on a 52-inch HDTV that I sit 5 feet away from, so my font needs are comparable to a visually disabled person {which I am not}).

    I use Greasemonkey every day. Greasemonkey is built into chrome. Not firefox. And when they auto-upgrade-without-permission to a new version that doesn't support it, I lose functionality that I use every day. Not smart.

    But it was the crashing every 10 minutes that finally did me in. I could live with the "1 gig of RAM per 15 tabs", even though I knew other browsers could do 50 tabs with the same memory. I mean: Buy more ram. Restart firefox to free up the leaked memory. There were solutions.

    But no solution to crashing every 10 minutes. No. The best was when I downgraded and the problems persisted.

    I'm so glad I finally took the plunge and switched to google chrome. I'd been avoiding it because the plugin/extension offerings were not previously sufficient. ANd it's true, I still have to open Firefox to use DownloadHelper to download YouTube videos (almost daily). There are Chrome equivalents, but I haven't found one that doesn't require you re-typing the title into the filename, and I'm quite willing to open a browser to prevent myself from having to type a long filename.

    but in general - Firefox can take its shitty browser and shove it into whatever incompatible plugin it keeps up it's bloated ass.

    --
    -Clio
    Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
    Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
    1. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I did this same thing. FF VI (what is this? a JRPG?) crashed every 10-15 minutes for me. So now it's chrome for me. I miss noscript. That's it.

    2. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by Tumbleweed · · Score: 2

      Yes, switch from Firefox because of the 6 week release schedule, and go to Chrome ... who started the 6 week release schedule. Only they rarely ship new features, unlike Firefox, that the user can actually see.

      Chrome now uses *substantially* more memory than Firefox, as of FF 7.

      I would say you most likely have some bad FF extensions and/or a corrupted profile.

      FF8 was the smoothest upgrade for me yet. Lazy tab loading is a godsend.

    3. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by DiabolicallyRandom · · Score: 1

      here is a great youtube downloader. you might have to restart the browser a time or two to get it working. but it is very convenient. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/linimbofbhfiebblpncbhgefaolagapd?hl=en-US

    4. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by ewieling · · Score: 1

      I switched to Chrome when Firefox "dropped support" for 3.x, or whatever the last version is which removed the "traditional" interface and replaced it with one that minimal interface which looks like Chrome. I had to give up a few plugins, but nothing I can't live without. My biggest issues with Chrome is that Flash doesn't seem to work. As I don't do much of anything which requires Flash, it isn't a big deal.

      --
      I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
    5. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by Crudely_Indecent · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Crashes every 10 minutes huh... You've got to be doing something wrong. I leave a firefox browser open for weeks on end. Occasionally, when I reboot for a software update, firefox gets shut down. I don't remember rebooting last week, and I only shut down firefox today because of the update.

      How much porn does it take to crash firefox in 10 minutes?

      --


      "Lame" - Galaxar
    6. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by ClioCJS · · Score: 1

      with the exception of DownloadHelper and NoSquint, I'm running the excact same set of extensions here. Firefox has been known to leak memory like a sieve. Just because your instance of something doesn't demonstrate a bug doesn't mean it's bug free. Now on to the crashing - Chrome has only crashed once in the past week, a crash tied to my explorer.exe crashing. Firefox never, even in it's good (3-4) versions, lasted that long, ever, regardless of extensions. Not on any of the 5+ computers running 3 different operating systems that I've used. My wife switched a long, long time ago, but I was hanging on because I liked NoSquint so much. I've actually seen Firefox use a full 8G before {obvious memory leak, you can see it climbing}. Firefox has major issues in 1920x1080 resolution that do not manifest in lower resolutions. Issues such as failing to be able to even display large-photograph JPGs, while simultaneously EVERY other browser (I have 5 installed) could.

      --
      -Clio
      Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
      Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
    7. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by ClioCJS · · Score: 1
      I actually view my porn in another browser, only an ameteur would view porn in his primary browser! The other browser can manage 300+ tabs with less memory than firefox with 20 tabs. No, I won't say which one it is. ;)

      Remember: A bug not manifesting in your instance of a program is not the same as the program being bug free. Firefox craps out at 1920x1080, failing to display JPGs at a JPG-ending URL if the system is distressed certain ways. Ways that don't affect the other 4 browsers I tested it on. But you know what? Now that I've switched to *anything that isn't firefox*, the problems are gone.

      --
      -Clio
      Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
      Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
    8. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by Desler · · Score: 1

      Only they rarely ship new features, unlike Firefox, that the user can actually see.

      So what? Featureitis is not a good thing. Secondly, mozilla is only adding all those new features in a desperate attempt to look relevant whilst they lose marketshare continually to chrome.

    9. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by ClioCJS · · Score: 1

      i think the current day "install_flash_player.exe" successfully installs it in current day Chrome, i.e. if you're starting from a fresh chrome install like I did. I'm not sure though. Flash can be a fucking bitch some/all of teh time. But when stuff is out there, I want to be able to view it, regardless of my opinion of the format, so...

      --
      -Clio
      Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
      Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
    10. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by Zhiroc · · Score: 1

      I was getting tired of FF4/5 using 800 MB of memory, so I decided to upgrade to FF7. Now it grows to 1.5 GB. Yes, it has almost doubled. On the plus side, it seems to perform a bit better at a higher memory level than FF4/5, but still gets to the same slow performance eventually (which is fairly quickly, on the order of a day). So no, FF7 did not have the great memory reduction it was touted to have, at least for me.

      I've decided to experiment and disable most of my extensions. I'm now running with the minimum of Stylish, NoScript, and ABP. The growth rate has slowed it appears (maybe by half), but as of right now I am at 944 MB and slowly growing.

      My suspicion? FF has terrible memory fragmentation behavior in their JS engine. The more things you run that need JS, the worse it gets. There's one, and only one thing holding me back from going with Chrome all the way: the lack of a Master password.

    11. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by Tumbleweed · · Score: 1

      Only they rarely ship new features, unlike Firefox, that the user can actually see.

      So what? Featureitis is not a good thing. Secondly, mozilla is only adding all those new features in a desperate attempt to look relevant whilst they lose marketshare continually to chrome.

      "Featureitis" implies useless features, which is not what Firefox is doing. Lazy tab loading is a brilliant thing, and makes the browser 10x more usable and responsive for me. Chrome, as of v17, doesn't even have the same feature set as a new install of Firefox, sans any plugins.

    12. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by amicusNYCL · · Score: 1

      I use Greasemonkey every day. Greasemonkey is built into chrome. Not firefox.

      Not to worry. Greasemonkey might not be built-in, but at least you can search Twitter without the hassle of installing an extension or actually going to Twitter.

      --
      "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
    13. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by Tumbleweed · · Score: 1

      What version of FF are you using? FF7's memory use is outstanding - WAY better than Chrome. I use the latest version of all the browsers and check these things out with every new release. Chrome uses 2-3x more memory on my work and home machines than FF does (as of FF7). Neither browser crashes for me on either machine I use. My work and home machines use 1920x1200 monitors (work machine has a secondary 1680x1050), and I have no weird problems about displaying large jpegs.

    14. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      KeepVid.com
      Just sayin...

    15. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by ClioCJS · · Score: 1

      I never got to use FF7 long enough to notice. Too little, too late. Not crashing is way more important to me than memory use. Memory use was just an example of memory leaks and such. Anytime I had my browser open (no porn!) for 2 days it would be 1.5G, at any point in my 5 yrs or so of using Firefox. That they fixed it around the time that I finally switched is just a case of too little too late.

      --
      -Clio
      Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
      Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
    16. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by Tumbleweed · · Score: 1

      I pruned most of my extensions when using FF6. I now use:

      Adblock Plus
      Add-on Compatibility Reporter
      DownloadHelper
      FireFTP
      Flashblock
      Live HTTP headers
      Memory Fox
      QuickJava
      SearchStatus
      Session Manager
      Tax Mix Plus
      Web Developer

      And life is good. I see memory use generally around 400-550MB, but I also tend to run with dozens of tabs, so that's not unreasonable. It's using 443MB on my machine this instant with 27 tabs open and Flash currently disabled. Chrome is taking up around three times that with half the number of open tabs (but with Flash enabled).

