Mozilla To Remove User-Facing Firefox Version Numbers 683
MrSeb writes "A great collective gasp issued from tuned-in Firefox fans when Mozilla announced that it was switching to a Chrome-like release schedule for its browser. Now Mozilla wants to take things one step further and remove Firefox version numbers entirely — from the user-facing parts of the browser, anyway."
You can see the Bugzilla entry for this change, and keep up on Mozilla's reasoning and discussion through a thread on the mozilla.dev.usability newsgroup. Mozilla's Asa Dotzler explained, "We're moving to a more Web-like convention where it's simply not important what version you're using as long as it's the latest version. ... The most important thing is confidence that they're on the latest release. That's what the About dialog will give them."
Are they -trying- to kill Firefox? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not to mention other web "apps" like learning management systems, etc officially supporting specific versions or a range of versions.
Seems like this decision will kill FF as a "supported browser" for this type of thing on non-windows platforms... Which I guess is OK since most can support Safari for the Mac users... but what about us Linux users?
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Not to mention other web "apps" like learning management systems, etc officially supporting specific versions or a range of versions.
That is a huge management mistake by the LMS programmers, its simply not the browsers problem.
Insert standard /. car analogy: Imagine if my local gas station pumps were so stupid as to only support certain named car brands, going to great effort to ensure I can't buy gas unless my vehicle is on the approved list, instead of just supporting some mostly common sense federal and state EPA standards for all machines.
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If only the interfaces in question weren't so trivial, your lame analogy might actually mean something.
As things really are, the best thing you could call such an argument demagogy.
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In the case of Angel, it is because htey use AJAX calls to save questions as you answer them on a test/assessment. Of course, it *is* the "developers" faults for not checking what is sent in the POST string when the "submit for grading" button is pushed...
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Testability and repeatability.
You've never worked in a corporate IT environment, have you? Testing is a factor - the people selling these things to companies can with confidence say "if you use version x, y or z it will work as expected." So when Mozilla jumps to a new version number, the expectation would be that the testing is done against version x, y, z and the new one - until then, there's no guarantee that because of a new rendering preference or change in API, the previous system will work.
It's not t
Re:Are they -trying- to kill Firefox? (Score:4, Insightful)
Imagine if my local gas station pumps were so stupid as to only support certain named car brands, going to great effort to ensure I can't buy gas unless my vehicle is on the approved list
Better yet, that the model year needs to be on the supported list, and then every year getting all defensive when patrons start showing up in the newest model and asking why they can't get gas. They tell them that they can't have gas until it's tested in that model year car because "who knows, maybe the 2012 Ford Focus runs on hydrogen", before finally blaming Ford for changing the year number even though the fuel didn't change.
What's really needed is an engine (API) version number that gas stations (addon developers) can target, and that only changes when the engine (API) changes. A well designed number would capture both added features and removed features in a way that a plugin can be marked with a range of versions that provide the required API features.
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intranet apps now only supporting IE again.
That is a mistaken strategy by the intranet app writers.
If you write a WWW application that uses HTML, anything can use it.
If you write a "IE" app, then you're wasting valuable resources, because you'd be better off putting a compiled .exe on a ftp site, and skip all this "www" "html" stuff that just gets in the way.
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If all you're doing is trivial HTML, a bit of CSS for formatting, and maybe the occasonal effect with jQuery, sure, it all works much the same. But then if that's all you're doing, why do you need to update to the latest and greatest browser every five minutes?
I have spent much of the past few days trying to track down browser portability bugs with some software I work on, because we finally reached the point where you just couldn't run it properly on the latest version of anyone's browser without some sort
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A web page and a web app are distinct things. Unless you're writing bare HTML with no Javascript or CSS, you're going to bump up against the rendering quirks of most major browsers.
