Firefox 3.7 Dropped In Favor of Feature Updates 252
Barence sends in a report from pcpro.co.uk that says "Under its original plans, Mozilla would roll out Firefox 3.6 and 3.7 over the course of 2009, each bringing minor improvements to the browser. However, a steady stream of delays to Firefox 3.6 has rendered that goal unobtainable, forcing Mozilla to rethink its release. As a result, Firefox 3.7 has been dropped and will be replaced with feature updates for Firefox 3.6 that will be rolled out with security updates. This should free up the team to work on the next major release, Firefox 4, slated for the last quarter of 2010, which is expected to follow the same development process." Updated 20100116 00:54 GMT by timothy: Alexander Limi, from Firefox User Experience, says that the PC Pro article linked above misinterprets the situation, and that 3.7 is still on the roadmap before 4.0. The confusion stems from a schedule realignment: the out-of-process plugins feature, originally slated to land in 3.7, will instead ship as a minor update in Firefox's 3.6 series. According to Limi, CNET gets it right."
Gecko 1.9.3 and SVG animation (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder what effect this is going to have on the implementation of SVG animation, which is part of gecko 1.9.3, which was to be used in 3.7. Is it going to be slotted into 3.6 sometime or will it get pushed to 4?
Minefield (Score:3, Informative)
I'm using it already as my predominant web browser of choice. Works like a champ so far. I know it's not even pre-release blah blah. It works for me.
no more daily 3.7 alpha updates then? (Score:1, Informative)
I've been running the 3.7alpha nightlies for a while now (codename: Minefield...which is now, possibly, ironic) and it's been quite good. Shame to see it dropped, but hopefully they can move the code into 3.6 quickly.
Re:no more daily 3.7 alpha updates then? (Score:3, Informative)
codename: Minefield...which is now, possibly, ironic
No, it's intentional. Mozilla has been using Minefield has the code name for their cutting edge nightly stuff for quite some time... you know, the stuff that could randomly explode.
Re:Multithreading (Score:3, Informative)
It [google.com] doesn't [google.com]?
Re:Multithreading (Score:3, Informative)
It [google.com] doesn't [google.com]?
No it doesn't. Straight from the author's mouths.
Chrome does not yet allow extensions to prevent page elements from being fetched, just to hide them.
Re:Firefox Needs to Be Dropped, Period (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe I'm lucky (conversely, maybe you are unlucky), but 32-bit Firefox 3.5x is 100%* rock-solid stable on my PCs. I can't compare this to IE's stability, as I never, ever, use IE. Granted, I only have 4 add-ons installed (ColorfulTabs, Flashblock, ForecastFox, and Oldbar), but Firefox simply works.
*Actually, I can remember 1 time that Firefox locked up on me, months ago, so its stability is 100% minus one_event.
Re:Gecko 1.9.3 and SVG animation (Score:3, Informative)
What exact problems are you seeing with the 1.1 test suite? Last I checked, Gecko passed a pretty big chunk of that (SVG fonts and SMIL excluded).
Re:Where's the meat? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:So much for Windows 7 support (Score:5, Informative)
Last I saw tab previews in the taskbar was the default for Firefox 3.6, I had to disable it any time I did a clean install.
browser.taskbar.previews.enable in about:config
IMO it entirely defeat the point of having tabs in ONE program, so only one app wastes taskbar space, even preview space
Re:Combining security and feature updates, bad ide (Score:3, Informative)
I think you're missing two things:
1) The article's first paragraph is taking a proposal for a possible future plan of action
and claiming that it is the plan of action.
2) Right now (Firefox 3.0 and Firefox 3.5) there are no features shipped as minor updates;
all features are "withheld" as you put it until the next major version.
The only firm current plan here is that one particular feature, namely out-of-process plug-ins, is currently planned to be backported to Firefox 3.6 and shipped in some form in one of the minor updates. Once it's judged ready and so forth. Since minor updates are all about security and stability, this particular feature fits well in their scope (for example, a significant fraction of Firefox crashes are actually Flash crashes).
There is also talk of possibly backporting some other small features (mostly performance-related) to the stable branch as they become ready. This may or may not happen. There is also discussion about what and when the next Firefox major update will be, and discussion about what and when the next Gecko release will be. These may not happen at the same time. None of that is decided.
Re:Firefox development is poorly managed, apparent (Score:2, Informative)
I have seen you post this ANY time Firefox has been mentioned for the past couple of weeks, cut and paste style. You are either a shill of some sort, or forced to do this because of one of your clients. Either way, you aren't wanted here.
Re:Firefox development is poorly managed, apparent (Score:1, Informative)
No operating system should crash due to a misbehaving application. If it does crash, the operating system sucks.
Re:Combining security and feature updates, bad ide (Score:3, Informative)
You're missing this:
(3) Mozilla does individual security fixes and feature updates for 3.6 as they are completed (maybe grouping the two together in an update if they happen to be ready at the same time, but not holding either to wait for the other), but doesn't have one big list of featur updates that must be complete for a "v3.7" that are released all at once. The "feature updates that will be rolled out with security updates", in this case, would mean that the feature updates are rolled into the usual chain of flowing, as-completed security update point releases rather than bundled together into a minor version release, not that each individual feature update must accompany at least one security fix.
