Firefox 7.0 Beta Released 237
An anonymous reader sends word that the first Firefox 7.0 beta has been released. One of the big areas of focus for this version will be performance enhancements. One optimization "Reduces memory use and improves performance areas including responsiveness, startup and page load time, even in complex websites and Web apps." Another addresses one of Firefox users' long-standing gripes: "The JavaScript garbage collector works more frequently to free up memory and improve performance when you have many tabs open or keep Firefox running for a long time."
FIrefox 8 Alpha... (Score:5, Insightful)
Next in few mins...Firefox 8 Alpha released and Firefox 9 Preview released... Do we need to clog up the front page with these articles? Gone are the days of version numbers making any sense in FF. We don't report Chrome versions do we?
Re:Fix the leaks perhaps?? (Score:5, Insightful)
If the garbage collected collected leaks, they wouldn't be called leaks anymore.
Re:FIrefox 8 Alpha... (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, I think you meant to say:
"Gone are the days of...any sense in FF."
Re:Aw c'mon (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:enough already with the version bloat! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's more that the beta for 7 comes out pretty much the instant 6 is released. One of the more interesting aspects of the Mozilla development process is that they essentially have a pipeline of four "releases" going on at once: Current (stable stuff, now 6), Beta (code being stabilized, now 7), Aurora (testing and major bugfixes, now 8) and Nightly (new feature work, now 9). When it comes time to do a new release, Current gets booted out, Beta and Aurora get promoted, and Nightly coughs up a build that becomes the new Aurora. It would actually be a pretty good system, except for the part where they forgot about maintenance releases and long-term support.
make the update notifications more annoying please (Score:2, Insightful)
It used to be a tiny little box that would slide up in the corner of the screen. It would stay there for exactly as long as it took for your brain to register the presence of the link, and then slide away. Unless you were a ninja and/or sniper you had no hope of hitting the link.
Now a big, huge window flops up onto the middle of the screen WHILE I'M WATCHING A GODDAMN VIDEO. Half an acre of gray emptiness with two buttons and a line of text about the new version.
I hope with future versions that the entire screen will be blacked-out, mariachi music will begin to play in the background along with the sound of 5 or 6 crying babies, and a 5 minute marketing video plays while the new version downloads and installs. Oh! And I hope they start forcing the icon onto the desktop with each update, Adobe style; that would rock.
Re:FIrefox 8 Alpha... (Score:2, Insightful)
It should not be up to the developers to dictate how I use software on MY system. Maybe YOU want to be on the bleeding edge and have the bells and whistles, I don't.
For a large group of people who rail against authority and being forced to do something by the government, it's amazing how many bend over and take it from the OSS/Free software community when they force shit down people's throats willy nilly.
Again, rule #1 of IT: Never let a programmer program your application*.
*Rule #2 is never let a web designer design your web site so it would be redundant to use the word design twice.
Why should I care? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry FF, but I'm sticking to the 3.6 series. As soon as that doesn't work anymore because of 1 OS upgrade too many, I'll stop using FF. If you can get things fixed and find sanity again before then, I'll stay. Otherwise, it's been a good 8 years we've had together.
Re:Really? What's the point of this version number (Score:5, Insightful)
You could use the super-secret Mozilla Add-on SDK
QUOTE: help ensure your add-on continues to work as new versions of Firefox are released.
Nobody seems to be mentioning this solution. Not even Mozilla.
At least in part because having Firefox auto-update the xpi to mark it compatible for a new version breaks when modules are signed.
So for those, the developer has to release a new package. And if your release cycle is 6 months (fairly common), and Firefox' release cycle is 6 weeks, there is going to be Problems.
Both users and developers aren't going to put up with it, and will leave. Which is exactly what we see happening now - it wasn't rocket science to predict this outcome.
Re:FIrefox 8 Alpha... (Score:5, Insightful)
Then get the source and do whatever the hell you want. YOU don't get to dictate what THEY do.
Re:enough already with the version bloat! (Score:2, Insightful)
This to me is such a fail, as most web devs need to be sure of the versions they are compatible with...
No, the "fail" is in that very chain of thought. Those web devs should not call themselves web devs since they do not understand the fundamental differences between the old media they used to work with and the new media, having to resort to web browser version to achieve what they foolishly are striving for.
At first I was not too keen on version number inflation, but thinking about it I couldn't care less. Actually, I find it good if it rids the world of people targeting web browser versions when they develop for the web. Target standards, not web browsers.
The only problem as I see is the plugins. That could be handled if Mozilla decided to create a stable API for plugin development and have version numbers on that API instead. This could even create a more stable browser with less unpredictability when multiple plugins are used. Another way, although more anarchistic, is to create a crowd sourced database of version compatibility between browsers and plugins, not having installers contain that information, but rather let us (the users) try it out and report.
Re:FIrefox 8 Alpha... (Score:4, Insightful)
FF5 didn't upgrade to FF6 automatically on any of my machines.
The only thing that stopped it on my Win7 laptop is the security message asking me if I wanted to allow the updater to change the system, every time I launched it. I kept telling it no, got tired of that and looked in Firefox and it told me it was a 5.x update. Let it install and suddenly I'm now running v6.x. As soon as I find a suitable replacement, I'm pulling it from all my systems. And I've been running it since Phoenix 0.3. I'm not amused. Some of us don't want to be bleeding edge.