Firefox 5 is now officially released | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 5 is now officially released

mozilla.com

373 pointssmash204 comments

To the Mozilla developers in here:

Although I am not going to install this version on my laptop (I am a chrome guy), I would like to take the opportunity and thank you for the great work you have done for the internet users and web developers.

In the days before firefox+firebug, we were alerting all the way in order to find an undefined / unassigned variable which was causing bugs and terror.

You have made the web a better place, you have made IE a better browser, and I tend to believe, you also made chrome a better browser, and chrome developers work harder by setting the bar that high.

What I most like in the story of Firefox is how, after bringing competition to a field that had been stagnant for quite a while and after, thanks to its impressive success, reviving that field, it now benefits itself from that competition.

We are now at a time when ALL browsers, including Firefox, are getting better and better thanks in large part to the increasing competition.

It has been a great journey thus far for Firefox. My best wishes to all involved for better and better things in the future.

(Firefox user since v0.6 here. These days I also use Chrome and Chromium quite a lot, especially on Linux, but Firefox remains my main browser.)

another firefox since early beta user here. i do not remember the number of machines i installed firefox on to, but i really like that there is competition now and every version gets faster and better.

Another Netscape Navigator, err before that NSCA Mosaic user here, and yes we walked to school uphill both ways.

I love firefox but have suffered with the memory issues for years. Please free memory when I close tabs, or at least add a flush button so I can reclaim the 500mb it balloons to in a day or two of heavy usage.

Current Aurora builds (which will eventually become Firefox 6) have an improved about:memory page, which includes buttons that make Firefox run the garbage collector:

http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/05/23/a-better-abou...

In my experience, hitting the GC button rarely makes any detectable improvement. Right at this very moment my Firefox instance is using about 900MB of memory; hitting all three buttons in a row (garbage-collection, cycle-collection, "minimize memory usage") brings the number down to 892MB, ~750MB of which is apparently allocated to "heap-unclassified" and the JavaScript "gc-heap".

Work on reducing Firefox's memory footprint is ongoing; the most recent effort I know of is MemShrink:

http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/03/10/memshrink/

...and it's beginning to make some progress:

http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/06/22/memshrink-pro...

It's amazing this wonderful FREE software has evolved the web so much.

Open standards build the web. Free tools create a vivid creative environment.

For the first time as a developer i used firebug today and avoided alerts in my js. Thank you firefox :-).

This is a confusing feeling. The Firefox release mechanism makes this more frustrating than friendly.

With Chrome, my browser automatically updates for stuff like this. I never see it and always have the correct version.

For Firefox, I have to purposefully seek out the next version, and considering I'm still upgrading some of my machines to 4.0 from 3.5 (I downloaded 4.0 yesterday on one machine), this is kind of annoying.

I'm not sure a quick release schedule works quite as well if you've got to manually upgrade. I like Chrome for the same reason I sign up for automatic bill payments - I understand it's important, but I don't want to have to deal with it.

Firefox does automatically download the next version in the background. It prompts you to restart a while after the update is downloaded, but we're working on making the prompting less intrusive than it's been in the past. Also, I think you get a more intrusive prompt if the update will disable any extensions.

See this article for some of the work we're doing to make add-on compatibility work seamlessly in new versions:

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

Where does it get the download? I seem to be one of the few left who likes to upgrade manually—I like to give others some time to shake out the bugs first—and so I use Firefox's notifications as a reminder to go and download the file myself.

I'm running 5.0b7, and have been receiving notifications for a while (maybe 3 days?) that there was an update available; but http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel and https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html didn't have any upgrade available until today. Is there somewhere else to look, or were my upgrade notifications erroneous?

Help -> About lets you know if there is an update and has an apply update button to start it whenever you like.

Thanks, but (while that's a sensible answer to the question) it's not quite what I wanted. I would like to be able to download the new version myself. Is it really true that, up until today, it was possible to update from 5.0b7 to 5.0 within the browser itself, but impossible to download 5.0 directly? If not (i.e., if it is possible to download 5.0 directly), then I must have been looking in the wrong places; where should I look?

I'm pretty sure there were no releases between 5.0b7 and 5.0 final, so I'm not sure why Firefox was prompting you to update. But in any case, you can download any release manually from ftp://archive.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/

Thanks!

> always have the correct version.