Re:Are they -trying- to kill Firefox? (Score:4, Informative)
Linux users might be in trouble for sure and this is a great way to kill Linux at the desktop at work
Note that until the end of time, iceweasel will be at 3.5.16 in Debian Squeeze release (currently Squeeze is aliased to stable; some day "soon" wheezy will be released and that is currently 5.0 and then may remain forever after at 5.0)
http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/iceweasel [debian.org]
I don't know if windows is capable of this kind of rollout, where you prevent upgrading and whatever you put in the repo just works. But for "linux on the desktop" this is pretty trivial.
Re:Are they -trying- to kill Firefox? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I can't even imagine what is going through the minds over at the Mozilla foundation.
I was a big Firefox booster, but the marketing-driven decisions that have been coming down have been troubling me ever since the damn Awesomebar. Not the existence of marketing; they needed marketing. The problem was that marketing was cons
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I can't even imagine what is going through the minds over at the Mozilla foundation.
"Our deal with Google, the deal that supplies the money for all our paychecks, is up this year and needs to be renewed."
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But, yes, there are a good number of add-ons that just haven't been updated to work in FF4, let alone 5.
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We're still stuck on 3.6 waiting for the plug-ins to catch up
There is no justifiable excuse for this. First, because the add-on developer should maintain the add-on and update its max-version (currently, the Mozilla add-on website permits max-version all the way up to 8.0a1). Secondly, because you can always override it anyway. It's not likely that the add-on will actually break.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter/ [mozilla.org]
After installing the Add-on Compatibility Reporter, your incompatible extensions will become enabled for you to test whether they still work with the version of Firefox or Thunderbird that you're using. If you notice that one of your add-ons doesn't seem to be working the same way it did in previous versions of the application, just open the Add-ons Manager and click Compatibility next to that add-on to send a report to Mozilla.
Even if your add-ons all work fine, if they're marked incompatible, please let us know that they work fine by submitting a success report so we can encourage the add-on developer to update their compatibility information.
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the add-on developer should maintain the add-on and update its max-version
You're saying that any person who writes software is automatically required to provide lifetime support of said software?
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currently, the Mozilla add-on website permits max-version all the way up to 8.0a1
max-version was 7.0a1 a few weeks ago, and 6.0a1 a few week before that.
A moving target for max-version is a bad thing. It's amusing to see web developers encouraged by browser developers (including Mozilla [mozilla.org]) to do feature detection instead of version detection, and then Mozilla's own extension system requires version detection.
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But that assumes that Firefox doesn't break the API the extension uses. With the Linux kernel it works exactly because great care is applied to keeping the kernel calls stable. Note that the kernel's driver API isn't stable, and therefore you have the same problems there (guess why distributions tend to backport bug fixes instead of simply using a new kernel version).
No kidding (Score:2)
I am getting real, real close to pulling Firefox from all the lab images. I am not interested in playing the support game with the "Major version numbers all the time," thing and I am far less interested in playing around with having to dig in to shit to find out if a copy is up to date or not.
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Re:This isn't a Mozilla problem... (Score:4, Informative)
Sure, it's the responsibility of the developers of the addons to fix the problems created by Mozilla.
Re:This isn't a Mozilla problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This isn't a Mozilla problem... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This isn't a Mozilla problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
Opera has features. Safari has features. Firefox has... a rendering engine and a cadre of passionate programmers who make the browser palatable for Mozilla at no charge.
I would understand this particular trend in Mozilla if their browser actually did anything useful besides view web pages out-of-the-box. But it doesn't, and so I don't.
I guess the bottom line for this one is that I'm now, as a web developer, going to have to treat Firefox as a completely unsupported browser. Sure, I can go to the about:support page for my testing if I want, but when I get a bug report from an end user, how much effort is Mozilla expecting me to put in just to support whatever flavor of the week they have now?
When this "fix" is committed to Firefox, it officially comes off the list of officially supported browsers. If clients want support for Firefox, I'm not charging extra to recuperate the extra costs it will inevitably incur.
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Ofcourse you are able to version check.
It just is the user-visible number in the title-bar they are removing.
That is it, that is all.
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> ... because addon creators are too lazy or don't care enough ...
