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."
Meaning what? (Score:0, Insightful)
What's the difference between "Firefox 3.0 with updates" and "Firefox 3.7"?
So much for Windows 7 support (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Minefield (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like when running through actual minefields, others may not be as lucky as you.
Where's the meat? (Score:5, Insightful)
What purpose does it serve to skip version numbers, except for some political or media-relations reason? The Linux kernel and many other open source projects have release cycles of "it's done when it's done" -- and a predictable version numbering system. What next, Mozilla Firefox 2010 Professional Edition? Delays are inevitable in any software development project.
Also, Slashdot -- this news post was like saying "X replaced by Y. Z reported jealous, but A and B are looking forward to bringing C onboard soon." Numbers should not be used in place of content. $WITTY_COMMENT. $RETORT. $TROLL. $VAGUE_REFERENCE_TO_SEXUALITY.
Combining security and feature updates, bad idea (Score:4, Insightful)
will be replaced with feature updates for Firefox 3.6 that will be rolled out with security updates
This seems to be a horrible idea to me, unless I'm misinterpreting it. I can see this being implemented in two ways:
One, Mozilla withholds security updates until there is a feature ready to go, which is just stupid - don't leave a hole if you've got a fix ready. One of the arguments in favor Firefox over IE is the more rapid security updates.
Two, Mozilla withholds features until a security update is necessary. I can't see any advantage to doing this, but there's a few obvious downsides (like withholding a perfectly good feature until someone finds something we're supposed to be hoping is not there).
Unless I'm missing something?
Et tu, Mozilla? (Score:5, Insightful)
Security updates should never be combined with feature updates. Anyone who doesn't want the feature update is then in the unfortunate position to decide whether they'll get the unwanted features or keep the unwanted vulnerabilities. Bad Mozilla.
Re:So much for Windows 7 support (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? That one, relatively useless piece of eyecandy is the only thing holding you back from using Firefox.
Uhuh.
Re:Gecko 1.9.3 and SVG animation (Score:1, Insightful)
SVG animation? Heh, they don't even have a half assed SVG static renderer yet, and you want animation? I think they need to make it so we can draw more than a smiley face using primitive shapes and basic fills before they start worrying about animation.
At a bare minimum, can we get it to pass SOME part of the 1.1 test suite for static elements before we start with animation.
You do want corporate support, don't you? (Score:5, Insightful)
Small feature updates are not conducive to getting corporate support. With large updates, a company can say, "We support Firefox 3.5+", and they can be reasonably confident that they don't need to fully test every minor release of Firefox 3.5. With small updates they have to say, "We support Firefox 3.6.7", and can't be sure that they will actually be able to support 3.6.8 without fully testing it. If you want corporate support, you have to have feature freezes, or support stops being worth the testing time.
Re:Ok, grandpa (Score:2, Insightful)
Is Lynx not working out for you?
Re:Firefox development is poorly managed, apparent (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm willing to bet that a fair part of the stability issues people have actually comes from badly-written extensions and plugins. Remember that most other applications don't execute code written by Adobe (and yes, I see that as an argument as to why they're more stable).
Re:Firefox development is poorly managed, apparent (Score:1, Insightful)
Huh. I typed in about:crashes, and it was completely empty.
Anecdote vs. anecdote. To continue this argument you need real data.
Re:Avoidance? (Score:3, Insightful)
Helpful Hint of the Day: There are other browsers. Use one.
Seriously, if it's not working for YOU, use something else. It works for everyone else here, so it must be something with you.
Also, it's open source. Please submit your patches directly to Mozilla or ask them for a refund in the amount of your purchase price. Either way this is not the place for it.
Re:Is it okay that Mozilla disclaims responsibilit (Score:1, Insightful)
So, is it okay that Mozilla Foundation disclaims responsibility for extensions being allowed to make Firefox unstable?
Um, yes.
I don't take responsibility for any code you write, and I don't expect you to take responsibility for any code I write.
Why in the name of sweet holy fuck would you expect the Mozilla Foundation to take responsibility for any code that some random developer completely unassociated with them writes?
I want multithreading! (Score:4, Insightful)
The far and away priority one feature should be Multithreading. Each tab and each plugin should have its own process and its own memory space, so that a crash of one tab/plugin, or one tab/plugin using loads of CPU power, should have practically no effect on my other tabs/plugins on my 4-core CPU.
So I don't care about copying Chrome's GUI. But copying Chrome's sandboxing and multithreading architecture I very much care about!
There is a Mozilla project to implement this [mozilla.org], but the project page hasn't been updated in months, as far as I can tell.
Just make it faster (Score:3, Insightful)
SO damn slow
Re:Ok, grandpa (Score:3, Insightful)
Please enlighten us on how firefox has gotten worse.
From where I sit, v3.5 is a huge improvement over what came before. I'm optimistic that v3.6 will be an improvement over v3.5.
In a word: "Awesomebar"
Re:Firefox development is poorly managed, apparent (Score:2, Insightful)
Quick, let me tell you home many of those people actually give a shit about: 3, possibly 4
Firefox, Thunderbird, Fennec, and if you count devs, Bugzilla, which is a pretty stagnate project at this point. Fennec is debatable as well at this point.
Perhaps its not so impressive to see this massive list but more a sign that they don't have any direction and are infact pulling the exact same failure mode that Netscape did. Good job guys, maybe if you're lucky after this time around you can go for a threepeat on doing a bunch of shit no one wants while stroking your own egos and utterly failing to provide anything actually useful.
I'm just jealous, I want to get paid to sit around writing shit that suits me rather than producing something people actually want.