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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?"
I do not understand techie luddites. Why didn't you upgrade? Why the anxiety? It's a fucking WEB BROWSER. Life will go on.
Doesn't seem too long ago that I was having the same questions about Netscape Navigator 4.5. I survived.
Guru Meditation #6d416769.21610a21
Stop being a pain the ass and upgrade.
It's a browser, not some server software.
One whose head is too hard to upgrade to a newer version.
Bitten Apples are still better than dirty Windows...
I have switched to Chrome and am happy with seamless updates.
Really, what advantages do you have with using an old, outdated version? Smaller memory footprint, well, are you actually low on memory? RAM is cheap. You already said that version 3.X is slower than modern builds.
The only suggestion I have is live with the new version progression, stop being concerned with it and live with what the developers are doing. Either that or move to gentoo and compile you own!
like phosphorescent desert buttons singing one familiar song
Firefox 9 is perfectly fine. No problems.
Who gives a shit if it uses a little bit more memory. I just bought 16GB of RAM for $75. It isn't 1991 anymore.
I don't like the bullshit upgrade schedule where they make a few minor improvements and call it a major new release. That's why I'll probably stay with 9 for a while. But there is no reason to stay with 3.6.
Memory management has improved somewhat in their later releases and I believe Mozilla has changed the plugin system to be compatible with their new release cycle. Additionally, the JavaScript engine is so much faster in later releases and HTML5 support has improved a lot as well.
Let it die.
(Then again, I became a Chrome user recently and haven't looked back. Their plugin and web app support is fantastic and built-in Firebug capabilities are great. Really love how well it synchronises with Google services and their Android version is looking very promising.
If Flash is causing kernel panics, it's an issue with your kernel. Nothing in userspace should be able to cause a kernel panic, and it's unreasonable to expect anything running in userspace to fix a kernel panic.
Making your life "much more complicated"? It's an outdated web browser. Update to something modern and move on with your life.
If you want to browse the current web, use a current browser. You may *want* to use an older browser, but clearly it's not working out for you. I may *want* to spread butter with a screwdriver, but I'd be better of using a tool appropriate for the job.
I'm sure you're feeling indignant about being "forced" to upgrade, and I'm sure you think your reasons for wanting to hang onto an old piece of software are valid. Nobody else cares. Either fix it for yourself or move on.
I actually don't agree with your premise. While Firefox had some issues around version 4, Firefox 10 is actually faster and more stable than Firefox 3.6 was, and RAM usage is on a downward trend. I understand that Firefox ~4 turned you off because I was really irritated by the regressions that came around that time, but things *did* get better. If you give it another try and make sure you give it a fair shake without already having decided it's worse, I think you'll find it's actually an improvement over what you're using right now. It's not like Firefox 3.6 was a speed demon in its day either... Firefox's memory hog problems go back way further than that.
Bít, zabít, jen proto, ze su liska!
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.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/category/memshrink/
Start there. They are working thru the memory issues. They have a pretty good idea where they are at (and how to fix them). They just figured out a huge one with a common plugin (mcafee) that they do not control.
They are also building in metrics to help people find the bugs instead of 'in task manager it is using 1.5 gig' (about:memory).
All in all I have been pretty happy with the 4-10 series. The only thing that pissed me off was the movement of controls. "learn yet another layout..." sort of thing.
Most of the speed increase for this last version came from the memshrink project (it was a decent one too).
If you are seeing crazy memory metrics they have steps they would like you to help them with to get it fixed...
Unless you're being forced to run obsolete software by some perverse corporate mandate, you have no excuse nor valid reason for running such outdated software. You are the smoking clunker on the highway of the internet. You are the grey haired granny in the fast lane of the web. The road hazard. The surfing security hole.
Are you getting it?
You are the security risk.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I'll skip the obvious question about why you don't like new Firefox or other browsers and try another tact.
Since this is all open source software, why don't you find like minded people and make a new fork based on Firefox 3.6? If you want to go older than Firefox 3.6, you can always use K-Meleon.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
You have essentially two choices: stay on 3.6 after EOL and deal with it, or upgrade.