So let's see, we are both talking about developers who spend their own free time writing FF add-ons and give them away for free? Because "lazy" and "don't care enough" isn't exactly the first thing that comes to my mind about them.
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The problem is that Firefox changes its plugin apis. So all that service would give is "Your plugin is not working"
The author of the plugin still have to update the add-on.
Lets look at The gwt plugin as an example:
To quote the Google developers (From 28 Jun 01:21) (Which is 7 days AFTER the release of Firefox 5).
"I'll note that Mozilla didn't have an OSX 64 bit SDK released until this morning, and that was a blocker for our ability to release. Once the process for their new release schedule settles down, we
Re:This isn't a Mozilla problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do not blame Mozilla because addon creators are too lazy or don't care enough to update their addons properly
But I do blame Mozilla for starting down the path of a rapid-release cycle that is unneeded and unwanted by Firefox users. I do not blame the addon developers if they choose not to participate in the egregiously inane rapid-release cycle that Firefox is using.
The root problem is not with the addon developers, no matter how much you try to deflect the issue.
The root problem is the foolish and resource-wasteful rapid-release cycle that Firefox has engaged.
Re:This isn't a Mozilla problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do not blame Mozilla because you are too lazy or don't care enough to unzip the addon, open the config file, and change the max version number yourself.
The non-technical end user should never - ever - be told to jump through these hoops.
The user doesn't understand the rules for development or the relationship between the developer and Mozilla. They only know that the Firefox browser has disabled an extension they need.
Re:This isn't a Mozilla problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
The only solution I see is to just not support Firefox, then allow clients to pay the development costs associated with supporting it. Just the process of taking bug reports will be hours of endless run-arounds trying to figure out what version I can duplicate some random idiosyncrasy in.
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There's also the user-agent string.
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The point being that this creates problems without solving anything. What value does this bring? All I see is Mozilla purposely deciding to create problems by solving issues that don't exist.
Re:This isn't a Mozilla problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
The Slashdot crowd may be vocal and anti the new Firefox, but the Mozilla developers need to sit up and take note. The vast majority of their current user base don't care enough to complain - they just switched to Chrome or IE. A significant number of friends and family who I converted to Firefox over the years have switched to Chrome in the past six months.
Re:This isn't a Mozilla problem... (Score:5, Interesting)
The vast majority of their current user base don't care enough to complain - they just switched to Chrome or IE.
What should worry Mozilla is that a number of linux distributions are switching. Even Ubuntu itself had the switch from Firefox to Chromium on the plate for 11.10. I would place a bet on it actually happening for the 12.04 LTS. Ubuntu, like it or not, wields a lot of clout within the open source community and when they decide to make the switch it makes a lot of distributions look long and hard at following suit.
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Both of those browsers update every 6 weeks, and those 6-week updates do change the user interface, functionality, web API support, etc.
If you want a stable browser, your options are IE, Safari and Opera, and not Firefox or Chrome.
Re:This isn't a Mozilla problem... (Score:4, Insightful)
I write and maintain an addon used by my employer's customers. The addon is part of the software suite we sell and contains proprietary intellectual property - so it is not available to the public. The addons break due version number changes and too-rapid release cycle creates a burden on addon developers.
Here on slashdot is a lot of people from IT field. The majority expresses themselves against these steps planned by Mozilla. But they still keep going. So if they are not listening to IT crowd, who do they listen to?
Re:This isn't a Mozilla problem... (Score:4, Insightful)
You've conveniently skipped over those changes that really break existing add-ons. Autorolling the version range won't magically rewrite an add-on that depends on a toolbar or menu or behind-the-scenes-hook that Mozilla decided to remove or drastically change between versions.
As for lazy devs not rewriting their add-ons - As a developer myself, I can find the time to deal with Major Platform X releasing a new version once or twice a year. I do not have the time to try to keep up with this new "gotta beat Google at their own game despite them paying people to do this" monthly release philosophy. And if you want to tell me "good riddance", you certainly have every right to do that; And when the authors of Adblock, NoScript, Firebug, Download Helper, or a dozen others, decide they would rather have a life than play catch-up? Good riddance to the lot of 'em, we can always just use Chrome instead?
