Mozilla Contemplating Five Week Release Cycle 495
MrSeb writes with an article in Extreme Tech about the ever quickening pace of Firefox development. Quoting the article: "Mozilla, not content with its monumental shift from four major builds in five years down to a new stable build every six weeks, is looking at outputting a new release every five weeks, or perhaps even less. Christian Legnitto, a project manager at Mozilla (and currently the 'release manager' of Firefox), announced the intention to shift to a shorter release cycle on Mozilla's planning mailing list. In response to one developer citing the success of the six-week release cycle, and asking whether it would be feasible to speed it up even further, Legnitto said: 'Yes, I absolutely think in the future we will shorten the cycle.' There are still some pains to overcome, though, such as add-on maintenance, testing, and localization — and ultimately, as browsers become more like operating systems, do we really want something as important as Firefox receiving a new major version every 5 weeks?"
In other news, it looks like Firefox is losing users faster than ever despite (because of?) the new rapid release cycle.
Sigh... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've stopped using Firefox. I was a constant user of it since the Firebird days, but somewhere down the line the whole project has lost sight. I find Chrome a good deal faster and more agile. Maybe I'd feel differently if I were a plugin developer, but as it stands, Firefox seems to be a project that has lost its way.
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I still use Firefox on Windows at work. The Windows version works well, and I can live with the constant upgrades (so far). And all things being (more or less) equal, I still prefer Firefox as a browser.
But I'm finding that the Linux version of Firefox is getting unbearable to use. There are just so many times when the UI becomes unresponsive. Hell, there are very noticeable delays just to scroll with the scroll wheel. And their attempts to copy the Chrome UI are really kludgey on Linux. Chromium work
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Interesting. I've been using Firefox nightly for a while now and it seems better than or equal to Chrome in most ways. Plus it's fully open source.
As far as performance goes Javascript in Nightly is on par (+/- a few % on Kracken) with dev channel Chrome, compositing is faster, the garbage collector is better (fewer pauses, less overhead). I don't notice the UI lagging like in older versions. You can have as many tabs open as you want.
As far as features, Nightly has an option to force add-on compatibili
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I actually PAID for Netscape Communicator once.
Re:Sigh... (Score:4, Informative)
I've personally switched to Chrome everywhere, and looking at getting the entire office at work switched from Firefox to Chrome as well (the rapid release cycle of Firefox is nuts, its more rapid than even Chrome and the browser only gets worse with each new release anyway.)
The Chrome release cycle is six weeks, the same as the current Firefox release cycle. The release cycles are effectively identical. The only difference is that, with Chrome, updates are mandatory. You can't disable auto-update, and you don't get a warning when it's going to happen. Where do people get this information?
Have they totally lost it, or what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Have they totally lost it? It's not like the browser world is making sudden great progress. It's a mature technology. The big problem today is getting stuff fixed.
I'm doing some Firefox extension development, and I'm finding documentation from versions 1.5 to the current one, all out of sync.
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As I understand it, the new SDK is available:
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Add-on-SDK-for-Firefox-updated-1343612.html [h-online.com]
It allows to rewrite the old Addons which need to be updated when Firefox upgrades.
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> It's not like the browser world is making sudden
> great progress.
Browsers today are switching to using hardware accelerated rendering, changing their HTML parsers for the first time in a decade, working on JITs for JavaScript, adding new ECMAScript features, adding a ton of DOM APIs, implementing new networking stacks (SPDY, say), revamping user interfaces (Firefox 4, IE9), adding support for lots of new HTML elements for the first time in over a decade.
What exactly would constitute "great progress"
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Django. I'm pretty sure there is more documention than code. There are a lot of open source projects with excellent documentation. Not all or even most, but a lot.
Re:Have they totally lost it, or what? (Score:4, Insightful)
And there's half of Open Source's problem. That "man" is even considered to be acceptable documentation. Hint: it's not. Look at the documentation available for MySQL for an example of what documentation should be. A one pager telling you all the command line parameters isn't going to cut it.
Re:Have they totally lost it, or what? (Score:5, Insightful)
You only think man pages are unacceptable because you've never seen a decent man page. Try ANY man pages from FreeBSD / OpenBSD. They're available via the web interface. Compare to some of the god-awful GNU man pages...
bash man page is good (Score:3)
And even GNU has put out some good man pages. My intro to shell programming was reading the man page for bash. It's remarkably comprehensive. I don't know how that slipped through GNU quality control. ;-)
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I second that. I remember printing out the entire bash 1.6(???) man page on my faithful old fanfold dot matrix, and putting it in a ring binder. It ended up full of scribbled annotations, post-its and hole reinforcers, since I used it as a reference so much.
