Mozilla plans four Firefoxes in 2011 Mozilla is planning to release four new versions of Firefox this year, shortening the browser's traditional release cycle considerably. To date, the open source outfit has released a new version of the browser every 12 to 18 months or so. Presumably, the proposed move is a response to Google, which now releases a new version …
Excluding bug fixes and security updates they should limit major releases to one to two a year. It's unlikely a delay of a couple of months for the new shinny thing would bother many. Stick with stable releases and don't hoist the bugs on customers. There are enough bugs left to fix after careful editing.
If you must change your operation do it to a plan rather than knee jerk response to a 'competitor'.
Mozilla has released a whole lot more versions than that, just not major versions.
Chrome isn't really comparable, since they don't make the same distinction of major vs minor.
It's arguable which is the better approach, both for users and for web developers. Sounds like Mozilla is edging towards a compromise position. Will that be better than the extremes? Only time will tell.
I'd prefer one with. Without the Status Bar it looks like a guy who forgot to put his trousers on. The missing SB is a fine example of the direction the browser as a whole appears to be heading and it is one I have no interest in. Rather like Gnome, reducing the ability to fine-tune and the available information. No thanks, I'm a control freak. I (once) thought we all were here. And coding for Mozilla.
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If you simply need the Status Bar back for Add-Ons purposes then you can easily get it back by simply unhiding it (http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/what-add-bar)
If you need the full Status Bar there is an add on for that (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/status-4-evar/)
The one No. 10 petition Brown _did_ satisfy. Apologise for something done decades before he had anything to do with it, so completely meaningless other than to theoretically get kudos for being his Honourable Right on-ness _and_ for giving the appearance of actually considering the petitions _and_ the implication that all the others - that _were_ relevent to the current electorate - were dismissed for unbiased common sense reasons rather than ignored for party political ones. And if a mike had been broadcasting it'd probably have caught him commenting about how if Turing had lived, Peter would be buggering the hatter out back as we speak !
Which standards would they be then? HTML 4.01 Transitional? Strict? XHTML 1.0 Transitional, XHTML1.1 Strict? HTML 5 which is not even standardised yet and is a bastardised HTML/XML mashup where tag closure is optional?
The thing with standards is that non-standard elements have to be created before they can become part of the standard. Take the ubiquitous "title" attribute - that was originally an IE extension.
Mind this is the first rant I've ever seen where "fucking with the standards" wasn't actually aimed at IE.
Oh noes - I may have fed the troll...
Mozilla does 4 stable Firefox releases this year and 90% of Fortune 100 companies will switch to using linux on the desktop for their staff. I also hear that they'll perfect cold fusion, cure the common cold and BBC News 24 will actually start broadcasting respectable news again, all this year :P
All this non-sense dicking around trying to keep up with the Jones of the browser world. There was a time when Firefox was going to right the wrongs of the browsers world - and give us an alternative for the crap the IE was putting out. Now they lost direction and all they can think is how to out-do Chrome (or whatever else) at completely irrelevant features.
Stick with delivering a solid, bug-free, compliant and efficient piece of software and stop trying to 'innovate' for the sake of innovation and to justify your sorry jobs. That's exactly what fat companies like MS keep on doing and shoving on us all sorts of re-inventions of the wheel. That's exactly what Open Source projects *didn't* use to do.
Nobody seems to be placing any priority on or talking about their other projects. How about the tons of bugs lying around for years in Thunderbird and Lightning? How about the crappy CalDAV support in Lighning? How about the pathetic speed on large calendar sets in Lightning? How about ongoing IMAP sync problems in Thunderbird? They have moved core functionality out of Thunderbird into add-ons - so that they can wash their hands of it and offload the work to outside contributors - in order to have more resources for marketing Firefox? Something has gone wrong there.
Fire all the fluffy marketing execs and hire some software developers that give the community something actually useful - instead of press releases. Unless the money Google is providing come with explicit strings attached that it should be used for anything, except useful software for the community which might compete with commercial products.
They are talking about Firefox 6 and moving to 4 releases per year for Firefox - when Thunderbird has struggled to move to even version 3 - and it looks like it is getting left more and more behind.
I hear you.
I could be completely wrong about this but I thought I read about two possible solutions to this:
(1) An add on (yes, an Add On!), or more promisingly
(2) Some settings in about:config. Perhaps this might help?
http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/07/06/remove-stuck-firefox-4-orange-menu-button-css/
Most are compatible with future versions - they don't screw up the UI that much between minor versions. Unfortunately, not all developers are adept at putting an appropriate figure in the MaxVersion tag. There are two ways around this:
a) Download the Add-on Compatibility Checker, which allows the browser to ignore MaxVersion and enable everything by default. However, if one extension does screw up your browsing, good luck in finding it...
b) Download the xpi for an allegedly incompatible extension (rather than installing it), open up the .xpi in a compression program (xpis are just rebranded zip files), open up install.rdf, and change the value of MaxVersion. Double check it's the FF section, as some extensions will work on other Mozilla programs. Save install.rdf back to the xpi, and do a manual install. Then if you're feeling generous leave an appropriate comment on the extension's page at AMO.
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