Depends what you mean by "correct version". If your app isn't tested with 5, then it's not the correct version.

Firefox's release mechanism is the middle ground between IE's and Chrome's: you get updates, but you decide when, and they're not tied to the OS.

In some ways, Chrome has reset the bar for updates. Google has shown that you can have silent background updates containing meaningful features that don't (in general) break add-on compatibility.

People may have felt deterred by this in the past, but I would argue that it has worked impressively well for Chrome so far, and makes older mechanisms seem clumsy and antiquated.

I never changed any default settings, and still got a dialog box asking if I wanted to upgrade. And I'm glad I got that question instead of a forced upgrade, because some of my installed extensions weren't ready for FF5.

How times have changed. Not too long ago people loathed automatic updates and some said they're boycotting Firefox for having an autoupdate feature.

Many still do. I've been using SRWare Iron and as my primary browser - it's Chromium with the privacy-compromising features removed - in part because I'm very uneasy about software being modified by stealth on my system.

In this era when the unfortunate trend in UI design is to make interfaces easier by making them less functional and less customizable, I also especially want a good look at redesigned major-version updates before I install them

I think there are just more users these days that are more vocal about wanting stuff done in the background. I'm in your camp, though -- I don't want stuff happening behind the curtain. At best, I would like an option to turn that off. I imagine a lot of web devs would be upset if their browser suddenly updated to the latest version without keeping the old one somewhere...

This is 100% true:

I switched on our super-workstation at the office a couple of days ago for the first time in a couple of weeks. It's a bit of a hungry beast, so only usually switched on when we need the power.

It took more than two hours of me sitting at the workstation to apply all the updates. I had to manually approve more than a dozen different installations, one after another. We used multiple gigabytes of our monthly bandwidth allowance just to download the patches.

This is a recently set up machine, just a couple of months old. Only a carefully chosen set of software is installed, all of it for professional use. Commercial software is all legal. Open source stuff is all recommended versions from master sources/repositories.

I don't like the idea of auto-updates either, certainly not for things that make any sort of functional change. But I have to wonder, if this is the best the modern software world can offer to people who have real work to do, whether auto-updates for security patches and genuine bug fixes aren't worth it.

I also have to wonder whether the world is really a better place now that on-line patching is routinely available. Software companies used to have to get something into a fit state to sell before they started selling it, because patching something afterwards was prohibitively expensive and shipping a product with serious flaws would get you a bad reputation and cost a lot of money.

What an odd story.

Where is it that you live that is so resource constrained, in both bandwidth and electricity? And why are you trying to run a business there?

Also it's fair to say that whatever you've saved in electricity has now been decidedly outweighed by the two hours of developer-time you spent updating it.

> Where is it that you live that is so resource constrained, in both bandwidth and electricity?

My home, in the UK.

We actually have a pretty good deal on bandwidth compared to most people here, but wasting several gigs just to download patches every few days is absurd.

The electricity isn't really the issue (though bills for that have risen far above inflation in recent months) but the heat generated by running that machine and all its accompanying peripherals full time is relevant at this time of year.

Besides, why kill the planet pointlessly? A staggering amount of precious resources are wasted because people leave equipment in power-draining stand-by modes all the time these days.

> Also it's fair to say that whatever you've saved in electricity has now been decidedly outweighed by the two hours of developer-time you spent updating it.

Presumably I would have had to spend at least the same amount of time spread out over those two weeks if I'd applied each patch as it became available, probably more because much of the software uses rolled up patch releases so I probably avoided a few intermediate steps.

I think my general point, that the amount and size of downloaded patches in modern software has become absurd, stands.

I don't think it is fair to lump "frequent updates," "large updates," and "background updates" into a single category:

Frequent updates, if properly managed, are generally a plus: security vulnerabilities get patched before they are widely exploited and minor bugs can be fixed without waiting for a major release. Other than the minor annoyance of downloading and installing frequent updates, I don't see a negative.

Unnecessarily large updates are always negative. If different patching practices would compress a 300 MB update to 15 MB, then there is absolutely no reason to prefer the larger patch. Apple is notorious for this: every software "update" requires downloading an entirely new piece of software (note: this is likely changing in Lion).

Background downloading and patching is a matter of preference. It's something I love in a web browser because of the security updates, but would be much less welcome in professional tools. Since it's a matter of opinion, I don't have much to say here.