And as for "blame" - I would prefer Mozilla stop this shit, but I don't blame them. I just won't upgrade until all my "must-have" add-ons work.
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Outside of Blizzard and Goldfarmers, and maybe a handful of others, how many businesses make use of World of Warcraft.
Now... Compare that to Firefox.
Well, that's one way to reesolve the problem... (Score:4)
This is a horrible idea (Score:3)
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Agreed. Was it really that difficult for them to hold their hands up and say "sorry guys, we goofed with that last idea about version numbers. Now we've listened to what people have been saying, and their reasons for saying it, and we're going back to the previous way".
Re:This is a horrible idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds to me like this is how they looked at the recent outcry over their rapid release schedule:
Problem: People are upset about our rapid changes in major versions.
Solution: Don't show people the version numbers!
I expect this kind of reasoning from the PHB in a Dilbert cartoon. I expect a bit more from an organization that is trying to create the bestest browser ever. I mean, I understand that they're setting themselves up for failure with trying to be everything to everyone, but at least there are good ways to aim too high, and then there is aiming high and shooting yourself in the foot.
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So if I have version "??" and it turns out it has a feature I don't like or a bug in it, then I can downgrade to version "??" to fix it?
Re:This is a horrible idea (Score:4, Funny)
Well, they've already gone apeshit with the version numbers anyway. I favor removing the number before it gets to 100.0.
I say name each version after the first thing you exclaim when something goes wrong.
In other news, Mozilla shitfuckdammit will replace the address bar with an animated monkey who suggests up to three web sites to you.
Re:This is a horrible idea (Score:4, Insightful)
This add-on only works with version.... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the problem here. Firefox's ever changing APIs which are always breaking add-ons. The Chrome add-on API is much more limited and as such doesn't need to change as frequently or as drastically. How Firefox thinks they're going to succeed by becoming a crappier version of Chrome is beyond me.
Did the Gnome guys take over Mozilla or something? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a really stupid idea.
If the user wants to hide the version number, someone will write an extension to do that. Quit dumbing down Firefox.
Re:Did the Gnome guys take over Mozilla or somethi (Score:5, Funny)
Moz devs: "No, no. We need an add-on that shows the version number. Someone will write it."
User: "What version of FF is that add-on compatible with?"
Moz devs: "Yeah about that....fuck you."
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Did the Gnome guys take over Mozilla or something?
In case you haven't noticed, those making decisions these days, be it government (politics), big business, or software development, have all gotten serious cases of dumbtarditis.
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have all gotten serious cases of dumbtarditis.
THIS! exactly THIS!
and Yes I have notice that it seems that almost everyone in a position of power lately have become complete retards.
Good ideas innovative ideas forward thinking... None of that exists lately. It's all changes for the sake of trendy change.
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Exactly. Hide the status bar, hide the full URL, hide the version number. Obscuring things is apparently their new development model.
Wait... (Score:2)
I hope they don't write code while smoking whatever it is they are smoking before coming up with such ideas.
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That's what I'm trying to understand.
I guess it's their way of trying to get us to stop being so angry by their versioning scheme.
The thing that is really getting on my nerves, though, is that they seem to be out-of-touch with the way big web developer groups work, which is to write to version numbers, kind of like how older developers wrote to RFC. There are some fairly big software packages like OnBase that probably will b
That's silly (Score:2)
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Presumably they just accidentally forgot to mention the part where they're changing the fundamental nature of plugins so that they never break when the version is updated, so nobody would ever have a reason not to update immediately.
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You know if your machine is up to date when you go to the about page and it says "this copy of Firefox is up to date".
How does it fight "web proxy gone wild"? https connection, I suppose?
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I've always said i'd wait for the dot one release of eternal life.
Yeah we'll good luck picking the right one, there's about ten thousand forked versions of life 1.1 all of which are literally in a holy war with each other, conflicting featuresets, etc. No wonder I opt out of that entire flamefest, just don't need the aggravation.