      I also flush out the flash plugin when I don't need it by using QuickJava to globally disable Flash, which, along with Flashblock, is probably why I'm not having any problems. I long for the day I don't have to keep track of what Flash is doing, but that's hardly the fault of Firefox, or of Chrome when it has the same issues with the same crappy plugin.

      I think FF9 is when the js memory issues are scheduled to be addressed, assuming it makes it in time (Dec 20). If not, then FF10 should have it.

    17. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by Tumbleweed · · Score: 1

      I never got to use FF7 long enough to notice. Too little, too late. Not crashing is way more important to me than memory use. Memory use was just an example of memory leaks and such. Anytime I had my browser open (no porn!) for 2 days it would be 1.5G, at any point in my 5 yrs or so of using Firefox. That they fixed it around the time that I finally switched is just a case of too little too late.

      Hey, if you're happy with what you have, and you use a browser that supports modern standards and doesn't force web developers like myself to have to use obsolete standards, then more power to you. Use what works. I vaguely recall I had some crashing issues with 7.0 that were fixed quickly by 7.0.1, but YMMV.

    18. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by anss123 · · Score: 1

      But it was the crashing every 10 minutes that finally did me in.

      Yeah. I haven't seen Firefox crash in years, until v7.0.1 that is. Now it's crashing regularly... so I'm in IE right now. Well, I'm going to give v.8 a try at least.

    19. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by knarf · · Score: 1

      Odd, isn't it? Some software works for some people, while the same software does anything but for others. Take Firefox as an example. I generally run the Minefield version, and it generally works fine. It hardly every crashes anymore - a marked change from a few years ago when running Mozilla betas was tiring at best.

      Now take Chromium. It just does not work around here, on several computers by several manufactureres with several different distributions (Debian and some Ubuntu). Chromium will start rendering a page, stop, freeze, and finally give up. Time after time. On different user accounts. On different computers. Chromium is unusable here. Firefox works. It stays up as well, and keeps memory consumption within bounds:


      user 26186 5.2 11.8 1297920 476064 ? Ssl Oct29 773:18 firefox-10.0a1
      user 26260 3.4 1.2 336752 50584 ? SLl Oct29 507:32 /opt/APPfirefox/firefox/plugin-container /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so -greomni /opt/APPfirefox/firefox/omni.jar 26186 true plugin

      See? It has been up for 11 days, has been cycled from 1 tab to >50 tabs to 1 tab several times. The machine this version runs on has 4GB of memory and runs Debian Sid. Firefox uses about 470 MB, flash gobbles up another 50 MB. That's it. Flash is currently playing audio in the background.

      This instance of Firefox has 16 active add-ons (plus another 16 disabled).

      --
      --frank[at]unternet.org
    20. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A bug which manifests itself in 3rd party code is not really a problem with Firefox. The developers should not be responsible for ensuring you don't install any crapware in their browser.

    21. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I am in a similar situation, and I know exactly how you feel. Now Chrome is to Firefox as Firefox was to IE

    22. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by ClioCJS · · Score: 1

      I credit your success to you not running Windows like I do! :) I used Minefield for a long time, but I stopped when I realized there seemed to be a high correlation between Minefield + flash + computer spontaneously rebooting.

      --
      -Clio
      Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
      Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
    23. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by Dr.+Spork · · Score: 1

      I am also getting crashes since version 6, never really got them before. Apart from that, I'm typically having to kill plugin-container.exe at least once a day to unfreeze Firefox. I wonder if I screwed up my profile somehow to deserve all this. The problem is that I don't want to lose all the saved passwords in my old profile. Is there a way to import just those into a new profile and start clean?

    24. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by ClioCJS · · Score: 1

      Yup, v7 was what finally forced me to take a decision I'd been considering for a long long time - to leave Firefox. I'm glad Chrome came along, though, or else I'd be using IE right now too. IE's come a long way. The problem is, nobody who's opinion really matters on that cares anymore. People are still trying to remove it from their computer and then bragging about taking functionality out of a computer in some kind of "rebellion" from Microsoft that does little to affect anything. Me? I want as many browsers as possible. I use 4 on a daily basis, and have another just in case. But most everything is Chrome now! I only use IE to display local HTML files I generate with scripts to assist with captioning and tagging my photographs.

      --
      -Clio
      Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
      Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
    25. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by BZ · · Score: 1

      You do realize that Mozilla hasn't dropped support for 3.6 yet, right?

    26. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by ClioCJS · · Score: 1

      I hear ya man -- Be thankful we're not all running IE5 or IE6, hehehehehe.

      --
      -Clio
      Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
      Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
    27. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by ClioCJS · · Score: 1

      The only way I know if is via one's brain! The worst machine of all! :)

      --
      -Clio
      Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
      Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
    28. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by Tumbleweed · · Score: 1

      I hear ya man -- Be thankful we're not all running IE5 or IE6, hehehehehe.

      I'd quit my job and learn to be a bricklayer or something. *shudder*

    29. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I never got to use FF7 long enough to notice. Too little, too late.

      If your not judging it on its current performance why do you think your choice is important to anyone else apart from you?

    30. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Now this is just bullshit. Plain and simple.

      There hasn't been one review in the 'net that says Firefox uses more memory than other browsers, especially Chrome. Know why? Because it doesn't. Everybody and their mother knows that browsers that separate tabs into separate processes use more memory. Chrome uses more memory than Firefox.

      Personally I can't use Chrome. It's fine and all, until the input box stops working (it stops responding to "enter"). Nothing but clearing the entire profile will help. Oh, and nice sandboxing: pressing return while inside text (i.e. not at the end) crashes every single tab in every single Chrome window.

    31. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Go look at this extension for Chrome - among other options for cleaning up Youtube pages, there's one to add download links for multiple sizes/codecs of each video:

      Youtube Options

    32. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by guanxi · · Score: 1

      You do realize that Mozilla hasn't dropped support for 3.6 yet, right?

      That wasn't well publicized. I didn't know until recently.

    33. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by guanxi · · Score: 2

      Firefox works great for me. It runs for days with dozens of tabs, no crashes; efficient memory use. You report problems on your computer with,
        - 1920x2100 resolution
        - crashing every 10 minutes
        - Flash causing spontaneous reboots
        - Huge memory problems

      It's a little hard to believe the problem isn't the rest of your computer. Certainly not every, or even many Firefox users have these incredible problems.

    34. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by ClioCJS · · Score: 1

      I already mentioned (but possibly in a side-post and not a parent-post, so you're forgiven) that this has been consistent across 5 computers and 3+ OSes, including places of employment. Not your list though. You merely cherry picked some of the worst problems -- like taking a problem related to Minecraft, which is an unofficial Firefox -- then threw them together as if they all happened at once. Congrats. You've defeated a straw man. Now please refer to previous slashdot articles about Firefox's memory problems. Now tell me why they don't happen with the other 4 browsers. List your specific reasons why. And don't say extensions. I'm running those in Chrome too.

      --
      -Clio
      Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
      Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
    35. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Or just go to Opera .. not sure why all the Opera hate. It's been free and ad-free for awhile now.

    36. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by jesser · · Score: 1

      Remember: A bug not manifesting in your instance of a program is not the same as the program being bug free.

      Conversely, a bug manifesting in your instance of a program is not the same as the program being a bug-ridden piece of crap written by insane monkeys.

      --
      The shareholder is always right.
    37. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by ClioCJS · · Score: 1
      No, it doesn't, but I have evidence to support my case, whereas you don't have any evidence to support it being bug free.

      . When Firefox upgrades without my permission (which was a first) and then starts crashing while other browsers don't, after having a demonstrated history of doing exactly the same, regardless of windows flavor, hardware, physical location, then I tend to blame Firefox. It was completely and utterly un-usable during 1.x and most of 2.x, but near the end of 2 they gained a lot of stability, which improved with 3, gradually decreased with 4, improved with 5 and 6 (but at that point so many plugins were broken I was already investigationg the competition), and shot it in the toilet with 7 (for many people, not just me). And then there's the fact that when I have problems -- like a JPG not displaying -- I can demonstrate that they only occur in firefox. Not Chrome, IE, or Opera. You see, I like to test these things when they happen, so I can demonstrably know: Yes, this is a problem with firefox. Even if the root cause of the problem is elsewhere, firefox is the one browser poorly written enough for it to manifest.