The man pages for awk, sed, grep, ls, gcc, gzip, etc etc are all perfectly servicable. I turn to them always before trying to find what I want online and I am very rarely disappointed.
That said, Open/Free BSD do have excellent man pages, in a way that Li
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"Organization does get a bit ugly in man, though."
Woman has been saying that for years.
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It's absolutely unacceptable, and it's telling that you're so out-of-touch that you think it's okay.
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It's absolutely unacceptable, and it's telling that you're so out-of-touch that you think it's okay.
He said acceptable for many applications, not all applications. You don't think man is perfectly acceptable documentation for 'ls', or 'find', or 'grep'? If not, why?
System Admins Contemplating ditching FireFox (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:System Admins Contemplating ditching FireFox (Score:4, Interesting)
What's wrong with auto update?
If you don't use auto update, you're potentially using vulnerable browsers.
If you do use auto update...seriously, what could break?
At an absolute minimum, every new release seems to move UI entities around or delete them altogether and then you have 1,000 users asking you what happened to their web browser because the status bar went away and can you come and fix it for them.
Mozilla seem to be committing suicide right now for no reason anyone can adequately explain.
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I'm going to guess that you don't really have any formal sysadmin experience. Otherwise you'd not be surprised at all about those unlikely regressions that show up on seemingly minor updates.
As to auto-update, care to suggest anyway to make that work without giving users admin rights?
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I understand your point, but it's irrelevant, we were discussing Firefox.
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What would break is Javascript. The different browsers have been messing around quite a bit with their Javascript engines in recent years, and there are idiosyncrasies that have to be worked around. What you see as a minor change to how a browser handles a piece of Javascript does in fact mean that major corporate websites could suddenly no longer work for thousands of users.
When you have to support such systems, you want to be able to do testing to make sure that things work. This new scheme means that eac
Re:System Admins Contemplating ditching FireFox (Score:4, Interesting)
> If you do use auto update...seriously, what could break?
FF5 broke my employer-mandated SSL VPN plug-in, which made me unable to telecommute.
They had a fix deployed about five weeks later...
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You don't have it automated?
Reason to use Firefox... (Score:2)
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Picking your battles is an important component of a happy marriage!
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KD
--
Kilroy is Here.
http://itunes.com/apps/kilroy [itunes.com]
Re:Reason to use Firefox... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not when doing so continually breaks the things that the users you do have care about, no.
What FF user actually wants this model? Most of them don't. Releasing at the same speed as Chrome isn't going to win over Chrome users, but it will chase FF users off. That's what we're seeing here.
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Perhaps addon writers shouldn't be lazy. Noscript has not once broken for me, despite having gone from FF5, to Aurora, to Nightly on my personal system.
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Do you really pretend that people writing extensions for hobby and not for work should rewrite them every 5 weeks?
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As an avid Firefox user, I find I'm torn with this release method. It used to be that when a new version of Firefox came out, it was the shizzle to the nizzle, the bee's knees, the cat's...well you get the idea. Version 3 was leaps ahead of Version 2 and Version 2 made Version 1 look antiquated. However, that's partially because it took Mozilla so long to release them, over the course of a year or so, Firefox would go from being the most advanced, best browser out there to being outdated and slow. This was
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Or something...
Forget versions if you're pumping them out this... (Score:5, Insightful)
How many people know what version of Chrome they're running? I sure don't know. But Firefox trumpets the "new" Firefox on every release.
If you're going to do a rapid release schedule, you've made the version number meaningless to your average user.
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Probably because in certain cases the "Firefox is up to date" ifnormation on that screen flat out lies and tells you you're up to date when you're really not. The version number is a pretty important sanity check until they fix that bug (which they still haven't).
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The other issue is when someone reports a bug in your website, you want to be able to know which version of the browser was used in order to reproduce the environment. The harder it is to find the version, the longer the helpdesk call.
It also makes it hard for vendors selling web applications. They say it works for Firefox--does it work for all versions? Does it break when a new version of Firefox is released? Some major educational applications still require Firefox 3. Ideally, they would be written to sta
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Because Chrome is special and exempt from the petty hate being directed towards Mozilla.
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To be fair, Firefox had more than its share of problems before going to this model. Chrome on the other hand doesn't seem to have too many terrible bugs (other than the crashes in their flash implementation, which is annoying) and it doesn't seem to leak memory like a sieve.
