Firefox 6 available, version 8 to offer add-on control
h-online.com
h-online.com
I'm actually quite frustrated with myself for having put my friends and family on Firefox as it's constantly needing updates, getting new versions, changing its look, etc.
It's more frustrating than dealing with IE now.
Mozilla's game of "look how fast we are moving" is absolutely frustrating and painful.
I can just click my "About Chrome" link now, and it says it's up to date. How refreshing.
EDIT: All a Firefox update means to me anymore is that my plugins won't work anymore so I need to stick with an outdated, probably less secure, and slower Firefox version.
On the other hand, the list of fixed bugs is pretty massive: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/6.0/releasenotes/buglis...
When I finally upgraded to v5, I spent a solid hour trying to get the thing back into a workable state.
The biggest mistake I ever made with Firefox was installing Tab Mix Plus, because now I have easily manageable rows of tabs, which led me to using tabs as ephemeral bookmarks - things I want to read but not now. I currently have 175 tabs open (and no, I don't complain about memory usage - it's not that bad and I know what usage there is is my own fault).
To keep things in check, I use an extension called BarTab, which keeps tabs unloaded on restart until I switch to that tab. Upon upgrading to FF5, that extension broke horribly, leading all of my tabs to fire at once. Turning off compatibility checking didn't fix it, and neither did installing a beta version upgrade to the extension. In the end, I had to go searching the extension library until I found something called BarTab Lite, which worked.
Also, my theme was incompatible with Firefox >=4, but I resigned myself to just deal with it, since I was tired of being made fun of for not upgrading a not-quite-five-months out-of-date browser (the community seems to be becoming one of the worst parts of Firefox). Eventually, I found a new theme, which was a non-linked upgrade to my old one. It would be nice if that was a little more obvious.
That was a long winded way of saying I'd like to see more explicit links between extensions. Rather than saying "there are no upgrades for this broken extension", I'd prefer that there be a way to identify "spiritual successors" so that Firefox can tell you "it's got a different name, but this is where extension Foo lives now."
It would have saved me a lot of time and trouble, because as it stands right now it seems a lot of broken extensions don't have upgrades when really they do - they're just hidden and you need to spend some time looking for them.
(Sorry.. /rant)
Now I just cannot tell anymore whether to upgrade or not. Believe it or not, the current browser* is running just fine for me. I am OK with a speedier browser etc, but not at the cost of more trouble.
* Does it really matter which? (Firefox 5)
That's it.
http://blog.getfirebug.com/2011/08/10/firebug-1-8-1/
You should try updating all your addons.
Still, this is great.
Who on earth though this was a good idea?
So, every six weeks a new release - that means Version 15 this time next year. Seriously?
Really, it is just a version number.
Are you okay with Version 20 by next December?
Version 35 the December after that?
Or should version 6 really be version 5.2 ?
Say that version 32 introduces a "do what I mean" feature where the browser simply goes to whatever site you want, no user interaction required. How are they going to publicize that version 32 is more important than 31 or 33 or 27, all of which were tiny incremental upgrades?
All silliness aside, I see your point. But is the browser really still at a point where such earth-shifting changes are likely to occur? The biggest single change of the last few years that I can think of is the addition of tabs to browers, and even that is a feature that's been around for 20 years in other programs. Any change that's much bigger than that almost warrants a whole new product, regardless of your numbering scheme.
of all these, 409 is the most readable anyway.
2) Every 6 week release you bump the minor version _unless_ some big feature(s) are ready to be rolled in, in which case you bump the major version instead.
There's also a real practical problem to fast-growing version numbers. Historically, a major release would have major new features and might break existing extensions. Minor releases were typically safe to install and were designed to be as compatible as possible with the version they were supplanting. With new major versions of Firefox coming out every 6 weeks you're constantly checking to make sure they haven't changed something critical.
Firefox, OTOH, still advertises their version number right on the download button (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/new/).
Never the less, I see what you mean about it being still "visible" to the user.
So HN has gotten past the language holy wars, but now they're arguing about something ridiculous like which browser is somehow better. Fantastic.
I think you're looking for conflict where there is none. I use both browsers, depending on what I'm using them for.
How do you check the firefox version? Firefox -> Help -> About firefox
Does chrome post a blog post when there is a new version? Yes.
Does firefox post a blog post when there is a new version? Yes.
Does someone on HN make a thread when there is a new version of either? Usually.
Neither one is making a big deal about their versions. You are.
A couple of examples of where Mozilla does make the version number clear:
* The download link
* The downloaded file (Firefox Setup 6.0.exe)
* The new version page that automatically comes up the first time you run the new version (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/6.0/whatsnew/)
* And, most annoyingly, the add-on version check and resulting incompatibilities.
That last one actually is kind of a pain, since, as other people have mentioned, not all add-on authors have updated their add-ons to be compatible with 6.0, despite that being a single character change to an XML file for 98% of them. (Fortunately, addons.mozilla.org does this for authors, so it is only the ones hosting the add-ons themselves that are a problem.)
All the comments about Firefox's version number are the same that were made last summer when Chrome started incrementing their version every six weeks. A year later, I think Chrome users would all agree that the choice of number in the UA string has relatively little impact on users, positive or negative. I'm glad it gives HN something new to argue about for a while, though. :)
It will take a while for the press to get used to the new Firefox release cycle, but by next year it will be treated just like Chrome. Mozilla has already stopped using version numbers in release announcements: https://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/06/21/mozilla-delivers-ne...