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Firefox 3.6 vs 8.0

zdnet.com

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Re: Firefox 3.6 vs 8.0

#31

Post by notatoad »

daave wrote: post #21
slowpoke wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I hope unnoticeable updates become the norm for all desktop software. As long as you can turn that off, sure. I don't like software bypassing my package managers. Firefox is so far the sole exception I'm okay with since I'm using the Nightly builds and don't update as often. But for everything else, that would be a nightmare. I like to be in control of my updates, thank you.

It's time to let go and trust the developers of the software you're using to know when updates are stable, or when you really need a critical bug or security fix (if you don't trust them, why are you running their software anyway?). Package managers are a great upgrade from having to manually update individual applications, and are still great for servers or other cases where upgrading can break crucial pieces of inf…

I don't see how package managers and developer pushed updates are incompatible concepts. Installing chrome adds a repo to my apt sources, it updates with the rest of my system, weekly and silently. I don't waste my time doing sysadmin work, and I get an up to date browser.

Re: Firefox 3.6 vs 8.0

#32

Post by gcp »

grannyg00se wrote: post #25
asadotzler wrote: post #7

Firefox 8 is light years ahead of 3.6 in performance and memory usage. It's light-weight and blazing fast. If you've been away for a while, delete your old Firefox profile and re-import your setting. You'll be surprised at how much better Firefox is.

Is that manual cleanup really necessary?

No, but many of the "Firefox crashes a lot" are caused by profiles who have gotten corrupted over the years, and many of the "it eats 2G of RAM" are caused by that and extensions.

Old Firefoxen also tended to fragment their SQLite databases heavily on disk (and in some cases, internally as well), which can show as sluggish response and "hanging" whenever disk I/O is involved. There were changes to ensure that some critical database files don't get fragmented any more, but if you already have those files from an old install you're SOL as it can't defragment them while its using them.

If you have serious performance or memory issues with Firefox, and you're a longtime user, at this point cleaning your profile is probably at least as likely to help as waiting for the next version.

Edit: Just to clarify, the manual cleanup is necessary because uninstalling (and reinstalling) Firefox never deletes your profile. This means that a serious problem can never be fixed by a reinstall - a behavior that probably should be changed.

Re: Firefox 3.6 vs 8.0

#33

Post by gcp »

rprospero wrote: post #26
ericabiz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really hoping you can get the remaining 3.6.x users to force-upgrade. We still have a couple people using 3.6 on our web app (where some pages won't render properly--we've labeled this 'wontfix' in our system since Firefox 7.0+ renders these pages properly.) Any word on whether there is any way to get them to upgrade? Last I saw, it upgraded them to a newer 3.x version, but then opened a page on your site with a…

Firefox 3.6 user here. I'd love to upgrade, but the new versions don't run on PowerPC

I'm not a PowerPC Mac user, but I understood PowerPC Firefox is now entirely handled by the community in the form of TenFourFox.

Re: Firefox 3.6 vs 8.0

#34

Post by itsnotlupus »

Is it a coincidence that the last version of Firefox that will ever run on PowerPC macs is being surprisingly resilient to those calls to upgrade?

I'd be curious to see how many of the 3.6 laggards really are on old macs and are simply unable to upgrade until they budget in some new hardware.

Re: Firefox 3.6 vs 8.0

#35

Post by VonLipwig »

I would love to use Firefox but I can't bring myself to do it. Firefox got really terrible and bloated and whenever I use it I am just waiting for a hint of terribleness to appear. Then I switch to another browser.

The main thing Firefox need to do is drop the version numbers all together. These numbers should be for developer's only. I could even argue developers do not need the version numbers and could work just fine with feature detection.

The fact is that most people do not care what version of Firefox they have. All they want is Firefox Latest. The latest and hopefully best version of Firefox will allow for the fastest and smoothest browsing experience. When I hear FF7/8/9 is out I sigh. Firefox automatically updates now, why all the grand announcements, especially considering for the majority of users the changes between 7 and 8 are fairly irrelevant background changes that won't be noticed.

