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Firefox 8.0 is Released

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Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#51

Post by Jach »

Karunamon wrote: post #47
richbradshaw wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 entirel…

Is it really silly? Gmail doesn't have version numbers. Facebook doesn't have version numbers. Hacker News doesn't have version numbers. Twitter doesn't have version numbers. They may refer to "the new version" or "the new, beta version" but not by number.

On the dev side, you might refer to a particular code snapshot with a "version number" that might as well be 3.2 or r304 or "2011-08-3 12:03:47" or d1b119d8f117b16fcfa58b2be60df87a6c45ac58. Considering the nightmares caused by conservative IT groups enforcing version X of software Y for years, eliminating version numbers from the public for something as critical as a browser seems like a good move to me on security alone. For other things the formal major.minor.release-revision can still make sense. Personally I miss the "even minor version represents stable, odd unstable" pattern that's increasingly fallen out of use.

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#52

Post by latif »

The Firefox teams seems to no longer care about add-ons and add-on users. I am an Add-on author. I submitted an updated version of my addon for Firefox 8 on October 27. Twelve days later the new version is still sitting in a sandbox waiting editorial review. With a new release happening every 6 weeks this kind of behavior is inexcusable and will likely drive people away from Add-ons.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/categorize/

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#53

Post by JoshTriplett »

Tichy wrote: post #18

The add-on thing could be huge, if it works out. I am tired of seeing computers riddled with spybars.

Definitely a good idea for Windows users, and possibly Macs as well (I don't know the prevalence of browser-infesting software there).

On Linux, though, it promptly flagged all of the addons I had installed through the distro packaging system as "third-party addons" and wanted to disable them by default.

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#54

Post by JoshTriplett »

latif wrote: post #52

The Firefox teams seems to no longer care about add-ons and add-on users. I am an Add-on author. I submitted an updated version of my addon for Firefox 8 on October 27. Twelve days later the new version is still sitting in a sandbox waiting editorial review. With a new release happening every 6 weeks this kind of behavior is inexcusable and will likely drive people away from Add-ons. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/…

Known problem with the compatibility system, and Mozilla plans to address it in the near future by improving the notion of compatibility, as well as adding the ability to quickly mark an existing version of an addon as compatible when it doesn't need changes.

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#55

Post by JoshTriplett »

evanw wrote: post #14
joenathan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use this extension to "make" your extensions compatible https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat...

This is great, thanks for posting it. I manage my passwords with 1Password, and while they're good about pushing updates, I've never seen their Firefox extension marked as compatible when a new version of Firefox is released.

Why 1Password rather than Firefox Sync?

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#56

Post by JoshTriplett »

Karunamon wrote: post #17
notatoad wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

here we go again with the version number complaints. get over it. it doesn't make any difference to you what number they want to call it.

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"

Actually, they understand it quite well; fixes to released versions of Firefox use dotted version numbers like that. Mozilla just switched from doing major releases on a timescale of 1-2 years to doing major releases many times per year.

Among other things, that has improved the quality of the browser, since features don't have to rush to meet the release deadline when they can just wait for the next one right around the corner.

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#57

Post by Sanddancer »

latif wrote: post #52

The Firefox teams seems to no longer care about add-ons and add-on users. I am an Add-on author. I submitted an updated version of my addon for Firefox 8 on October 27. Twelve days later the new version is still sitting in a sandbox waiting editorial review. With a new release happening every 6 weeks this kind of behavior is inexcusable and will likely drive people away from Add-ons. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/…

I disagree. The folks at Mozilla are not so quietly encouraging developers to get involved in the alpha and beta releases to ensure that things do work on day one of a release? How much work was done up to October 27 ensuring that your add-on was ready to go?

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#60

Post by nitrogen »

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.

If I have 6GB of RAM and feel like e.g. editing a bunch of very large photos or videos without closing my browser, it's annoying to have that browser using 25% of RAM.
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