The web evolves at a rapid pace. Now that browser vendors are implementing new features at a faster rate, developers can deliver better experiences to end users with a greater degree of certainty that each will have the same experience the developer intended.
He isn't complaining about the fast release cycle at all, he just want its browser to do it without interrupting his workflow and disabling all of his plugins. You know, kind of like chrome.
So if this is just an issue of certain add-ons being disabled because they're incompatible with X version of Firefox (something that's always been the case), then we're merely in a transitional phase where the good developers with popular add-ons will have to adjust their development cycle to fit with this new trend.
@nolok got it right, plugin stability is incredibly important to users. It's also demoralising as a plugin developer if you have to spend most of your development time testing compatibility. Mozilla need to find a balance between a fast upgrade cycle and maintaing stability for plugins. At the moment I think things have moved to far from the glacial 2.x -> 3.0 to the flash flood like 4+ upgrades.
Maybe it just needs adjusting a little.
He's not just complaining about the release schedule; he's complaining about the numerous and intrusive dialog boxes that pop up whenever Firefox's major version number is increased. Mozilla needs to remove every last one of those dialog boxes and make major version updates as silent as they are in Chrome.
He pointed out why that might not be possible. If an add-on is only supposed to work from version 3.6-6.0, and Firefox silently updates to 7, the user loses the add-on's functionality (and for many people, the only reason to use firefox are the add-ons)
When an add-on is disabled some sort of notification is desirable, but it doesn't have to come in the form of a modal dialog that blocks usage of the browser. There's generally nothing a user can do about it anyway. Furthermore, Mozilla could be doing a much better job of compatibility testing for the most popular extensions to ensure they don't have to be disabled every upgrade.
I'm really getting sick of people complaining about Firefox's release schedule.
Look people, Firefox changed their version numbering system. Why do the fuck do you care? Does it really make that much a difference to you whether you're on version 5, or 1.5, or 0.1.5, or 0.5, or 1.0.5? No! So stop complaining. If you don't like the versioning schedule, switch to a browser that has a different schedule (Opera or Safari are the only two i can think of).
Haven't you read the article before commenting ? He isn't complaining about the new versioning (although he mentions that he finds it stupid), what he complains about is its implementation:
> Chrome is running on a major version update once every 6 weeks or so, but the beauty of chrome is that it’s silent and quiet, doesn’t interrupt the user. Google being the law unto themselves has decided on this major version system, and thats ok, because they hide it very well, most users aren’t bothered by it, or could find it if you asked them.
> Firefox updates on the other hand, are of the most obnoxious variety intrusive, inconvenient, and obstructive. It forces the user to make a choice to upgrade, forces the user to stop browsing then insists on taking a very long time to upgrade. Most intrusive.
> Once upgraded it disables most the plugins as they are not yet compatible, thats the real catch, with the auto disable of all plugins till they are compatible I’m left with a version of firefox that basically doesn’t work for me.
First off, this is not just a question of version numbering. 6.0 is not really just 5.0.whatever. Mozilla made a decision to release fewer new features more often, rather than lots of new features less often. Each release is now introducing new stuff, new APIs' and things are breaking.
Therefore, it makes a huge difference for those of us in corporate IT who have to manage software rollouts. I used to allow automatic updates at my company. I have now turned them off. Firefox is bad enough, but the killer is Thunderbird.
For example, We especially rely upon Lightning functioning with every release. When 5.0 came out, Lightning didn't auto-update, and the previous version didn't work on 5.0. There WAS a working version that we were able to use, manually. We can't afford this crap. If our users are constantly updating every time TB or Firefox asks them too, critical stuff breaks, and thus we are left with a support nightmare.
Look at how long it previously took Mozilla to get major releases (and major features) out the door: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Firefox#Release_hist...
The web evolves at a rapid pace. Now that browser vendors are implementing new features at a faster rate, developers can deliver better experiences to end users with a greater degree of certainty that each will have the same experience the developer intended.