Chrome is on what now? v15? Does Chrome continuously shout about how version 15 is out? No.. it just updates.. the user doesn't really know about it. The user doesn't really care about it.

Please.. just call the damn product [Firefox - no version number on the end] and be done with it.

Re: Firefox 3.6 vs 8.0

#36

Post by nodata »

gcp wrote: post #32
grannyg00se wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that manual cleanup really necessary?

No, but many of the "Firefox crashes a lot" are caused by profiles who have gotten corrupted over the years, and many of the "it eats 2G of RAM" are caused by that and extensions. Old Firefoxen also tended to fragment their SQLite databases heavily on disk (and in some cases, internally as well), which can show as sluggish response and "hanging" whenever disk I/O is involved. There were changes to ensure that some cr…

To defrag your databases, first close Firefox then run:

  for i in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*default/*ite; do sqlite3 $i vacuum; done

Re: Firefox 3.6 vs 8.0

#37

Post by kemayo »

itsnotlupus wrote: post #34

Is it a coincidence that the last version of Firefox that will ever run on PowerPC macs is being surprisingly resilient to those calls to upgrade? I'd be curious to see how many of the 3.6 laggards really are on old macs and are simply unable to upgrade until they budget in some new hardware.

Analytics for me says, for the last month:

  Firefox 8.0: 2.68% Mac
  Firefox 7.0.1: 9.53% Mac
  Firefox 3.6.24: 13.47% Mac
So it's definitely appreciably lower for 8 than for 3, but the closeness between 7 and 3 makes me wonder whether it's actually an effect.

Re: Firefox 3.6 vs 8.0

#38

Post by gcp »

nodata wrote: post #36
gcp wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but many of the "Firefox crashes a lot" are caused by profiles who have gotten corrupted over the years, and many of the "it eats 2G of RAM" are caused by that and extensions. Old Firefoxen also tended to fragment their SQLite databases heavily on disk (and in some cases, internally as well), which can show as sluggish response and "hanging" whenever disk I/O is involved. There were changes to ensure that some cr…

To defrag your databases, first close Firefox then run: for i in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*default/*ite; do sqlite3 $i vacuum; done

Note that this does not defragment the storage on disk, just the internal SQLite pages. So it's not a complete solution.

Re: Firefox 3.6 vs 8.0

#39

Post by slowpoke »

daave wrote: post #21
slowpoke wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I hope unnoticeable updates become the norm for all desktop software. As long as you can turn that off, sure. I don't like software bypassing my package managers. Firefox is so far the sole exception I'm okay with since I'm using the Nightly builds and don't update as often. But for everything else, that would be a nightmare. I like to be in control of my updates, thank you.

It's time to let go and trust the developers of the software you're using to know when updates are stable, or when you really need a critical bug or security fix (if you don't trust them, why are you running their software anyway?). Package managers are a great upgrade from having to manually update individual applications, and are still great for servers or other cases where upgrading can break crucial pieces of inf…

>It's time to let go and trust the developers of the software you're using to know when updates are stable, or when you really need a critical bug or security fix (if you don't trust them, why are you running their software anyway?).

I agree partially. My point is that you absolutely need the ability to turn it off. Always. But I'm fine with it being the default because that's what is most useful for the majority of users.

>When everything is a web app you'll have to get over it anyway. :)

You'll have to pry locally running programs out of my cold dead fingers. Web apps are fine for incredibly simple things. For everything else, they are as much buzzword bullshit bingo as the cloud.

Re: Firefox 3.6 vs 8.0

#40

Post by nirbheek »

gcp wrote: post #38
nodata wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To defrag your databases, first close Firefox then run: for i in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*default/*ite; do sqlite3 $i vacuum; done

Note that this does not defragment the storage on disk, just the internal SQLite pages. So it's not a complete solution.

Actually, that command will also rewrite the entire .sqlite file, and if you have enough free space, the filesystem will most likely rewrite it in a contiguous manner.

I tested this with filefrag.

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