Re:Gecko 1.9.3 and SVG animation (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Test/20061213/htmlEmbedHarness/basic-index.html [w3.org]
I just tried it using 3.5.7.
I skipped the first 2 tests as they are animation related.
I stopped at test 7. I figured since 3 through 7 didn't match up, and I'm currently at a 100% failure rate that I didn't need to prove much more.
Yes, Firefox can score great if you ignore all the tests that it fails, unfortunately things like fonts ARE KIND OF IMPORTANT.
I should point out that proper font rendering is required for EVERY test. You can't pass any without proper font rendering.
Go a head and scroll through the list though, the composition test fails, gradient tests fail, fill tests fail, event handling and scripting is pointless in firefox, structured image placement, text selection doesn't work, inheritance is broken, text alignment is broken beyond belief.
I'm not going any further, the point has been made. Gecko hasn't passed any tests, it can't without proper font rendering. You don't get to exclude part of the test and claim you passed it when that part of the test is fundamental to the standard. Thats like the 'Windows is secure as long as its in a locked room with no cables to it and turned off.'
Re:Firefox development is poorly managed, apparent (Score:5, Informative)
Have you seen $200 million worth of development in Firefox?
http://planet.mozilla.org/ [mozilla.org]
Spend a little time reading this on a regular basis, and you'll soon discover how many projects Mozilla handles, and all the developers they're paying.
The big projects include:
Firefox, Bugzilla, Camino, Fennec, Lightning, Sunbird, Seamonkey, and Thunderbird.
These are major multi-platform projects.
Mozilla has several projects for first-party add-ons for all of the above such as Firebug, Chromebug, . Then they have tons of major projects that most people never hear about. At the moment they're working on:
Jetpack
Raindrop
Bespin
Concept
Personas
Prism
Snowl
Test Pilot
Ubiquity
Weave
Electrolysis
A tool recently said the KDE code based purely on lines of code should have cost $175 million to develop, and that wasn't counting Koffice, and anything outside the main KDE trunk.
Mozilla also doesn't just do code projects, they do tons of community management and outreach projects like Mozilla Education, which costs even more money.
They also help support outside developers using Mozilla and Xulrunner for other apps such as Kompozer, Songbird, etc.
I don't know where all their money goes, but Mozilla does *A LOT*. To suggest they're not doing much development is ignorance or lies.
Firefox experiences a LOT of crashes and memory hogging, and has for years.
Firefox does crash for me from time to time, on Windows and Linux. I tend to use a lot of extensions, and the most common thing I hear is that extensions are the largest source of memory and stability issues. Do I get daily crashes, or 10 crashes a day? No. And I run daily snapshot builds. I maybe get 1 crash a week, if that.
As a Systems Engineer, I troubleshoot and support some big money apps that crash fairly often. Large software projects are going to have bugs. However, I wager if you run without extensions, you'll find that Firefox is pretty damned stable for such a massive multi-platform app.
Memory issues are all but lies these days. Memory usage has improved so much over the past few years. Firefox is actually better with memory usage than Chrome in many ways. The core app doesn't take too much memory on first load. It doesn't have memory leaks.
There are some intentional features which cause Firefox to eat up some memory that you can turn off, such as Firefox keeping fully rendered pages in memory, so that when you hit the back button, they just display immediately without having to re-render. When you close a tab, it still keeps that full session in memory for some time, so that you can reopen the closed tab with full rendered pages and history if you want.
If you don't like these features, turn them off. Not to mention, these are set to use dynamic chunks of memory which is preportional to your total memory. If you have a desktop with 8 gigs of memory that you're not using, why get upset that Firefox is using 300-400 megs of memory?
Unused memory isn't doing you any good.
Stop with the FUD. Real geeks know better and see right through BS and lies.
Re:Did you read the crash reports? (Score:3, Informative)
I just read mine - I have one in Nov 2009 & one in Dec 2009. I seem to recall that both of those were caused by some script on cnet.com; it was certainly one particular site in both cases. I start each morning with a fresh 12 tabs open and go through the day opening & closing tons of tabs. Maybe this is "lighter" browser use, but I also have a machine at home which keeps 50+ tabs open for weeks at a time & almost never crashes. This leads me to agree with the GP, claiming that Firefox has major problems with crashing sounds like shill bs.
Re:Where's the meat? (Score:3, Informative)
What purpose does it serve to skip version numbers, except for some political or media-relations reason?
Work was going on simultaneously on 3.7 and 4.0 branches of the code. There is an overhead in doing that, eg builds of both could be failing, who's looking into that, etc. Not least of your problems is getting developers who're working on shiny-new-stuff (4.0) to care about incremental-updates (3.7)
Version numbers are just marketing. The linux numbering system changed not that long ago, and every so often there is a bunfight over it (there was talk of making releases last year version 9.x, matching the year); and the discussions are always about how this would be perceived, since what matters to developers is just the git hash anyway.
Re:Is it already time for the next *generation*? (Score:3, Informative)
There's been continuous rearchitecture going on in the 1.9, 1.9.1, 1.9.2 Gecko milestones, and it's ongoing. I mean.... the JS engine is being rewritten from the ground up, in 1.9 CSS layout was rewritten from the ground up, the DOM is about to see some major changes...
Not sure why you decided that there's no rearchitecture going on. ;)