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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.
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.
Firefox 9.0 will be out next week.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Coding etudes
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.
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.
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
No.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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