> Other than the minor annoyance of downloading and installing frequent updates, I don't see a negative.

The negative is that every time you change the functionality of your software, you risk usability and integration problems. See the way Firefox 5 is repeatedly being slaughtered on Slashdot -- normally a forum that strongly advocates for successful OSS projects -- this week.

Not the person you were replying to, but I live in a remote mountain community in the North Cascades. I'm merely the IT Coordinator, but we run a business quite well, and we do it because giving people a retreat in these remote mountains is our business. Simply upgrading Firebug often takes a couple minutes.

As a primarily front-end dev guy, these auto updates make me happy. I don't have to waste time working around old browser quirks if the vast majority of people are on the latest and greatest browser versions.

Yeah, it seems to be a bit of a leftover from the days when each major version was radically different and customers would demand to stay on an old one.

I like Chrome's way much better, even though I admit it does play a bit of havoc with the enterprise-y types that don't use standards-compliant sites.

Best new feature: Multiple tab closing behavior is more like Chrome's now - http://www.theinvisibl.com/2009/12/08/chrometabs/

Love the Chrome-like tab closing behavior. Annoying that a tab has to have focus to get the on-tab "X" though.

(EDIT: Only when #tabs > 9 it seems. Otherwise all tabs have the "X".)

Try this: Turn off the x's as they just waste space. Then close tabs with a middle click or Ctrl+W.

By contrast, for Chrome #tabs > 24

> 28 for for me. I assume it is dependant on the width of tabs, not the number.

Middle click to close those tabs.

Or Ctrl+Click if you don't have a middle button (e.g. laptops). Ctrl+W works on the active tab as well.

Unless you're on a flash page, because flash captures your keyboard, because flash hates you.

Thankfully I can as my Thinkpad has a 3rd button. The majority of laptop users won't be so lucky.

Hitting both buttons usually simulates a middle-click.

If your drivers are clever you can do it with the trackpad, too - sometimes tapping the pad with two fingers will middle-click. Less error-prone than using the buttons.

I much prefer Seamonkey's "tab close button on right" feature.

Feels like a step backwards to me. I preferred when I closed a tab it would resize immediately. Now I have to wait until I move the mouse away.

I will now transfer 1 UNC (UNicorn Coin) to the devs for this. Definitely a feature that should have been there earlier.

However there is a bug, clicking the X sometimes causes the need to click it twice because the first time it is ignored.

I havent seen this on linux yet, is it still ugly as all hell or did they improve it like they did with windows version?

It is buggy with the x having to be clicked twice if you close too fast.

Edit: Try it yourself if you disagree.

That's a feature, not a bug. One of the things I dislike about Chrome is this tendency to auto-close two or three tabs if you cannot easily control how many times you click rapidly. That is, I can somewhat reliably double click, but fairly often an intended single click becomes a double click instead, or a double becomes a triple. (I thought my father had a lot of trouble learning the difference between single and double click back in the 90s, even while he protested that he knew the difference, but now I totally understand why he wasn't following directions...). Having the next tab's close button typically not land under the pointer prevents this from happening most of the time, but I'm glad they put some thought into this and enforced a delay before the second click would close the tab.

My guess is that there are more people accidentally closing extra tabs than people who want to close a lot of tabs they haven't seen in a while.

Yeah, but cmd-shift-t brings them back when I get clickclickclick happy. I'd rather click fewer times.

I agree that that shortcut is very, very useful. I need it many times a day. :)

I can understand that, but having tried both, I'll happily stick with the Chrome way.

Yep, my guess is that it's a failsafe for those "always double-click everything" people like my mother. Taskbar icons, submit buttons, hyperlinks, dock icons, EVERYTHING.

Elephant in the room is the ugly and unnecessary search box. It sticks out like a sore thumb when you consider the effort Firefox has gone through to clean up the interface.

side rant: what's up with search boxes that keep your previous search term in the box. What's the point? iPad does this as well and it drives me insane. I always just manually delete the entry after searching but I shouldn't have to do that and I don't want guests to know my previous search.

You can of course customize the toolbars [1] to remove the search bar, since you can also search through the address bar. But unlike the search bar, the address bar does not show suggestions as you type, because of the privacy implications of sending everything you type there to a third party. (There are add-ons to change that if you want to.)

[1]: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/how-do-i-customize-toolb...

Why ship with the redundant feature? Revenue?

