Firefox 8.0 is Released

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/8.0/releasenotes/

by evanw • 15 years ago

141 61 15 years ago

hozzer• 15 years ago

Dear Mozilla. Why do you keep doing all these full version releases? Seriously it's just annoying. Just because IE is on version 10. Doesn't mean you have to be. Why are you doing this.... You've gone from 3-8 in a year. That's not right.

sp3323• 15 years ago

"Full" version releases? There will be a new release every six weeks. Whatever features are ready to be shipped at that time will be released. There was a discussion about removing the version number from the "About" box but it was left in for debugging purposes. That's all the version number is for now. Since there are no "long-term support" versions, just make sure you're up-to-date and don't give the version number any mind.

technomancy• 15 years ago

> There will be a new release every six weeks.

The corrollary to this being that releases are no longer news.

skl_• 15 years ago

Although I've not looked into exactly why Mozilla have adopted the rapid-release cycle, I'd imagine it may be something to do with the ability to quickly drop backwards-compatibility and support. That way the code base can mature faster and less time is spent on redunant versions.

DEinspanjer• 15 years ago

The most important reason for it was to keep new features from being stuck in limbo just because they happened to be part of the same branch as a feature that was taking a long time to be production ready. This is what killed us with 4.0. There were big and nice features in 4 that were actually ready more than 6 months prior to release, but they couldn't go because they were "full release" features and they were waiting for other features that were considered to be "must have" for 4.0.

With the rapid release cycle, when features start development, they have the ability to be easily configured out of the release product if they aren't ready for a particular version. We have a reliable release schedule that we expect to hit every 6 weeks. Obviously, we do our best to have as many new features as are ready be part of each release, but we don't leave people wondering when it will finally happen because we keep to the schedule and release the features that are ready.

Some of the biggest parts of this release were actually groundwork improvements to make the add-ons ecosphere more comfortable in the context of rapid release.

eCa2• 15 years ago

I sort of understand their reasoning. It's easier to get people interested in a "full" release, than some 3.0.21 version every three mongths.

It also was more wrong to stay on 3.6.* for over two years.

A middle road might be to start a year with a full release and then do point-releases doing that year, so in 2013 we would have, for instance: 13, 13.0.1, 13.1, 13.2, 13.2.1, 13.3.

Karunamon• 15 years ago

This is a valid, on topic, cogent post. Why is it getting downvoted?

ianb• 15 years ago

Mozilla is dropping the idea that some features are point releases and others are major version numbers. As a web browser there's always only been one web, so if a feature is ready then it's ready and it doesn't matter. Internally there's an actual product that other people might interact with -- and Firefox more than other browsers at that, as the traditional way to extend Firefox is to monkeypatch your changes in. But it was never quite so clear what a point release was there either, and it was getting in the way of advancing the core product.

I think simple dated releases would be an improvement (e.g., Firefox 2011.1, 2011.2, etc., or tag them based on month, this one being 2011.10, or 2011v2 or whatever.) But that's basically just a PR move. There's no longer anything really like a point release except in the case of regressions that demand an immediate fix (as happened with Firefox 7).

notatoad• 15 years ago

the whole point of this scheme is that there shouldn't be point releases. having them throughout the year is just as bad as any other point release.

the reason behind going to full numbers is that if you don't have the latest version, you have the wrong version. if there is a 13.1 and a 13.2, it makes it seem like people using 13.1 are still using the latest version. they aren't.

keeperofdakeys2• 15 years ago

Here is a post about where Chrome and Firefox are probably heading http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-infinite-versio....

The biggest problem with updates are regressions. Since Firefox uses four release channels (since the introduction of the Aurora channel), most features get a decent amount of testing before being introduced to stable.

azakai• 15 years ago

Firefox and Chrome both have the same update cycle - a new major version every 6 weeks.

I believe the main reason for both projects doing it are allowing them to get improvements and new features to users faster. One or two releases a year means a very long time before improvements get to users, and it holds everything back. 6-week releases means you get improvements to users in just a few months.

