This is a UK site, yes?
So why link to the US versions? Link to the GB versions! :)
Firefox 6 silently released ahead of official unwrap date
Mozilla isn't officially breaking the seal on Firefox 6 until tomorrow, but the code for the latest iteration of its popular open source browser is already available online. It is currently tucked away on the organisation's FTP server. A blogger over at TechnoBolt spotted that the code has been downloadable since at least …
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Monday 15th August 2011 10:02 GMT DuncanL
Expected beter from El Reg
Joining the horde of crappy "news" sites after a few advertising dollars by being "first" to announce a new release?
As always, the appearance of a build on the FTP servers does not mean it has been publicly released. The FTP servers aren't load-balanced and are not intended for end users to get release - it the mechanism for pushing the release files to the various international release HTTP servers so that when the release is officially announce they don't have a server meltdown.
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Monday 15th August 2011 10:45 GMT Teoh Han Hui
The real story...
From https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Planning/2011-08-10
"we will ship mozilla-release to the desktop beta channel before the weekend to make sure nothing screwed up (should be no content changes but it would be silly not to test what we will ship!)"
"We will ship the build off mozilla-release to the release channel on 2011-08-16 if no issues are found"
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Monday 15th August 2011 10:22 GMT Peter Mount
Thats weird
My mac prompted me yesterday morning to upgrade so it's already been running 6 for over a day now. Somehow at one point the update servers must have had it up.
Saying that this has now broken most of the plugins as they are now reporting incompatible etc :-(
I'm not sure what this fad about releasing major versions every time is but it's not going to end well at the rate
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Monday 15th August 2011 12:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
My thoughts exactly
Its the main thing not working on IE. That and GPG support. I moved to SeaMonkey a few months ago; even experienced 2 updates already.
And it gives me the same "boring" interface which Netscape has been using for years (this this is 'themable' but I didn't really bother looking).
But at least I can use Adblock plus, NoScript and Enigmail /without/ having to worry that they'll either stop working or suddenly start to appear in places where I don't want them, while still enjoying a recent software project.
It takes a little getting used to; but then again the same could be said for switching to IE & Hotmail ("Windows Mail").
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Monday 15th August 2011 10:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
The idea is to iterate often and so make the upgrade process appear seamless
The idea is to iterate often so as to make the version number increase quickly and catch up with Chrome.
But who's to blame: Firefox for following the lead, or stupid users who believe that no matter what products you compare, the one with the highest version number is the best.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not judging Chrome either.
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Monday 15th August 2011 11:29 GMT shawnfromnh
Still needs a little work
I used it for a few days and half the links I hit would just not load.
You would sit there and then click stop then refresh then it might load or partly load.
Worst part was this website was one that was the hardest to load and I finally switched back to version 5 when I realized if a new BOFH was posted I would miss it.
This version still has plenty of bugs and they should wait till it is as good as 5 loading pages before releasing it.
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Monday 15th August 2011 11:29 GMT Kurgan
I suggest...
I happen to know a little about the history of pinball machines (a friend of mine is one of the bigger pinball collectors in Italy). In the fifties, pinball machines had scores that advanced by one when you hit some target. In the sixties, they advanced by ten. In the seventies, by one hundred. The latest ones, by thousands. I call this the "score inflation". It's psychologically pleasing for the player to score "1 billion, 234 millions and 9 thousands" points instead of "12.349" points. But if you look at the pinball machine code (or mechanical relays, depending on the year) you will see that the two scores need the same effort to be reached.
Now, it seems a little silly, but I believe that later on we will see version numbers increase by ten, then by a hundred, and so on.
Now we have Firefox 6. In 6 months we will have firefox 12, then Opera could switch from 12 to 22 to play "catch up" with Firefox, and IE from 9 to 19... then Firefox will release version 23, and Opera version 40 (to make it even, they will jump over version 32), and eventually Firefox vill release version 100, and so on.
I suppose I will see somebrowers release "345K" (as in 345.000) before I die.
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Tuesday 16th August 2011 08:07 GMT HMB
Chrome Ignorance
So chrome does major updates constantly? What of it, they don't blow a trumpet, call a press release or even push dialogues to the user (unless you don't shut down chrome for days). To most users it's the most awesome update model ever.
It never bugs you.
Except when the Google monster decides to make a UI change you don't like! Then it's a horrible case of update rape.
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Tuesday 16th August 2011 08:35 GMT FrankAlphaXII
FFS, You do realize....
That the same codebase was released awhile ago as Firefox 6 beta 5. Its not exactly brand new. If you're on the Beta Channel you've been running the same build as the release-version Firefox 6 for nearly two weeks. Nothing major's landed since.
And Doug, you might want to upgrade, there are several trunk level vulns, most of which have PoC code, that the 3.x branch hasn't fixed and may not be able to without blocking further release on that branch.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