      Then there's mozilla's "bug support". They say extensions cause problems, but their first suggestion to fix any problem is to upgrade to the latest version (incidentally, if it hadn't upgraded without my permission I'd probably be happily and ignorantly using FF4 right now). Of course this disables a lot of plugins, but doens't fix the problem, so I get the worst of both worlds.

      Yes. The problem is Firefox. Even if you want to blame it on my system, why is my system (or rather, all my systems, I use 3 computers daily) good enough for every other browser, but not for IE? Even if you want to blame my extensions, why does chrome, running the same functionality (except NoSquint, which I've individually disabled for quite some time to determine that it not to blame either), run the functionality in these extensions (adblock, betterfacebook, greasemonkey scripts)?

      In short, it seems that in the absence of any evidence, you somehow want to frame it as some personal reflection of my inability, because you have an illogical fanboyism with Firefox. This is a very human trait of folly that you may want to work on.

      --
      -Clio
      Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
      Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
    38. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by kesuki · · Score: 1

      if you miss noscript try seamonkey http://www.seamonkey-project.org/releases/#2.4.1

    39. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by jesser · · Score: 1

      I was making a general point, not especially directed at you.

      Sorry your experience with Firefox has worse than the norm, though.

      --
      The shareholder is always right.
    40. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by thermal_7 · · Score: 1

      > new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome

      You do realise Chrome also has a 6 week release schedule?

    41. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by ClioCJS · · Score: 1
      A lot of my computer experiences are worse than the norm. I think most of it is just excessive usage. It's a great mystery. For instance my wife & I built 3 identical computers in 1999. Two were mine (one got upgraded in 2001 and basically became a different computer), one was hers. The one I upgraded lasted til 2007. The one I didn't lasted til 2004. It's 2011 and she's moved on from her 1999 computer (P3 450Mhz), but it's still running perfectly in our bedroom. Even installed a new OS on it last year, and a video card with tv out, so it can operate our bedroom tv. Which we never use. Damn thing won't die. Why can't that be MY computer?

      A good example of this is the timeline of computers we have, which was how I learned wikipedias timeline markup code: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:ClintJCL#Clint.27s_computer_history Mine die faster!

      But we do a lot of things other people don't do. At various times our computers control lights with x10, receive infrared with external receivers, transmit audio over FM, have hard-wired audio runs of hundreds of feet in multiple directions, operate a custom ambilight system... we've burned 10,000 discs in 12 years, I have 10TB on my LAN.... had computers with three SATA controllers in them.....and shit is running constantly all the time. So I'd like to think my failures are mostly due to overuse, especially with the case of us having identical hardware and software.

      Not sure if this concept transfers over to browsers and software, but it just may.

      --
      -Clio
      Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
      Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
    42. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by ClioCJS · · Score: 1

      but will it auto-update me such that existing extensions don't work? (Actually, it can't. Greasemonkey functoinality is built in, and me having to do greasemonkey tasks in Chrome after a Firefox update is precisely what started the slippery slope that ended in me changing my default browser for the first time in 6 or so years.)

      --
      -Clio
      Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
      Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
    43. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      it is because there is no spoon.
      you may have switched 5 computers(spoons) and 3 oses (spoon racks) but your mind never changed.
      your mind got tired of the software called firefox and decided to make it always break and behave the
      same, the cause for this anomaly is most likely because your mind sensed it was under attack by the
      software update, which was trying to change things in your mind that causes the crashes.

      because like the spoon in the matrix your use of hardware and software is an extension of your own mind, in the sector of the world you currently call home. it took me a while to adjust to the fact that the computer boxes were just as false as the rest of the illusion we call the earth. it took me a while to realize the hackers in the matrix were uploading a replicating virus in the mind of all the 'free' people, to make them be ejected for running rabbits.

      for a while i thought i was someone special, but then i realized, if i allow hackers to inject a virus into my mind even i would get ejected. and the world was designed to be able to handle this stuff. this is why we don't ever run out of resources when we are supposed to, because we are constructs inside a matrix. and thus rules like death and aging and taxes are all part of the constructs programs.

      so why do we struggle and suffer at times? because we want interesting lives with just the right amount of drama and adventure and we protest being treated identical to others. how do i know this is a matrix? for me it was just a matter of reading the signs, and having my mind broken in a repairable way. i even take drugs that help me be more aware of the rules and constructs others have built in. sadly my mind has difficulty holding on to the information, so i require paper and computers to help sort them out. even though as in the matrix there is no spoon. but the construct of the computer in the matrix interface lets me know things that don't fit inside my mind. besides i've figured out how regions of the matrix correspond with 'real' minds/machines whatever it is that we go through when we walk/drive places.

      now why doesn't people just live in reality, instead of being constructs in a matrix? haven't figured that one out myself, i could be wrong, but if i am why do so many people keep inventing resource deposits? including a few like super heavy metals? or other radioactive items to explain how we get hot water, etc. and why can't we fly like birds? because the rules say what we can and cannot do, and they do for a good reason, because simple laws make sense, and someone made it immutable about what could fly and what could not.

      ultimately though there is somewhere a reality outside the game, because computers don't self evolve, they don't invent compilers or build software, they don't make rules or craft items. all that happened in the real world, at some point and somewhere there is a thrumming away the computer that runs the game, although how and why it was built is not handy to me because i am a bit crazy and don't need to know every single detail i just know enough to know that the ideas of what a computer is here on slashdot is a bit skewed compared to reality.

    44. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why are you downloading YouTube videos?

    45. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Good. Take your shitty attitude with you. And when Chrome fails to meet your standards in a couple of years, feel free to not let Chrome's door hit your ass on the way out.

      Mozilla should be happy you'll be someone else's problem. Clearly no one will ever satisfy your browsing needs, which are to be perfect 100% of the time, for free, as of yesterday.

      Enjoy perpetually wandering around looking for perfection. Chrome will surely seem that way for a while, so feel free to praise it endlessly for a for weeks so somebody out there feels like their effort is worth something to you.

    46. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you can't see 5' away from a 52" HDTV you aren't visually disabled, you're blind.

    47. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by repapetilto · · Score: 1

      I don't see how this excuses Mozilla. In that case they should have seen this coming and prepared for it.

    48. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by wye43 · · Score: 1

      I switched away from Firefox two years ago, I got tired of the crashes too. Chrome is simply better. Far better.

    49. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I swtiched to chrome after spending my entire lunch break waiting for firefox to load. It never did load.

    50. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by DaVince21 · · Score: 1

      But the magic drawing system in FF8 sucks. ...Sorry. Couldn't help myself.

      --
      I am not devoid of humor.
    51. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by DaVince21 · · Score: 1

      You don't have to restart the browser. Just close and re-open the tabs that had YouTube open, if you had any.

      --
      I am not devoid of humor.
    52. Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Firefox asks for your permission to upgrade, so your entire post is a lie.

  13. Slashdot as a search bar option? by PastTense · · Score: 1

    Is it true that headline features for Firefox 9.0 include adding Slashdot as a search bar option?

  14. Yes! even number by shadowrat · · Score: 2

    The even numbered firefoxes are the best!

    1. Re:Yes! even number by idontgno · · Score: 1

      WRONG!

      The even numbered firefoxes are good.

      The irrationally numbered firefoxes are the best.

      --
      Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
    2. Re:Yes! even number by fellip_nectar · · Score: 1

      That may be... until Firefox: Nemesis

      --
      Worst. Signature. Ever.
    3. Re:Yes! even number by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Don't encourage them. To catch up with Chrome, Mozilla's going to start making the version number go up by 2 at a time.

    4. Re:Yes! even number by thsths · · Score: 1

      > The even numbered firefoxes are the best!

      That would be funny, if you had a choice. When 3.0 came out, 2.0 was still supported for a while. When 4.0 came out, 3.6 was still supported (and still is). But when 5.0 came out, support for 4.0 was dropped immediately. Which makes 3.6 much better than 4.0, incidentally.

