Firefox 16 live: Here's What's New (opens in new tab)

I think it's time to cut this 'version number' debate. Mozilla has been pretty clear about the plan to use such a system. The only problem was from enterprise users which Mozilla has addressed. The background auto-update is in the stable builds now, should be enough to keep FF updated. I am really tired of this versioning non-sense. Users complained, Mozilla addressed legitimate concerns. Now it's just a difference in perspective. Seems like the new system is actually helping Mozilla put out updates faster. Lets move on.

I think even the Firefox team would agree with you in saying that their version numbers are now meaningless. Which is why they are slowly removing the version number from every user visible interaction.

The point is that Firefox never wants to ever have a "major release" again. Small frequent changes work much better for everybody. So what are their options? Keep incrementing the minor number? The major major number then becomes meaningless and you end up with absurdities like "2.6.39".

I think the solution they chose is much better than the one Linus chose. What's the difference between 2.6.39 and 3.0? About the same as 2.6.38 to 2.6.39, and 3.0 to 3.1. Eventually they'll get up to 3.BIG and he'll call it 4.0 for no particularly reason.

The thing is, given the Firefox project's new development model, their old versioning scheme makes absolutely no sense. Deciding which version numbner to bump would be completely arbitrary and exactly as informative as just using a single number that tells the user "this version is newer than the one with a lower number", which is the only useful information they can convey using version numbers.

Would you also be one to complain about the Linux kernel versioning scheme? It conveys exactly as much information as Firefox' does and works on the same principle. They just happen to have that extra first "major" number there, but it exists only for compatibility reasons. The change from 2.6.39 to 3.0 was exactly as "major" as pretty much every "point" release since 2.6.0. Yet I don't see people complaining about the version numbers every time a new kernel version is released.

It's worth mentioning that the complete bug list is a lot larger: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/16.0/releasenotes/bugli...

How come no one complains about Chrome version numbers?

Yep, same feeling here. There seems to be a new trend of a shifted decimal point: "beta"-ish feel until version 10, and a .1 version bump is now a new release.

I can't fathom a reason for "several hundred tabs" unless your job specifically requires you to open that number of tabs for some (albeit strange) reason.

With the "Tree Style Tab" extension you can manage tons of tabs in a comfortable and ordered way.

Anecdotally, I have an oddly large population of vistors to my site with Firefox 9. I don't know what changes were made to how Firefox updates around that time. But it seems like the update train has unwittingly left few users behind.

That is correct, only a few percent of active Firefox installations still run 3.6, and the majority of those are active less than once per week.

There are a few dozen support staff employees at my company still using Firefox 3.6, as that is all the vendor of our product supports. Luckily, they are on a local network, with no Internet access from these machines.

Hasn't that been a feature from day one. Are you sure you haven't got the option ticked that forces links to open in external tabs/windows?

Sounds like a trivial extension.

That cycle should be invisible now. It updates silently in the background and should only notify you if an extension gets disabled.

Yes. I switched to Chrome for a while because of performance, and for my use cases, they are back close enough to parity. I would also recommend Aurora, which gets newer features faster, but is much more stable than the nightly binaries.

HiDPI is available in Aurora this week (the code that will become Firefox 18).

It will likely be in Firefox 18. It is on Nightly right now.

Can you be more specific about the kinds of problems you are seeing? Can you reproduce these problems in safe mode? You should file a bug at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ and put [MemShrink] in the whiteboard.

Check what extensions you are using. Firefox by itself uses much less memory and is very fast now.

I cleaned up a lot of my extensions, and the memory usage went way down. I still get leaks where having a dozen or so tabs open will, over time, use up much of my free memory. This happens in Chrome as well, so I just keep that in mind and occasionally restart the browser.

So, that's great for you and all, but what the fuck does it have to do with the article?

It has. They semi-recently switched from XUL to native Java, which has made it as fast (maybe faster?) compared to Chrome or Browser on Android. Definitely worth checking out again.

We are indeed plugging away on the tools (and they are getting better each release :)

Firebug will be getting faster as well as they are working on putting Firebug on top of the new debugging API in Firefox (which has much better performance than the old).

My solution is to create various profiles for my different browsing needs. I have my "webdev" profile which has a lot of web development extensions including firebug, I also have my "main" profile for most browsing, the "wastetime" profile and some other profiles.

While my main profile is open most of the time, I can open webdev using "firefox -profileManager -no-remote" for some javascript debugging and close it when I am done without messing with my other open profiles. If I get bored I might fire up "wastetime" to browse some websites, or the "noextensions" profile to check a website with no extensions (sometimes noscript, better privacy, adblock plus, ghostery or even pentadactyl might mess up some website that I visit).

A really cool bonus is that with each profile I can save the opened tabs, so for example I have a "coursera" profile and it has all the tabs I need for the course I am taking (functional programming with scala). So, when I am studying I only need to open that profile either by itself or in addition to other profiles.

Web Apps are a very real part of the future of the web. The fact that this space exists in the first place whereby there was only desktop apps previously should be testament enough to that. I may not personally agree with Mozilla in regards to the role of web apps, but I think that we all agree, it's better to be in a position to allow users to make their own minds up rather than go off of what a few loud naysayers want.

That is correct. The Firefox parts have to land before the Marketplace can open, otherwise the Marketplace is useless.