Just saw I got upgraded to FF6 - didn’t see a what’s new file, what is the consensus of the most significant changes?
Release notes are here, looks like mostly minor, internal stuff and the usual bug and security fixes.
Are they just going to go up a whole number with every point revision until they get ahead of IE9?
I remember when Word jumped from 2.0 to 6.0 to catch up with WordPerfect. :)
Firefox 6 apparently breaks compatibility with one of my addons, so I’m declining the update for now.
One new version every six weeks.
The address bar now highlights the domain, just like IE9. That’s the only visible change I noticed.
The next big change will be Firefox 8 (now in nightly build testing) which actually has a real x64 version.
Is there a point? IE9 already has a real x64 version but nobody’s using it because 2 GB is really enough address space for a web browser, and 32-bit plugins are incompatible with the 64-bit version.
Firefox 7 will have a new version of the JS engine, it will consume less memory.
I know, some people have a weird boner for x64 versions.
“Oh yes, software XYZ will release a x64 version!!”.
/software XYZ runs with 150MB of memory…
It’s already 64-bit on OS X, and I’ve noticed that it doesn’t get into weird states anymore when getting close to the 2GB memory mark (it used to do stuff like start ignoring CSS, render fonts as boxes), but it’s still a resource hog that chews up more memory and CPU than it should anyway (it did when 32-bit, too).
Chrome is currently at 13.0
Has Chrome broken anything (web sites, addons, whatever) when it moves up a version? I hear about this stuff famously from IE, and somewhat from Firefox, but I’ve not heard a peep about Chrome.
With Firefox, you seem to only hear it about extensions, and I think Chrome has a more abstracted extension model, one that’s not as tied to the internals of the thing. (And even with Firefox, I suspect it’s mostly some historical legacy; I can’t imagine there’s any real reason why something would break going from 5 to 6, and suspect it’s just the extension developer hardcoding versions in their compatibility check.)
With both Firefox and IE, you rarely hear about pages being problematic, because the things that are problematic for IE are those stupid corporate/banking apps that were written in 1998 and never updated, and everyone’s already trained to use IE on those anyway.
Well, I already see a problem with FF6 - tried to login at http://www.dishonline.com/ and when I hit the login link, it goes to that screen, pauses for a few seconds, then kicks me back to the previous page, i.e. will not display the login boxes. Tried it on Chrome, works fine. Worked fine on my previous FF before the upgrade.
EDIT: well, crap, it worked on Chrome, I entered my login info, didn’t hit enter, came here to post, went back to the Chrome page and it apparently timed out, and now it won’t work on Chrome either. Ugh
Trying it out … seems fast! Might switch to this from Chrome now.
Just went to try this out, and I am amazed at how bad the update experience is. It’s very manual, very heavyweight, and it also broke three of my extensions (one of which has an update, which it’s been downloading for the last 10 minutes).
If they’re going to do this Chrome-style release process, they need to design a Chrome-style upgrade process.
Went perfectly fine for me, and as a bonus, it disabled the dozen Java consoles I’ve had hanging around, zombie-fashion, in my add-ons list.
If you don’t like the domain name highlighting (it makes the rest of the URL a bit too dim for my tastes), go to about:config and toggle ‘browser.urlbar.formatting.enabled’.
A recent Chrome update mostly broke the previously-awesome Surplus extension.