Mozilla needs to do something to de-dramatize what some people see as version inflation. A lot of people get anxious to see these very frequent bumps because major x releases are associated with add-ons not working, bloat, etc.
True, but on the other hand people will get used to it, just like they did with Chrome. The version number doesn't matter, all that matters is that it works.
I like to see Mozilla responding. I don't know if development has speeded up, but it seems to have done. If they can keep this up without letting security slip I'll be impressed.
The problem with Mozilla is that they make the actual number an important part of their communication. With Chrome on the other hand, you rarely hear about version numbers - you just know they exist and that you don't need to care.
Not anymore. Mozilla is dropping the version number everywhere, except where it matters. Notice how in the blog posts that there's no version numbers mentioned, anywhere:
I think this bolsters the criticism. Making a big deal about Firefox 3 did more to spread awareness of the browser than perhaps any other thing Mozilla has done. Version numbers used to be this well-articulated conceptual unit that got people to care about your browser.
Now, there's more count-downs to the big release date. No more Guinness World Records for downloads in a day. There is a gimmickiness about it, but I don't have a problem with that given how hard it already is to get laypeople to care about these things.
I don't think people were exposed to Chrome versions in the same way. I have no idea what version of Chrome I am running. I wasn't even aware that they had crept up major versions for a long time... in many ways this is ideal - I don't want or need to know 90% of the time :)
Chrome also doesn't throw version numbers around constantly and it silently auto-updates. I installed Chrome 9 when I switched away from Firefox, then I later saw an article about a new feature in Chrome 12 and was surprised when I was already running it.
Most people don't use chrome—thus, most people aren't used to it.
It's good Mozilla is moving forward at a rapid pace (particularly with the memory issues), but as long as the remainder of the software world is still in either the 90's slow release cycle or the 00's everything-is-a-beta-v0.x mindset, Firefox/Chrome will be aberrations.
I may learn to tolerate it, but that doesn't mean I'll get used to it.
"A lot of people get anxious to see these very frequent bumps because major x releases are associated with add-ons not working, bloat, etc."
The fast release cycles make me less anxious... I like the fast release cycles... I think extension writers get lazy with long release cycles. The move from 3.6 to 4.0 was brutal.
People said the same things when Chrome switched to their similar 6-week release cycle in July 2010, but about twelve months later the choice of version numbers has not caused any important problems that I've seen.
You couldn't have a better demonstration of why competition is good.
I stick with FF because I prefer the interface, but there's no question that all web browsers have become much better since Chrome's introduction. And if you're willing to drop support for IE6, web development is really a pleasure compared to five years ago.
I switched to Chrome because of all the memory issues and crashing. But there are so many little details as well as add-ons that I miss from FF that I'm pretty excited about version 8. If it proves out, I'll switch back.
If FF on OSX no longer uses quartz to perform drawing operations, what implications are there for type rendering? Will OSX users be subjected to the (IMO) ravages of freetype? Or will each platform continue to use native type rasterization?
RTFA: "Azure removes the Direct2D and Quartz (OS X) go-between and allows Firefox to write directly to the underlying 3D subsystems (Direct3D and OpenGL)."
That seems like a journalistic misunderstanding; I'm pretty sure Azure is designed to replace Cairo as the layer between Firefox and Direct2D or Quartz.
Diffeent platforms use different font rendering algorithms. I'll avoid saying that one is better than the other, but it's off putting to see one rendering alongside another on the same display. Apple got into trouble with this when they ported Safari to Windows, and used OS X font rendering on that platform.
Chrome's killer feature for me is still process separation. Slow pages kill my entire browsing experience in firefox, and when I have 20+ tabs open, that can be really annoying.
Process seperation isn't the only savior to this, its just one way to compartmentalize things, intermediately, as of Firefox 7 (Aurora), there's been a massive improvement on managing compartments of memory
I'm all for speed improvements, feature parity, etc., but my question is why has it taken a (somewhat) radical change to versioning/release-schedules to realize these performance improvements?
