Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

Post by nnethercote » Sat, Jul 07, 2012, 3:55 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #62

dangoor wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, Firefox developers care a good deal about memory management. More than Add-on authors unfortunately. We've had a project called MemShrink running for about a year and it has been making steady progress. and that progress has been shipping to users. The current Aurora channel release even has a fix for most add-on bad behavior. Firefox actually stacks up really well in memory usage (even in third party tests…

I quit firefox purely over its tendency to leak my entire RAM and force restarts. I was told at the time, and do believe, that the memory leaking was an addon problem. However... firefox was sold on the idea of addons. When your two main messages are "we're the most convenient browser; just look at all our awesome addons!" and "you can't use the addons, or your computer will implode", you've got a serious problem.

Post by nfm » Sat, Jul 07, 2012, 4:04 AM UTC

Tangaroa wrote: post #95

city41 wrote: post #80

One thing I've not seen anyone bring up in the comments here is Chrome updates just as often as Firefox does. Chrome might even update more often than Firefox does. I don't know because Chrome solved the rapid update problem exceptionally well . Chrome could update every hour and I probably wouldn't even notice, let alone care. Rapid updates in and of themselves are not the problem here.

Here are the two major problems that I see in Mozilla's "rapid updates" process: 1) Interruption of user work process Firefox freezes for a few seconds at startup to see if there are any updates to the core or plugins. If this were handled in the background in a separate thread that did not freeze the browser, no one would care about it except for privacy advocates who don't want their version number being leaked. Th…

Post by nnethercote » Sat, Jul 07, 2012, 4:10 AM UTC

human_error wrote: post #53

I'm still trying to figure out why the "add-ons" you install appear in "extensions" window and what's the difference between an extension and an addon. I can search and install Firebug but can disable/remove it from extension section.

Post by snatch_backside » Sat, Jul 07, 2012, 4:39 AM UTC

AshleysBrain wrote: post #19

breadbox wrote: post #3

The takeaway quote: "After years of aspiring to improve software usability, I've come to the extremely humbling realization that the single best thing most companies could do to improve usability is to stop changing the UI so often!" I wish I could ink this command onto the right hand of programmers (and program managers) everywhere.

Can't users who don't like the new-fangled UI just stay on old versions? I know that ultimately creates compatibility headaches, but it at least gives them time to decide to move along.

Post by accountswu » Sat, Jul 07, 2012, 5:04 AM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #35

ck2 wrote: post #31

I have not had an extension break since FF7 (now on FF14) Firefox has come a long way and I as a developer I don't like how Chrome hides everything. It's also super easy in Firefox to turn off automatic updates and only update manually when you are ready (help -> about firefox)

>I have not had an extension break since FF7 (now on FF14) It's been my experience that extensions don't 'break' (i.e. stop working as expected) as much as they self validate against the currently running version of FF and refuse to load unless the developer has flagged it as workable. Every time a major release comes out, half of my plugins are disabled. Then, I go and download the compatability reporter plugin (whi…