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Firefox 8.0 is Released

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Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#41

Post by FantasyIslander »

sp332 wrote: post #33
technomancy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There will be a new release every six weeks. The corrollary to this being that releases are no longer news.

Right. New features might be news, but new versions shouldn't be.

Exactly. For business who have legal or medical requirements to keep track of Browser Capabilities, Firefox is already known to be a rogue browser.

Browser capabilities are very important, and how it behaves must be expected for legal and medical requirements.

Please join us in the real world, and leave your fantasy behind. The plane boss! The plane!

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#43

Post by starwed »

Karunamon wrote: post #19
eCa wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sort of understand their reasoning. It's easier to get people interested in a "full" release, than some 3.0.21 version every three mongths. It also was more wrong to stay on 3.6.* for over two years. A middle road might be to start a year with a full release and then do point-releases doing that year, so in 2013 we would have, for instance: 13, 13.0.1, 13.1, 13.2, 13.2.1, 13.3.

This is a valid, on topic, cogent post. Why is it getting downvoted?

Perhaps because this argument has croppped up, like clockwork, with every release since FF5. It's boring, predictable, and doesn't add anything to the discussion.

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#44

Post by keeperofdakeys »

eCa wrote: post #7
hozzer wrote: post #2

Dear Mozilla. Why do you keep doing all these full version releases? Seriously it's just annoying. Just because IE is on version 10. Doesn't mean you have to be. Why are you doing this.... You've gone from 3-8 in a year. That's not right.

I sort of understand their reasoning. It's easier to get people interested in a "full" release, than some 3.0.21 version every three mongths. It also was more wrong to stay on 3.6.* for over two years. A middle road might be to start a year with a full release and then do point-releases doing that year, so in 2013 we would have, for instance: 13, 13.0.1, 13.1, 13.2, 13.2.1, 13.3.

Here is a post about where Chrome and Firefox are probably heading http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-infinite-versio....

The biggest problem with updates are regressions. Since Firefox uses four release channels (since the introduction of the Aurora channel), most features get a decent amount of testing before being introduced to stable.

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#45

Post by apaprocki »

jlongster wrote: post #15
recoiledsnake wrote: post #5

Just got the notification, but didn't upgrade because a lot of my very useful extensions for HTML dev weren't compatible. I don't think the new features in 7->8 make up for the lack of my extensions.

I disabled addon compatibility checking, and jumped from 7 to nightly (version 10) and was surprised to find all of my extensions still work great (including Firebug). Mozilla is working towards making this happen automatically, but it seems to be working well already.

I just saw this being discussed today.. watch out for it if you have Firebug installed. There could be a performance regression because debugging is on even if you're not using it.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=699528

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#46

Post by bakhlawa »

Have the memory issues been resolved? Under Windows 7, it isn't uncommon to find an idle Firefox browser with a few low-activity tabs using up more than 1.5GB of memory. It's gotten to a stage where I have to restart the browser every couple of days...reminds me of when I had to this with my Windows PC! I've recently moved over the Chrome and while I miss Firefox, the browser is far less of a memory hog.

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#47

Post by Karunamon »

richbradshaw wrote: post #21
Karunamon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering the whole reason they're doing this crap is to make it look like they're keeping up to date with Chrome, yeah, it kinda does make a difference. Methinks they don't understand the concept of "Major release.minor release"

That's not why they are doing it. It's because it's better for everyone if things like browsers are essentially versionless, and everyone is on the newest version. Immediate automatic updates mean that users are always able to access the newest features.

That's an awfully subjective position to take. I don't have a problem with rapid release, but I have a problem with passing off minor revisions and bugfixes as major releases.

And try to tell me the version doesn't matter when there's a regression or otherwise something broken on a newer rev that works fine on an older one.

I don't know where this recent trend of "version numbers are evil" came from, but it's entirely silly.

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#48

Post by daemin »

bakhlawa wrote: post #46

Have the memory issues been resolved? Under Windows 7, it isn't uncommon to find an idle Firefox browser with a few low-activity tabs using up more than 1.5GB of memory. It's gotten to a stage where I have to restart the browser every couple of days...reminds me of when I had to this with my Windows PC! I've recently moved over the Chrome and while I miss Firefox, the browser is far less of a memory hog.

Why does it bother you that an application is using so much RAM? Do you only have 2 GB or something like that? I'd prefer that applications used my RAM since unused RAM is just wasted electricity.

I find it strange that people still think of RAM as a precious resource that needs to be conserved and under-utilised. I'd rather have it used than have to fetch something from disk or the network.

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#49

Post by hnwh »

daemin wrote: post #48
bakhlawa wrote: post #46

Have the memory issues been resolved? Under Windows 7, it isn't uncommon to find an idle Firefox browser with a few low-activity tabs using up more than 1.5GB of memory. It's gotten to a stage where I have to restart the browser every couple of days...reminds me of when I had to this with my Windows PC! I've recently moved over the Chrome and while I miss Firefox, the browser is far less of a memory hog.

Why does it bother you that an application is using so much RAM? Do you only have 2 GB or something like that? I'd prefer that applications used my RAM since unused RAM is just wasted electricity. I find it strange that people still think of RAM as a precious resource that needs to be conserved and under-utilised. I'd rather have it used than have to fetch something from disk or the network.

Some of us actually use our RAM for other things...

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#50

Post by getsat »

daemin wrote: post #48
bakhlawa wrote: post #46

Have the memory issues been resolved? Under Windows 7, it isn't uncommon to find an idle Firefox browser with a few low-activity tabs using up more than 1.5GB of memory. It's gotten to a stage where I have to restart the browser every couple of days...reminds me of when I had to this with my Windows PC! I've recently moved over the Chrome and while I miss Firefox, the browser is far less of a memory hog.

Why does it bother you that an application is using so much RAM? Do you only have 2 GB or something like that? I'd prefer that applications used my RAM since unused RAM is just wasted electricity. I find it strange that people still think of RAM as a precious resource that needs to be conserved and under-utilised. I'd rather have it used than have to fetch something from disk or the network.

> I'd prefer that applications used my RAM since unused RAM is just wasted electricity.

I... but... er...

This is probably the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen on this site.

You could write a two line C program that allocates all the memory on your system and then sits in a loop doing nothing, but then you'd be wasting even more electricity because your hdd would be reading/writing to your swap space. :|

> I'd rather have it used than have to fetch something from disk or the network.

Modern operating systems do use your free memory for cache. Linux will regularly chill at 90%+ memory usage (the majority being cache that can be freed instantly when other apps need it) and Windows has SuperFetch which does basically the same thing as I understand.

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