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Firefox: In With the New, Out With the Compatibility
snydeq writes "Mozilla's 'endless parade' of Firefox updates adds no visible benefit to users but breaks common functions, as numerous add-ons, including the popular open source TinyMCE editor, continually suffer compatibility issues, thanks to Firefox's newly adopted auto-update cycle, writes InfoWorld's Galen Gruman. 'Firefox is a Web browser, and by its very nature the Web is a heterogeneous, uncontrolled collection of resources. Expecting every website that uses TinyMCE to update it whenever an incremental rev comes out is silly and unrealistic, and certainly not just because Mozilla decided compatibility in its parade of new Firefox releases was everyone else's problem. The Web must handle such variablility — especially the browsers used to access it.'"
Use the ESR version and don't stress about major version changes until November-ish.
Where in the hell they hurry with releases? "Release often, release early" madness continues...
I edit the add-on package (they are easy to download and are just renamed zip files) and change the version number manually and hope that there wasn't some fundamental code change in Firefox that breaks it. Maybe Add-on writers should push it up a few versions and hope it works? I dunno.
There Can Be Only One...
Maybe TinyMCE isn't actually as "platform independent" and "cross-platform" as it claims?
Code to standards (with appropriate polyfills) and ye shall prosper.
flamebait
A few years from now after firefox usage will shrink to 5% the chrome fanboys will say - "We won, Chrome is so awesome". Whereas, the other camp will simply reply - "No you din't, we lost on our own".
I stuck with Mozilla starting with V1.0 in July 2002 but about a month ago the bloat and crashes from Firefox 11.0 got too much for me and I gave Chrome a try.
Chrome is faster with no crashes.
I don't know where Firefox went wrong but I'm not going back.
Ponca City, We Love You
Tons of websites, including those with advanced features work perfectly with updated versions of firefox.
So what's wrong with this particular feature? And why is it that FF is getting the blame?
Mod Article.... Flamebait
.. what the point of an API is since forever.
Maybe they will learn when their company dies and comes about for the 3rd time.
It is the 3rd, right? Or did they pull a Matrix on us and it is much older than we initially thought?
The real annoyance for me is the version numbering / compatibility scheme. There are add-ins that are still relevant, and still work perfectly, but you have to go through a song and dance to install them every time the version numbers change, the song and dance being unpacking them, editing the version numbers in their metadata, and repacking them, or finding the add-in in your profile from an older version and editing it there.
If they could fix this, that would be much better. Instead of add-ins declaring which versions they are compatible with, it should be possible to compute which APIs they access, and whether their behaviour has changed.
In the case of TinyMCE, I'm not sure what the issue is, unless people are packaging it as an add-in - my only encounters with it are as something embedded in a web page, so it would naturally have to cope with a wide variety of browsers by default.
None of the extensions I use break with 'every' revision. Most I don't even think have needed to be upgraded from 8.0 to the current 13.0a2[Aurora], and it updates Firefox essentially every time I restart Firefox. It makes me think TinyMCE are the one's doing something wrong.
TinyMCE is not an addon - the article seems to be talking about a Firefox bug, but doesn't provide a bug ID.
Addons are now up-issued automatically where possible; I have found fewer addons breaking compared with the sweeping changes made using the old model of major releases.
The article also misses the benefits from regular releases: features and improvements get in front of users more quickly, and changes are incremental, rather than jarringly abrupt. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Firefox_(Rapid_release_development_cycle) for a list of changes since Firefox 4.
There is a little check box in the options somewhere to stop nagging for updates. Trying to keep FF 9 because of addon compatibility.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
It is free and has way better support. Bugs are fixed a lot faster.
Having been a devout follower and promoter of Mozilla Firefox since the very very beginning, I have to say that over the last few months I have slowly been bracing myself for the inevitable realization that it is over, and time to move on. I will admit that other browsers briefly caught my eye at times through the years, and although I may have strayed momentarily here or there to others, it was more curiosity than anything else. I always came back home to FF with the knowledge that it was the best for me.