Staying on 3.6 (Which I have to do one one machine because it's a G4 Mac and already has no support) is an option, but eventually, depending on what kind of websites you frequent, you may get pwn3d. But if you restrict yourself to known-good websites, and use extensions like AdBlock, FlashBlock, and possibly GreaseMonkey, you can probably coast along for years.
Upgrading to a new browser (Especially on Linux) is also not a terrible idea. Firefox 10 is actually pretty good about RAM use (Better than Chrome 17, for my uses), and you can set the interface to match Firefox 3.6 so you don't have to re-train yourself to the new look and feel. It's even a bit more snappy than Firefox 3.6, and it does have some nice features for web-centric users (Like pinned apps, and Firefox sync).
I understand the "I'm staying here" feeling, but unless you're willing to make some serious compromises, you're on your own.
... And so it comes to this.
give up the F.U.D. and enjoy the FUN!
If you can't stand the constant updates you can always get the ESR (extended support release). If you have javascript enabled then upgrading is absolutely worth it. Firefox 10 also has add-ons set to compatible by default so your add-ons should work unless the developer has opted out, or the add-on uses binary components. Memory usage has also improved leaps and bounds since 4.0 - I dare say it is better then 3.6 since I can now leave it running overnight with no adverse effects when I go back to it
I am a hard-core user of Firefox 3.6.x
Dear Slashdot,
I am a hardcore Windows 98 user and I don't accept the fact that my outdated software makes me a security risk. What do I do?
Sincerely,
A fucking dummy
Many algorithms can make a tradeoff between memory and higher speed. If the RAM is cheap, why not make that tradeoff?
(Acrobat reader here of course exempted, because it reaches the remarkable achievement of managing to go slower AND using more RAM.).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The benefits you mention are immediately negated by the horrible UI that Firefox has had starting with version 4.
They threw out decades of experience, knowledge and convention, for absolutely no gains whatsoever.
Getting rid of the menu bar by default was just plain stupid. Then they followed it up with the status bar bullshit. These are among the worst UI design decisions ever made in an application that's so widely used. They both harmed usability significantly, with no benefits. The 20 extra pixels at the top and bottom of the screen, when most users (even laptop and netbook users) have over a thousand vertical pixels to work with, are not worth the loss in usability.
There have been many other stupid and unnecessary changes recently. What was one an effective browser to use is now a mess. Any performance improvements in the past few releases have been completely negated by these UI screw-ups.
It does us no good if pages now load a half-second sooner due to performance improvements to the JavaScript engine, if simple actions that were easily accessible via the traditional menus now take us 30 seconds or more to figure out how to do, if we can even do them at all, since the UI changes have been put in place.
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.
How often should people be required to upgrade? Keep in mind that upgrading does break things very often, and Firefox is among the leaders of breakage. Upgrading takes time. And with something like Firefox, that's a very critical point to be broken, because you may not be able to access anything until the glitches and other bugs are worked around (which is often slow when answers are not forthcoming on the forums where asked). My last Firefox upgrade took 2 weeks to get it working right.
And of course you will see a lot MORE straggling this year because of Ubuntu's switch to Unity, and people holding back in versions 10.04 or 10.10 to "wait and see" what happens. At least I'm going to try Xubuntu 12.04 on a separate machine and see how well it works. If it works OK and I can get Compiz running under Xfce this time, and the Firefox version on it can be made to work in multi-instances OK, then in about 2 months after that I'll switch my main desktop over to that, and then be on whatever that version of Firefox is.
I now wonder if the question I started this post with will even be answered.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
. . . and upgrade it any way you like. That's what all /.rs do, right?
Newer is not always better. People on slashdot should be tech savvy enough to know that much.
I'm in the same boat, I just (two weeks ago) switched from 3.6 to 10. I still have 3.6 installed just in case, but so far I'm adjusting.
