Mozilla pushes out final Firefox 5 test build Mozilla plans to release the next small-fry iteration of its Firefox browser next week. Ahead of that, a release candidate version of Firefox 5 landed yesterday. The open-source browser-maker lists the following tweaks to the latest test build: Added support for CSS animations; The Do-Not-Track header preference has been …
Three major version releases in under a year? What's the freaking rush???
You already have the better browser. However, how about letting your developers catch up with your current browser before kicking up the version number.
I have not upgraded to V4 yet as 3/4 of my add-ons do not work with it. Here's a tip kids. The functionality I find in my add-ons is of more value to me than the browser. So unless you plan on building in the same functionality as my add-ons into the next version I am not upgrading.
That, or let add-ons WORK with future releases without having to be re-coded.
Switch to decaff, take your time and slow down the major version releases. Stabilize the version you have now, before moving on.
I don't understand why they're rushing out the versions so fast. I'd prefer if they worked on getting the current version stable and faster first. It seems that with every release they've done over the last year or so the browser has got slower, I'm seriously considering jumping ship to Chrome but, of course, Chrome doesn't have all the add-ons I need yet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser)#History
Currently 11.11 (released 18th May 2011)
I wonder if they're tracking the year number. But anyway, Firefox is still a long way behind a version 11!
I think this announcement refers to Firefox 5.0 (test) AND Firefox, um, 4.0.2 probably.
"Joke Alert."
I did put in a ":-)" though.
I do like Opera, and I have a vast and unreasonable number of web pages open simultaneously. But I have Firefox installed as well. Not Chrome though.
The other day Windows 7 told me to close Opera as it was using too much RAM, but when I checked, I found that a fingerprint recognition device's service that I never use was running amuck and taking a gigabyte of RAM and climbing. Thank you so much HP. I stopped the service. If I'm overlooking something else there, I'm eager to hear about it.
"It seems that with every release they've done over the last year or so the browser has got slower,"
Did you just MISS Firefox 4 or something? Don't even begin to tell me that is slower than 3.6. When it came out I ran it through benchmarks and it was beating the then-current Chrome for JS times.
Yeah, 4 was an improvement and ran fine, the hardware rendering stress test maxed out at 60fps. A few patches later and it now runs at 9 fps, or 11 if I disable hardware rendering. Yes, on both of my PCs it runs faster with hardware rendering turned off.
My main PC is less than 2 years old and has been regularly upgraded, it doesn't have any issues running high-end games or 3D modelling but try to view a page with more than 5 gif's on it in Firefox and the browser practically locks up. Removing and reinstalling doesn't fix it either.
For reference, IE9 with hardware rendering turned on still maxes out the stress test at 60fps.
If you edit the "install.rdf" file in the XPI bundle (which is just a ZIP archive) with any text editor you can change the "maxVersion" to whatever you please. Though you might want to test it first before wide-scale deployment. Sometimes those version limits are there for a reason.
You can move home, reload and the stop button if you choose to. It isn't entirely obvious but if you right-click the bar and select "Customise" you'll see that in the address bar you now have a separate refresh and stop button. If you drag these out they stay as separate icons instead of the contextual stop or refresh button. The home button is just off to the right for some reason and again that can easily be dragged back by using the customise option. As for the status bar it's still there but turned off by default.
For others asking why the rush... did you read that this is *not* a major release? They're upping the release schedule so they can get features out faster instead of adding huge amounts of features in a longer development process. It's a better idea in my opinion and means that we don't have to wait for a year or more to get features that other browsers might have by offering more frequent releases.
The version number is largely arbitary anyway. Why not just update when features are finished? Mozilla 5 isn't going to be a massive change from 4 anyway, because they are updating often instead of saving the changes up over a number of years before release.
This is what Google are doing - they don't put so much emphasis in version numbers.
So there's nothing stopping you from staying exactly where you are.
Paul Irish gave a demo at this years IO conference (http://youtu.be/N8SS-rUEZPg) highlighting some features of Chrome's dev tools and they are pretty tidy. Not that it's worth anything, but I've switched to them an find them better than firebug, like I say that's just my opinion; YMMV. Chris Pederic's Web Developer Toolbar is also available for Chrome
There is still a religious fervour about Opera but the browser does now work for this ex-Firefox user of several years. I just could not get on with FF4 or FF5. Even ALT-tooltips work now with the right Opera add-on but there is no Weatherfox yet. The only problem is importing tabs & bookmarks- they are alphabetised so you need to manually reorder them.
Fit that matter, what's the point of computers? Mankind got on quite well without them for several thousand years.
On a serious note; your Firefox 2 will have security issues as it is no longer supported by Mozilla and there are some floors in it's now less-than-efficient JavaScript implementation. It's standards compliance won't be up to scratch. I'm not talking leading edge either (HTML5 and CSS3 etc.).
This is a bad idea. The whole point about big and small version numbers is that you know what to expect. If you develop an app for Windows 2000 (5.0), you expect it to work in Windows XP (5.1); but you expect problems in Vista (6.0). Same with Firefox extensions - if it works in 3.5 then it should work in 3.6, but you can expect trouble with 4.0. Minor version numbers should only contain superficial changes; major versions should make deep changes to the APIs.
Continuous change simply isn't possible; sometimes you need to stop and re-write large parts of the system from scratch.
Reminds me of the time Microsoft bumped the version of Word from 2.0 to 6.0, because people thought it wasn't as good as WordPerfect 6.0.
I had to go back to 3.6 on my work computer (from 4); my wife decided to take the plunge to 5 beta.
From her account 5 is much better than 4 and maybe as good as 3.6. . .
Of course that was the beta and feature creep might have munged* the hell out of it by now.
*mung, from the old hackers dictionary is an acronym meaning mung.until.no.good.
(but you knew that.)
I think the new quicker release cycle will benefit Firefox in the long term. To me It seem that most of the bugs people fine are when everyone upgrades and if they are shipping upgrades faster hopefully those bugs will be fixed quicker. Hopefully by going for smaller releases the software will increase in stability and maintain that stability. Either way it has not done Google chrome any harm. An Adobe seem to be moving Flash to the same rapid release cycle.
About the numbering, if you really cared about what each version fixed and whether there are minor fixes or big fixes then you would read the release notes and documentation. So I do not really care what they call each release. An I think the some people are overreacting a little bit here.
The add on problems should be fixed once Mozilla finishes the new add on system. Plus developers who are interested in keeping there apps up to date will change there developing process to speed up app development make sure they work with each version of Firefox. Chrome add ons have not suffered any issues from Chrome rapid release cycle, not as far as I know any way.
An for the memory leaks FF5 is suppose to fix a lot of them.
I was having problems loading the Doctor Who website at the BBC, which then became the whole BBC website. The text was showing fine, but some graphics and flash were not showing even with NoScript and Adblock disabled. It worked fine in IE9, so I installed Portable FF3.7 which worked as well. So I uninstalled FF4 and re-installed it again. Voila, it's now working. I installed Adblock and NoScript, and it's still working. Not sure if there was a problem with FF4 itself, or a plug in or Extension causing the problem, but doing the re-install fixed it. If you are going to re-install, remember to export your bookmarks first. :)
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