It saddens me deeply, the direction that they have chosen. I really don't want to have to move on and change the way I interact with the web, but the situation is purely intolerable. I can only hope that there is refuge to be found elsewhere...
On a few occasions, I have been presented with an updated version of the Add-On a few days after the new Firefox disabled it. But it is increasingly annoying to have functionality I have come to rely upon disabled. It's very difficult to work with tools that keep mutating and supporting the concept of Add-On functionality becomes pointless when everyone has to run like the Red Queen just to stay even.
This is so obvious, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
Users see the Firefox version. Plugin developers see the plugin API version. So if FF 10, 11, 12 ,13 all have the same API, then they are automatically compatible. New features added to the browser can be tested for. Removing features causes a API rev.
ffs, just do it and stop with all the noise!
-d
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
You have to find a balance somewhere.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
I stay with Firefox because of its superior adblock abilities (via adblock plus). As soon as another browser is equally capable Firefox is GONE. I suspect others will be too.
I still use Firefox but I mainly use chrome/opera these days. Firefox was good until about 2 years ago, whatever happened around that time sure has f*cked up a once good web browser.
I'm using Chrome now
I am doing automating testing for several companies and it is not easy to support so many browsers versions (and multiply it by 3 OS)
people bitched that there add-ons were getting disabled for no reason due to version compatibility checking, so they removed it. Now people are bitching that there add-ons are breaking?! How it this mozilla's fault? you got what you wanted! It is the add-on developers responsibility to either enable compatibility checking, or test there add-on before each new version.
besides, why would you even need an add-on like tinymce? If your website requires a Firefox add-on for full functionality then YOUR SITE is broken. Don't blame the add-on, and definitely don't blame the browser when things go wrong. Joomla and wikipedia can do it without problems! do it right or STFU
The only reason there would be a compatibility problem is if programs/scripts/modules/whatever are using user-agent identification to determine what features are available. This is (and always has been) a very bad practice - You check to see if the functions (or alternatives) are available, rather than checking against UA. That way you don't have to continually update scripts to maintain compatibility with the latest versions. When when browsers start supporting new functions coded in, those functions just work. When deprecated functionality is removed, the check for that particular function fails and the code moves on to another branch.
For example, rather than the following:
function getXMLHTTP() {
if (navigator.appName == 'Microsoft Internet Explorer')
{
var ua = navigator.userAgent;
var re = new RegExp("MSIE ([0-9]{1,}[\.0-9]{0,})");
if (re.exec(ua) != null)
rv = parseFloat( RegExp.$1 );
if (rv try { return new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP.6.0"); }
catch (e) {}
try { return new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP.3.0"); }
catch (e) {}
try { return new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); }
catch (e) {}
} else
return XMLHTTPRequest;
} else
return XMLHTTPRequest;
}
Which uses nasty browser detection to try and cope with IE 8 and below, you should use:
function getXMLHTTP() {
if (XMLHTTPRequest) return XMLHTTPRequest;
if (ActiveXObject) {
try { return new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP.6.0"); }
catch (e) {}
try { return new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP.3.0"); }
catch (e) {}
try { return new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); }
catch (e) {}
}
throw new Error("This browser does not support XMLHttpRequest.");
}
Which nicely checks to see both if the newer/proper XMLHTTPRequest Javascript object exists, and if not, tries to use the latest ActiveX object (Necessary for IE 8 and below), while only using the "ActiveXObject" function if it is available. It also means that if MS put out a version of IE that falls back to the ActiveX Object route, this code will still work with it, whereas the first will not. It's a minor example, true, but it's an example nonetheless.
It's on v14 now and Almost every addon I try still works. You just have to disable the nightly compatability check.
Version numbers aside, they are not important.
First they remove the statusbar and I need an extension to restore it (had nobody made that, I would be screwed).
Now they break image viewing and yet again I need an extension to fix it.
Whoever is approving such changes is the problem.
