Mozilla fixes the UI problem that has been crippling FF3.5 takeup | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla fixes the UI problem that has been crippling FF3.5 takeup

bugzilla.mozilla.org

16 pointssailormoon10 comments

Slightly offtopic but on crippling Firefox, too: I didn't need automatic updates because I used the nightlies of FF3.5 before it was called FF3.5, mainly to get my hands on the javascript JIT.

But then Chromium came.

Now I'll wait until Electrolysis fixes the biggest problem in the current Firefox: the sluggish bottleneck of the single UI thread that does all events and rendering for everything. It's not only slow but a single Flash video can bring down all my dozen tabs and while Firefox can restore them, it takes forever to load them in "parallel".

WebKit is quite crappy and odd, Chromium is still in its infancy but the user experience is an order of magnitude better almost solely because of multiprocessing.

It's amazing how a single thing can make so much of the difference merely by coming from the next decade. Now I'll just have to wait for the copycats to work their duty and I can go back to Firefox.

Answers the question: why should automatic updates be opt-out rather than opt-in.

This is why I install Chrome on my family's computers. Set it and forget it - auto silent background update means they'll always have a current browser.

This is what I love so much about Linuxes and package management. I set them up, software update notifications pop-up (I liked it best when they appeared in the notification area) and everything is quickly updated mostly behind the scenes.

I find the idea of every program having its own independent self-update mechanism ludicrously primitive.

Apparently Google agrees: when you install Chrome on Ubuntu it uses the OS's update manager to keep itself updated (by adding its own APT repository). Nifty.

Firefox updates are pretty annoying, I hate to launch Firefox only to wait for him to update. I wish they could fix that.

Chrome is great because he handles all this dirty job in the background and you can browse almost instantly.

I guess Firefox could try to de the same job as Chrome, I don't know why the typical user wouldn't want to update it.

So if I understand this correctly: they fixed poor uptake by making it so you cannot opt out of upgrading to the next major. It just does it without asking?

No no, that's not how I read it at least.

There are two types of update notifications in Firefox. There's a little overlay slider that pops up in the lower right telling you about a minor update available. Then there's a large dialog window that can pop up to tell you about a big update.

Unless the user left the browser open for at least 12 hours, they were never being shown the big dialog notifying them that the upgrade to Firefox 3.5 was available, only the small notification. The fix is to make the big dialog pop up. It is not to make it install automatically, you still have to click the button to say you want that update.

I think they should just get rid of those annoying pop-ups and make a red notification bar to the right of the help menu whenever there is an update.

No, I think the bug was that Firefox 3.0 doesn't even tell you that 3.5 is available but now everyone running 3.0 will get a big window advertising it. The upgrade is still opt-in.

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