In reply to a post by Sark:

It's just a version number. Who cares? Chrome is on version 12 already.

Chrome releases a new version every time one of their devs sneeze though. I don't think it's wise for mozilla to copy them (again). FF gets many more minor version updates than any of the other browsers. I think most people aren't stupid enough to compare browsers on the frequency of their major version updates.

In reply to a post by camieabz:

The 5.0 upgrade took no time at all for me, and no difference to my browsing experience. It feels more like 4.x

It does for me, but only slightly. I have browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs set to 0, so that when I load up FF it doesn't pull in every background tab and only loads them when I switch to them. Now the pages load in the most clumsy way possible, loads of blacking out etc.

In reply to a post by OpenAccess:

Having worked with 5.0 for a while I find that it is an improvement over 4.0.xxx which would take about a minute to recover if multiple tabs were open and accessed later. That was an improvement over 3.6..xx which had to be closed down and terminated through task manager before able to restart the program.

i always close multiple tabs, never close the browser with them open, so that is not a problem for me.

Not sure if I want to try 5, 4 was awful and I don't really want to go that hassle again. 3.5 is working fine for me at the moment.

In reply to a post by Sark:

It's just a version number. Who cares? Chrome is on version 12 already.

chrome makes you update, you got no choice with chrome it updates without you knowing, I don't like that idea.

at least with Iron I have the choice to update to the latest version, the problem is it won't let me know when a new version is out.
Firefox does give you the choice as well, but i found on my FF 3.5 that even after telling it not to update or tell me there is a update it still tells me now and again. Come to think of it that is getting more often.

FF6 gets released in August!

Jesus, the firefox roadmap used to be a list of technical code milestones and targets, now look at it; https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Roadmap it's a managers wet dream full of buzzwords and pointless infographics. They've lost the plot.

You and I have our disagreements, but I'm with you on this one

The "How to ship faster" bit is fascinating... loosely translated it seems to read as "We'll supply what we supply, and if it doesn't work or you don't like it, tough"

In reply to a post by Pipexer:

It's only been out 5 minutes! What a joke.

I tried explaining this on mozilla forums and the amount of abuse I got from fanboys was unreal. The moderation on there is aweful as well, they allowed people to verbally abuse me, I sniped back and got moderated. That was the end of my brief contribution to those forums.

My view is/was that whilst enthusiasts will happily update regurly even daily following beta/alpha/nightly updates, the mainstream user will not tolerate regular updates, ff3 to ff4 has a GUI change which I object to (as well as others) and with every major version update there is a chance in a change of how the app operates, GUI changes and new bugs been introduced as well as plugins stopping working. I often deliberatly wait at least a month for a new major update of an app to stabilise and can be quite a bit longer, with this new policy I could well always be a major version behind.

The reason FF3 is not EOL yet, is because FF4 was released under the new policy whilst FF3 wasnt. FF3 will be EOL eventually but I got no idea when.

For me FF4 has some nasty showstoppers, hence I am still not using it for anything other than testing. FF5 'partially' fixes a major memory leak in FF4. But the other showstoppers are still there for me.

The new policies are a panic to copy google, chrome has regular major version updates, also the GUI changes are to copy chrome as well, eg. removing the (in my opinion) extremely useful down arrow next to back button and removing the menu bar.

Edited by Chrysalis (Wed 06-Jul-11 07:50:54)

I hate the chrome GUI and think that Firefox's blatant copying of it was a step too far.

I have taken a copy of 3.6.18 and stuck it somewhere safe in case I need to reinstall it.

Thanks for reminding me to do that, now done