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."
Re:Gecko 1.9.3 and SVG animation (Score:3, Interesting)
We'll probably see the Geck 1.9.3 engine "slipstreamed" in with automatic updates to Firefox 3.6. As such, don't be surprised by the end of 2010 we'll see Firefox up to Version 3.6.15 as all the new features are "slipstreamed" in.
Re:Combining security and feature updates, bad ide (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:So much for Windows 7 support (Score:3, Interesting)
So now we have to wait until 2011 for Firefox 4 to get tab previews in the taskbar? Time to investigate ad-block addons for IE8.
That's what IE does, and I hate it--then it takes even more work to switch back to my browser when I'm in another application. (Instead of my windows, I see all my tabs, making the list much longer and harder to navigate since I have to remember which tab I was on, unless I want to jar my experience by unintentionally switching tabs.)
But, if that's the way Windows 7 is "supposed" to work, I suppose it will be more consistent...
Ok, grandpa (Score:2, Interesting)
Continuing to support old versions is a heavy burden, and has to end at some point. It's not a question of if people will have to make that decision, but when.
Re:Multithreading (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Avoidance? (Score:3, Interesting)
I keep HEARING about all these serious problems, but the five computes in my household using Firefox 3.5x (two of them Ubuntu 9.10, three of them Windows XP SP3) haven't SHOWN me any of these problems.
These posts keep talking about how there are major problems with Firefox, and they keep getting worse...yet I haven't experienced nor do I know anyone in my relatively large nerd circle who has experienced what is being described after the release of 3.5.
It sounds like paid shill bullshit to me.
Re:Did you read the crash reports? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to feed a troll, but...
If he and a number of other people, as stated in his report (and I'll throw my experience in there as well), don't have the problems, it calls into question the original report of overwhelming issues.
Personally, I'd have to say that I use firefox for an average of 12 hours a day. I use it quite a bit at work and again when I get home. If you add in the time that my friends and relatives use firefox without on going crashing issues (ESPECIALLY those that take down windows, I've NEVER even heard of Firefox itself bringing down properly patched XP, and I know I've not had it take down either my Ubuntu, Gentoo or Fedora systems). I'd have to say that daily useage of Firefox in my circle has to be aproaching 80 or 90 hours per day.
I'm also saying that the "Automatically Generated Crash Reports" "Didn't happen" because, well, they didn't. mostly because there was no need for firefox to automatically generate a report on an event that didn't take place.
Is Firefox perfect? No, far from it. But I have found as many other people, that crashes, when they do occur are almost never caused by firefox itself, but one of the extensions. In the times I've heard of someone with a crash or two, they uninstall the last extension they put on there and they're back to stable. It's that easy. Same goes for slow load times, large memory usage, high CPU usage, etc.
Also, that originating post says that 91% of the Mozilla Foundation's income is $68M, and complains that we haven't seen $200M in development... Well, did you ever think that calculation is a bit off? after all, that'd only mean we'd see $75M which, last I checked is less than $200 by quite a bit.
You really should think about these things more before you post. If you bought that info, you might want a refund...
Re:Firefox Needs to Be Dropped, Period (Score:1, Interesting)
Strange, 2.x and below were massive memory hogs and somewhat unstable in my experience, when 3.x came along and they started worrying about memory usage and plugging the memory leaks of old by firefox experience did improve, especially on older hardware. Chrome is the biggest memory hog of current browsers, this is very much by design.
Shiretoko? isn't that the codename for an old unstable/testing version of firefox? I would certainly expect that to be unstable and crashprone.
Not that i don't think firefox is starting to lag behind, the XUL GUI is just feeling impossibly slow at this point, but less FUD and more substance next time, please, ok?
Re:Avoidance? (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't. Here's a list of my firefox crashes from one week:
7/27/2009 9:21 PM 9:31 PM 9:34 PM 9:34 PM 9:36 PM 9:44 PM 9:53 PM 9:54 PM 10:12 PM
7/28/2009 1:16 AM 4:05 AM 4:36 AM 12:29 PM 1:41 PM 1:55 PM 5:44 PM 6:55 PM
7/29/2009 11:17 AM 12:28 PM 1:39 PM 6:19 PM 8:24 PM 8:25 PM
7/30/2009 12:24 AM 12:58 PM 1:14 PM 5:22 PM 6:49 PM 7:01 PM 7:30 PM
7/31/2009 11:24 AM 5:35 PM 8:29 PM 8:32 PM 8:44 PM 8:55 PM 9:02 PM
8/1/2009 2:50 AM 11:36 AM 1:31 PM 9:48 PM 9:58 PM
This continued up until 10/9/2009, when the crashes just stopped happening. Since then, I average 1-2 crashes a month.
Re:Firefox development is poorly managed, apparent (Score:3, Interesting)
It is a serious flaw in FireFox that a crashign plug-in brings down the entire browser and all tabs. Yes, applications and plug-ins are going to have bugs. Software architects should take this into account when designing things. FireFox's architects seem not to have done so.
Re:I want multithreading! (Score:3, Interesting)
If you read the article (or better yet the one it cribbed from), the one feature that's so far being considered for backporting to 3.6.x is in fact out-of-process plug-ins.... So what you want is coming! You can try it right now if you grab a nightly build. At least on Linux and Windows.
Mac optimized build of Firefox 3.7 rocks! (Score:3, Interesting)
In case you did not know, you can download optimized Mac versions of a number of browsers from here [latko.org]
Specifically, one of the browsers available is a 64-bit optimized version of FF 3.7 for Snow Leopard.
I finally installed it the other night, after eyeing it warily for the last month or so (as I worked through the latest 3.6 optimized builds). I finally installed it last night, and have to say that it's the biggest improvement to FF that I've came across.
It loads faster, uses less CPU & memory than previous builds, and it's mega fast. My impressions are that it's now as fast as Safari is on a Mac.
It's now my main browser. If you run Snow Leopard, you should check it out.