Addon breakage (Score:4, Insightful)
Now people will think their addons break at random. I doubt the typical user will ever look at about:troubleshooting
Mozilla needs to rethink a lot of things about addon support before pushing their new release and version philosophy any further.
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What is this about:troubleshooting you're talking about? My copy of Firefox (technically it's Aurora) doesn't recognize that...
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They were referring to about:troubleshooting in the mozilla.dev.usability discussion linked in the article summary. I think it is the "Help > Troubleshooting Information" page (about:support in Firefox 5). Either they have plans to rename about:support to about:troubleshooting or add a new about:troubleshooting in the future ... or they misspoke in the conversation.
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Mozilla needs to rethink a lot of things about addon support before pushing their new release and version philosophy any further.
One of the things I'd like them to provide is the ability to remove extensions and add-ons, instead of just disabling them. I have been accumulating unwanted extensions that I have disabled but I see no button to uninstall them.
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One of the things I'd like them to provide is the ability to remove extensions and add-ons, instead of just disabling them. I have been accumulating unwanted extensions that I have disabled but I see no button to uninstall them.
You sure about that? "Tools" "Add-ons" look at the right column for the "remove" buttons. Maybe its a version thing, I'm running 5.0, you can click "help" "about firefox" to see what version you're ... Oh, very smooth move there sir, I must applaud you...
Version information can be important (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the developers want me to have the latest version, but it's not always what I want, and above all, whether latest version or not, I want to know what I've actually got.
From my pov, this will ensure that I never go back to Firefox (after abandoning it a while back because of the memory leaks and denials that there was a problem.)
-wb-
Re:Version information can be important (Score:5, Informative)
From my pov, this will ensure that I never go back to Firefox (after abandoning it a while back because of the memory leaks and denials that there was a problem.)
Don't worry the memory leaks are still there, a couple times I week I kill it and restart it just to lower its memory usage.
Re:Version information can be important (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait, you mean you don't constantly restart Firefox? My good sir, you are clearly doing it wrong!
By which I mean that Firefox no longer checks for addon updates while Firefox is running. As of Firefox "Several Months Ago, I think, I dunno" (previously known as "Firefox 4") Firefox only bothers checking for addon updates when you start Firefox.
Or maybe it only bothers mentioning that there are updates when you restart, but will happily and silently download them in the background. I dunno.
Clearly, the proper and intended way to run Firefox is to constantly close and reopen it to make sure your addons and plugins are kept up to date.
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I don't need to close Firefox and reopen it. It is perfectly able to close itself at random times for me.
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Reading stuff like this makes me wonder why people aren't upgrading to 3.6 en masse. Sounds awfully lot like vista rollout, with people upgrading to xp.
Too bad (Score:2)
If I have to certify my product x, works with y browser then how can my clients truly know what version of Firefox they use?
Unlike IE updates the api changes every 6 weeks and so does the html rendering and everything else. It looks like IE is the only game in town.
I am beginning to like the browser more day in and day out. Even if your job is just a help desk job it is going to be a pain to figure out which verison of the browser the client is using. If I owned a tech support company I would be strongly in
then it looks like I'm never upgrading from 3.6... (Score:3)
Well, have fun with bug reports ... (Score:5, Insightful)
"I've found this bug in Firefox ..."
"Do you run the latest version?"
"I don't know. I'm running the version my distro gives me."
"So which one is it?"
"I don't know. It won't tell me."
"Please update to the latest version."
"Well, I already have the latest version my distro gives me. If this is actually the latest version, I have no idea."
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Yeah, too bad Mozilla doesn't include a bug reporting feature that automatically would submit data like a version number to the developers.
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Yep, that's great help if you don't work on Firefox, but rather with, say, an addon for Firefox or a website in Firefox.
"Your site doesn't work in Firefox." ... oh, right, fuck."
"Huh. It works for me. What version are you using?"
"Uh... Windows 7?"
"No, I mean, what version of Firefox does it say in the About dialog?"