Would it still auto update if the IP or entire range were to be blocked? ...$ nano etc/hosts [127.0.0.1 Offending IP] or firewall?
Is this something people actually use?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Organizations need to test external software (such as web browsers) before they allow their workers and customers to use it with their apps and web pages. Each major version of a web browser counts as another item in the test matrix: so the following
Firefox 6.x
Firefox 7.x
Firefox 8.x
Firefox 9.x
Firefox 10.x
Firefox 11.x
would be approximately 6 times as costly for organizations to support than:
Firefox 3.x
What often happens instead is that the webmaster picks one version of Firefox (probably the most recent at the time of the in-house rollout), and requires everyone to upgrade to that. So what, you might say, the FF version upgrade happens automatically on the desktop. Yes, but if a new major release of FF comes out, the webmaster won't add that to the supported browsers list until it's been fully vetted by QA. When that happens, the site no longer supports FF as far as many of its visitors are concerned. Whose fault is that? I'd say it's the FF team, for forcing each site to spend scarce resources re-testing their browser for compatibility every few months.
When they made the browser work with site regardless of whether or not it confirmed to standards? Some one is looking awfully kettle-ish right now.
What's wrong with just falling back to a fucking <textarea>?
TinyMCE is an Add-On or Extension?
TinyMCE is an "add-on" in the same sense that Slashdot.org and jQuery.js are.
How is it that this asshat's "stories" continue to reach the front page?
It's probably this one: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=736952, which is fixed in the nightlies.
... files so that the max supported version of firefox is 99.*. may be problems at some future point, but at least for now, add-ons continue to work after updates.
That's why I prefer Opera. All the functionality I like that would require a plugin from Firefox is just built in. Since it's built in, the Opera development team are in charge of maintaining them so they don't break with every release.
Because there is no easy way to distinguish at a glance between major upgrades and minor bug fix releases. Because the only reason Mozilla is doing this is because Chrome is. Because the major.minor version system has worked for decades. Because Mozilla is being an ass about this and telling their users it is better because we tell you it is. Because I have no freaking idea whether 10 compared to 9 is a major upgrade with tons of new features, a minor upgrade with just bug fixes.
That is why people are 'whining' over a numbering scheme!
Can't please everyone I guess. I'm a web developer, and one of the software packages I'm the chief maintainer of was affected by the FF/TinyMCE issue. Turned out I was using a two-year-old version of TinyMCE, so it was a good impetus to update - something I probably should have done on my own initiative ages ago. There were literally hundreds of other bug fixes during that time.
If that's the price I have to pay to have a user-base which supports recent standards like HTML5 and CSS3 then damn, I'll pay that! Chrome was a total science-send when that hit the scene and started gaining momentum - "You mean it's just *always* up-to-date?!?!"
Web technology moves quick, if browsers don't support those changes they don't get off the ground, and we can't use them! Every now and then there might be some collateral damage, sure best to try and avoid that, but it will still happen.
Compare it to major OS upgrades (a pretty fair analogy given the browser is essentially a website "OS") and how much software breaks during those. Web gets off pretty easy really, well, except for the IE elephant in the room..
Dear Mozilla,
You're starting to smell kinda-sorta like Microsoft. Kindly please knock it the fuck off.
Thank you,
A user
It's JS and html. How can it be dependant on a specific version of Firefox unless it's coded exceptionally poorly? Why doesn't chrome's fast versioning cause problems? This submissions is shit.
What bullshit is this that I just read? Are you retarded or something? Don't you know how to spell correctly, or form coherent sentences?
I mean, what is this? I don't even think a human being wrote this. Some primate-creature must have gotten hold of the keyboard.
See, this is why I always disable auto-update and use *my* schedule to check and install updates. Otherwise things break when I'm doing something important, messages pop-up at inconvenient times, network bandwidth gets sucked away when I'm doing something else, and so forth. If I'm in the middle of a conference presentation, no, I don't really need to know that the latest Java, Adobe Flash or Reader update is available. If I'm in the classroom, I don't need to know that it's ready to install, especially when I don't actually have the user privileges to install the damn thing on the computer in question (sorry, but it's been bugging me on one computer EVERY LOGIN for the ENTIRE TERM).