  15. I can't wait for Firefox 26. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    We might have 5 brand new actual features by then, rather than giving essentially bugfixes their own major version number.

  16. Do we now get a Slashdot post every time Chrome... by Rhywden · · Score: 1

    ... updates its major version number, or what?

    Seriously, why is there such a big hubbub about the version of Firefox when they've just moved to rapid incrementations of the version number? I don't see people doing the same with Chrome.

  17. At least change the joke version number by JustTech · · Score: 1

    It's kinda upsetting that the jokes on slashdot are the same at every Firefox release... shape up, think outside the box =)

    1. Re:At least change the joke version number by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 1

      Knock Knock,

      Who's There,

      The Next Version of Firefox

      The Next Version of Firefox who? Hello- where did you go?

      Knock Knock,

      Who's There,

      The Next Version of Firefox

      The Next Version of Firefox who? Hello- where did you go?

      ?

      --
      "That's the way to do it" - Punch
  18. Every release breaks all useful tools by snotclot · · Score: 1

    Every release breaks some tools - don't even mention their own plugins and addons created by others.

    For example, my Thinkpad Client Security password manager used to work well with Firefox 1/2 - for v3 I had to go to the trouble of patching some js files myself because Lenovo didn't support it fast enough. Now with this super-fast release cycle, I can't patch my software and don't even bother anymore.

    It's frustrating. I would move to Chrome (being a loyal Firefox person I have not yet) - if not Chrome is more evil in other ways.

    Give a bit more time and I will give up Firefox. Just plain fed up with their douchebaggery. It was us fans that installed it for our non-geek friends, and it will be us fans that uninstall them and recommend everyone something else.

  19. I'll wait to update... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I wont bother updating firefox until this time next year when they release firefox 195.0, and have removed all of the things that made me move to firefox in the first place.

  20. I'm going to wait by overshoot · · Score: 1

    By the time I compile 8, 12 will be out and that's the one I'm really waiting for.

    --
    Lacking <sarcasm> tags, /. substitutes moderation as "Troll."
  21. It's just a number people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Quit getting your panties in a bunch. It's just a number.

    1. Re:It's just a number people. by green1 · · Score: 1

      The problem is that that number is depended on by most plugins to remain stable. As such, every time they change the number, most plugins stop working as they haven't been "updated" for the new version. When you release a new major version, the expectation is that you changed a lot of stuff, and as such, the plugins should test on your new version and make sure everything still works properly. In fact though these major versions are very minor changes, and the plugins you had before would probably work just fine, if they had been told that nothing would be changing in this version.

      I could care less if they call it Firefox 32768.0 or Firefox 0.0000001. what I DO care about is that I don't loose functionality just because someone can't figure out the difference between what a major version change is versus a small update.

  22. I don't mind by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I don't mind that they're releasing so fast, although it was annoying at first, having just installed 3.1 or whatever, and 4 is out so I switch to it, and it seems like a few days later, 5 is out... but that's really no different from releasing 3.1, followed by 3.2, followed by 3.3... and just calling them 4, 5, 6... but the inflation is annoying. Why limit yourself to integers, though? I'm sure they'll soon be doing it by multiple integers... version 8 to be followed by version 10, then 14. When they get to 16, they'll start maybe using powers of 2, so after 16, they'll release Firefox 32, then Firefox 64. It seems absurd.

  23. 64-bit? by clarkn0va · · Score: 1

    8.0, the one that is supposed to finally be available in a 64-bit compile for Windows? Come on, even Flash player beat you to it!

    --
    I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
    1. Re:64-bit? by jader3rd · · Score: 1

      8.0, the one that is supposed to finally be available in a 64-bit compile for Windows? Come on, even Flash player beat you to it!

      Don't you mean "Come on, even IE beat you to it!"

    2. Re:64-bit? by clarkn0va · · Score: 1

      I don't know which is worse, to be beaten by Flash or by IE, although technically IE 64-bit is pretty well unusable last I checked, so I don't know if it counts.

      --
      I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
    3. Re:64-bit? by jader3rd · · Score: 1

      I've been using IE 64-bit as my primary IE for the last two years. Sure there are plugins which don't run in it, but that tended to make a better browsing experience anyway.

    4. Re:64-bit? by BZ · · Score: 1

      The biggest problem with 64-bit IE is that is has no JS JIT. So you get pretty bad JS performance. Of course that might not matter for your use patterns.

    5. Re:64-bit? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    6. Re:64-bit? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Seriously? The main reason Firefox hadn't switched already is because they were waiting for flash support.

    7. Re:64-bit? by srjh · · Score: 1

      They'll have to move to 64 bit soon - at this rate, Firefox 4294967296 will be released some time around January.

  24. best FF upgrade yet by Tumbleweed · · Score: 5, Informative

    Completely smooth upgrade, no incompatible plugins, and lazy tab loading is the best feature ever for tab-crazy people like myself. Since they got the memory use under control in v7, life is good. With Chrome taking up 2-3x more memory than FF, I just can't deal with that anymore. Plus lazy tab loading is now my killer browser feature. Gotta have it. I think FF9 (Dec 20) or FF10 is supposed to have even more substantial memory reduction applied.

    1. Re:best FF upgrade yet by theweatherelectric · · Score: 1

      I'm looking forward to the JavaScript engine improvements in Firefox 9. I tried the Broadway.js H.264 video decoder (github page, demo page) in Firefox 7.0.1 and Firefox 9 Aurora. On my system it ran about two and a half times faster in Firefox 9.

    2. Re:best FF upgrade yet by aardvarkjoe · · Score: 1

      Since they got the memory use under control in v7, life is good.

      This might be a little more meaningful if we hadn't been hearing "the memory problems are fixed now, honest!" for every Firefox release in the last six years or so...

      --

      How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
    3. Re:best FF upgrade yet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      This time you can actually follow the work being done by Nicholas.

      about:memory in Firefox to see exactly what is using memory where

      https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=640791 for the memshrink project

      And of course, Nicholas' week-by-week progress reports.
      http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/11/02/memshrink-progress-week-20/

    4. Re:best FF upgrade yet by Tumbleweed · · Score: 1

      Since they got the memory use under control in v7, life is good.

      This might be a little more meaningful if we hadn't been hearing "the memory problems are fixed now, honest!" for every Firefox release in the last six years or so...

      You seem confused by what I said. I said they got memory use under control in v7. v8 is what just came out. I'm not saying it's NOW fixed in v8 - it's been fixed for a while.

    5. Re:best FF upgrade yet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      For the first time ever a FF upgrade asked me to reboot to complete the installation - scary!

    6. Re:best FF upgrade yet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Oh, and over here I have 94 tabs in 3 tab groups in Firefox 10 nightly on my Windows XP test machine.
      Admittedly only a dozen or so have been accessed in the last hour.

      According to about:memory Firefox is using 151MB (173MB before minimize memory usage button)
      I have 5 add-ons enabled. DOM inspector, Firebug 1.8.0b6, Font Information 0.1, NoScript 2.1.8 and Rainbow 1.4.

      I have a bunch of others, including Add-on Compatibility Reporter 0.9.2, but I don't have 'em active on this profile right now.

    7. Re:best FF upgrade yet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Apparently that's if the installer couldn't actually overwrite the application. Just a guess, but you're using Windows and its rather aggressive file locking.

      Some random weirdness I guess. Maybe firefox.exe was actually still running, or the plugin container? *shrug*

    8. Re:best FF upgrade yet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > no incompatible plugins

      Lucky bastard.

    9. Re:best FF upgrade yet by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

      ^ This.

      Nicholas has single-handedly restored my faith that Firefox will survive.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    10. Re:best FF upgrade yet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What platform? 'Cause FF has a tradition of sucking on all platforms but Windows and I avoided that shipwreck a long time ago.

  25. Yet another version, still no MSIs or GPOs by denis-The-menace · · Score: 3, Informative

    I know FF is multi-platform but you cannot even make GPOs an add-on. (It kinda defeats the purpose if the user can uninstall the add-on!)