"There are no numbers in the About dialog."
"What? See, when I go to About, it says,
Be Firefox, not Chrome (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does Mozilla keep treating Firefox like it's something they need to apologize for? Firefox has the best add-ons out there, hands down. And it's been around for years. Why are they acting like Chrome and others are setting the standards now? Why do they act like they're in some kind of pissing contest with Google? Google is the one with something to prove here, not Mozilla.
Just knock it off and stick to your strengths.
Re:Be Firefox, not Chrome (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to be a fan of Alex St John in MaximumPC.
Basically, he used to work for Microsoft and helped write a bad clone of postscript for Windows 95 and was influential engineering DirectX1 & 2 when it was called WinG for Windows 3.11.
He had an article detailing how Microsoft wins over its rivals. How? The rivals see the big bad scary Microsoft and end up doing something stupid and killing themselves out of fear. MS had nothing to do with it. I look at Mozilla and you know what I see? Someone freaking out trying to be something they are not in a market they are not.
I believe in 2 years Firefox will start to become irrelevant. Grandmas might use it and of course some geeks will have it on their computers even if they do nto use it but the marketshare will drastically go down and that is a shame. What Firefox had that Chrome didn't was a stable release cycle and some limited enterprise use for clients who had to stick with IE 6, but needed a secure more up to date browser for the internet. But Mozilla wanted to be cool like Chrome and follow all of its disadvantages and be something that they are not.
Chrome was well planned to be gradually updated with stable api's and a similiar rendering engines with all versions with slight additions rather than complete changes. Firefox was in such a hurry it didn't implement it right. May they rest in peace.
Asa Dotzler as a verb (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm going to start using his name for boneheaded changes done for "me too" reasons and decision by committee.
"Man, T-Mobile really Dotzler'd their unlimited plan."
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Seems like Asa has been known as a troll for a while now in fact. For example:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2279891 [mozillazine.org]
Hmmm .... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not so sure I'm entirely keen on this.
From an IT perspective, it's helpful to know what versions people are running. And, from a practical perspective, who the heck updates every single day?
This is like agile development and continuously running the steaming build from last night ... it seems to completely violate any notion of a tested, supportable version of software, and turns it into a thing that is completely difficult to nail down. It's just a constantly evolving piece of software. So if something was broken for a day or so, you'll never really know WTF it was.
Hell, having done QA and the like ... the version of the browser you're running is part of the stuff you need to know so you know what you support. You can't even begin to say your software supports Firefox if you can't say anything more than "well, whatever Firefox looked like in January, we know it works on that".
I've dealt with a vendor who pretty much does constant releases of their software (several times/week), and their idiot support people mostly won't listen to you until you're running the latest version. It takes me several weeks to promote a version through my environments to do testing and get approvals, and you think my production instance is running the steaming turd you released on Friday?? How do you expect I've managed to do that? By having no control whatsoever as to what is deployed?
I'm pretty sure that for some organizations, this is going to make it really difficult to use Firefox. I'm pretty sure that in at least one or two places I've worked, this would be a complete non-starter.
Standards... (Score:5, Insightful)
From one of the posts in the group...
Microsoft Guidelines show version number in their About Box example.
----------
Excerpt from Mac OS X Human Interface Guidelines:
About ApplicationName
Opens the About window, which contains the app's copyright information
and version number.
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Excerpt from GNOME Human Interface Guidelines 2.2.2: ...contains the name and version number of the application, a short
Help About
description of the application's functionality, author contact
details, copyright message and a pointer to the licence under which
the application is made available.
----------
Could someone please post references to the relevant standards Firefox
will comply with after implementation of bug 678775?
