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Firefox Mozilla Software Upgrades

Firefox 10 Released 364

Posted by samzenpus from the brand-spanking-new dept.
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."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Firefox 10 Released More

Firefox 10 Released

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  • For unknown reasons, my work computer (still on Windows XP but Win 2007 is coming any day now) won't let Firefox higher than 8.X run. 9.X or 10.X just freeze when starting up.

  • "Firefox n released"... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Sez Zero ( 586611 ) on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @03:37PM (#38895601) Journal
    "Firefox n released" is not a story.

  • Before any jokes appear (Score:5, Informative)

    by jcreus ( 2547928 ) on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @03:38PM (#38895609)
    Firefox has launched a new version release system, creating an ESR for enterprises, organizations, etc. which is released once in 7 Firefox usual releases (Firefox 10, 17, 24, etc.), so that they don't have so much trouble (it must be horrible to find that two new versions have appeared as you are updating...). See a submission which didn't get to the front page [slashdot.org] for more details.

  • Chromium master race (Score:5, Funny)

    by akilduff ( 2523374 ) on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @03:38PM (#38895613)
    Firefox's constant updates drove me to Chromium.

    • Re:Chromium master race (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jcreus ( 2547928 ) on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @03:43PM (#38895691)
      [sarcasm]Which has a faaaar slower release schedule. Definitely.[/sarcasm]

      Where do you think Firefox got the idea from?

    • lolwut (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Chromium gets updated as frequently, if not more.

      It just doesn't prompt you, and ask for your permission.

      Firefox actually started this rapid release schedule in response to Chrome's process. A large factor in the adoption of this process was likely due to Google's heavy involvement in Firefox and it's primary sponsor funding an assload of Firefox's cash flow. In fact a lot of what Firefox does not, seems like an active pursuit to become more like Chrome, whereas when Chrome started out, it essentially seeme

      • Re:lolwut (Score:5, Informative)

        by Grishnakh ( 216268 ) on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @04:48PM (#38896513)

        Wrong. Chromium doesn't auto-update at all. You're thinking of Chrome.

        Chromium also doesn't have a lot of the built-in BS that Chrome has, such as a PDF reader (Okular works just fine, thank you), and stats reporting.

  • OMG guys (Score:4, Insightful)

    by eexaa ( 1252378 ) on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @03:46PM (#38895729) Homepage

    Every time you users are hit by the "release early, release often" that you always wished, I hear you moaning.

    "It's time to upgrade again."

    Attitude of that sentence somehow doesn't fit on shlashdot for me. I hoped that it was _here_ where people can appreciate the last "big" and still free browser.

    • I actually like it, but I have acute versionitis, I use git/hg/etc more than apt-get...so I don't count.
      The transition from latest versions has been quite smooth actually. No addons here (30+) failed to load in about 3-4 releases (beta channel).

    • Re:OMG guys (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 0123456 ( 636235 ) on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @03:53PM (#38895825)

      "Release early, release often" is intended for testers and bleeding-edge users, not end users who just want a stable product.

      It's not as though there have been any user-noticeable changes between 3.6 and 9 other than them buggering up the GUI.

      • "Release early, release often" is intended for testers and bleeding-edge users, not end users who just want a stable product.

        Pretty sure that was also John Holmes' personal philosophy.

        Thank you, thank you, I'll be here 'til Thursday.

      • Also (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @04:42PM (#38896443)

        With releases, keeping version numbers, you know, USEFUL is something we'd all like.

        I'm ok with software updating often. However I'd like to have some easy idea of how large an update it is and version numbers are supposed to do that. Firefox used to do the multi-dot system of major.minor.fix. So if something went from say, 3.5.8 to 3.5.9 I knew it was just bug fixes, no testing needed just deploy it. However going from 3.5.9 to 4.0 tells me there could be some major changes and I need to look at it.

        Now I have no fucking idea. There's a new "major" version like once a month, some which seem to be changed not at all, this one which seems to have made some non-trivial changes. Rather a pain in the ass to deal with in a large deployment setting, and confusing to users either way.

        Imagine if MS did this with Windows, if every patch Tuesday brought a "new" Windows version out. However sometimes a new product would ship and be totally different. So you have a situation where Windows 3652 to 3653 is just a patch for XP but 3654 is Vista and is totally different.

        FF's versioning is nonsensical and is just number envy as far as I can tell. "Let's do really big numbers so we look all new and shit!"

        • Re:Also (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Drinking Bleach ( 975757 ) on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @06:12PM (#38897431)

          I'm going to quote myself from another forum; it's slightly old so the version numbers don't match what is current, but the idea is still the same. I'll also have you note that nowhere was there a guarentee that 3.5.x or 3.6.x releases were bug-fix-only releases; there were some rather significant feature changes and additions in both lines' "minor" versions.