Privacy. I don't think revenue is a factor, since it's probably hooked up to the address bar search too.

How does the existence of a search box affect privacy?

The search box provides suggestions, but it does this by sending everything you type to your search provider. The address box doesn't, because we feel it's bad for privacy to send every web address you type to a third party.

Thank you for respecting your user's privacy. This is one of the many reasons I use Firefox over Chrome.

FWIW, it's an option in Chrome. Simply uncheck "Use a prediction service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the address bar" in the preferences.

But with Firefox, your search box can still make suggestions while not sending web addresses to a third-party, thereby allowing you to have your cake and eat it too.

Can't you use regexp to differentiate urls from search terms and only send search terms?

How? Do you start all your URLs with "www"? I know I don't, so a regex couldn't possibly know until I typed either a space or a dot.

On the other hand, if you could make this work, I'd love to see it.

Perhaps we could do the reverse? Provide search suggestions if the user explicitly tells us to by beginning their input with a special character. '?' perhaps.

Alternatively, although not intuitive, if the user enters focus with the search bar through a specific key-stroke: CTRL + L for a regular URL entry, and re-route CTRL + K to our web-bar, but with suggestions.

In Opera typing g + space begins a Google search. The prefix is stripped off before it's sent.

Your alternative method is Chrome behaviour (of course it gives suggestions even if you don't prefix with ?, but the keyboard shortcuts are there)

I like the search box because the URL history autocomplete of the main URL bar is so much better in Firefox than any browser. I can type any part of a page title or URL (not just the start) and it goes through and finds pages from my history. I do that much more often than I search for things and so I really like having them separate.

Whenever I switch to another browser (such as IE at work because it is mandated for 'security reasons') that is the first thing I miss. In many cases I only type one letter before getting what I want.

I like it but it needs some optimization or throttling. Would you believe the fans on my laptop go on full blast when I type in the url bar? Annoying.

Chrome searches your history and offers the search option, without requiring a separate search box. It doesn't force you to use the start of the URL or title, either, as far as I can tell.

It kind of does but it doesn't work nearly as well, at least in part because it clutters up the list of options with suggested searches.

I have a ton of search engines installed but it only does one suggested search in the list of options, as far as I can tell.

The chrome address bar search tokenization seems much more simplistic. Something like splitting on path elements would help me match "finance" when searching through my history for google.com/finance

Everything you type in Chrome's single address bar is sent to Google servers. In Firefox, only the stuff you type in the search bar reaches servers for auto-completion, but the location bar is entirely local.

This is an important distinction for privacy, but you are right that we may need to come up with a better UI that unifies the two boxes whilst maintaining the distinction between a local and remote search. The "prospector" series of experimental add-ons from Mozilla Labs have some ideas in this area, most notably AwesomeBar HD: https://mozillalabs.com/prospector/2011/04/27/awesomebar-hd-...

The "search bar keeping your previous search term" issue has to do with the ownership of the search box. It used to be, when tabs were below the search box, that made sense. You'd be using the same one search box no matter which tab you were on, and thus it would always keep the same search term between tabs.

Now, with tabs-on-top, each tab contains its own search box. These should be unique, just like each tab has its own URL bar. It doesn't make sense at all that search queries are preserved between tabs. But that's the way Firefox still does it.

(Thinking about this now, I guess that's a different issue than the one you were talking about... why any search box saves any query after pressing "Enter". Still an annoying little quirk though.)

> Now, with tabs-on-top, each tab contains its own search box. These should be unique, just like each tab has its own URL bar.

The location bar is faked, too. Try focusing the location bar and ctrl/cmd+Z-ing through the values it's held since browser startup.

At least when you click from tab to tab the URL bar changes, that's the important part if you're faking it. The search bar keeps the same query on every tab.

I am not sure about FF5, but on FF4 though the search bar kinda seems to be related to the particular tab, it is still the common search bar and the things I searched while at one tab are displayed in every other tab. I am using Ubuntu 11.04/Firefox 4.0.1

And the saving the search term thing is that way because that's how Google-the-website works. Search for something on google.com, and the Results Page shows that term in the box. The Search Box behavior was just carried over from that.

If you use more than one search engine, keeping the term after pressing enter can make a lot of sense.

Example: If I search wikipedia and that produces no results, I'll google the same term instead.

That said, it would probably make sense for it to clear out after a few minutes, or after your interaction seems to indicate that you're done with that search term.