Perhaps the problem is not the release cycle, but I would rather they dropped the release cycle and went to something that allowed them to fix bugs (rather than introducing new ones more and more quickly) if they can't manage to get th
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What I don't understand is why they don't do a half way and release a new minor every 6 weeks and save the major versions for...well...major versions? Firefox went from 4.0.0 to 5.0.0, then a bugfix came out that was 5.0.1, then 6.0.0. Why didn't they just do 4.0, 4.1, 4.1.1, 4.2, etc? That would shut most people up and considering that little has changed between versions, would probably make extension developers' lives a bit easier. It also removes the superfluous middle digit.
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What I don't understand is why they don't do a half way and release a new minor every 6 weeks and save the major versions for...well...major versions?
They'd never release a "major version".
The idea of a major version release is that it's one which changes a lot of things, or adds a large number of new features or a few very large features. But the idea of an agile development process, with a very short release cycle, is that you never do that. You change a few things in each release, or add a few features. When it comes to big features, you find ways to break them down into smaller features and add those incrementally. If a feature is not decomposa
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Simple: because IE is already at 9. With Firefox only at 6, it's obviously way, way behind, so they need to catch up. Staying with 4.x would have been even worse.
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And I think this is a big flaw in Chrome too. A product shouldn't be just a straight line of incremental fixes, there need to be branches so that you an stay on old versions and still get bug fixes and security patches. The straight line model is the naive straight-out-of-school developer's favorite model, the one they used on their class projects.
Not despite, because of (Score:3, Insightful)
If they keep this up, I will remove it from our labs. I am not going to deal with this shit. Release bug fixes as often as you need to, but new features need to be something that doesn't happen too often. I can't go and test this shit every few weeks, nor do I want to deal with things that are outdated. I like FF, but this policy they have is pushing me to dump it. I haven't yet, but we'll see.
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Yeah, we should sit for years between versions to keep cranky IT workers and the corporations they inhabit happy.
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Here's the thing; IE is basically free to manage if you're using Windows. To install Firefox means extra testing work, and I'm told it requires tailoring to work effectively with our desktop management, so there is a cost involved.
Any case I try to make for installing Firefox has to be based on a benefit to the organisation. IE security holes are patched fast enough there's no case to be made there, so it depends on increased web app development costs. That can be done with Firefox on a yearly release sched
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No, instead we should arbitrarily break shit simply because we can, serving no real purpose whatsoever aside from turning what was previously exceptionally stable into something that's shaky at best. Clown.
Well, part of the goal of an agile process is to reduce the amount of changes in each release, precisely for the purpose of minimizing breakage and increasing stability. I haven't used FF much lately so I can't comment on what they have or haven't achieved, but that's part of the goal.
There is an alternative (Score:3)
Seamonkey uses Gecko and is compatible with most Firefox extensions, but has a sane release schedule. 4 years from 1.0 to 2.0, 2 years from 2.0 to 2.3 (current version).
It gets new features more slowly than Firefox, but, currently at least, it is as good as Firefox (for my use, at least). Oh, and it has a menubar and statusbar.
Bad Mozilla! (Score:2)
No, the fact that it will very very soon go to eleven does not make your browser any better! I realize you are getting version envy (IE 9, Chrome 14, Opera 11) but believe it or not, NO ONE GIVES A DAMN. Except the Mozilla devs, apparently.
A faster release cycle is fine. Just not one that increments the main version number, especially when (perhaps poorly coded) extensions break. When you do that, it just looks like a "mine's bigger!" contest. Which I think it is. And that is sad.
Browser share (Score:2, Informative)
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I suppose they could be gaining users, and that some users...aren't using the browser, leading to paradoxical loss of browser share. More users of Firefox using less browser.
Ow. I think I just sprained my brain.
Let's try this again. Browser share is user share, unless (A) some users are using more than one browser, or (B) some browser users aren't actually using the browser, in defiance of the actual meaning of the phrase "browser user". Like, "non-driving driver", or "non-drinking drinker".
Dammit, my brain
Shooting Themselves (and us) In The Foot (Score:2)
We use Selenium IDE for test scripts. Every new release# kills Selenium. My boss has canceled several projects that were intended to use this for regression and other testing while we try to find something that's not going to die on us every few weeks.
Extensions... (Score:5, Insightful)
Extensions stop working at random without any good reason and in record time. So many of us use Firefox over Chrome because of extensions.
This plan is just terrible.
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I am an extension author. If they expect me to work so regularly on something that enhances their product, they need to pay me.
