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Firefox 5 Beta is available for download

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Re: Firefox 5 Beta is available for download

#61

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…

For a web browser there is no reason not to want to use the newest build, especially while HTML5 and CSS3 are being actively implemented. Your bash script is just your own version of Mozilla's auto updater.

Re: Firefox 5 Beta is available for download

#62
post #2

Use it if you want break all the working addons for nothing.

None of my extensions are broken or disabled so far. I can totally see your scepticism and where you are coming from though. With the update from FF3.x to FF4 it was all hell with extensions and it has been like that between previous major versions as well.

Just thought I'd report that for my (somewhat meager) selection of addons, I haven't found anything auto-disabled or crashing yet.

Re: Firefox 5 Beta is available for download

#63
post #7

Actually the first beta of FF5 is available for almost a month on their ftp here ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/5.0b1/

That wasn't really a real beta. that was simply a copy of then Aurora to the beta channel to test the process and the channel switching utility in Firefox.

Re: Firefox 5 Beta is available for download

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For a web browser there is no reason not to want to use the newest build, especially while HTML5 and CSS3 are being actively implemented. Your bash script is just your own version of Mozilla's auto updater.

Sure there is. A while ago, while I was using the 4.0 beta, I ran into a problem: modal dialogs wouldn't work. In beta 4 they worked just fine. Beta 5, just fine. When beat 6 rolled around, they stopped working. I reverted and used that until beta 12 fixed my problem. 6-11 were useless for some of the things I used it for (example: TiddlyWiki editing) because Javascript alert() and confirm() dialogs would literally not show up.

EDIT: also, the bash script is there because I install Firefox to /usr/local, and it's easier to type "update-firefox" in an already-open terminal than to reboot Firefox as root so it can modify my files. I'm aware it's redundant, but it also a) requires my active participation, so I can't miss it and b) lets me downgrade, in case of something like what happened above.

Re: Firefox 5 Beta is available for download

#65
post #25

When a new version of Firefox comes out, I always like to find the oldest bug that it fixes. It looks like the winner this time is a 12-year-old bug affecting MathML: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21479 Also fixed is this 7-year-old bug that has annoyed me for years: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=254714 (When you open a link in a new tab, the new page's URL doesn't appear in the Location…

Wow, thanks for pointing out that second one. That's bugged me for some time too!

Re: Firefox 5 Beta is available for download

#66
post #58
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Chrome uses a binary PDF reader plugin, there are no sources available. Open source projects like Chromium and Firefox require an open source reader. I think MuPDF would be a good choice.

Does MuPDF have any speed/performance/etc benefits over the plugin in Chrome? Are there any reasons to spend the time/effort to switched other then one is open source?

I wasn't talking about Chrome switching. MuPDF is an open source option for open source projects.
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