SillyDog701

[Antony]

Mozilla, the open source company and organisation well known for its push on tricking and forcing to rush for the latest of its whatsoever product, seems to reverse that Asa Dotzler said 6 months ago.

Mozilla announced a plan called Extended Support Release (ESR). In short, unlike the rushed 6-week release cycle designed for individual consumers. Mozilla plans to release merely once a year special ESR version of Firefox which will continue to receive security update (patches) while not changing the rendering engine or add-on structure etc.

According to the proposal, the first ESR release should be out as ESR 10 based on Firefox 10, and will receive security updates until next ESR release which (to many open-source extremists' disliking) won't be out in rushed 6-week period.

In Mozilla's normal rushed 6-week release Firefox (designed for individuals), Mozilla not just drop off the usual expected security update for software merely 6+ weeks old, but kills them off almost completely.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; en-US; rv:1.9.2.25) Gecko/20111212 AlexaToolbar/alxf-2.14 Firefox/3.6.25

[James]

You know, Antony, it's almost as though Mozilla doesn't have a clue how to move forward at this point. To me, it's as though they're moving in dozens of different directions as a result of which, they are beginning to lose numbers. Chrome make ONE browser... period. Internet Explorer 9 is the Microsoft browser of Windows 7. Apple make Safari. Opera make the Opera suite. And Mozilla? Well... they've got SeaMonkey, Firefox 3 fork, Firefox 9 fork (or whatever you want to call it) and now they're going to further divide things up with a slow release and a fast release? This is ridiculous. It's as though there is no real leadership but rather a hydra-like bunch of heads saying... this way...no this way... no this way.

Remember when it was simply Netscape? I long for those days of sanity. Give me back a safe and secure Netscape 4, capable of rendering today's pages and I'd be happy. We don't need a thousand ways to skin the browser nor a thousand extensions to add this and that and the kitchen sink to the browser. It's mad.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/9.0.1

[Antony]

Mozilla might make the source code available to those who are interested and the product free, but is that what people want?

I installed Firefox 9 on Laurent's iMac (running OS X Lion), and watched the video available there. Somehow, I have a strong feeling that Firefox is not really what users want, but rather, what the developers want, especially Asa. From my observation, Firefox's decision-making has been very centred on the attitudes of a small group.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; en-US; rv:1.9.2.25) Gecko/20111212 AlexaToolbar/alxf-2.14 Firefox/3.6.25

[DJGM]

And Mozilla? Well... they've got SeaMonkey

I should point out at this juncture ... SeaMonkey is not an official Mozilla product. It's still a community based
project that has the full backing and technical resources of the Mozilla Foundation at it's disposal instead.

The SeaMonkey Council are in charge of the way the project is managed and maintained, and although they have a new release every 6 weeks like Firefox, they prefer not to treat them as major releases. If they did,
we'd probably be matching the version numbers of Firefox, and up to SeaMonkey 9.0 by now, not 2.6!
I'm sure they have no plans to jump to a v3.0 anytime soon ... or 6 weeks after v2.9.

Remember when it was simply Netscape? I long for those days of sanity. Give me back a safe
and secure Netscape 4, capable of rendering today's pages and I'd be happy. We don't need a
thousand ways to skin the browser nor a thousand extensions to add this and that and the
kitchen sink to the browser. It's mad.

The nearest you'll get to anything like Netscape 4 now, is ... SeaMonkey. While Netscape 4 is long dead,
(indeed Netscape itself is long dead) it's no longer capable of rendering any modern websites, and more
than likely has more unfixed security bugs than you could shake a stick at! SeaMonkey is it's modern
day equivalent, kept as up to date as Firefox, and can render all modern websites just fine.

As for thousands of extensions and themes, with either SeaMonkey or Firefox, they're entirely optional,
although it is worthwhile having a small handful of add-ons installed to enhance the overall experience,
regardless of the browser choice, be it SeaMonkey, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera . . .

Gotta be thankful we're not stuck with IE6 ... which could've been the case if Firefox hadn't come along!

Choice is good ... although nowadays, there's perhaps a little too much choice.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20111221 Firefox/9.0.1 SeaMonkey/2.6.1 Lightning/1.1.1

[Fulvio]

Choice is good ... although nowadays, there's perhaps a little too much choice.

I, fully, concur, but no matter what, Seamonkey is my workhorse. I am confident in it, and, except for a few websites which have no clue what it is (but, I get around them), there is no problem.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20111221 Firefox/9.0.1 SeaMonkey/2.6.1

[James]

Good. As I've mentioned on more than one occasion: if it's working for you, then use it by all means.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/9.0.1