If these latest benchmarks hold up, then Mozilla will have noticeably reduced the memory footprint in FF7 and then again noticeably sped up the browser itself in FF8 (all of this coming within a matter of weeks). Can it really be that these two (suddenly important) features went largely unaddressed in Firefox 3 and 4 because of a different release cycle?
I'm very happy to see the competition, but if Mozilla has been able to address these two long-standing gripes in a matter of weeks, then I find it somewhat implausible that it was ever a technical issue.
Firefox 4 was a lot faster than Firefox 3.6 in all sorts of ways.
Some of those improvements were checked in before Firefox 3.6 was even released.
The only reason it looks like they took a long time to do is because the release cycle for Firefox 4 was long, so you didn't see the improvements until the final release of Firefox 4.
So all the release schedule is doing here is getting improvements out to users closer to when the code is written.
This stuff has been brewing for a long time. Note that it takes four months to get from nightly to release and code may be under development for months before it even lands in nightly.
I wonder how this release schedule is affecting addons/extensions.
That was the only reason I ever didn't update was for plugin support (namely firebug/etc and 1password).
Any extension authors or power users care to comment?
6 is in beta now. Nightlies were 7.0a a few days ago, but if you update.... yep, 8.0a1
PS. Nightly has been incredibly stable on my Mac. I actually use it in production, for no other reason than I was testing it and have no reason to get an old release since it's never crashed and is incredibly fast.
Actually most browsers' alphas are very stable these days. At home I run Opera Next, Chrome Canary and Firefox Nightly and I haven't had any problems for months.
Sometimes some websites are not shown properly in one of those but all it takes is to switch to another browser.
I run Aurora and use the Add-on Compatibility Reporter[1] to disable version checks and run any add-on I want. For most of my add-ons this works fine, but if there is a significant API change an add-on might not work correctly. But if you were scared of that you wouldn't be using Nightly or Aurora.
re: 6 -- there were very few performance tweaks in FF6. Mostly CSS3 and HTML5 additions. FF7 is the 'performance' build (Azure, first round of start-up, smaller memory footprint). FF8 seems to have some performance bits -- and presumably it will have some feature additions, too (but I need to investigate).
Are you seriously going to over-analyze specific tenses of words? Each major version will include different features. Stop just trying to distract the conversation.
Apparently saurik and I are the only ones confused!
I found it very jarring to read that Firefox 6 isn't out yet, but the thread talks as if Firefox 8 is actually out, or very close to being released. In my mind I'm envisioning a weird, staggered, neither increasing nor decreasing of version number release cycle.
I think you're coming from a different angle where all of this is very familiar for you, so you can't relate to the confusion some of us other readers have had to deal with.
The "conversation" of this thread started with someone commenting on the fact, seemingly surprised and even bothered, that we are already talking about Firefox 8 when seemingly Firefox 6 and 7 went by so quickly we didn't notice it happening. In this context, it is incredibly relevant that Firefox 6 and 7 are still being described in the future tense, as that would imply that they haven't actually been released yet.
Versions 6 and 7 haven't been released yet, but the feature sets are locked in due to the faster major version release cycle. The recently discovered memory fragmentation issues (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666058) and more efficient garbage collection are being addressed in version 8.
(This should be very familiar to anyone who has seen Chrome's update schedule, which has three versions in flight at once, staggered by the same six-week intervals.)
Doing a search for Firefox 6 on Google finds this article: "Firefox 6 (And 7!) Are Right Around The Corner -- Here's What's New"... almost makes it sound like they were released concurrently ;P.
Just had a play with Firefox 8. It's certainly fast but they've copied Opera & Chrome with removing the "http:// from the URL bar. I can see the arguments for the change but this feels really wrong to me. I hope there's an about:config tweak somewhere to change it back; even if there is, it's a shame Mozilla have gone down this route.