    Meanwhile in bug 267888 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=267888) there are still talking about creating ADM files.
    ADM files are for Windows XP, when this bug was created 7 years ago!!!)
    Windows 7 uses ADMX files.

    But it doesn't matter now.
    The people that need MSI/GPO cannot handle Full versions of FF coming out every 2 months.
    They have enough trouble keeping up with "patch Tuesday" from MS.

    --
    Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
    1. Re:Yet another version, still no MSIs or GPOs by bertok · · Score: 1

      But that's not shiny!

      It's not... 3D in web pages... or... video decoding with JavaScript!

      Those are sooooo much cooler to play with, I mean work on seriously like the professional developers we are.

    2. Re:Yet another version, still no MSIs or GPOs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      An ugly workaround is to install (or actually just dump) the addons in the firefox program folder instead of in the users' profile. FF will discover them and enable them, but they cannot be uninstalled directly through the addon manager. They can, however, be disabled. You can add registry entries (manually, or through a custom ADM rolled out through GP) in place of the applicable addon prefs in prefs.js to perma-enable the addons (this is how FrontMotion does its GPO-aware FF distribution). It's messy but its still possible to centrally manage addon functionality in Mozilla applications.

    3. Re:Yet another version, still no MSIs or GPOs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

      And no ROPs or GORs.

      What the fuck are MSIs and GPOs? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, YOU CUNT?

  26. HTML 5? by unixisc · · Score: 1

    Yeah, they ought to be fully 64-bit by now. Incidentally, do they support HTML 5 now OOTB?

  27. ...huh? by JustAnotherIdiot · · Score: 1

    I'm still on 6, what happened to 7?
    I can only imagine how pissed off add-on developers are with this batshit insane update schedule.

    --
    What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
    1. Re:...huh? by Microlith · · Score: 1

      I can only imagine how pissed off add-on developers are with this batshit insane update schedule.

      My guess is that any competent addon developer is using the Nightly channel, and thus their addons have been fixed for weeks already. Hell I use Nightly on my system at home and it's been rock solid.

  28. Safari 5.1 on 10.7 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I moved away from Safari for a long time. But now, Safari can load tons of tabs and windows while retaining a smaller memory footprint than the others. And with the ClicktoPlugin extension, close to zero CPU time. Very stable. These are the only things that matter to me any more, and I haven't run into another browser that delivers them. Because I don't want to drain a battery in 30 minutes browsing the web.

  29. Re:Do we now get a Slashdot post every time Chrome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's not evil when chrome gets updated?

  30. Two different platforms... by IANAAC · · Score: 1
    two completely different behaviors.

    I very happily run FF 7.01 on Ubuntu (11.04). It's snappy, fairly light - well, in comparison with previous releases.

    On W7, however, it's dog slow, eventually becoming unresponsive enough that I have to open task manager and kill it. I've eased the problem lately by running Chrome. It runs much faster than FF (on W7, not on Ubuntu, curiously), but I sure would like to be able to have the same responsiveness of FF on both platforms.

  31. What's the record? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is there a current highest version number record? Is the Firefox developer community trying to beat it? The way things are going we're going to be at Firefox 150 this time next year, assuming they don't accelerate the timetable further.

    1. Re:What's the record? by webnut77 · · Score: 1

      Is there a current highest version number record?

      We used to run DOS/VS version 34 on da mainframe years ago.

  32. Re:Do we now get a Slashdot post every time Chrome by Desler · · Score: 1

    Chrome silently updates and Google doesn't trumpet each release as if it's the second coming like what happens when Mozilla decides to bump the major version for no reason.

  33. A good release: Much faster by TerranFury · · Score: 2

    On an old machine (8.5 years) running Windows XP 32-bit, this version is significantly faster than its predecessor. I don't care what version number they use; this is an upgrade.

  34. How do I adapt to this?!?! by Beelzebud · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'm panicking right now. Why a new version number? I'm just not sure I can deal with this. It's just too much. Goodbye cruel world!

    1. Re:How do I adapt to this?!?! by snotclot · · Score: 1

      It's annoying and it breaks tools? When you have Firefox imaged as part of your basic image install, and then it is outdated immediately by 5 version numbers and auto-upgrades ?

    2. Re:How do I adapt to this?!?! by BenJury · · Score: 1

      Then dont upgrade it?

      I honestly dont get this. Smaller changes is surly better as there is less changing each increment so less can go wrong, plus it gets new features that are developed to us faster instead of having to wait 6months to a year. Thats win win?

      Yet people still complain?! Crazy madness!

      --
      Blatant Advert: Android Apps!
  35. Still can't remove unwanted plug-ins... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... without a lot of detective work. Maybe in FF1701 out next summer?

  36. I uhhh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...I seemed to have missed 7. Shit.

  37. Both Firefox and Chrome have big problems by Dwedit · · Score: 1

    When I use Firefox, memory usage is still a big problem. After running it for days on end, with lots and lots of tabs open, it eventually starts using 2 gigs of RAM.
    Then there's problems where Flash Player just stops working after an upgrade. That stopped me from using Aurora and Nightly, because Flash will work for a while, then it breaks after a new Aurora/Nightly version. Whenever there's Flash problems, YouTube often crashes at the end of a video.
    I really don't mind the "Extension upgrading situation" in Firefox, since I disable compatibility checking anyway. But nobody else knows you can do that. Firefox needs to make it a lot easier to disable "compatibility checking". It's a worthless feature that should be expunged, since it seems like it's more for liability or "not our fault" reasons than anything else. Only a small number of Firefox extensions actually break, like CacheViewer. That was a nice extension, and nobody has fixed or replaced it.

    I've also tried Chrome. Actually SRWare Iron, but they're the same thing. (Don't respond with that outdated FUD about 5 lines of code being changed, since official Chromium doesn't support "adblock.ini" like Iron does).
    After running Chrome for several days on end, it develops a completely different problem. You switch to a particular tab, and it takes about 5 seconds before it responds to anything. No scrolling, no interaction, just seeing the image of the rendered web page, and you are forced to wait until it wakes up. Firefox never had that kind of problem.
    Also, Noscript and Adblock aren't available in Chrome. At first, I was using the built-in whitelist feature for Javascript, but due to boneheaded design decisions in Chrome, it takes a very long time to start the browser when there is a significant number of entries in the whitelist. Also, it treated first-party and third-party content as equally trusted, so it's just bad.
    Then I used ScriptNo, which seems to work much better. Kudos, ScriptNo developer!
    Ad blocking still sucks. Iron has its own ad blocking feature, which works very well, but it can't hide the elements that it is filtering, so you need an element hiding extension as well. Good luck figuring out which Ad-blocking extension is the good one, and which ones are trash, I'm still not sure which one is the good extension.
    Then there's the problem with user scripts waiting for the page to be completely loaded before they run. For example, I use a UserScript to hide the awful right-side panel from Wikia sites. In Firefox, the script executes instantly with Greasemonkey. But in Chrome, it takes several seconds, as it waits to completely finish loading the page before it executes the userscript. Often there's some slow third-party javascript that isn't loading, and the userscript gets delayed for several seconds until that loads.

    But the most annoying thing about Chrome is how it handles focus for links. In MSIE and Firefox, whenever you click on a link, or drag a link to nowhere, the link retains focus, and you can press Tab to go to the next link. But you can't do the same in Chrome or Opera.

    1. Re:Both Firefox and Chrome have big problems by jesser · · Score: 1

      Firefox 10 or 11 will assume add-ons are compatible by default, which is more or less what you're asking for :)

      There will be a few exceptions, such as add-ons with binary components and add-ons that are known to not work.

      --
      The shareholder is always right.
  38. Nobody's addons were disabled by Cito · · Score: 1
    If you addons were disabled then you are running an ancient addon and never updated it.

    All addons will not be disabled due to version changes anymore.

    That was changed last version, last version specific version changes no longer affect the loading of extensions.

