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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.'"
Maybe TinyMCE isn't actually as "platform independent" and "cross-platform" as it claims?
Code to standards (with appropriate polyfills) and ye shall prosper.
You mean like Chrome's rapid release cycle?
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.
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"
They're not whining over a numbering scheme, they're whining over a plugin compatibility scheme.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
a) Chrome have always done it that way.
b) Chrome doesn't fucking break everything every upgrade!
Honestly. Does Firefox still give you a XUL error instead of sensible HTTP error pages if it's upgraded and you haven't restarted it yet?
I stopped using Firefox and don't stress at all. I want my fucking browser to just work, and since i have no particular emotional investment in it, it got uninstalled, and it is unlikely, unless I start doing a lot of web work again, to ever reappear on my machine.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Just because you have abundance does not mean you can become lazy with efficiency. If we learned anything with the economic collapse that we have had to deal with in the last few years, it is that people and corporations (not people) that operated fairly well in the good times started to get eaten alive by their own inefficiencies.
I may have 8GB in my laptop, and looking for more, but I also run a *lot* of programs at the same time while I am working. Having 10-20 tabs open at any one moment is not unusual, and even more when I am developing/debugging APIs, websites, etc. That does not include a separate browser on another screen with references open, etc.
If IE and Firefox want to be lazy buttheads and use twice the memory just because it is cheap, I can also use Chrome when I could use that gig or two of memory back for other processes.
That's just for single users. That kind of inefficiency is more evident on remote desktop environments where you have 50-100 sessions running at any one time with employees using 5-10 tabs for web portals to 20-30 SaaS vendors. When you get to that level, you will see the difference between using Chrome and IE very quickly.