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.'"

Comments

Re:Extended Support Release

[spire3661]

This is /thread right here. I just want my browser to be fast, efficient and mostly stay out of my way. IE8 infuriates me with all the bullshit they want you to setup before you can actually use the damn thing.

Re:My solution Works most of the time

[VGPowerlord]

Maybe Add-on writers should push it up a few versions and hope it works? I dunno.

Mozilla forbids Add-on writers from putting it more than 2 major version numbers ahead. This policy worked fine when 2 major version numbers took years... but right now, that's 12 weeks.

Yes, Firefox breaks things.

[Animats]

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.

Re:Extended Support Release

[amicusNYCL]

What, like Opera? Tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, speed dial, several other things that later browsers copied. Those only became features once someone created an extension for them in Firefox, right?

Have you looked at a vanilla install of Firefox? Compare that with Opera and the number of features in Firefox is pretty much approaching zero.

If the only thing you want to compare is plugins or add-ons, instead of actual browser features, then you should look at things like this, this, and this to avoid making yourself appear uninformed in the future.