SillyDog701

[James]

Check this story out. It's interesting:

http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/08/firefo ... sions/?utm

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:6.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/6.0

[Fulvio]

James,
the comments were, particularly funny. One said that the last version is not the best version. What does "best" mean? But, they might as well stop numbering, if they cannot keep track of the betas, and, according to another report, if you are in beta, you stay in beta. And, all those Firefoxes came out in 1/1/2010, after all!
As you know, I play around with all this silliness, and found good old Seamonkey less mentally taxing (and SM2.3, based on FF6, came out on 8/13/2011, which is reassuring. I did not sleep for 20 months, after all!
Today, FF6 or whatever took forever to show up, so I invoked the Windows Task Manager to see what was going on. About about 10 min. firefox.exe started going, but I noticed well over 20 instances of plugin-container.exe, anywhere from a few hundred Kb to nearly 110 MB. Firefox.exe stopped at about 132 MB, the most I ever saw it.
I know that there is a plugin-container.exe, with god knows what garbage, but has anyone seen anything like I describe.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:6.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/6.0

[ncd]

Check this story out. It's interesting:

http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/08/firefo ... sions/?utm

Here is an interesting followup from one of the Mozilla release guys.

http://soberbuildengineer.com/blog/2011 ... on-second/

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.19pre) Gecko K-Meleon/1.6.0

[Antony]

From the linked article,

After all, even Google Chrome, the browser from which Firefox has borrowed much of its new look and its new rapid release cycle, still offers a version number.

It is good to know that Firefox taking ideas from Chrome is a common knowledge now.

Also (with added emphasising),

In the words of Asa Dotzler, director of Firefox, "we’re moving to a more web-like convention where it’s simply not important what version you’re using as long as it’s the latest version. (...)"

Geez, so it's all about rushing to the latest. Not naming anyone in particular, but rushing to the latest does seem to be one of the common things for a particular group of people who can't live without everything being the latest, and I usually refer to them as open-source extremists.

In case anyone is interested, this message is posted in Firefox 3.6.20 under (perhaps now outdated*) Mac OS X 10.6.8.

(* by their standard.)

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.20) Gecko/20110803 AlexaToolbar/alxf-2.14 Firefox/3.6.20

[Fulvio]

I had updated to Firefox 6, while keeping 3.6.20. I, generally, do not pay attention to what Firef0x/Thunderbird tell me, and I do not let them have their way. But, I do pay attention to Secunia PSI. This morning, it told me that I had three end-of-life programs. One is Real Player, which I, hardly ever, use. The other two were Firefox 5.0.1 portable and Thunderbird 6. So, from now on we are likely to have so many updates, that we may get into six digits numbers. I am tempted less and less to, even, look at this circus.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.20) Gecko/20110803 Firefox/3.6.20

[Antony]

A relief news: Firefox will back down, and stick with version numbers after all.

Wired Webmonkey reports.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.20) Gecko/20110803 AlexaToolbar/alxf-2.14 Firefox/3.6.20

[James]

The problem started when Asa Dotzler, director of Firefox, filed a bug that would remove the version number from the about dialog. Dotzler believed that Mozilla’s user experience team had already made the decision, but as it turns out, they had not.

So, according to the article to which you referred, this is the reason things went awry. It figures. Oh well... I wonder how soon before Mozilla will back away from their rapid releases in version numbers and return to some sanity there as well?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.854.0 Safari/535.2

[James]

I see they're also debating getting rid of version numbers and replacing them with dates:

In that scenario the upcoming Firefox 7, scheduled for release in September, would be Firefox 2011.9 or something similar.

I suppose this would make more sense in light of the rapid releases Mozilla insists upon.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.854.0 Safari/535.2

[Don_HH2K]

I see they're also debating getting rid of version numbers and replacing them with dates:

In that scenario the upcoming Firefox 7, scheduled for release in September, would be Firefox 2011.9 or something similar.

I suppose this would make more sense in light of the rapid releases Mozilla insists upon.

This actually isn't a bad idea. I'm currently employed by a large software company (which will go unnamed) which makes releases every seven weeks. Our releases are generally called "2011.5", "2011.4", "2010.8", and so forth - the year, followed by the release. A lot of our middleware (sourced from outside the company) does likewise.

I honestly think it would've suited apps like Chrome better to follow such a versioning convention. I believe Chrome is currently at version 13, with 14 and 15 in the preview stage, despite having been around only three years. IE and Netscape, by comparison, took over ten years each just to hit version 9.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/13.0.782.112 Safari/535.1

[James]

I agree. It would give developers the information they require when working on bugs and add-ons and at the same time not appear to be in a race to crank out version numbers ahead of the other company. Evidently it's being considered.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:7.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0