I'm not saying that auto-update *must* be evil, but at the very least there needs to be some way to inform these auto-update systems that "I'm busy and any notifications would be especially inconvenient at the moment", or "I'm on limited bandwidth and you shouldn't be trying to download a 50MB update that I may or may not want", or "Yes, that's very interesting but I can't install it", and so forth. The current auto-update mechanisms are DUMB. If those updates also break compatibility it's even more foolish to enable them by default and have them update silently. They should *SAY* during the update process that "This update is known to break compatibility in the following areas: .... Do you still want to install it?" If that situation isn't clear until after the update is out for a while, well, then update the notification once you do know.
After Firefox upgraded itself to version 11, Netflix (watch instantly) just does to the system requirements page. Why is that? (Windows XP SP2 64-bit)
Netflix in Chrome has always gone to the system requirements page. My version of IE8 is 64-bit which Silverlight DOES NOT SUPPORT.
Netflix support is clueless and wants to push me off to Microsoft support.
"Mozilla's 'endless parade' of Firefox updates adds no visible benefit to users but breaks common functions"
...
And the solution is to not update to the latest version
AccountKiller
From an add-on developer perspective, Firefox's frantic updates are a pain. I have the same add-on for Firefox and Google Chrome. Most of the code is common. On the Firefox side, I have work-arounds for two bugs in Firefox, and they've been open bug reports in Bugzilla for many months. There's a new bug this week because the last update to the Mozilla add-on SDK broke something in message passing. That's supposedly fixed in the next version of the SDK being released today. Now I have to rebuild, update and test my add-on, then run it through the Mozilla approval bureaucracy again. (Yes, the AMO web site says this happens automatically. That's only true if you let them host the source code.)
Over on Google Chrome, it just works. No workarounds needed. A stable API. No updates needed from my side.
I get far more downloads of the Firefox version, though.
People who don't understand traditional version numbering should not criticize numbering schemes. Traditionally it's major internal changes (i.e. compatibility change), whether user visible or not, that rev major version numbers, everything else goes after some dot or another. Not that many have ever followed it... but of course those making illusory compatibility promises via crappy numbering are fine, as long as they don't rev the major number too much you can pretend it's not your problem and use the number to CYA when combining with your shaky systems. Hey, guess what, Firefox is not your internal IT department and shouldn't keep back useful internal improvements to satisfy your business needs. Fix you processes, be they software testing or web development so that everything doesn't come crashing down when something changes, because version number stability doesn't mean shit won't break.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
after the original iPhone started shipping.
Linux or Windows, it's always the same: Firefox (Not Responding)
Microsoft is was not above bribery in the past. What makes people think they will not do so in the future?
Mozilla has been doing some idiotic things lately. Could we crowd source looking to see if anybody there is driving a new sports car or something?
I was a loyal FF user until about version 4.0 when all my add-ons broke. The developers must not realize that the add-ons are the reason to use Firefox. Constantly breaking the add-ons removes all incentive to use Firefox at all.
I might be a little off-topic, but why is rich-text editing not supported natively by the browser? With all these Web 2.0 and app-stuff, wouldn't it make sense to have a decent text editor available by default?
Let it spit out simple HTML fragments and you'll be fine for most apps.
-- The Internet is a too slow way of doing things, you'd never do without it.
They NEVER updated... yeah, fucking great!
I still use two PPC Macs regularly, one of which is a PBG4 I've been quite reticent to upgrade to Leopard, the last supported OS X on these machines. Running the Firefox PPC Mac builds of 3.6 has worked for me, but about a month ago I decided to have a look at Camino again, for the first time in years & years.