Of course there are downsides to 6-week releases. If you prefer a slower-updating browser, there are other good options, such as Opera. And if you want even more stability, there are Safari and IE, which these days are quite good as well.

recoiledsnake• 15 years ago

Just got the notification, but didn't upgrade because a lot of my very useful extensions for HTML dev weren't compatible.

I don't think the new features in 7->8 make up for the lack of my extensions.

joenathan• 15 years ago

Use this extension to "make" your extensions compatible https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat...

evanw• 15 years ago

This is great, thanks for posting it. I manage my passwords with 1Password, and while they're good about pushing updates, I've never seen their Firefox extension marked as compatible when a new version of Firefox is released.

faruken• 15 years ago

Which would beg the question why would I need an addon to make my current addons compatible with Firefox? Everyone knew that 6 weeks release cycle is going to break addons but they've decided to go with it anyway. I'd expect from Mozilla to make such decision after fixing the potential problems. I've been hearing this will be fixed soon but that date is yet to come.

jlongster• 15 years ago

I disabled addon compatibility checking, and jumped from 7 to nightly (version 10) and was surprised to find all of my extensions still work great (including Firebug).

Mozilla is working towards making this happen automatically, but it seems to be working well already.

apaprocki• 15 years ago

I just saw this being discussed today.. watch out for it if you have Firebug installed. There could be a performance regression because debugging is on even if you're not using it.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=699528

keeperofdakeys2• 15 years ago

As of Firefox 4.0, there is an extension api that is both version-less and allows restarting extensions without restarting the browser. Especially with Firefox's new release schedule, more extension developers should probably make the effort to start using it.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Extensions/Bootstrapped_ext...

jusob• 15 years ago

Unfortunately, there is little documentation. I have looked into adding this for my extensions, and didn't manage to do it. Same documentation issues I had when I first started to port my extensions for Firefox to Fennec: pieces of documentations here and there, but nothing that clearly explains the differences between the 2 platforms.

That said, their extension framework is by far the most powerful of all browsers.

Tichy• 15 years ago

The add-on thing could be huge, if it works out. I am tired of seeing computers riddled with spybars.

udp• 15 years ago

Yep - I was very impressed to see the update installer ask if I want to keep add-ons installed by a third party, with the default option being no.

JoshTriplett4• 15 years ago

Definitely a good idea for Windows users, and possibly Macs as well (I don't know the prevalence of browser-infesting software there).

On Linux, though, it promptly flagged all of the addons I had installed through the distro packaging system as "third-party addons" and wanted to disable them by default.

Ziomislaw2• 15 years ago

so it worked properly on Linux. there is no way to know whether an addon instaled 'for the whole' system was added by third party, or by package. only addons in Your home dir are considered as 'installed by you'

dman2• 15 years ago

Folks at mozilla - keep up the good work. Could you create some videos and tutorials about extension development?

padenot• 15 years ago

Tutorials (and learning material in general) can be found on https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Extensions. This page seem to cover both API (XUL & Jetpack).

dman2• 15 years ago

I am aware of the page and have written an Extension in the past. I am unclear about the following things a) Is Jetpack the way to go going forward? How much of the XPCom api is available through Jetpack? b) Is there an IDE I can setup that will allow me to get autocompletion for extension development? c) Is there an API browser for XPCom objects listing the objects, the methods available on them and the minimum version of Firefox that supports the particular api? Having a searchable index would be even better. d) When I was working on a Firefox extension I often got the feeling that I was doing something suboptimal because the development process seemed pretty broken. I was building extensions and had to restart the browser for them to take effect, getting a debugger going was more work than it should be, I wondered why isnt the Firefox ui itself written using HTML and css. I am hoping that more tutorials and workflow related posts will address many of my concerns.

Knowing the workflow of folks at mozilla will be a huge help to people like me who are working on writing extensions because the road to writing a meaningful extension is not as straightforward as it could be.

