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.

Comments

No With Even More Suck!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Negative comments

[frodo from middle ea]

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.

Re:Negative comments

[PRMan]

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.

Re:Negative comments

[MobyDisk]

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.

Re:Negative comments

[bertok]

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.

Re:Negative comments

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Negative comments

[Tom]

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.

new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome

[ClioCJS]

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.

Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome

[Crudely_Indecent]

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?

Re:slow down cowboy!

[MachDelta]

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.

Re:You mean...

[Grishnakh]

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.

How do I adapt to this?!?!

[Beelzebud]

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!

Re:To bad it isn't 3.x

[smellotron]

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?

Plugins are tied to version in FF, but not Chrome

[bigtrike]

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?