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

Extended Support Release

[Harshmage]

Use the ESR version and don't stress about major version changes until November-ish.

Re:Extended Support Release

[Kobyov]

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/ It's great really, makes the updates much more like the 3.6 era, when they did things sensibly

Re:Extended Support Release

[MightyMartian]

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.

Re:Extended Support Release

[Anonymous Coward]

The ESR version sometimes rants about libertarian issues when I'm trying to browse the web. Is there a Bruce Perens version?

Re:Extended Support Release

[EdIII]

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.

Crazy Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe TinyMCE isn't actually as "platform independent" and "cross-platform" as it claims?

Code to standards (with appropriate polyfills) and ye shall prosper.

Re:It's a madness

[msclrhd]

You mean like Chrome's rapid release cycle?

Article is misleading

[asquithea]

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.

Solution: API version apart from FF version

[MetalliQaZ]

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

Re:It's a madness

[characterZer0]

They're not whining over a numbering scheme, they're whining over a plugin compatibility scheme.

Re:It's a madness

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

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.