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Ask Slashdot: Life After Firefox 3.6.x?
Mooga writes "I am a hard-core user of Firefox 3.6.x who has chosen to stick with the older, yet supported version of Firefox for many years now. However, 3.6.x will soon hit end-of-life, making my life, and the lives of similar users, much more complicated. 3.6.x has been known for generally being more stable and using less RAM than the modern Firefox 10 and even Chrome. The older version of Firefox is already having issues rendering modern websites. What are others who have been holding onto 3.6.x planning on doing?"
You want SeaMonkey. Modern Gecko, archaic memory management model. Required system specs page says 128 MB of RAM and 233 MHz Pentium. It even sits in your system tray if you ask nicely enough. Not exactly pretty by modern standards, but I gather that's not your highest priority.
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The advantages to sticking with an older version are, you already know it works, and your add-ons work with it. You also know that the good gentleman at Firefox haven't decided to rearrange the interface again for no apparent reason. Finally, of course, the new versions don't actually seem to have any interesting new features.
I updated from 3.5 to the latest version, recently, because of some problem where the browser would just stall out for 3-4 seconds, becoming completely unresponsive. The update does seem to have fixed that problem. Otherwise, I haven't really noticed any significant difference, which is really just fine with me.
here's what you were really asking through your raging: Why did Firefox drastically increase build numbers for only minor releases?
great question AC, here's the answer. Public opinion held consensus that the higher the build number, the more advanced the browser. As IE was in build 9, Google chrome was in version 10, and Opera was in version 11 when Firefox version 4.0 came out, Mozilla decided to abandon their convention for build numbers and play catch-up. Nothing more than public opinion.
I think this was a smart decision.
They're using their grammar skills there.
So? Does that mean they owe him a good product or anything?
Company offers free product, of course in the hopes of attracting people.
People shrug and move on.
End of story.
Some people of course feel like they have a right to bitch and moan instead of simply moving on to greener pastures or actually getting involved in producing a product that they like (which in the case of Mozilla is an actual option). That doesn't mean these people aren't a pain in the rear.
Bitten Apples are still better than dirty Windows...
The answer is Soulskill. Have you seen the last dozen or so stories on the front page? Ridiculous.
10 might take more disk space. But it is far supieror in memory usage.
I keep the browser open for weeks with multiple tabs open and i've quite often seen it hit 1GB+ of memory use, but around version 8-9 that it went down. while it's still one of the more memory hungry it's memory usage doesn't seem to be stacking up as much.
The only reason that I can see for holding back from the latest version would be, because of potential compatibility with existing sites. But this is mainly for corporates with intranet sites which might still have legacy html. I've personally not run into any such issues. For personal use I see no reason not to update to the latest version. In my experiance while in some version there have been regressions, it's generally been faster and more memory efficient.
I think mozilla messed royally up with this fast update cycle. Had they slowed it down just a tad bit and not publically said anything about a fast updating and version numbers, most people would just update to the latest version without so much anxiety.
> There is no excuse for a web browser process to hit the GB mark, none.
So if all the images that are open in your web browsers all add up to 2 GB of uncompressed pixel data then the browser still shouldn't use hit the GB mark? I want my computer to be magical too.