          Meanwhile I have Chromium 15 installed, which sounds just as bad. The rapid release schedule is desirable for progress of web technologies. Keeping traditional versioning schemes doesn't really work with that. Otherwise it'll be 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, etc... until what? 4.32? By then 4.32 might seem like a big enough step from 4.0 to have warranted several "major" version bumps, even though the change will seem minor compared to 4.31, and that minor compared to 4.30, and so on. (Emacs predates the browsers... it skipped from version 1.12 to version 13 when the authors realized they may never leave 1.x otherwise, essentally that first number became meaningless)

          To both Google and Mozilla's credit, they have seriously downplayed the prevalance of the version number. What matters now is that users are up to date, and by most common installation modes, that happens fairly automatic for both of them. How many people can really tell that they're on Firefox 8 without having to open Help>About, or that they're on Chrome/Chromium 15 without opening its about dialog? Probably not many.

          tl;dr: the old versioning system doesn't work. To top it off, Mozilla doesn't actively advertise version numbers either. Much of the hate seems to be generated by Slashdot feeling compelled to note that Firefox got an update.

          • Re:Also (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02, 2012 @12:35AM (#38900011)

            So... your argument is that because Mozilla failed to post the major updates with a correct increment to the major version number sometimes that it is reasonable to move to a system that always fails to increment the major version number correctly?

        • Re:Also (Score:5, Insightful)

          by elashish14 ( 1302231 ) <`profcalc4' `at' `gmail.com'> on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @07:47PM (#38898313)

          On the other hand, if they just kept the same version, you'd have something like Linux where all the changes between 2.6.0 and 2.6.40 were incremental enough not to merit a major version change, yet the differences between versions 2.4 and 2.6 were completely dwarfed by the differences between 2.6.0 and 2.6.40.

          I'm not a software engineer, but from what I've noticed, it seems that once a product becomes mature enough (ie. once it does pretty much everything you expect), the version numbers become less significant as at that point as each revision is mostly just changing things under the hood, tweaking performance/security/stability/etc.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Kjella ( 173770 )

            I think that works well for the kernel, which isn't actually a end-user visible system, plus it's a cumulative system where you can expect that if you have a kernel bigger than x.y.z then all is well. For GUI software I'd very much recommend a "redesign.features.patch" pattern where

            "redesign" means we've moved things around, no guarantees about anything
            "features" means we may have added some menu items, expanded some dialogs and such, but if you knew how to use the old functionality you should still be able

    • I hoped that it was _here_ where people can appreciate the last "big" and still free browser.

      Maybe it's because we remember when Firefox (then called Phoenix) was the small, lightweight, nimble browser that saved us from Mozilla's insanity ? Unfortunately it has gone over to the dark side.

  • Still no Flash in mobile ... (Score:3)

    by MacTO ( 1161105 ) on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @03:52PM (#38895807)

    I realize that it isn't a very popular around these parts, but quite a few websites still use this critter and are unlikely to stop using it in the near future. Meanwhile they're implementing antialiasing for WebGL and OpenGL ES acceleration, features that aren't in common use yet.

    Hum ...

    This is the web we're talking about. It should be access to content first, then the frills.

  • Under actual news, IE 6 market share grows. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Baloroth ( 2370816 ) on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @04:03PM (#38895947)

    I wish I was joking. IE 6 as a precent of desktop web browser views went up [arstechnica.com] by 0.72% last month. FF as a whole went down, as did Chrome.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Not sure where they got their figures from, but I imagine it's something to do with country figures etc. being updated, which can lead to such odd jumps. At StatCounter [statcounter.com] IE6 continued down from 1.78% to 1.56% and Chrome grew a lot. Firefox is on the downward trend though, though not as bad as IE. In fact at last month's rate of change (with all the dangers of extrapolation) Chrome would overtake IE as the world's #1 web browser in four months, at least according to StatCounter. They seem to disagree with 10-

  • I like it (Score:5, Informative)

    by Barefoot Monkey ( 1657313 ) on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @04:04PM (#38895963)

    A version bump doesn't mean much these days, but this version is a big improvement. It's suddenly much more responsive and there's a very stylish built-in inspect tool if you press Ctrl+Shift+i. Also, Safari-style 3D transforms are implemented at last!

  • Incomplete summary (Score:5, Informative)

    by revealingheart ( 1213834 ) on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @04:04PM (#38895979)

    Could a Slashdot editor please add to the summary info about the Extended Support Release [mozilla.org] for organizations released at the same time, and the new built-in web developer tools [mozilla.com]? Even a link to a website with coverage about the new changes to Firefox [pcworld.com] would do.

  • Addons now compatible by default (Score:4, Interesting)

    by InvisiBill ( 706958 ) on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @04:11PM (#38896061) Homepage

    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).

  • Firefox 4.10 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by vga_init ( 589198 ) on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @04:12PM (#38896075) Journal

    I prefer to think of this as Firefox 4.10 (or 3.10?)

  • I just upgraded everything to firefox 9 last night ...

  • Oh for crying out loud... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Fuck off with the crazy versioning already. Otherwise, we're going to have to start using scientific notation to represent Firefox's version # in a few years. They'll just start skipping to the next 1000-level release # whenever there's a major update - "Firefox 2E3 ?! What the hell happened to 1.78E3 thru 1.99E3?!

  • date-time version system (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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 n

  • So, no 9.1 then? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by SkimTony ( 245337 )

    Major version numbers should be for major features, not for bug fixes.

    • Major version numbers should be for major features, not for bug fixes.

      For better or worse, Firefox doesn't use versions numbers anymore. They're only numbering releases now - versioning is gone.

      I personally like version numbers, but we can't complain about Firefox doing version numbers wrong when they're not longer using version numbers.

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