In order to have some stability though, try the ESR version, it's what I'm using. http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all.html And if you want to read the FAQ, go with http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/
So far, there are a few hiccups. There were a few add-ons that didn't make the switch, but they were rarely used, so I haven't noticed their absence yet. The tab size is annoying and I haven't figured out how to fix that yet. The old about:config fix doesn't work, and the userchrome.css fix just screws things up more.
I did need to readjust the default layout, the lack of a refresh and stop button is just annoying, but they're easy to add back. I like having a user interface, so yeah, that.
Noscript and Adblock plus work. I recommend the "status-4-evar" addon to get the status bar back.
Overall, I haven't noticed the slowdown or memory consumption. Of course, everyone's mileage will vary.
One new feature, at least new for me, is that you have FF restore all your tabs after you close your browser, but when you start back up, the tabs won't load unless you click on them. I really like this feature. Back in 3.6, it could take a really long time to restore a browsing session.
Overall though, the shock of switching isn't as bad as you think.
I think I should probably end this post with instructions on doing a side-by-side install. Before installing anything, make a copy of your firefox profile. Then edit the 'profiles.ini' to reflect this, it's up a folder or two from the profiles. In the profiles.ini, make a new name, something like myff10stuff for your profile. Then, get the ESR build and install to a different folder, but do not start FF at the end of the install. Edit the existing FF shortcut or make your own, but put -P on the end. it should read something like
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 10\firefox.exe" -P myff10stuff
All that is because the profile manager doesn't let you copy an existing profile. You can delete, rename, or create a new one, but you can't copy. You'll probably want to do the same thing to the 3.6 copy and use the 3.6 profile.
No, you should upgrade to 10.0.
Here's three simple reasons:
1) New LTS version. It's going to be around for a while.
2) 10.0 is the fastest version, since maybe forever with Mozilla/Firefox.
3) No more default incompatibilities with add-ons. By default all plug-ins/add-on are compatible. Only those marked incompatible by the authors are incompatible.
The smart user will be doing testing on 3.6 now, before official support ends. So when it ends any known issues can be dealt with. Nothing worse than having to scramble to upgrade because of some newly discover security flaw. Scrambling leads to hurriedness which leads carelessness which leads to mistakes which leads to the darkside ... taking over your servers.
In the past, upgrades usually brought at least some benefits. There'd be useful new features
The reason 3.6 can't render some web sites is because it doesn't have the new features.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Then they should have skipped all the intermediate version numbers and went straight to version 11.
I hate Chrome, but it has it's uses. It's fast too. But totally sucks for configuring stuff, navigating my hundreds of bookmarks, importing said bookmarks in a sane way, and very anti-intuitive. Give me back a fucking menu, or keyboard shortcuts. God what an awful interface.
Other than that it's a wonderful browser.
Give me back my clutter.
Totally agree. The thing is though that the web is a platform which is still in its infancy and still has its kinks being worked out, which requires all parties to keep moving on. FF3.6 must not become the next IE6. For IE6 at least there was no upgrade path for a long time. There is for FF, and there are enough alternatives if you do not like the upgrade path.
Bitten Apples are still better than dirty Windows...
Opera is where I went after I stopped feelin' Firefox. Tab groups, notes, mail/irc/bittorrent/rss clients built in, Opera Turbo for those times you're tethering and need to conserve on your wireless cap, gestures, widgets and extensions (including AdBlock and NoScript), speed dial, session preservation, private browsing, reasonable memory usage, skins and themes, configurable download behavior, configurable keyboard shortcuts, a sane release schedule, and performance that frequently rivals Chrome. Also, it runs on basically anything - Windows (as early as 2000 with the current version, I believe), OSX, virtually every flavor of Linux, and Solaris (and basically every mobile operating system ever developed), and the Windows installer for Opera is nearly 33% smaller than the most recent edition of Firefox. While it's not Richard-Stallman-Free, it is freeware now.