I've got it right here (Score:5, Insightful)
Could someone please post references to the relevant standards Firefox will comply with
RFC 9.402.001: Dicking around with vesion numbers and GUI behavior in lieu of performing actual work
I like it (Score:2, Interesting)
No responses so far in favor of the idea... I'll toss one out:
1) No more coding some bizarre non-standard garbage code to a specific version of the software anymore. I'm looking at you, JAVA coders. And those guys still stuck in Internet Explorer 6 or whatever from 1999. You want it to work? Don't write to a browser version, write to a standard. I LIKE IT that it will be impossible to write for a browser version. I want a standards compliant browser, not version 12.345.2-19 of a browser and memorizati
Re:I like it (Score:5, Insightful)
And those guys still stuck in Internet Explorer 6 or whatever from 1999. You want it to work? Don't write to a browser version, write to a standard. I LIKE IT that it will be impossible to write for a browser version. I want a standards compliant browser, not version 12.345.2-19 of a browser and memorization of which sites require -20 and with can't work on anything newer than -18.
You think that browsers are all magically going to be standards-compliant just because version numbers are removed?
You think web developers *like* developing around browser idiosyncrasies and coding conditionally to specific versions? They do it because the HAVE TO.
You think every organization is going to allow all their machines to do automatic, arbitrary versioning of the browsers they allow their users to run?
Maybe you should get your head out of your ass.
Hell No! (Score:2)
Hell! No!!!!
What are they thinking about?
If they remove that, then they should have a display with a list and version of all components of Firefox available.
How am I going to figure out what kind of version I have when I arrive at a system I haven't touched before?
This is incredible dumb!
Retardoverse (Score:2)
Did a large fraction of the FOSS developer community recently get hit with a Retardo Ray or something?
Microsoft Support Center (Score:5, Funny)
Support: "What version of Windows are you running?"
Caller: "Windows"
Support: "But what version of Windows are you running?"
Caller: "Windows"
Support: "..."
Weird (Score:2)
Version numbers have always worked for years. And now suddenly they collapse. What's happening?
Plugins (Score:2)
What about plugins?
Firefox devs are suddenly idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh for the love of God, Firefox admins, what's going on, does the sweet, sweet, wall candy taste good? Your Aunt Mom tell you you are a special little snowflake and never mind what the bad, bad real world has to say?
I love Firefox. I really do, but honestly, it's like they are trying to be as stupid as humanly possible. I'm getting sick of "my way or the highway" program developers breaking things and telling me that they've been fixed. Do you morons notice how your market share is shrinking? Do you notice that you're producing nothing but bad press these days and people are getting pissed off at you? So your answer to this is to get in everyone's face and tell them to suck it up or go away? What are you, Tea Party-ists?
I work in tech. I need version numbers to tell what the hell people have. "You have the latest version" lies all the time like a cheap rug.
Firefox - it's this type of attitude that got me to switch from Ubuntu, where they've developed the same attitude that negative feedback means they're doing the job right. Learn a lesson here or lose more market share.
Time to purge some MBAs from management, you bozos.
How about removing... (Score:4, Interesting)
The fricking bug that makes it hang and sit (not responding) for 4-12 seconds at a time at random intervals on page loads once in a while? I am about to completely give up on it because of that. IT happens a LOT of slashdot, I would blame the poorly written CSS that slashdot uses (still get the jump to the top of page when you click on the commend dialog text box once in a while as well) but I've see it on Cisco.com as well as motorola.com
Dear God, what art these people thinking???!!! (Score:4, Informative)
Have the Firefox developers gone entirely mad? I thought their rapid release schedule was stupid, but this is just plain asinine. No, in a perfect world, we would all be happiest and more productive if we were using the newest version, but we don't live in a perfect world. New versions introduce new bugs, they break addons, and, even if the new version is completely bug-free, it may not play nice with a Web site that has problems with its content or Web server.
And, as someone else already said, IT departments aren't going to like this. It's not that they're inefficient or resistant to change, but, when you're supporting several thousand desktops, you have to make sure that shiny new release isn't actually a polished turd or that it won't break something else. If something goes wrong, it may be easy to fix a problem if you're only concerned with a few machines, but what happens when that update you just pushed out to 3,000 desktops has a show-stopping problem you never saw coming? And yes, it happens. Just ask HTC about the disastrous update to the HTC Thunderbolt that caused the phone to start randomly rebooting, sometimes several times a day. I have no doubt the update was tested, and both they and Verizon were confident it was ready for deployment. Well, it wasn't. Bugs, often serious ones, can get by the most stringent testing.