    I know since I have 2 plugins on the mozilla addon's page FTP browser extension and a ssh console tab plugin

    i havent had to update them for new versions of firefox in 2 versions

    and no plugin dev has to edit their plugins for new version numbers

    version numbers no longer affect extentions.

    only morons stuck in the 3.6 world or left firefox during 3.6 to chrome still have that antiquated notion that is how firefox works. It quit working that way long time ago, go ask a real extension developers

  39. Amazingly fast by Cato · · Score: 1

    Since I have a lot of tabs loaded, being able to have tabs load only when I select them after (re)start is great. A browser restart now takes only a few seconds, which mitigates the need to do this for addons.

    For extra points, get the Restartless Restart addon (no restarts to install, oh the irony) to quickly restart Firefox.

    Firefox also feels really fast now - apparently Firefox 8 is as fast as Chrome, it certainly feels like it. And it runs all the addons I like too...

  40. Can't use FF in Ubuntu by Is0m0rph · · Score: 1

    Flash runs too slow. It's fine for some things but a Facebook game I play Castle Age Heart of Darkness it runs in slow motion. Load it in Chrome without changing anything and it runs fine. So because of that I got used to Chrome and use it under Windows now too.

  41. how will they disable 3rd-party add-ons? by radarsat1 · · Score: 1

    > we are disabling add-ons installed by third parties without your permission

    how will they do this, technically? from what I understand, on windows, as long as the program installer can write to your firefox directory (unfortunately this is highly probable), it can put what it wants there, even modify the firefox binary. The only solution I can think of is some kind of hash-based solution where modified files are detected, but that stinks of a flawed DRM-style approach. How will they mitigate ill-behaved 3rd-party installers?

    1. Re:how will they disable 3rd-party add-ons? by BZ · · Score: 1

      The idea here is to prevent incompetence, not malice.

      If some malicious software really wants to modify the binary, it can in fact do that. The changes in Firefox 8 don't help there; as you note solving this involves some sort of trusted computing base and all that jazz.

      But if it's just some stupid app dropping in a broken extension that it thinks is Really Important for all Firefox users to have, this check will catch that. This is happening all the time (antivirus toolbars, extensions to inefficiently look for and linkify phone numbers in web pages, the Google Update extension, and so forth). That's what Firefox 8 aims to stop.

  42. Latest press release from Mozilla by renegadesx · · Score: 1

    The Mozilla team is committed to user control over their browsers: we are proud to announce in Firefox 9 the ability to change version numbers on the fly.

    Firefox 9 will be released this Friday for both of you not playing Skyrim on that day.

    --
    Make SELinux enforcing again!
  43. I've been hanging out on YouTube too much... by sootman · · Score: 2

    ... watching old music videos.

    Thumbs up if you're still running Firefox 3.6 in 2011!

    --
    Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
    1. Re:I've been hanging out on YouTube too much... by neminem · · Score: 1

      Does it count if I'm running FF 3.6 (well, Pale Moon 3.6) -and- Aurora? I use Aurora most of the time, it seems they've finally gotten at least some of the memory issues fixed, but each update breaks more of my greasemonkey scripts in more weird ways, so the one web game I play that I use greasemonkey for extensively, I keep 3.6 around for.

      I certainly don't use any of the "features" they've been adding, I just appreciate the backend work.

  44. Bad place for feature requests by Requiem18th · · Score: 1

    You know what would be nice? Sharing Panorama among windows, or rather having a "Global" panorama view that allowed you to move tab groups between windows (and sessions, with sync.)

    --
    But... the future refused to change.
  45. Why is this here? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If they're really emulating Chrome's release schedule, why are Firefox releases more noteworthy around here than Chrome's?

  46. Bullshit. You are an ignorant idiot. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If you addons were disabled then you are running an ancient addon and never updated it.

    I run an exif viewer plugin.. For whatever reason, the developer of the plugin waits until after a "major" Firefox version is released to update his plugin. Therefore your first sentence is ignorant and incorrect.

    Maybe make less ignorant generalizations in the future? Are you one of the stupid Firefox developers that insists on this stupidity?

  47. Of course... by FunPika · · Score: 1

    The addon that my fingerprint reader uses to fill in passwords for me broke. Time to downgrade to 7.

    --
    After years of not using a signature, I am going to make one to say the following: Fuck Beta
    1. Re:Of course... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      0. Install "7-Zip" (if you don't have it already). Open the 7-Zip File Manager and browse to where the incompatible .xpi file(s) are located.

      1. Double-click the .xpi installer file. It's a zipped file. You'll see its contents.
      2. One of the files inside it should be named "install.rdf". Right-click it and select "Open Outside".
      2.1 After a short delay, Windows should say it cannot open this file. Choose "Select the program from a list" and continue.
      2.2 Scroll down, select Notepad. "Always use the selected program..." should be checked. Leave it checked. Click Ok.
      3. Find the tag <em:maxVersion> . It will have a version, e.g. 4.0.*. Change it to include your version, e.g. 8.* or 10.*.
      4. Close. When prompted, say Yes to save the changes.
      5. 7-Zip will prompt you "File 'install.rdf' was modified. Do you want to update it in the archive?". You do, so click Ok.

      You're done. You can now install the .xpi in Firefox. It should work (probably). If you have more than one add-on to install, you may keep 7-Zip open and return to step 1 (open the next .xpi file - you can sort by Date Modified to put the ones you've already edited to the top/bottom of the list). If you left "Always use the selected program" checked in step 2.2, steps 2.1 and 2.2 will be unnecessary for the rest of them because Windows will remember to open the file with Notepad. The .rdf file type isn't used by anything else, so there's no harm in always opening it with Notepad.

      The non-geeky route would be to install the Addon Compatibility Reporter extension. It lets you "test" incompatible add-ons by disabling the compatibility check and letting you run them. Most likely they'll work fine.

  48. FF8 ? WTF ! by sponse · · Score: 1

    FF8 ? WTF !
    I wanna get FF7-2 !
    :'(
    ... stup!d square !

  49. Crashes? What crashes? by SuseLover · · Score: 1

    I don't know what your environment looks like for all you who claim instability, but I keep FF open for weeks at a time without any issues lately.

    Those of you who claim it is so unstable, you better check your operating environment or which addons/plugins are crashing it because I'm just not seeing it!

  50. But if they know ... by wisnoskij · · Score: 1

    That a addon is being installed without your permission then why not just pop up a message box and ask if you want to install this addon?

    --
    Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
    1. Re:But if they know ... by BZ · · Score: 1

      That's exactly what Firefox 8 is doing. Except it's doing this retroactively for already-installed stuff that wasn't explicitly installed via Firefox itself.

  51. Too far behind by greywire · · Score: 1

    I'm not switching back to firefox until they catch up with IE (9) and Chrome (16).

    I mean come on, even Microsoft is up to version 9 and 10 is coming soon!

    And Chrome 16? That just makes Firefox look archaic!

    Its no wonder Chrome is so much better!

    Catch up, Firefox!

    --
    -- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
  52. because it still can't scale to multiple cores by electrosoccertux · · Score: 1

    we are negative because it still can't scale to more than 1 core when you're rending multiple tabs.
    When someone has 6 cores, there's no reason they should have to enable GPU acceleration to keep smoothscroll on the foreground page smooth while other pages render in the background.

  53. Still no Webkit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Still no Webkit. Also, it'll be a matter of time before third-party add-ons will turn themselves on.

  54. Now Disabling Add-ons by dubner · · Score: 1

    "At Mozilla, we think you should be in control, so we are disabling add-ons installed by third parties without your permission and letting you pick the ones you want to keep."

    It took 8 major (and countless minor) releases for Mozilla to realize this? Sheesh!

    --
    Joe

    1. Re:Now Disabling Add-ons by thsths · · Score: 1

      > It took 8 major (and countless minor) releases for Mozilla to realize this? Sheesh!

      It is not an obvious choice - in fact it is completely the wrong way to address the problem. If you don't trust applications, don't install them, and don't run them. If applications change Firefox settings behind your back, the application is to blame, and maybe the lack of separation between applications by the OS. Firefox cannot solve this problem, and trying to may lead to an arms race between applications that Firefox is in no position to win.

      So while it seems like a good idea, in fact it is not.