To be fair, the only issues I've had were with some IE specific sites. The most prominent example is...basically every version of Outlook Web Access Microsoft ever released, even though the more recent versions have worked correctly on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. The Sharepoint at work does work correctly, however lists aren't rendered in database view the way they are in IE. Opera tends to take standard compliance to the point where it seems as if the browser says, "if I don't render it right, the site is wrong". While technologically correct, in practice Firefox handles these kinds of sites with much more practical grace, in no small part because FF is almost invariably a part of website design testing, while Opera is less frequently tested. Still, it's the rare exception for websites to not display correctly in Opera, at least to the point of getting the content you need, but even these discrepancies are relatively infrequent.
why is it that every time we end up with twice the memory capacity on new machines, the application (especially GUI application) developers feel the need to double the size of their programs?
To give you a better user experience.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Once they start advertising, the whole 'you get what you pay for' argument is useless.
True. If it doesn't work as advertised you're entitled to a full refund.
Blank until
If they were smart, they would make ALL plugins run in a separate process, with the option to jail it. There's no reason for Flash to have access to even the files in your home directory. Jail it in its own process with an empty chroot directory. Then even I wouldn't have issues with it. I don't WANT to hate Flash. I just hate the way it gets used. And I don't install it because of that. I would install it if it were run the safe way.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
For me Firefox uses way less memory than Chrome on both my computers. Less than 50% with the same tabs open. This is with many Firefox extensions installed and only one Chrome extension. On my older computer because of the memory issues Firefox is way faster as it isn't swapping like crazy. On my brand new i7 I also have all my youtube tabs crashing on Chrome pretty frequently. I just have to refresh the tab to get it back but I don't get anything like that with Firefox. I use try to use Chrome for using Google services and Firefox for everything else.
They'll stop providing security updates in a month, though, so it's certainly obsolescent and will be obsolete shortly.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
portableapps is what you want.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
You mean like Firefox -P -no-remote ? http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/Managing-profiles I can understand that end-users with little computer knowledge think it doesn't exist, but you are posting on Slashdot and are supposedly an advanced user that can check his facts, that was the first hit on google for "Firefox profile management". This feature exists since... forever (Mozilla Suite even had it), I have 2 versions of Firefox running happilly at the same time with separate profiles. How do you think that web developpers check their pages in different versions of Firefox ?
You can criticise anything you want any time you want, but don't always expect a positive response because every group has it's share of douchebags (F/OSS is no exception). The Mozilla Foundation advertising on a web page, in a newspaper or by planting little flags in dog turds makes absolutely no difference in law or custom, that's something you've imagined.
Blank until
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...
There is no technical reason videos and games need Flash. And I don't like making system configuration decisions based on PHB reasoning.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
So, basically, everyone else was lying about how advanced they were, so Firefox should, too?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
"Free" doesn't mean "exempt from criticism." I wish people would stop saying things such as this.
Please this is a CPU architecture change. It would be like dusting off your 286 and getting all bitchy that windows now wants at least 32 bit hardware.
Chances are there will be some non-mainstream browser available for the PPC till the end of time. You might have to use something called Goggzilly 3.1.233 that no one knows about other than people with the same problem and doesn't have all your favorite plugins but people will probably find a way to make the dinosaurs keep rendering pages.
Exactly because, you know, most blokes will be playing at 10. This one goes one higher.
blog
I've run Firefox on very old machines, and I can tell you that 192M is about the lower limit for version 10. Firefox 4 was a memory pig, but they started this Memshrink program. Firefox 10 really does not take much more than Firefox 3.6, and it's getting better. Currently, for memory usage, Firefox is the best of all the big browsers, better than Chrome, Opera, and IE.
Firefox 10 works okay on a 350MHz Pentium II with 192M RAM, but is unusably slow and flogs swap mercilessly if the computer has only 128M. I have run Firefox 3.5 on a 133MHz Pentium with 96M of RAM, and it's barely usable-- takes 30 seconds to launch, but it does work on simple web sights. So, yes, 3.6 is still the leanest reasonably modern version.
You can find computers with more than 192M RAM in the trash. I suggest the poster go dumpster diving. Or if he's just a few megabytes short, grab an alpha of Firefox 13. Or use Dillo. Or live with a text based browser such as lynx or links. Or use wget or curl.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Low RAM usage, pretty stable on Windows 98 & 2000. Yeah, IE 5.5, that's the ticket!