On this older machine, it's a hell of a lot more stable, & faster too. I've been running it for a month with no lock-ups. It doesn't have NoScript (my primary reason for sticking with FFX) but the flashblock functionality works fine. I had forgotten how nice all of Camino's various OS X integration features are. If it had NoScript I'd replace FFX with it on my newer Intel Mac too.
The article is really well balanced. No offence, but every 6 weeks I am reminded why sticking with FF 3.6 is a good idea, as I see my colleagues scream at FF because of yet another broken thing.
Rapid releases are not a bad idea as long as you do it right (like chrome), if you do it wrong (like FF), it just pisses everybody off.
What the Moz team seams to not understand is that doing rapid release right means that users should not notice. With FF, users are hurt every 6 weeks, the bugs fixed and new features are probably nice, but they are not worth the pain of having something that does not work in a predictable way in the long run.
The good news is that there are alternatives:
- Chrome
- FF ESR (to some extent)
- FF 3.6
But for me, the plain FF with auto-updates, no thank you.
et les Shadoks pompaient...
I use kubuntu and the continuous upgrades of firefox and thunderbird and very annoying!!!
I switched to thunderbird recently following a kmail2 upgrade failure. The thing is that firefox and especially thunderbird are useless without plugins. I have 17 extensions on thunderbird, ranging from standard enigmail and lightning to firetray because the stock tunderbird does not seem to have a system tray icon (duh!).
The latest and greatest firefox broke zotero for a some days. Zotero is the sole reason why I use mostly firefox.
What I do not understand is why every single update in Firefox breaks at least one of my add-ons.
Chrome has no such problem - it updates CONSTANTLY and I have NEVER seen it break an add-on.
I don't know if this is because the Chrome add-on system is just better than Firefox's, or if it is because Chrome goes to an effort to maintain backward compatibility layers - all I know is this is a MAJOR reason I stopped using Firefox.
If Mozilla is not careful they are going to auto-update themselves out of existance... come on guys, you are supposed to be smart people, you can do better than whatever the current status-quo is with the addon system.
My dev team despised the fact that add-ons would break so often that we had to switch from Firefox because no matter how useful the web development tool was we knew it wouldn't work in about a month or so. Firefox should be honest about its business plan and simply remove the add-on functionality. I am one of those people that started using Chrome because of Firefox's constant "updates"
If there is no God then free will is an illusion.
If you've ever hacked TinyMCE code, you'd see it's absolute shit. I've worked with several other WYSIWYG editors written in JavaScript, and they all handle browser changes and upgrades just fine. The problem is with TinyMCE's quality, not Firefox's release cycle.
Rule number one. Never auto update, it just screws things up.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
These days, IE9 is a better browser than Firefox. Chrome is better than Firefox. Opera is better than all of them. Why are people still using Firefox?
Why?
These stories get posted to Slashdot all the time regarding Firefox. Usually the comments are filled with people crying about performance and memory issues. Upon further reading, you'll usually see those same people saying that they have 100 tabs open for a few months. Honestly, why do you even do that?
I use Adblock and Noscript and have very rarely, if ever, had any performance or update problems with Firefox and those two plugins. I don't stare at my task manager, so I have no idea how much memory Firefox is using at any given moment, and I don't care until I see it affecting other applications.
People and corporations that operated fairly well in the good times started to get eaten alive by their own inefficiencies they were too inflexible or proud to shed. Assuming ample potable water and no murder, who will more likely last the longest on the proverbial desert island, the obese person or the skinny one?
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
Why you so stupid? I use tinymce all the time and use the latest firefox builds with no issues. Note that I did not say that I use the latest tinymce builds. Could it really just be that tinymce's updates are really the issue or just that version of tinymce that you are using? 100+ websites in current use say YES!
-DaveM
Firefox's rapid release schedule has not impacted on the compatibility of add-ons to the degree that this statement makes. That's just misinformation. My biggest beef with Firefox is the continual memory leaks and high cpu load when opening a large number of tabs. This issue has **still** not been addressed.