In the end I dont want the above points to act as a downer in a software release post and would like to congratulate folks at Mozilla about the great work that they do.

rnadna• 15 years ago

Is this great news, or good news, or nothing too exciting? Dunno. It might be interesting to learn how many people read this in another browser, popped over to firefox to update it ... and then returned to their other browser. We may be at the point where browsers are like toilet paper -- lots of brands will do the work, and it's hard to pay much attention to which one is installed.

bergie• 15 years ago

Firefox Sync sort of changes that for me. It gives enough convenience that I've also gone Firefox on my mobile devices. Being able to access open tabs from my laptop on the phone is great when I'm sitting in the bus.

quinndupont• 15 years ago

I really hope the persistent sync bugs get worked out soon. I'm told that the final, and big, fix was in alpha, which makes me think that it's not in 8.0. Soon, soon.

electic• 15 years ago

In 5 weeks they are going to be shipping Firefox 13.0.

shocks• 15 years ago

It would make more sense (to me) that they focused on fixing some of the many bugs filed in the bug tracker. Just saying, but then Chrome is my browser of choice anyway...

bzbarsky• 15 years ago

You do realize that there were tons of bugs fixed between 7 and 8, right?

It's just that bugfixes never make the news.

abraham• 15 years ago

Chrome has over 31,000 open issues. http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/list

bakhlawa• 15 years ago

Have the memory issues been resolved? Under Windows 7, it isn't uncommon to find an idle Firefox browser with a few low-activity tabs using up more than 1.5GB of memory. It's gotten to a stage where I have to restart the browser every couple of days...reminds me of when I had to this with my Windows PC! I've recently moved over the Chrome and while I miss Firefox, the browser is far less of a memory hog.

daemin4• 15 years ago

Why does it bother you that an application is using so much RAM? Do you only have 2 GB or something like that? I'd prefer that applications used my RAM since unused RAM is just wasted electricity.

I find it strange that people still think of RAM as a precious resource that needs to be conserved and under-utilised. I'd rather have it used than have to fetch something from disk or the network.

hnwh• 15 years ago

Some of us actually use our RAM for other things...

getsat• 15 years ago

> I'd prefer that applications used my RAM since unused RAM is just wasted electricity.

I... but... er...

This is probably the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen on this site.

You could write a two line C program that allocates all the memory on your system and then sits in a loop doing nothing, but then you'd be wasting even more electricity because your hdd would be reading/writing to your swap space. :|

> I'd rather have it used than have to fetch something from disk or the network.

Modern operating systems do use your free memory for cache. Linux will regularly chill at 90%+ memory usage (the majority being cache that can be freed instantly when other apps need it) and Windows has SuperFetch which does basically the same thing as I understand.

nitrogen2• 15 years ago

If I have 6GB of RAM and feel like e.g. editing a bunch of very large photos or videos without closing my browser, it's annoying to have that browser using 25% of RAM.

latif• 15 years ago

The Firefox teams seems to no longer care about add-ons and add-on users. I am an Add-on author. I submitted an updated version of my addon for Firefox 8 on October 27. Twelve days later the new version is still sitting in a sandbox waiting editorial review. With a new release happening every 6 weeks this kind of behavior is inexcusable and will likely drive people away from Add-ons.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/categorize/

JoshTriplett4• 15 years ago

Known problem with the compatibility system, and Mozilla plans to address it in the near future by improving the notion of compatibility, as well as adding the ability to quickly mark an existing version of an addon as compatible when it doesn't need changes.

Sanddancer• 15 years ago

I disagree. The folks at Mozilla are not so quietly encouraging developers to get involved in the alpha and beta releases to ensure that things do work on day one of a release? How much work was done up to October 27 ensuring that your add-on was ready to go?

wslh• 15 years ago

Sorry Sanddancer but my experience as an add-on author is that writing free add-ons can quickly turn to a demanding job.

For example, if you look at the tab mix plus add-on source code you can find a very long list of workarounds to make it work in different contexts.

patd• 15 years ago

My last addon release was reviewed after a little over a month.

They do however do automatic check to ensure that your addon still works with newer releases and upgrade the compatibility automatically.

nodata• 15 years ago

s/is released/has been released/;

Firefox 8.0 is Released

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