I'm not really a web designer, I just play one on the Internet.
You're like the pedophile of browser users man-- Real men use Mosaic! None of this fancy newfangled javascript bullshit.
Look, you can mod my posts down if you like. Fine. Just remember, though, that when you start talking your product up, you're elevating it from "community project' to "this is ready for prime-time". That means it'll get criticized. It doesn't matter what the price is, that door has been opened.
"You get what you pay for" is a common cop-out with complaints about OSS. When you do that, you're not saying "see, OSS really can replace proprietary software", you're saying "It's inferior, you know that already, don't bitch."
Don't play that card, it only hurts OSS.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
"Example the back and forward buttons in Firefox 3 has a small downarrow, showing you a quick convienient history of the last 10 pages per tab. (I hear that's removed in 4 onwards)"
yes it was removed, now you just right click the big ass back or forward button to get that same menu. Now this may seem like a inconsequential change, but on my crappy ass laptop, or on our netbook, or my buddies tablet, its much easier, quicker and less frustrating to right click a large target, rather than try to nail a 16x16 pixel icon with a pointing device that takes input as a general suggestion.
Seriously, that browser is ridiculously outdated and web devs shouldn't (and often don't) have to cater to people who willingly choose to be so far behind standards. Fine, you don't like the new Mozilla, go find another modern web browser you do like. Either way, get over it and move on.
And what version do you think was current just ONE year ago (relative to your post and my reply on 2012-03-04)? Hint: 4.0 had not even come out yet.
Don't be confused by the strange new numbering system the Firefox devs started to use at 4.0 and beyond just because its competitors were using accelerated release numbering. Under the traditional numbering scheme, the current version today (2012-03-04) would be around 4.6.1, making 3.6.27 merely one major version behind.
Or maybe we should be using release numbers based on year-month (like Ubuntu). Then we'd be seeing major release numbers 04.xx, 06.xx, 08.xx, and now 11.xx. Sure, it is time to be moving off of 08.xx. But it is NOT yet time to have expected everyone to complete that move, especially if they just got ON to 08.xx right before 11.xx came out (less than a year ago today).
At the very minimum, upgrades should not be required more often than every 2 years. 3 years is more reasonable. Ubuntu LTS releases are supported for 3 years (5 years for server versions). Slackware has been doing security updates to releases as old as 6 years or more.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Here's a full list of web features that 3.6 doesn't support and FF 12 does. If you use a website that employes any of those technologies, you'll lose some of the experience you were supposed to get.
And web developers won't care. I think this is an important note. Old IE users (6/7/8) make up a large enough chunk of the web that legacy support for them is considered a higher priority for most, but FF 3.6 users are very much a minority, so you can't expect any support going forward.
My laptop only has 2GB of RAM, so I can't run Firefox anymore anyway, so I switched to Chrome.
A browser should not consume 1.2GB of RAM (and Firefox 10, 11, 53, 1275, or whatever they're up to now, WILL consume that much if you leave a GMail tab open long enough)
On the contrary, Moore's law has more to do with memory than with processor speed. Moore's law is an observation that transistor density doubles roughly every 1.5 years. When transistor density doubles, the capacity of a memory circuit on the same die size doubles. And as developers incorporate Moore's law as an assumption in their designs, we get Wirth's law.
Please tell me what businesses still use and optimize for IE6. Seriously, Microsoft has explicitly begun forcing IE7/8 upgrades down the throats of XP users because IE6 is a massively outdated browser. You are not helping any company by agreeing to make an "IE6 only" site/app. You are hurting them, because your job is to evangelize to them the importance of upgrading. Letting them continue to use IE6 means you are letting them continue to be vulnerable to all kinds of security issues.
Frankly, any customer who refuses to update to at least IE7 is one who I would not do business with. I wouldn't want my name associated with the various security holes that could bring down that company's systems.
No; version numbers have nothing to do with how "advanced" something is.
So, basically, people are stupid, and Firefox was getting bad press due to said stupidity.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face