I don't like the change either. It's one of the many reasons Chrome's UI is terrible. Opera actually implements it pretty well through, since when you click in the location bar the part to the left gets replaced with http://.
20% sounds good, but unless versions 5, 6 and 7 also had 20% improvements, it would still be slower than the current version of Chrome on canvas stuff.
For the relatively simple canvas rendering I'm doing, I can watch Firefox chugging along at 10fps struggling to render a few dozen filled rectangles, while Chrome is happily pegged at 60fps (via RequestAnimationFrame).
It's mostly night and day in the opposite direction. Firefox 4+, like IE9+, uses Direct2D on Windows. That leads to canvas being much faster than Chrome (if your graphics card supports that).
On other platforms, results may differ, and it depends on your graphics card. I am guessing that you happen to have a configuration that Chrome runs better on, but most benchmarkers have found (as expected) than Firefox and IE have faster Canvas implementations than Chrome (since they tested on Windows, with cards that can utilize Direct2D).
Canvas on Firefox is hardware accelerated (at least on Windows), so it's really fast. I don't have Chrome installed, but I'm pretty sure it chokes on the FishIETank benchmark with 1000 fish: http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/FishIETank/Def.... Firefox on the other hand easily gets 60 fps with those many fish.
> Canvas on Firefox is hardware accelerated (at least on Windows), so it's really fast.
If your video drivers aren't blacklisted, after I found out by whining about the lack of speed with hwaccel--which wasn't actually active. Check it out at the bottom of the super secret "about:support" URL.
That just means your Firefox isn't benefiting from GPU acceleration. It could either be because your OS or hardware doesn't support it or because your graphics drivers are out of date.
The reason why is unimportant. The end result is the same: terrible performance on Firefox, good performance on Chrome. It's not up to the end user to know or care why.
I might go back to Firefox when it no longer consumes gigabytes of RAM after a few hours of operation. Until then, I'm with Chrome. I don't care about speed as much -- so long as it's reliable, and doesn't grind the rest of my machine to a halt, it's all good.
Chrome is very wasteful; only after many hours of operation in which you opened and closed dozens and dozens of tabs, it starts to be better than Firefox; as Firefox fragments memory and doesn't release it properly when closing a tab.
But for my usage patterns; with many tabs opened after a few hours of operation, Firefox consumes less RAM for me.
Also, don't confuse memory waist (coming from bloat and fragmentation) with memory used for improving the browsing experience, like caching. These browsers are doing a lot of caching and I personally don't like having 4 GB of memory and being left unused.
memory footprint or not, chrome is faster than firefox. both in terms of page loading, and raw operation. i might reconsider firefox when it doesn't take 4 times longer to boot up.
I am on Firefox 5 and I don't see visible differences between them anymore. Yes, Firefox 3.x used to be visibly slower.
I also don't see visible differences in boot time, but this depends a lot on how many extensions you have -- I only use Firebug and the Web Developer toolbar. And at least Firefox has plugins that aren't totally useless.
I think it depends on what hardware you're running. On my laptop Chrome is so noticeably better I only keep Firefox around for testing. On my maxed out desktop I can't tell the difference.
firefox 4 is visibly slower on a completely fresh install on my mbp. you may have a point about firefox 5, i haven't tried it. my firefox and chrome reference has only been the past to 2 years of major releases.
Starting up a browser is a relatively rare even, for me at least. The only time I restart Firefox is when it's consumed or leaked too much memory, about once a day.
Hmm.. If a browser really wants to make a dent I think they need to diversify their marketing push. It needs to be cool to the people who need cool, safe and trustworthy to the people that need that, technically sound, exciting and promising to us geeks.. At the moment it seems that they try to do a bit of all this at once, but maybe separate voices focussed on these markets would be more effective?