Someone at Mozilla needs to put the brakes on this harebrained idea immediately, if not sooner.
Fuck you Mozilla (Score:5, Insightful)
Not all of us WANT to run the latest version. Not all of us WANT to update every time you push your supposed "latest and greatest".
This, next to Linux, is the clearest example of Rule #1 of IT: Never let a programmer program your application.
This constant push to have "shiny" shoved down everyone's throats without regard to what the end user wants must stop. People have no idea what they're running now so your dictatorial forcing of upgrades does nothing to make people feel comfortable with the software they're using.
Maybe YOU want to have the latest version, but I don't. And as is said on here on a daily basis, once it's on my machine, I'll do what I want with it.
It looks like it's time to move to another browser and stop suggesting people move from IE to Fx. Congratulations you arrogant pricks, you've jumped the shark.
Mozilla Corp Gets Much Funding From Google ... (Score:3)
Mozilla Corporation gets most of the funding from Google, and so it's no surprise that Firefox is becoming more like Chrome.
Are many of the influential people involved with Firefox development Google employees? And/or many Google die-hard fanboys? If so that alone explains much of it ...
As to what the end game is?... Firefox, while keeping its branding / look, becoming a Chrome clone? -or- Firefox simply being made redundant, and eventually killed off, by getting most Firefox users over to Chrome - from anecdotal reports, people are switching in droves.
What gets me is where are the FORKS? ... if big corporations and developers rely on Firefox, why aren't any forking recent versions of it? Imho, 3.6x would be a fantastic fork point, and improve on that.
From idiocy to stupidity (Score:4, Insightful)
1- take a perfectly working version numbering scheme
2- mess it up to try and look like Chrome, come with all love Chrome for its sexy, round version numbers. And for nothing else.
3- get rid of version numbers entirely rather than admit you're idiots,lose face, and backtrack
4- enjoy the entertaining confusion about updates, addon compatibility, features, security....
5- watch your userbase exodus to saner pastures
6- ???
7- Profit ! (for Google)
The shark... they've jumped it (Score:3)
The discussion thread link is pretty illuminating reading. It shows just how disconnected from what people actually want FF to work on these guys have become.
Why does the UI team want to remove something from Help > About that exists in basically every program there is (and is a standard on basically every major OS)? Because they think they're cool. That's why. Don't like it? You're not cool.
They need to fire Asa and the entire UI team over there. That's the only way they'll stop the bleeding of users that is going on now. These guys are completely out to lunch and are just wasting effort chasing their own tail instead of doing things that users are actually asking for.
Oh well. At one point this was a great project, now it's just a dysfunctional one. That's what happens when you get management heavy and management gets spooked about market share. They try to take shortcuts instead of simply improving the product.
I know this will likely fall on deaf ears (Score:3)
My wife has about 10 websites that she frequents that don't support anything above FF3.6. IIRC Chrome stopped being supported around Chr6 on most of these sites. IE is supported up to IE8.
This is the same thing you see with all the add-ons.
Please fix this Mozilla. I hate having to explain to my wife how to check the supported browser page for these sites, now I have to show her how to check the FF version as well (which certainly won't be supported for what she intends to use it for anyways)?
about:support (Score:3)
For anyone concerned about tech support situations, the troubleshooting URL about:support will stay. Initially I was concerned about this as well, but it's not THAT serious.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The version number makes no difference (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't understand why people get into such a huge fuss about changing the fecking version number, it's probably the most inconsequential part of the entire browser?
Because most people want software that, you know, works.
They don't want things to randomly break and force them to spend half an hour on Google trying to fix it.
They don't want to be forced to upgrade to a new version that removes useful features.
They don't want to be forced to upgrade to a new version simply because the developers refuse to port security fixes back to the old one.
When a software developer starts to imagine they're more important than their users, they soon discover they don't have any users anymore.