Not the intended purpose, but the search box has been very useful to me in the past as a quick second paste-buffer, much quicker than opening a text editor or anything to place it in.

It might not be necessary, but it is the one feature I prefer about Firefox than Chrome. I use it a lot and it is more handy to change search engines or to search other sites than typing those things in my hand in Chrome.

the search box is kept because it may be part of the deal with google i think

Better than normal update experience that's still nowhere near Chrome. The Tree Style Tabs extension still works after the update...

Chrome is absolutely unusable for the amount of windows I have open at a time and Firefox doesn't crash on me as much as it used to in order to warrant having every page take up a separate process.

The worst for me in Chrome is trying to scroll while a site is still loading or you have tabs loading in the background. That damn bug hasn't been solved for 2 years and counting... (yes, I've filed a bug report)

Strange. For me, Firefox has unresponsive scrolling with background loading, but Chrome doesn't, which is a big reason I use the latter nowadays.

> Chrome is absolutely unusable for the amount of windows I have open

Odd, that's the exact reason I switched from FF to Chrome. I generally have about 20-40 tabs open, and FF is terrible for me with more than just a few open, while Chrome flies along gracefully.

I wonder what the cause for the widely varying performance experiences is?

Probably an extension you had installed.

More important is that tab kit still isn't fixed.

That damned plugin keep me in FF3, since tree style tabs are so goddamed ugly.

Edit: But looking at the page, it seems the developer posted an update yesterday promising an update in a week or two. yay!

There are several themes for TreeStyleTab available in options, and you can also use your theme's default tabs (which looks weird). I wish it was supported by default in Firefox, but oh well.

Wow, never encountered this problem. How many tabs in how many browser instances did you have?

> The Tree Style Tabs extension still works after the update..

that's always the most important information for me before i upgrade ff, so thank you!

Have you tried enabling side tabs in Chrome? Works wonders for me.

I love Tree-Style Tabs, so had to try this out.

For anyone else who had trouble tracking down modern instructions for this:

  * Go to about:flags
  * Enable Side tabs (first option)
  * Restart Chrome
  * Right-click on a tab and chose "Use side tabs"

Not a treeview of collapsible tabs, but muchmuchmuch better than normal tab view in Chrome. Thanks for mentioning that they had this.

While on the subject of about:flags --

Enable 'Tab Overview' if you have a Mac with a trackpad.

Three finger swipe down shows all of your tabs like expose.

This is my favourite chrome feature! It's so useful that it's convinced me to buy a magic trackpad so I can use this when I'm using the laptop with an external keyboard.

Ctrl + Cmd + t

Thank you!!! I know you're not mean't to put posts like this on HN, but I've been searching for a shortcut like that for a long time! :)

What version has this? I just tried 12, 13 and 14 (Canary) and I don't have that option. I have "Tab Overview" as the first thing in flags. Is this a Windows only thing, perhaps?

In osx I had to do:

     cd /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS
     mv "Google Chrome" "Google Chrome Binary"
     echo '#!/bin/bash
     exec "${0%/*}/Google Chrome Binary" -enable-vertical-tabs "$@"' > "Google Chrome"
     chmod ugo+x "Google Chrome"

This let me start chrome with the "-enable-vertical-tabs" command line switch. Once it was started I needed to right click a tab and choose "Use Side Tabs".

Wouldn't this break after an update?

Probably worth noting that the vertical tab UI you end up with looks pretty weird (on Mac OS, at least), as it's literally just moving the existing tabs over to the side without changing the graphics at all.

to try it out without making it permanent, just open a Terminal window and enter something like this:

  /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome -enable-vertical-tabs

Is this a Windows only thing, perhaps?

I believe so, I've been using sidetabs since they were released in Canary one year+ ago and I've never figured out how to get it to work on my Mac

I last heard about it a while ago... just tried it... nowhere near as good as TreeStyleTabs...

Chrome also just doesn't work well for me for the amount of windows I usually have open at a time. 70+ at least.

Are you on windows or osx? Would love to know how to get side tabs working on OSX.

Release Notes: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/5.0/releasenotes/

And for web developers, some more detailed notes at https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Firefox_5_for_developers

By the way, if you are a web developer, I strongly encourage you to use the Firefox Beta or Aurora channel:

http://www.firefox.com/channel/

> By the way, if you are a web developer, I strongly encourage you to use the Firefox Beta or Aurora channel:

Sorry if this sounds harsh, but if you're really expecting a lot of professional web developers to do that, I think you're crazy.

