Weekly Edition
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Quotes of the week
It's amazing to me how people think of documentation as easy or an
afterthought, but there's a huge difference between documentation
written by someone coming up the learning curve and documentation
written by someone who really knows it. I'd say well designed and
engineered documentation is more important than well designed and
engineered source code.
-- Brien Behlendorf
Sure, we could have labeled it 4.0.1 or some other fractional value
that would have made some slashdot and ars readers happy, but that
would be a lie to add-on and web developers because it's not a
minor non-breaking change for them. With this versioning system, we
are communicating honestly to the only people who will have a
reason to care about versions -- developers, that we are making, or
at least asserting that we may be making, breaking changes that
they should care about.
-- Asa Dotzler
Again, Firefox version numbers are not for consumers. Nowhere in our announcements of Firefox was it called anything but the latest version of Firefox. There will be no past versions of Firefox available to consumers so it's just plain "Firefox" and it gets better at regular 6 week intervals.
1.4.0 has actually seen testing in the form of loading the module,
enjoying a view of a non-crashing X server (-retro too, I'm soo 80s
today...) and thus deducting that the driver is bug-free. Which is
more testing than previous releases have seen. Nonetheless, you
may not want to control your nuclear power plants with this driver.
-- Peter Hutterer
The RFC forgot to send an army with you, so it cannot expect to be
obeyed. In the GNU Project, we do not obey standards -- we
consider them, then DTRT. Often TRT is to do what the standard
says. Sometimes TRT is something else.
-- Richard Stallman(Log in to post comments)
Hubris and flawed assumptions Posted Jun 30, 2011 4:31 UTC (Thu) by bignose (subscriber, #40) [Link]
> There will be no past versions of Firefox available to consumers so it's just plain "Firefox" and it gets better at regular 6 week intervals.
Better is incompatible with breaks an extension I rely on that worked fine with the previous three releases.
Better is incompatible with due to drop out of support really soon after release.
Hubris and flawed assumptions Posted Jun 30, 2011 15:39 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
Yeah, I read the same thing. If you ignore the wordy bits (apologies to Mad Mag), he says:
> It's not a minor non-breaking change. We are communicating honestly... that we are making... breaking changes. ...It's just plain "Firefox" and it gets better [and breaks your plugins] at regular 6 week intervals.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. FF had better roll a lot of plugins into core because, stock, it's pretty weak compared to Chrome.
Firefox and SAP Posted Jun 30, 2011 14:12 UTC (Thu) by jhhaller (subscriber, #56103) [Link]
My company just changed payroll systems, forcing me to log into the time reporting system via SAP. SAP doesn't support a Firefox User Agent of 4.0, let alone 5.0. It wasn't too hard to find a solution, reporting the user agent as 3.5, but I'm sure this is the tip of the iceberg. For me, it wasn't too hard. For people with less computer savvy, the idea of installing a plugin, and configuring it may be more than they can do.
It seems that Mozilla doesn't want people to use the UA string to make decisions (other than to blacklist old versions). But, it looks like the version number is being overloaded to both provide an interface version to plugin authors and to web page providers. Not being a web page provider, I'm not sure what other methods are available, but something more granular than a browser version would be more valuable.
Firefox and SAP Posted Jul 1, 2011 10:35 UTC (Fri) by justincormack (subscriber, #70439) [Link]
They should use feature detection not browser version detection. See http://www.modernizr.com/ for example. And blacklists not whitelists.
Firefox and SAP Posted Jul 1, 2011 16:08 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
Completely agree.
Sites which whitelist are such an annoyance. There should also be a way to ignore the checks altogether so that developers (particularly of "alternative" browsers which would never make a list of "browsers that should work" list at a company) can see what is missing for the site to work.
The one I keep running into that does this is Google Docs (particularly spreadsheets).
Firefox and SAP Posted Jul 3, 2011 21:19 UTC (Sun) by yaap (subscriber, #71398) [Link]
The web-based version of SAP is a pain. Support of browsers is capricious, not only with Firefox but also with recent IE (IE9 not yet supported last time I checked). FF 3.5 ended up being supported by our previous SAP version, but FF4 had odd glitches making it unpractical.
Anyway very recently we had a SAP upgrade and guess what? Now it requires silverlight. To end the compatibility nightmare and allow linux users accessing it we now have a window box dedicated to SAP, with a controlled environment based on IE, and accessible with RDP (so work from any client OS). That's SAP for you. Not only Web 2.0: Web 2.0 + RDP!
If SAP makes you suffer in the future, know that you're not alone. And look at the bright side: you only use it for time reporting. It could be much worse.
Quotes of the week Posted Jun 30, 2011 15:52 UTC (Thu) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
VMware Server 2.0 has a web based admin tool with a Firefox plugin that only works on Firefox 3.5, even today, and there is no more recent release.
If this happened more recently, and Firefox 4.0 only was supported, Firefox users would simply have to turn off upgrades.
Deleting old versions of Firefox seems to have already started - try finding 4.0 on http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/relea...
Mozilla is really showing contempt for its user base by making it even harder to work around problems with out of date plugins, handling enterprise application validation, etc. Blinding following Chrome's release model isn't going to win over people who can't always upgrade.
Quotes of the week Posted Jun 30, 2011 19:30 UTC (Thu) by roblucid (subscriber, #48964) [Link]
They do have :
2.0.0.20/
Perhaps regularly breaking plugin, would work better as it means plugin authors actually need to support their work, rather than just dump them,saying "certified for 3.5.x".
Quotes of the week Posted Jul 1, 2011 6:10 UTC (Fri) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
Removing old versions is unnecessary: Mozilla can just say they are unsupported without spending any more effort. Instead, users must find sites such as this to download old Firefox versions: http://www.oldapps.com/firefox.php?old_firefox=116
Quotes of the week Posted Jul 3, 2011 12:28 UTC (Sun) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link]
I dunno. If old users have known security flaws, and the developers have no resources to fix them, then removing old versions sounds like the right thing to do.
One could also say that the argument applies to unknown security flaws as well.
Quotes of the week Posted Jul 8, 2011 8:44 UTC (Fri) by patches (guest, #76520) [Link]
Old releases are kept on the archive server because they don't really need to propagate to mirrors.
Quotes of the week Posted Jun 30, 2011 23:40 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]
The issue is the difference between customer-base and user-base. A customer-base are those who 'pay' for it in one way or another (patches, addons, money to pay for the foundation, etc). User-base are the ones who use it but don't put anything into it.
In this case, they are listening to their customer-base who are people wanting to do regular fast updates without a care about long term support. Their user-base may want something else, but unless they can put in a large enough donation/cost... it is not going to happen.
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