Slashdot Mirror
Firefox 49 Postponed One Week Due To Unexpected Bugs (softpedia.com)
An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes Softpedia:
Mozilla has announced this week that it is delaying the release of Firefox 49 for one week to address two unexpected bugs. Firefox 49, which was set for release on Tuesday, September 13, will now launch the following Tuesday, on September 20...
Firefox 49 is an important release in Mozilla's grand scheme of things when it comes to Firefox. This is the version when Mozilla will finish multi-process support rollout (a.k.a. e10s, or Electrolysis), and the version when Firefox launches the new WebExtensions API that replaces the old Add-ons API, making Firefox compatible with Chromium extensions.
Firefox's release manager explained the delays as "two blocking issues and the need for a bit more time to evaluate the results of their fixes/backouts" -- one of which apparently involves opening Giphy GIFS on Twitter.
Firefox's release manager explained the delays as "two blocking issues and the need for a bit more time to evaluate the results of their fixes/backouts" -- one of which apparently involves opening Giphy GIFS on Twitter.
Aren't all bugs more or less "unexpected"? If you expected them, you'd check for them and hopefully squash them before they are committed.
I think the more appropriate word here might have been "blocking". They're severe enough to delay a release over.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
The Chromification of Firefox continues.
Firefox is anything but a "win" for the community. With users abandoning the buggy slow piece of shit in droves it is an example that even Open Source gets it wrong sometimes.
Nope Janders... Start a CPU meter and watch how much of your CPU Firefox consumes while it does pretty much nothing. Display a few static web sites and watch your CPU run hot while Firefox god knows what. People have been complaining about this for years in the Firefox forums. They don't fix it. Electrolysis will make it worse, the same way multi-process made Chrome worse: Yes, you can give each tab it's own process to protect it from instability when it crashes, or write a stable browser which doesn't crash. Derp. Multi-process will make Firefox even slower. F*cking idiots.
Waiting for someone to deliver to the world a lean fast browser. FF49 won't be it.
And Firefox releases are now so frequent this is scarcely news. e.g. Release *49*!
The problem with Firefox is that the community has little say in what that browser does. Plenty of excellent proposals were made that all got shot down by the arrogant lead developers who see Firefox as the coded manifestation of their egos. FF is open source only because the source is open, but not because a community is working on it together taking user feedback into account. Maybe they fix the update bug, my tests systems are stuck on version 47 although 48 is available.
But the current CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, is certainly somebody who has "vast ambitions but no skills to match".
People have been repeating this since 2003, yet here we are in 2016... You would expect Firefox wouldn't even be news if this was reality.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I was a pretty harsh critic of the 'personalized ads', but Mozilla removed that, so now Firefox is back to being the best browser. Its performance is slightly shy of Chromium in my experience, but it has better features, customizability and a selection of add-ons.
Anyway, what I'm taking from the comments on this article is that Mozilla really shouldn't read Slashdot, because most commenters here hold that Mozilla really cannot do anything right. I'm sure Firefox would've been heavily criticized if a major release was too buggy, so it seems to be the right course of action to delay its release, but they're getting shit for that too. Oh well. Some people are just unpleasable and can be safely ignored for that reason.