Now that both Chrome and Firefox are on silly release schedules, we waste enough time just keeping up with the breaking changes and random UI rearrangements in day-to-day work. Who has time to spend reading yet another set of release notes every few days, when there's a good chance that nothing in them will be usable in production projects for several years anyway?

If you really want to drive progress, I implore you to stop this madness, and allow a few months for the industry to consolidate so we have some sort of standards to work with. You've made your point: the W3C is a dinosaur chasing a snail riding on a tortoise and you can go faster. But until the new technologies are standard enough that we only have to develop for them once and we can rely on that development still working in a couple of years, all your hard work is being wasted because we still have to write to the lowest common denominator.

You are the new Netscape, Microsoft are the new Microsoft, and now there are several other major browsers we all have to cope with as well. Going it alone just doesn't cut it, whichever of you does it.

Actually, one reason web developers can benefit from running pre-release browsers is that you are in the best position to prevent breaking changes from happening. If a bug that breaks your web site makes it out to the 400 million people on our stable channel, then it's too late stop your users from seeing it. But if you report the bug to the vendor when it first appears in alpha or beta, you improve the chance it will be fixed before your mainstream users ever see it.

I appreciate what you're saying, but unfortunately my clients pay by the hour, and they aren't paying me to be a beta tester for your organisation. Even if I wanted to help you, it would be deeply unethical for me to do so while charging my clients for the time. And even if it weren't, please consider what a huge amount of time it would take to download and install development builds of every major browser regularly enough for this to matter. It's just not practical for me, and I don't see how it ever could be for any other professional web developer in a similar position.

Maybe if we were talking about a team of in-house developers responsible for a single application or something it would be more realistic, but not for freelancers or small agencies who get paid time and materials, which seems to be most of us these days if my experience is at all representative.

> we still have to write to the lowest common denominator.

You have to write to your customers. If your customers are the lowest common denominator I would advice rethinking your business plan.

People around here think it is a perfectly viable business plan to write to only iOS, which has 63 million users, so why isn't a viable business to write only to WebKit (Chrome has 160 million users alone)? And if you write to WebKit it's not much work to make it also work in Firefox and Opera.

The idea that we have to write to the lowest common denominator is the one aspect of web development that I wish would go away. You don't have to, you choose to.

> You have to write to your customers. If your customers are the lowest common denominator I would advice rethinking your business plan.

The most popular operating system in the world today is Windows XP, and the most popular browser on Windows XP is Internet Explorer. If you can afford to rule out anyone using IE below version 9, I envy you your business plan, but most of us can't.

It is bad enough that Microsoft creates this problem for us for unrelated commercial reasons. There is no need for the Firefox and Chrome teams to sink to the same level.

> People around here think it is a perfectly viable business plan to write to only iOS

People around here think a lot of things are perfectly viable business plans. Most of them will fail, often because they overlooked some obvious, common sense test they should have considered on day one but didn't.

> The idea that we have to write to the lowest common denominator is the one aspect of web development that I wish would go away. You don't have to, you choose to.

We all wish it would go away, but on my planet the web developer is rarely in a position to determine the requirements of a job for a paying client, nor to dictate the browsing software to be used by the general public. If you are one of the lucky ones, please understand that you in a very small niche. Somehow I doubt the guys working hard on all these new features for Firefox and Chrome and Safari want their work to be useful to only a tiny fraction of the web-using world.

I'm with you. FWIW, I had the option of jumping ship from the web development industry, and took it because of stuff like this. The build-test-rebuild-testagain-fix-tweak-test cycle for web development is horrible, and aggravating, and life's too short to deal with that kind of nonsense.

Now there are multiple browsers that are going to modify their rendering engines every few months. Yeah, fuck everything about that. I no longer give even two turds' worth of a care what browsers a particular project works in, as long as it works for me. This is just stupid.

Thank you.

Quite annoying that there isn't an obvious way to get the release notes when browsing to mozilla.com.

Chrome user here since launch (who is also very entrenched into Chrome in terms of workflow): Ever since FF4b, I've been nearing a full switch back to Firefox, but the main deterring factor for me was performance. With FF5, the performance increase is absolutely noticeable and I commend the Mozilla team for their work. It's nearing a point where I'd like to switch back.