  55. Heck, I'll one up that by rsilvergun · · Score: 1

    My plugin uses a binary component and it still worked in FF 8.0 w/o me lifting a finger. I gotta admit I was worried at first, but so far, so good.

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
    1. Re:Heck, I'll one up that by Chris+Burke · · Score: 4, Funny

      Hey that's good to hear. Do you also have a plugin for plugging your plugin? And if you used the plugin-plugging plugin to plug your plugin-plugger, would the internet stack overflow? :)

      --

      The enemies of Democracy are
    2. Re:Heck, I'll one up that by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, it would end up translated into Marklar, automatically.

    3. Re:Heck, I'll one up that by EvilBudMan · · Score: 1

      Stack Overflow. Well just take that out at the hardware level so that any crap code will work on this machine.

  56. I switched to Aurora a few months ago... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And never looked back. It updates even more often than the releases, and works with all of my add-ons after every update. I've never had it crash. It's weird that the dev version seems to be more stable and a better experience than the actual releases. Biggest memory load I've seen was ~500 mb for 50 tabs in multiple tab groups.

    Tab groups are awesome, and definitely a reason to use FF.

  57. I have Firefox 11.0 alpha installed, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    and I love how they teamed up with the Gnome people, removed all that clutter like menus, icons, settings, dialogs and text, and replaced the URL bar with a big 256*256px icon of the site! I cannot imagine how they expected us to read... words... in the past! Joe Sixpack doesn't understand words, and he shouldn't have to! You know what they say: KISS: Keep it simple, cause we're stupid! And good software teams like Apple, MIcrosoft, Ubuntu and Gnome know we want to stay that way!

    But I must say I still prefer the iPad. No other platform allows me to divert even more of my brain resources to drooling and rotting away. It's so simple! All I need is a hand, and a hammer! Now die you fuckin' birds! Get some Xanax like me as soon as I get a refill, and stop looking at me with those angry faces! Die! Die! Dieeeee!!! *Furiously hammers away at the iPad*

  58. Remember When... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Remember when Firefox was all about leaving unnecessary crap out?

  59. ...and mine don't work in Firefox 5 yet by bigtrike · · Score: 1

    It was updated to work in Firefox 4. The author hasn't had time to catch up yet on all platforms. So instead, I've switched to Chrome which doesn't have problems with all of my plugins breaking every 6 weeks. It's faster, anyways.

  60. Plugins are tied to version in FF, but not Chrome by bigtrike · · Score: 4, Insightful

    From what I can tell, your plugin interface is still using version number to determine plugin compatibility, causing plugin authors to do a lot of extra work. The plugin interface should be frozen and versioned and changed infrequently, so plugins could go more than a month without updates. Yes, Chrome updates frequently, but it never disables half of my plugins on update every month and declares that they don't work like firefox did before I ditched it.

    Why not stabilize the plugin interface for some long time period (more than a month) and version it?

  61. Prime numbered are better by bigtrike · · Score: 1

    So, wait until next week to upgrade.

  62. Bah by Yvan256 · · Score: 1

    I'll skip this one and get Firefox 9.0 instead.

    I can wait a few days.

  63. New versions, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Just pick Chrome's current version and +1 it. All done.

    (it's just a game of dick-size comparison at this point)

  64. Freaking Morons! by samantha · · Score: 1

    Firefox has been less and less dependable ever since Firefox 4.x. Every other day it seems like I get some update pushed at me that breaks some or all of my extensions, some of which are actually pretty important to my workflow. On an update all extensions I had loaded should be reloaded if at all possible. Period. Firefox doesn't get to make decisions whether I mean what I already decided in the previous version. That is parternalistic crap to hide the fact they have managed to define an extension API they can manage to keep from breaking almost every release. I have even started using Safari again on my Mac to get away from Firefox. They both get slower and slower the more tabs you have opened and don't recover regardless of how many of them you close. On linux I use chrome when at all possible. Who is making decisions on the Firefox team, Microsoft employees?

  65. firefox 8? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    lol what year is this?
    how long was i one coding?

  66. Finally, it's all quiet by rapidreload · · Score: 1

    Things seem to have settled down in the Firefox world. I did the update, it worked very smoothly with all my extensions supported without requiring any hacks. I think most extension developers have finally understood the need to future-proof their extension's compatibility with Firefox when it does get upgraded, which is probably why there were no issues for me.

    Personally (and I do mean personally, just in case someone thinks I'm talking for them) I do not have an issue with the Firefox versioning system anymore. The updates are appreciated, and ranting about it seems less about practical issues and instead people preferring to complain instead of just going with it.

    --
    To all newcomers - people here are very close-minded and can't handle complaints about Linux. Keep this in mind.
  67. Where is TLS 1.1 for years ago already? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Let alone TLS 1.2 support? An upgrade of that would be colossal news compared to the Twitter-search.

    TLS 1.0 - the double rot13 of the interwebs.

  68. Re:Plugins are tied to version in FF, but not Chro by kripkenstein · · Score: 2

    That is where we are headed with 'jetpack' addons. Those have an API like you said. But most addons today use the older interface, which doesn't work that way - and it will be a long time until most addons are rewritten to the new API.

  69. Re:Plugins are tied to version in FF, but not Chro by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    From what I can tell, your plugin interface is still using version number to determine plugin compatibility, causing plugin authors to do a lot of extra work.

    The add-on site is supposed to auto-patch add-ons so they work with the new version if the APIs used haven't changed. I have no idea how well that works but I haven't had any compatibility problems after 6.0.

    The plugin interface should be frozen and versioned and changed infrequently, so plugins could go more than a month without updates.

    Firefox has 2 plugin APIs, Jetpack which is versioned like Google's and Clusterfuck which is essentially "call any function anywhere inside Firefox" which is versioned based on the browser version (since "any function anywhere" can be changed at any time when the developers add new features or refactor the codebase).

  70. Pale Moon x64 by totalnet · · Score: 1

    Will upgrade as soon as the Pale Moon project release the 64bit version.

  71. Firefox URL History by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    /:RANT_ON

    What rocket scientist decided that removing the ability of the user to choose how long to track visited URLs was a good idea? Apparently this got ditched when they released Firefox 5. Firefox supposedly automagically decides an optimal number of URLs it can keep in your surfing history now.

    I like to have my visited URLs expire and go away after 3 or 4 months tops. Now my only options (without using an addon) are to either clear the entire history or just let Firefox have it's way. FUCK THAT. It fucking sucks that I have to install a damn addon to restore functionality that some dolt(s) decided to remove.

    I can't easily delete visited URLs from the history using the Library UI. Try deleting more than a couple hundred history items at once. Chances are Firefox will stop responding and you'll have to kill it and restart it and find it didn't delete any damn thing at all. Deleting several months or URLs from the history in chunks that won't lock Firefox up is a royal pain in the ass.

    /:RANT_OFF

  72. Lockups? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Have they fixed the system lockup bugs? That is quite a game killer for me. I've already adapted to Chrome though, so...

  73. Dishonest. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Dishonest. Stop posting. You are a shill. You are trying to convince us that stupid Mozilla foolishness is okay. It isn't.

  74. Firefox is the most unstable program in common use by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 2

    Firefox Crash Info

    about:crashes
    Put into your URL bar and press ENTER. Shows a list of crashes of your copy of Firefox.

    Crash Info for all users and all versions
    https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/products/Firefox

    Crashes per 100 Active Daily Users, version 7.0.1
    https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/products/Firefox/versions/7.0.1

    Top Crashers, version 7.0.1
    https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/topcrasher/byversion/Firefox/7.0.1/14

    Notes:

    1) The lists of crashes are ONLY the ones that Firefox caught. The lists do NOT include crashes that don't start the crash reporter.

    2) Version 7.0.1 often stays in memory even though the GUI was closed.

    3) The crashes are often preceded by rapidly increasing memory use. Firefox corrupts Microsoft Windows, so that Windows needs to be re-started. When Firefox corrupts Microsoft Windows, it often damages operations in Windows that are not connected with browsing.

    4) Crashes are most frequent for those who do a lot of online research, and open many Firefox windows and tabs, and leave them open while putting the computer into standby or hibernation.

