

Firefox 8.0 is Released - evanw
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/8.0/releasenotes/

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latif
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/>

~~~
Sanddancer
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
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.

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

~~~
JoshTriplett
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.

~~~
Ziomislaw
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'

~~~
JoshTriplett
Except that Linux doesn't tend to suffer from the browser-infesting stealth
installs common to other platforms; the case of packaged addons seems far more
common and likely.

~~~
Ziomislaw
ubuntu? yes, you can unistall it, but popular distros do come with pre-
installed stuff.

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

~~~
padenot
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).

~~~
dman
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.

~~~
sp332
Jetpack is preferred because it's easier to write, reduces compatibility
problems between versions (because there are fewer "hooks" into deep FF
innards), and you don't have to restart to install, uninstall, or reload them.
Of course there are limitations, but unless you really need something in XUL
that's not available in Jetpack, Jetpack is the way to go.

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bakhlawa
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.

~~~
daemin
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.

~~~
getsat
> 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.

~~~
daemin
Yes, you could write such a program.

Yes modern OSes do use non-Application RAM for caching, mostly files and other
small buffers. While Firefox is probably doing a lot of caching for web
content, something that modern OSes don't yet do. Hence I have no qualms about
it using over a gig of RAM.

I guess my comment was read more angrily than I meant it to sound. What I mean
is let applications use as much RAM as they need and be done with it.

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rnadna
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
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
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.

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nodata
s/is released/has been released/;

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recoiledsnake
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
Use this extension to "make" your extensions compatible
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-
compat...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-
compatibility-reporter/?src=api)

~~~
evanw
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.

~~~
JoshTriplett
Why 1Password rather than Firefox Sync?

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nassosdim
Probably because 1Password doesn't support just a specific browser and it's
also available for tablets and smartphones.

~~~
carussell
The Sync API is documented, and Mozilla encourages development of outside
server and client implementations. Sync is available for tablets and
smartphones.

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

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

It's just that bugfixes never make the news.

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hozzer
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.

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

~~~
richbradshaw
Because version numbers are irrelevant, what's important is keeping people on
the newest version. "Solving" the problem of large version numbers is like
solving the problem 1/0.

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eCa
At work we have a web application purchased about 18 months ago that
officially don't support Firefox above 3.6. There were rendering differences
between 3.6 and 4 that were serious enough to enforce that restriction for
certain users. Apparently, it has begun working as expected again in FF7
(might have worked in FF6, not sure).

The application also uses jQuery 1.2.6 (released May '08) - I guess I'll be
the one to QA the migration to the present day.

Hence I am not yet a believer in "latest version is the greatest version", in
all cases. In principle, yes, but there are exceptions that makes version
numbers necessary.

~~~
carussell
Let's be clear.

"The version number is too high" is one complaint.

"I have compatibility issues across releases" is another. They are not the
same. They are not interchangeable.

What happened here perfectly exemplifies what happens every time a release is
brought up. One of these complaints is brought up, then in the next breath
it's switched to the other, as if we're still discussing the same thing.

We are not.

Conflating the two by bouncing between them _multiple times in a discussion,
every time the discussion occurs_ results in massive, unproductive churn.

