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Comment by ujjvala | Hacker News Reader

Use it if you want break all the working addons for nothing.

The list of bugfixes is hardly nothing: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/5.0beta/releasenotes/bu...

Still, there's no reason to break bugfixes. Heck, a lot of them still work, if you flag some "developer mode", but you don't need to do that in Chrome.

Who care's if Mozilla has more extensions? They cause too much trouble when you upgrade.

Who care's if Mozilla has more extensions? They cause too much trouble when you upgrade.

I do. TreeStyleTab and Pentadactyl essentially change Firefox into a different browser that I much prefer. There's nothing like that on Chrome, and until they get better capabilities for extension writing, there won't be. The day when they have working full replacements (not Vimium and the mediocre sidetabs option), I'll happily switch to Chrome, but until then I'll take having my nice customized browser.

"Who care's if Mozilla has more extensions? They cause too much trouble when you upgrade."

Exactly. I switched to Chrome because of this and Chrome's better (less buggy!) Sync features.

I don't think it really counts as an "upgrade" if you opt-in to a beta.

True, but unless FF adds a "re-version-tag my addons based on feedback from testers" feature, we will get bitten when FF5 final comes out and disables all existing deployed extensions.

In actual fact, they've changed the process so this generally won't happen:

http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2011/04/19/add-on-compatibili...

None of my extensions are broken or disabled so far. I can totally see your scepticism and where you are coming from though. With the update from FF3.x to FF4 it was all hell with extensions and it has been like that between previous major versions as well.

Just thought I'd report that for my (somewhat meager) selection of addons, I haven't found anything auto-disabled or crashing yet.

This was with FF3, I think, but I once managed to over-write all my bookmarks with the temp ones from doing a separate install for a beta. Probably "my fault" on some level, but it still sucked. I have an aversion to trying out betas since then.

Not your fault, but that is a risk of using a Beta (before Google hijacked the term to mean "Upgrades are Planned").

Bugs like what you saw are flagged as high-importance "data loss" bugs, and FF has gotten better about avoiding those, even in pre-release builds, since the bad old days of accidentally deleting non-FF data from your home folder.

I've used the same profile on my primary computer for something like 5 years, across a migration from Windows to Ubuntu, and a few times when I've had too much time on my hands and ran minefield/betas for a month now and again.

They were unstable, but I never corrupted my profile.

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