    5) The crashes and memory gobbling have been reported for more than 9 years. Not much has improved, even though the change reports for every version say there have been "stability improvements".

  75. If it crashes, it's a bug. No way around that... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Crashes every 10 minutes huh... You've got to be doing something wrong.

    If a user can accidentally crash a piece of software when using it for what it was meant to be used for... there's a bug. That fact remains whether or not most users ever encounter that bug. I'd go as far as claiming that if a plug-in to which you didn't grant "Crash my browser" permission crashes your browser, there's a bug.

    Massive amounts of people complain about FF crashes, memory leaks, etc. and every time there's a response of either "It doesn't crash/leak for me/people I know so the bug you're describing must not actually exist. You're going mad." or "It's your extensions. You should totally spend a few days by disabling your extensions and enabling them one-by-one until you find the one that causes it (unless... it's actually a bug in the browser), even though extensions and thus extension management is the main selling point of FF... If you don't do that, this is all your fault. If you've done that and it still crashes, you just did that wrong".

    That's worse than IE apologists ever were. That's even worse than the "You're holding it wrong" iPhone issue because in that case it was at least clearly specified how to fix the problem.

    Captcha: Obsolete

  76. What's the deal ? by DrYak · · Score: 1

    They need to stop this before we get to Firefox 27, sometime in mid December.

    Yeah, but, what's the problem with this?

    Basically after launching FireFox 4.x they've determined that firefox is mature enough that it won't see any major overhaul before a long while, everything now will be frequent small incremental upgrades (Firefox 27 will be rather different than Firefox 3. But no version will show jumps like FireFox 1->2 or 2->3).

    Given this, does it really makes sense to keep a number "4" that won't change in any foreseeable future ?

    And what's the big deal about the new numbering system ? Why is a "version 27" scary ?
    The only problem was that until recently, extension compatibility was based on version numbers, but even that was fixed recently.

    Maybe they should stop calling them "versions" and instead call them "releases". You know, just to avoid that some geeks get a hearth infarct when the versioning reaches into 3 digits number. Sometime in March 2012. :-D

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
    1. Re:What's the deal ? by MobyDisk · · Score: 1

      Fair question.

      First of all, version numbers actually mean something, they aren't just arbitrary. To software, major version numbers usually indicate some level of incompatibility: plug-in compatibility, bookmark formats, etc. To users, it usually indicates some visible overhaul and learning curve. It has psychological impact as to whether or not they upgrade, and they may alot time to learn some new stuff or expect some problems. To IT managers, it means test it out before deploying it. Or wait for version .1 before messing with it. Minor version number changes indicate minor changes but generally backward compatible. Below that is just tiny bug fixes but no new features. Some installer systems actually use this information to determine what can exist side-by-side, and when to automatically update.

      So using an arbitrary version number system messes up those things. They should stick with the industry best practice that they have been using for years.

  77. Slashdot by DrYak · · Score: 1

    What exactly makes the latter "screaming" while the former is not?

    Answer: the reaction that /.ers have to it.

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
  78. version numbers becoming meaningless by Tom · · Score: 1

    There used to be a time when version numbers actually meant something.

    Then marketing took over and discovered numbers as a means of advertisement.

    Now, they've lost their meaning. Mozilla is aware of the fact that they'll be releasing versions with double-digit version numbers shortly, yes?

    Maybe the ordinary consumer is fooled by a "bigger is better" thing, but even I don't think so. Seriously, go the logical step and dump the version numbers altogether, show a build number somewhere in the "About" dialog for bug reporting purposes, and otherwise consider it a constantly evolving product.

    --
    Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
  79. Re:Firefox is the most unstable program in common by ifrag · · Score: 1

    3) The crashes are often preceded by rapidly increasing memory use. Firefox corrupts Microsoft Windows, so that Windows needs to be re-started. When Firefox corrupts Microsoft Windows, it often damages operations in Windows that are not connected with browsing.

    Ok, but I'd consider that a Windows bug as well. It should be caught as a segmentation fault if it is actually stepping on memory it shouldn't be touching. Either that or the system running it actually has some problems of its own.

    I've pretty much abandoned Firefox already, but it would be nice to see them at least provide a little competition to keep the other browsers moving ahead.

    --
    Fear is the mind killer.
  80. Mod up bertok (226922) @6:56PM (#37993032) by amcdiarmid · · Score: 1
    Especially Active Directory Group Policy Support.

    I don't have the time to spend a few days making a adm/admx file to modify the registry keys to make security configuration changes for widgets run from 0: My computer, 1: the local Intranet, 2: The Intranet, 3: untrusted Sites, etc...

    I have five pages of settings on how to configure IE on my network. Almost every one of those security settings is applicable to Firefox, or any other browser. I have personally posted this to bugzilla, slashdot, etc... and the answer is: "Do it yourself (TM)" or use an obselete adm template for an old version of (Mozilla, Seamonkey, Firefox 2.x) - they should work.

    I want to use a non IE browser at work. Yes, I will also have to use IE due to IE only applications we have - but at least not 100% of the time. The developers want to use Firefox outside of the sandbox. SECURE says: You have to implement the same security settings on every browser.

    If I had to guess, I would say that Google will implement adm/admx files for security settings for Chrome on XP/7 before Firefox will. At that point, Chrome will get a large % gain in browser share because it will be implentable on corporate networks.

    oops: http://dev.chromium.org/administrators/policy-templates they allready did it. Guess that's why Chrome has surpassed Firefox share.

    Dev's requesting Chrome for their department in 3,2,1....

  81. Re:best FF upgrade FAIL by juggledean · · Score: 1
    I did the upgrade and received the notice that it won't work on my 10.4.11 Mac. Mozilla could have checked the useragent and known it wouldn't work and they could have posted something on the download page to tell me it wouldn't work but they didn't, until after I installed it.

    Installation removed my working FF3.6.24. I backed it up but, for some reason, I can't move it back into the Applications folder. sudo cp -r {source} /Applications doesn't change the Applications directory.

    So know I'm using Safari and lost all the plugins.

    Does anyone know a way to go back to 3.6? I'm otherwise happy with the 10.4 macos.

  82. Re:best FF upgrade FAIL by juggledean · · Score: 1
    Belay that request.

    FF 3.6 here

  83. Re:Firefox is the most unstable program in common by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 2

    Sleeping w/ 109 tabs open.

    That's how I roll. It really indicates the failure of 'bookmarks" or any other reasonable way to keep information at hand.

    I run Linux - and it was browsing that drove me to 64-bit. :-)

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."
  84. Harummppphhhh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Google "Get Firefox"
    Click on first link
    Go here: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

    Version 8.0 proudly displayed

  85. FF 8.0 is a bit on the heavy side by Cherubim1 · · Score: 1

    Firefox needs to go on a diet. It's getting way too bloated now compared to what it used to be. I see that the memory leak and high cpu issues are STILL not fixed. Way to go Mozilla - maybe by version 99 you'll get it right ?

  86. Re:Plugins are tied to version in FF, but not Chro by marcello_dl · · Score: 1

    Updating to v.8 also popped up a dialog to disable extensions...
    Wha...?
    If you are dealing with a user, do not meddle with his settings unless the extension doesn't work (and providing a compatibility layer for old extensions would have been the right thing to do)
    If you are dealing with a luser, expect his choice to result in calls of help.

    What did Firefox gain from all of this? losing extensions? Does firefox team realise that the extension ecosystem is the main thing that sets firefox apart?

    If you go on in concentrating only on performance, like chrome and all the others, websites will then deliver more pointless if not harmful scripts and effects in the pages. What will have the user gained then?

    --
    ---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
  87. Re:best FF upgrade FAIL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    By plugins you might mean addons.
    The vast majority of addons should exist for Firefox 4+
    Although you might have to search AMO for the updated version, not all autoupdate.

    If you are, say, going from FF7 to FF8, and are pretty sure all your addons should just work, just install Addon Compatibility Reporter which enables them all by default, lets you selectively disable certain ones, and submit "Yes this works/No this doesn't" to Mozilla.

    Apparently they are trying to work out more finegrained way to identify which interfaces are changing so that they don't have to retest addons each release.