Firefox: In With the New, Out With the Compatibility 366
snydeq writes "Mozilla's 'endless parade' of Firefox updates adds no visible benefit to users but breaks common functions, as numerous add-ons, including the popular open source TinyMCE editor, continually suffer compatibility issues, thanks to Firefox's newly adopted auto-update cycle, writes InfoWorld's Galen Gruman. 'Firefox is a Web browser, and by its very nature the Web is a heterogeneous, uncontrolled collection of resources. Expecting every website that uses TinyMCE to update it whenever an incremental rev comes out is silly and unrealistic, and certainly not just because Mozilla decided compatibility in its parade of new Firefox releases was everyone else's problem. The Web must handle such variablility — especially the browsers used to access it.'"
My solution Works most of the time (Score:2, Interesting)
Too Late (Score:2, Interesting)
I stuck with Mozilla starting with V1.0 in July 2002 but about a month ago the bloat and crashes from Firefox 11.0 got too much for me and I gave Chrome a try.
Chrome is faster with no crashes.
I don't know where Firefox went wrong but I'm not going back.
Re:Extended Support Release (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:My solution Works most of the time (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe Add-on writers should push it up a few versions and hope it works? I dunno.
Mozilla forbids Add-on writers from putting it more than 2 major version numbers ahead. This policy worked fine when 2 major version numbers took years... but right now, that's 12 weeks.
Re:Extended Support Release (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not so much about processing speed - It's about memory hogging. I don't have much of a problem with that concerning Chrome or FF, but depending on what you have open using just a few tabs under IE can quickly eat a half-gig of RAM. With a couple of GB in the computer that may or may not be an issue, but it seems rude and makes me feel a little violated and dirty...
Re:It's a madness (Score:4, Interesting)
That's because chrome wasn't doing any hardware acceleration. I don't want Firefox not using a feature just because your video drivers are buggy. The problem is definately in them. I don't care what calls you make to the video driver, it still should not bsod. Ati is just being stupid. Sorry you are stuck with them, but it's not surprising. It's been very well known that the ati drivers are terrible.
Yes, Firefox breaks things. (Score:5, Interesting)
From an add-on developer perspective, Firefox's frantic updates are a pain. I have the same add-on for Firefox and Google Chrome. [adlimiter.com] Most of the code is common. On the Firefox side, I have work-arounds for two bugs in Firefox, and they've been open bug reports in Bugzilla for many months. There's a new bug this week because the last update to the Mozilla add-on SDK broke something in message passing. That's supposedly fixed in the next version of the SDK being released today. Now I have to rebuild, update and test my add-on, then run it through the Mozilla approval bureaucracy again. (Yes, the AMO web site says this happens automatically. That's only true if you let them host the source code.)
Over on Google Chrome, it just works. No workarounds needed. A stable API. No updates needed from my side.
I get far more downloads of the Firefox version, though.
Re:Extended Support Release (Score:5, Interesting)
What, like Opera? Tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, speed dial, several other things that later browsers copied. Those only became features once someone created an extension for them in Firefox, right?
Have you looked at a vanilla install of Firefox? Compare that with Opera and the number of features in Firefox is pretty much approaching zero.
If the only thing you want to compare is plugins or add-ons, instead of actual browser features, then you should look at things like this [google.com], this [opera.com], and this [iegallery.com] to avoid making yourself appear uninformed in the future.
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Extended Support Release (Score:4, Interesting)