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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 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.
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.
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.
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