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It would be nice, but I am using some extensions that are only supported on two browsers - IE and Firefox. I had to fricking use IE at home... grr. IE is for work only because I still need to use the damn ActiveX heavy HR web system that integrates with that godawful HR system SAP puts out (dear SAP - hire a usability engineer already... as someone trained in usability, I can attest your software is not, and my companies' custom web interface isn't much better - I have a theory that is your goal however, as
"In response to one developer citing the success" (Score:4, Insightful)
Still my browser...for now (Score:2)
Firefox is starting to piss me off. I'm relatively happy with the way it looks and works now, and I've got the add-ons I want installed and working properly. I see no way they're going to keep a schedule like this without breaking aps and causing me problems.
I've had Opera as my back-up browser for quite a while now. I notice it's getting quite a nice stable of widgets together. When they get enough that are close to my current Firefox add-ons, I think it's going to be curtains for the Fox.
the bottom of this particular slipper slope (Score:3)
Mozilla, much more than Google, is pushing me toward using Chrome.
Re:the bottom of this particular slipper slope (Score:5, Funny)
Question: "What version of Firefox are you running?"
Answer: "I dunno, is it AM or PM?"
---
Question: "I hear they're replacing the Planck length as the smallest measurement. What are they replacing it with?"
Answer: "Mozilla release cycles."
Incredible (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm amazed at how hateful and petty people are towards Mozilla over this. Google gets a pass though.
I guess the notion of "release early, release often" is dead?
Re:Incredible (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Incredible (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm amazed at how hateful and petty people are towards Mozilla over this. Google gets a pass though
Google don't break compatibility with every release
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Same here. It's not like they radically change the user interface every 6 weeks.
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I guess the notion of "release early, release often" is dead?
Once people are actually using your product, yes.
When a project is just an experimental research toy, nobody cares how fast your updates break everything. But when you're dealing with adults, stability is a feature, not a bug. I know it's old-fashioned and boring of us, but we like to use browsers to do our work, not just to admire the shiny go-faster stripes and try to work out where the gear shift lever is this week.
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Quick, someone tell the Kernel community that they need to stop doing frequent releases IMMEDIATELY.
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I just realized that that's the perfect analogy.
The kernel community's interest in the problems you have with old versions of the kernel is pretty much non-existent unless you can show it exists in the current version. They also release on ~13 week schedules. But if you need long term kernel support, you go to a 3rd party like Redhat.
Maybe instead of bitching on Slashdot and shitting on the honest efforts of the Mozilla team, someone should step up and make a long term support release of Mozilla (like Debia
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They have?
How exactly have they lost sight of where they started? That would suggest that Firefox is bloated in some way, yet I'm not seeing how.
Live demo of the definition of insanity (Score:5, Insightful)
Did Mozilla go hire some MBAs or something? That's the only rational explanation for this idiocy.
The userbase has rejected rapid release. They hate it. Users are leaving the browser faster then ever before ever since it started.
So Mozilla's response is... even faster releases? Is it possible to miss the point any more then this? People don't care about this shit, they just want a good browser.
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Indeed, so people are leaving a browser that is moving to rapid release and going to a browser that does... rapid release. Wait, what?
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Indeed, so people are leaving a browser that is moving to rapid release and going to a browser that does... rapid release. Wait, what?
Mozilla seem to be putting most of their development effort into trying to ape Chrome. If they're just trying to be a second-rate copy of Chrome, then users might as well just switch.
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Is it possible to miss the point any more then this? People don't care about this shit, they just want a good browser.
Don't worry: after they remove the version number from the UI, no-one will notice the rapid releases.
Re:Live demo of the definition of insanity (Score:5, Insightful)
The Mozilla devs don't care about this shit either, they just want to check in code without worrying about customer support on older versions. Ie, they want their lives to be easier by cutting the customer out of the picture.
Headline is misleading (Score:5, Informative)
Did Mozilla go hire some MBAs or something? That's the only rational explanation for this idiocy.
The userbase has rejected rapid release. They hate it. Users are leaving the browser faster then ever before ever since it started.
So Mozilla's response is... even faster releases?
Hi, I am a Firefox dev. The answer to your question is no: The answer is not faster releases. We are not currently planning to do faster releases, despite the Slashdot headline.
;)
What is the link then? Someone - not sure if a Mozilla developer or not - posted the suggestion to make it faster. Since Firefox's development is open, anyone can post whatever they want whenever they want. There was some debate, most of it negative - as you would expect. Then someone posted it to Slashdot, where it was picked up.
So, no faster releases. What actually is the Mozilla response to the current situation: To fix the problems. We are working to make updates silent and break less addons. We've also made it so third parties can't install addons without your permission. All of this is in response to user feedback. Hopefully some of that stuff will be posted to Slashdot too
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We are working to make updates silent and break less addons
And from a business perspective, that's even worse. I get to spend hours trying to figure out why 10,000 workstations are suddenly flaking out on me, and then finally explain to my boss that it was because a "silent update" went out completely untested and unproven.