I am using it on my macbook pro. FF8 is faster compare to FF5 I was using. Schubert-it PDF plugin, Adblock, XMark, Flashgot works. Firebug, Google Dictionary, Download statusbar don't work... and there are some minor bugs with mouse hover effect.
Yeah, I just downloaded firefox-trunk in ubuntu, and it certainly is fast, fast enough that I can go back to using it for Microsoft Exchange webmail (which was the real killer before.) But not having the extensions is going to be a pain. I think I might try to port "It's All Text!" to 8...
This is pretty crappy. What is the rendering difference of 5 to 8? How many versions am I as a web developer going to have to support. short dev cycles and fast releases like this are stupid.
Mozilla has moved away from the typical versioning system to one where major x.0 releases are shipped much more frequently per their rapid release development cycle [1] [2]. So even if there are no "major" changes you will see a new x.0 release. This shouldn't cause developers any major problems. Well, unless, for example, someone is using shoddy user agent detection scripts, the consequences which Opera experienced when it released version 10; turns out some scripts aren't designed to handle two-digit version numbers [3] ಠ_ಠ
I find the innovation that competition spurs to be beautiful, even if that innovation is "just" squeezing performance out of every crevice you can find.
> Chrome 14 should be stable in about 8-10 weeks. Firefox 8 won't be stable until 14-16 weeks from now.
This almost-gripe is such a beautiful illustration of how far we've come in upping the pace of browser tech innovation. Thank you Mozilla (for this round).
While I agree with the general point you're making, the "thank you mozilla" should be "thank you google", since they are the ones who got mozilla to make that change.
They forced pretty much everyone in the browser area to play catch up with them to stay relevant, and the results are really awesome (and not just in release cycle speed).
That is a brilliant idea. Not just for the reason you mentioned, but also in communicating with non-geeks.
"Oh, you're using IE from August 27, 2001? That's a little bit out of date. Because browsers update so fast, we can only support browsers released within the last 2 years." :-)
It's incredible the sound and fury generated by version numbers. Ubuntu is almost there if they would just drop the rather silly animal names and stick with 10.04, 10.10, 11.4, 11.10 et cetera. Also having such a easy to remember and unique string makes searching for support and technical questions nice.
Ubuntu's animal names make it easier to search for support and technical questions-- "maverick", "natty", and "lucid" are all much more likely to be associated with Ubuntu than numbers like 10.10.
The article said the "dev" channel of Chrome, which is equivalent to Firefox's nightly build, so they are about equal. It just happens that the current nightly channel of Chrome might be released earlier.
It's not the same thing. How is Firefox 7 version called then? What about 6? Does Firefox have 4 modes instead of 3, like Chrome (dev, beta, stable)? Firefox's "dev" mode might be equivalent to "Chromium" mode for Chrome, in which case I suppose Chrome also has 4 modes, but their dev modes are still not equal to each other.
The point was that Chrome 13 will become stable in 2-3 weeks from now (an Chrome 14 - beta), and then in another 6 weeks Chrome 14 will become stable. While Firefox 6 will become stable in 3-4 weeks, then another 6 weeks for FF 7, and then another 6 weeks for FF8, before it becomes stable. You do the math.
"it’s worth noting that Firefox 8 is as fast or faster than the latest Dev Channel build of Chrome 14. Chrome’s WebGL implementation is still faster, but with Azure, Firefox’s 2D performance is actually better than Chrome. JavaScript performance is also virtually identical."
I continue to be confused be what I interpret as "version number envy". Are people really that impressed by version 14 vs version 7? If FF7 is awesome, Chrome 14 must be x2 awesome! Is Firefox development "behind" because of version numbers? I'm most surprised that Mozilla seems to take this so seriously. Are the numbers anything other than a marketing / PR game? Any reason either side couldn't arbitrarily jump to version 100 and TOTALLY CRUSH the competition?
This is not about marketing. I'm travelling and typing this on a phone right now, so I'll just link to a reply from the last time this misunderstanding appeared: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2679813
