Firefox 10 Released 364
Taco Cowboy writes "It's time to upgrade again. Firefox 10 is out and here's a list of bugs fixed in the new version."
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Firefox 10 Released
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"Engineering without management is art." -- Jeff Johnson
Addons now compatible by default (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, it hasn't been an issue for me (with my old, highly-customized profile), but one of the new features listed in the not-so-technical release notes [mozilla.org] is "Most add-ons are now compatible with new versions of Firefox by default". This seems to be the major issue most people have with their quicker release cycle, so hopefully it'll alleviate some pain there.
Older versions of Firefox (Firebird? Phoenix?) had a separate version number just for extensions, which would've avoided these issues. However, it would create a confusing second version number completely unrelated to the browser version, and they always seemed to set it to the same number as the browser version anyway.
As for my personal upgrade anecdote, I set "extensions.checkCompatibility.10.0" to False just to be safe. When I restarted Firefox, I got the box asking which addons I wanted to enable and disable (with my current settings pre-selected). I clicked OK and Firefox 10 opened up, looking exactly the same as 9.0.1 (which I have customized to look and act almost exactly the same as 3.6).
date-time version system (Score:2, Interesting)
can we all just please move to a date-time version system for software?
to me, firefox is just firefox, not firefox [number]. any software with the same name but a different version number is still just the same software to me, because it generally has the same overall basic function - even if it's found better ways or interfaces for doing so. it's not like firefox 9 was a browser but 10 came out and was all like "being a multi-tool web interface is lame, I'm gonna be an auto-cad clone now, so I need a new number!"
I'd much rather see "firefox v.2012.02.01.14.57.05" (YYYY-MM-DD-hh(24hr)-mm-ss of the final build's file time-stamp.) as it would not only tell me that this version is newer than the last version (which is all mere version numbers do), but it would also tell me WHEN it was last updated (+1 minor level of usefulness).
arbitrary version numbers just don't mean much to me anymore. especially not when mozilla and others are just going to randomly assign them based on a feeling of inferiority when compared to microsoft's IE version number or whatever.
Re:How does it compare to Chrome? (Score:4, Interesting)
firefox RAM usage on http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/02/01/1840252/firefox-10-released [slashdot.org], only tab open - 243mb across 2 processes(firefox.exe, plugin-container.exe)
chrome RAM usage on http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/02/01/1840252/firefox-10-released [slashdot.org], only tab open - 99mb across 4 processes(chrome.exe x4)
This isn't a problem on your average desktop, but it blows ass on older machines, laptops, and netbooks that don't have the resources or the newer technologies that help offset the fact that Firefox is fat
Firefox does have issues with being leaky. I came into the office the other day and it was using over 700MB RAM with about six tabs open. A restart fixed the issue, but Chrome doesn't have that problem. Then again, Chrome doesn't have side tabs (Tree Style Tabs), which is a must for having many tabs open. Tree Style Tabs is the only thing keeping me on FireFox.
Currently, Firefox is using 417 MB for 9 tabs. The second largest memory hog on my system is Notepad++ at 96 MB.
Re:Still no Flash in mobile ... (Score:4, Interesting)
This is working fairly well on Nightly [mozilla.org] and Aurora [mozilla.org]. On Beta (11) soon.
Adding Flash to Firefox was a considerable amount of work. Adobe and Google rather drastically re-wrote NPAPI. The only documentation on how Flash worked on Android is the Android source. This work represents several hundred person hours to get it working.
TBH Flash support is in the current release version has a pref for flash on 2.2 and 2.3 but the experience is rather poor, hence it being disabled with no UI to enable it. about:config change plugin.disable to false. Judge Flash progress against the Nighty or Aurora builds. The Beta 10 or release 10 builds are not representative of the Flash experience for 11+.