If you guys really don't want any Enterprise use of FF, just say so up front so we can start looking elsewhere, instead of holding onto a few final shreds of hope.
We don't want massive changes to the function of the software all the time, it's a
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Hello FF dev,
Please stop trying to change the paradigm and go fix some bugs [mozilla.org].
Sincerely,
An ex FF user.
You know what is funny? (Score:4, Insightful)
Chrome scares my from a privacy standpoint. Firefox wants updated between every keystroke. IE is my new browser of choice.
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Since you mention IE, implying Windows, I won't mention Safari. It works great on Mac OS X but it seems a lot of people don't like the Windows version.
So my only question is: have you ever tried Opera?
Better than Chrome on Mac but worried about addons (Score:2)
We're Doing 5 Blades! (Score:4, Funny)
One bug fix, one version (Score:2)
Eventually we'll move towards a new version for every bug fix.
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Why 5 weeks? (Score:2)
They might as well make it an even month. Call it version yyyymm (201109 for this months version). That way, they not only have their fast updates, but the higher version numbers ever!
I've asked this before, and I'll ask it again (Score:2)
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The problem of how to blow as much market share and the shortest period of time.
Thunderbird, Too (Score:2)
What's the point? (Score:2)
Browsers versions are not a pissing contest. Is your goal to be at version 9000 before Google?
There goes the neighborhood (Score:3)
It's getting so bad with the rapid release cycles that I've tossed out FF4+ as my critical add-ons no longer work. The rapid move from 4 to 6 w/o actually fixing things made as much sense as them simply having gone to Firefox 11 (because it's 1 more then 10).
It's gotten so bad that I'm finding myself actually using IE 10 more then I'm using firefox. I've got tabs and since I've configured my scripts to none except for those websites I actually find that I need them on, I'm finding IE to be more stable and less of a problem. The only thing I'm hoping is that the noscript folks actually get an accelerator/plug-in for IE so I can get the same functionality as what firefox gives me as Noscript is the only add-on that has at least remained compatible with it.
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This is just a redefinition of what rel #s mean (Score:2)
I mean they are not actually speeding up development and testing and fixing.
I do not believe they can speed up their delivery of quality tested features
by much at all. Who can?
They're just re-labeling what they have as a whole-number release much more often.
Why? Who knows. Maybe because it's fashionable.
Good enough (Score:2)
The browser I use is good enough.
I was a long time FF user since early alpha releases. Plugins are nice but FF has too many issues. I started to use Chrome and I like it. As long as it continues to work well and is fast (enough), I'll stick with Chrome.
Among the reasons I think a lot of people back when had a 'favorite' browser was standards compliance and rendering speed. All the major browser devs are working towards standards compliance *now* (as compared to severals years back) and we have faster comp
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That was so last week. Get with the program.
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Why don't they do something really cool, like exponential release numbers. I'd love to install Firefox 10^81, meaning there are more versions of Firefox than atoms in the observable universe
Irrelevent (Score:2)
Since many US government agencies...
Which US gov agencies use FF? None?
FF is irrelevent to the average US government wonk (like me), as we will never get the chance to install it anyway - Microsoft bought us a long time ago.
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Untrue. I know a couple that use FF as a standard browser. IE is also supported, but the ones I know draw the line at supporting more than 2 browsers.
In fact, where I work, IE is in place only for the occasional ancient site that still uses ActiveX. Say -- Oracle Financials, which seems to only run on IE6.
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With the exception of those who get down and dirty with their browser specs, has anyone even hardly noticed the change from 4 to now?
Yes. Every new major release either moves something around in the UI or removes it completely.
Good way to piss off your existing users who don't want to have to remember a new menu location for some random option every few weeks.
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You mean it doesn't? Seamonkey's done that since day one, so I naturally assumed Firefox would too as they run from the same codebase.
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The difference is that Seamonkey cares about the customers.
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I really don't see what people are complaining about. Fast release cycles is what we want, right?
No, it really isn't. That's the heart of the problem.
Some web developers want fast release cycles so they can get to play with the latest, non-standardised, bleeding-edge HTML5 toys.
The rest of us who are web users think the browser is done, has been done for years, it works, we're using it every day to do real work and we just want the security patches to be fixed so we don't get rooted by this month's security exploit.
What would be super awesome would be if some open-source project somewhere worked out ho
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FF team: Please listen to your users closely. I'd like to see FF continue to thrive, but you can't do it without listening closely to the user needs.
Interestingly, this exact same behavior is being seen in other major open-source projects: Ubuntu, Gnome, etc.