If they keep this up, I will remove it from our labs. Releasing at the same speed as Chrome isn’t going to win over Chrome users, but it will chase FF users off. What FF user actually wants this model? Most of them don’t. Sorry i have other things to do than repackage FF for deployment every 5 weeks. The big problem today is getting stuff fixed. Have they totally lost it? It’s not like the browser world is making sudden great progress. The resulting discussion on Slashdot gave rise to these negative comments about the change: There was even some talk of increasing the frequency of the Firefox releases to once every five weeks or less. IE’s longer release cycles and excellent backwards compatibility really appeal to corporate users compared to Firefox’s new release model. For example, HttpWatch 3.2 was last compiled nearly 5 years ago but still works with IE 9 on Windows 7: In comparison, Microsoft has been the master of backwards compatibility across versions of Internet Explorer. Therefore, the frequent updates to Chrome don’t cause as many issues because there are less extensions and the extension API is less likely to change as it is so much more restricted. Of course, Chrome has always been frequently updated but it has a much smaller extension ecosystem because it doesn’t have the range of APIs available in Firefox or Internet Explorer. Even consumer focussed add-ons like RoboForm need updating for every Firefox release. It’s not just developer centric tools like HttpWatch that are affected.
Roboform extension not loading in firefox install#
Also, we have to add at least one new DLL to our install program for every new Firefox release. That means it’s impossible for us to ship a version of HttpWatch that will work with a future release of Firefox. Binary components must be recompiled to work with each new release:
Roboform extension not loading in firefox code#
There’s no guarantee that code in an extension will work with a new version of Firefox.įor native binary components like HttpWatch the picture is much worse. That’s all changed so anything can be updated. In the past many interfaces were said to be ‘frozen’ meaning that script based and native binary extensions could rely on using them at any point in the future. While changing to this new model, Mozilla largely gave up on backwards compatibility to speed up their development process. Releasing often seems like a good idea unless you’re in a controlled corporate environment or you develop extensions for a living. So in the previous four years we had five major new builds of Firefox, but this year we’ve already had versions 4, 5 and 6. Septemin Firefox, HttpWatch, Internet ExplorerĮarlier this year Mozilla shifted from releasing a new version every year or so, to once every six weeks.
Poll: How Often Should New Firefox Versions Be Released?
0 kommentar(er)
