In reply to a post by zyborg47:

In reply to a post by Apprentice:

I'm still using 3.6.18 as 4 didn't seem to like my Windows XP OS or some websites either.

Sadly I have knocked Firefox on the head, got fed up of the delay on start up, the crashes and other problems.

bartab fixes the delay, fixes the stalls (by forcing idle tabs to unload).
crashes I found using the plugin container options help, I have flash load in the container which also stops flash videos from stuttering as well.
I think a lot of firefox problems stem from the fact they still having everything share 1 process, by default the entire firefox gui, garbage colelction, tabs, browsing etc. all runs under 1 process. Both chrome and IE stopped doing this ages ago.

I can understand why people have given FF the boot as a lot of its issues are long standing that get ignored by the dev's.

In reply to a post by 12eason:

I'm on nightly and it works with all my addons.

what I find interesting is the FF users who run beta, nightlies like the new release system as they used to updating regurly anyway.

The users who use stable and generally avoid updating until absolutely necessary dont like the fast updates. I think it will bomb as those who use nightlies are a very small minority. However I guess many will just blindly update the app when prompted, the question is will they tolerate the changes/problems that occur from such updates. As they wont be expecting certian things like a gui that changes from ff3 to ff4 and addons that stop working.

Edited by Chrysalis (Mon 15-Aug-11 11:51:26)

You consider 2 or 3 updates a year to be too much? What about windows update, do you cancel that all the time? Your computer must be riddled with back doors.

windows update is patching up security holes, the equivelent for windows would be upgrading to windows 8 now, then windows 9 again at christmas.

I do consider 3 major updates a year to one app too much yes. Firefox are copying google.

http://www.osnews.com/comments/24890

Edited by Chrysalis (Mon 15-Aug-11 15:26:18)

All very well these incremented version numbers but do they actually improve anything?

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

bartab fixes the delay, fixes the stalls (by forcing idle tabs to unload).
crashes I found using the plugin container options help, I have flash load in the container which also stops flash videos from stuttering as well.
I think a lot of firefox problems stem from the fact they still having everything share 1 process, by default the entire firefox gui, garbage colelction, tabs, browsing etc. all runs under 1 process. Both chrome and IE stopped doing this ages ago.

I can understand why people have given FF the boot as a lot of its issues are long standing that get ignored by the dev's.

Should not have to use a add on for poor coding.

In reply to a post by 12eason:

You consider 2 or 3 updates a year to be too much? What about windows update, do you cancel that all the time? Your computer must be riddled with back doors.

windows is a bit different, far more complex than a browser and as been said above, if we updated Windows like Mozilla want us to update Firefox, we would be up to windows 9 or more by now.


what improvements do these Firefox updates really bring that could not be put into say 4.6 instead of going to version 5, 6, 7 or how how they are going to go before the end of this year

Maybe they want to catch up with IE version numbers, in which case they have a long way to go.

what improvements do these Firefox updates really bring that could not be put into say 4.6 instead of going to version 5

What difference does it make whether they call it v4.6 or v5.0?

In reply to a post by Sark:

what improvements do these Firefox updates really bring that could not be put into say 4.6 instead of going to version 5

What difference does it make whether they call it v4.6 or v5.0?

if you think thats all it is then ask them why they changed the numbering.

The answer is that it is more than just changing how they numbering it, on minor updates only about 10% of features were put in and only ones that were known to not break addons etc. Mozzila have openly said they changed it as they want new major features and fixes to be rolled out more quickly.

Personally I dont have a major problem with fast rollouts, to me the big issue is the extremely fast EOL, I cant think of many major applications that go EOL in just 8 weeks. In fact firefox is the only one I can think off.

FreeBSD support 2-3 branches at once to counter regular updates to their OS. So eg. FreeBSD 7 is still supported for security patches even tho FreeBSD 8 is the latest stable version and when 9.0 is released 7.4 will still be supported.