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Firefox 5 Beta is available for download

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Re: Firefox 5 Beta is available for download

#41

Post by lurker19 »

ZoFreX wrote: post #16
wisty wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, there's no reason to break bugfixes. Heck, a lot of them still work, if you flag some "developer mode", but you don't need to do that in Chrome. Who care's if Mozilla has more extensions? They cause too much trouble when you upgrade.

I don't think it really counts as an "upgrade" if you opt-in to a beta.

True, but unless FF adds a "re-version-tag my addons based on feedback from testers" feature, we will get bitten when FF5 final comes out and disables all existing deployed extensions.

Re: Firefox 5 Beta is available for download

#42

Post by rsoto »

thomas11 wrote: post #40
dpcan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I JUST downloaded FF4 and now I see 5 is coming out. Version-less updates of browsers makes sense, and they should be seamlessly, silently, updated in the back-ground. This is getting crazy. I install Firefox for friends and family who I want off IE, and this actually embarrasses me a little. If I have to keep telling them to update, they will quit - or end up using REALLY OLD versions of Firefox and we'll have an IE…

Firefox 5 is not coming out. It's a beta. You shouldn't bother friends and family with it.

Actually, my Firefox it's advicing me to update. And I'm not on the nightly, developer or beta channel.

Re: Firefox 5 Beta is available for download

#43

Post by thomas11 »

rsoto wrote: post #42
thomas11 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox 5 is not coming out. It's a beta. You shouldn't bother friends and family with it.

Actually, my Firefox it's advicing me to update. And I'm not on the nightly, developer or beta channel.

Strange, mine (4.0.1) doesn't. There's something broken either in the update routine or in your Firefox. The beta is not supposed to be recommended to users of a release version.

Re: Firefox 5 Beta is available for download

#44

Post by m_eiman »

randallsquared wrote: post #36
timtadh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a linux user I am surprised. When I download to open in my reader the pdfs go into /tmp. This is fine, because since /tmp is a ramfs it just goes away when I turn off my computer. If I want it I just save it to a permanent location.

Unlike m_eiman and cemerick, I regard dumping debris into my Downloads folder as a feature. I basically never clean it out; it's just a convenience place to keep stuff that I have a low probability of ever wanting again, auto-sorted by how likely I am to want it (most recent first, in other words). Since I almost never bother with more than the first few items in the stack display of Downloads, it didn't occur to me…

It's desirable when you're using a laptop with a 120GB SSD that for some reason fills up all the time :/

Re: Firefox 5 Beta is available for download

#45

Post by naner »

cemerick wrote: post #12

The state of PDF support in Firefox on OS X has me stuck at FF 3.6, and it doesn't look like that'll be changing for a while (unless I want to experiment with random xpi's and running FF 4+ in 32-bit mode, etc). Until that's resolved, all the fancy CSS tweaks in the world won't mean a hoot.

FF or Chromium (or both) should embed MuPDF[1]. It is extremely fast, reasonably small, and renders very well.

1: http://mupdf.com/

Re: Firefox 5 Beta is available for download

#46

Post by gmac »

jaysonelliot wrote: post #31
randallsquared wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On OS X, there's possibly the best PDF viewer ever, in Preview. I'm curious why you'd want so strongly to avoid using it?

Whatever engine Apple is using to view PDFs in Preview, it doesn't always display PDFs correctly. It's much faster than the bloated beast that is Acrobat, but I'd say about 20% of the documents I open in Preview have to be viewed in Acrobat to be usable, so I've just defaulted to avoiding Preview instead. A good, fast PDF viewer in the browser would be far better than either of those options.

What kinds of PDFs are you opening? I find the failure rate in Preview is more like 0.5%, and it's generally related to annoying (Adobe proprietary?) form-related stuff.

Plus Preview can also do some very handy basic editing (cropping, adding/deleting/reordering pages, etc.), which I can only assume Adobe have left out to in order to up-sell you Acrobat.

Re: Firefox 5 Beta is available for download

#48

Post by gmac »

lurker19 wrote: post #41
ZoFreX wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it really counts as an "upgrade" if you opt-in to a beta.

True, but unless FF adds a "re-version-tag my addons based on feedback from testers" feature, we will get bitten when FF5 final comes out and disables all existing deployed extensions.

In actual fact, they've changed the process so this generally won't happen:

http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2011/04/19/add-on-compatibili...

Re: Firefox 5 Beta is available for download

#49

Post by horser4dish »

redemade wrote: post #47
sapper2 wrote: post #24

Unless they have the quick, silent updates of Chrome AND the (so far) perfect quality control of Chrome, these quick releases do more harm then good.

seriously... WHY aren't other browser vendors adopting the chrome release strategy?

There's still a market for people who want to manually upgrade. There was a comment thread on HN a few months ago about this as well (no way we'll be able to find it now, I don't remember the story), but it summarized my views very well. I like knowing what is or isn't being installed on my computer. I've got a bash script to automatically download and update to the newest Firefox, so the act of upgrading isn't a chore. But I don't want a given company, be it Google or Mozilla, to arbitrarily change what's on my computer.

That's not to say I don't see the allure of automatic updates, but I just don't want them to be silent and mandatory.

Re: Firefox 5 Beta is available for download

#50

Post by kijinbear »

horser4dish wrote: post #49
redemade wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

seriously... WHY aren't other browser vendors adopting the chrome release strategy?

There's still a market for people who want to manually upgrade. There was a comment thread on HN a few months ago about this as well (no way we'll be able to find it now, I don't remember the story), but it summarized my views very well. I like knowing what is or isn't being installed on my computer. I've got a bash script to automatically download and update to the newest Firefox, so the act of upgrading isn't a cho…

Given how configurable Firefox is, I'm sure they'll add an option to disable automatic updates even if it becomes a default feature.
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