Now if only they can polish the Android browser a little more ;)

We are polishing Firefox Mobile, too! It is releasing in sync with desktop now.

Anyone using the Amazon S3 Firefox Organizer extension will be disappointed as I am to discover that it doesn't work with FF5.

EDIT: Luckily, I had a moment of intelligence and copied FF4 before installing FF5, so I would recommend doing that if you use S3Fox with any regularity.

You can also use this extension to enable add-ons in new versions and tell the developer (and Mozilla) whether they need to be fixed or not:

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibilit...

Done and done. Thank you sir!

You can probably hack the extension to support FF5. There haven't been too many changes that should affect this.

I found a way to do this in XP. (Vista or 7 should be similar)

1. Open "Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\extensions

2. Find the folder for the unsupported extension, there should be a file called install.rdf inside.

3. Open the file and change the <em:maxVersion> to 5.*.

Might have missed something, but that did the trick for me.

You can probably hack the extension to support FF5. There haven't been too many changes that should affect this.

And hence the stupidity in adopting Chrome-style meaningless major version-numbers when what is released is only a minor update. I know the IT industry is highly fashion-driven, but that doesn't mean following fashions doesn't have drawbacks.

This is Firefox 4.1 at best, but released as Firefox 5 with all the needless addon breaking headaches that will bring, just because Mozilla wanted to be more "fashionate". Great job guys. Great job.

I guess this another thing we can thank the Chrome team for.

> This is Firefox 4.1 at best, but released as Firefox 5 with all the needless addon breaking headaches that will bring

Point releases in the past have broken extension compatibility, so asking that it be 4.1 instead of 5 wouldn't necessarily have the kinds of tangible benefits that you seem to think it would.

Yep. Have an upvote from a fellow proper versioning devotee who's ranted about this recently: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598360

Of the add-ons I used to have only 1 (RDS Bar) is not supporting FF 5. But, that's in addition to a couple that don't support FF4 yet.

Weird, I am actively using it right now with FF5.

LOVE that pinned tabs stay open after reload, without resorting to hacks like you have to with Chrome. That's about the only thing that persistently bugs me in Chrome these days. All in all, FF5 is looking really good. Way to go!

What is the purpose of pinned tabs in Chrome if they aren't pinned after reload?

There's no "hack" to get pinned tabs to re-open in Chrome, they just do.

Only if the last window you close is the one with the pinned tabs, otherwise they're gone and there doesn't seem to be a "re-open pinned tabs" option to retrieve them either. So at this point, the only effective solution is to use the bookmark bar and avoid pinned tabs. After I erased them accidentally once, I'm not wasting time with that "feature" again.

Nope, then you go to recently closed tabs and you'll see a folder that says "6 Tabs" or whatever and clicking it will restore the window.

If I update, I'm going to have to manually edit the few extensions I actually run Firefox for to increase their "max supported version" string to 5.x. That's one downside I can see with this new release system.

Most add-ons hosted by Mozilla have already been automatically updated for 5.0 compatibility:

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

Cool. Glad they thought about that situation before switching to this new release/versioning system.

Not necessarily. Install this extension and you'll be able to use any unsupported extensions: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat...

It'll also let you report their compatibility back to Mozilla and the extension developers so they know if the extension needs updating.

Awesome, thanks for the link. Didn't realize there was an extension to let you run extensions. :)

I would like to upgrade from 3.6 on the Mac, but when I tested Firefox 5 beta, it still seemed to have the same memory leak issue Firefox 4 has, i.e. I open two tabs without any add-ons and with a half hour's time Firefox is using 250+ MB of memory.

Me too, I don't like the feeling that I am now two versions behind.

Does it auto-upgrade, a-la Chrome?

Update, nope, it does tell you there's an upgrade, though (at least on OS X). I think the next step for the FF team is getting those cool assembly-text-diff things like Chrome has working. Until then, there's just fragmentation.

Firefox does use binary diffs for updates, and has for years:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Software_Update:MAR

It downloads the update automatically, but it will prompt you to restart a while after the update is downloaded (if you haven't restarted on your own). We are actively working on making the whole process less intrusive and more seamless.

Still, Chrome's updates tend to be measured in kilobytes, and the update for Firefox 5 was a few megabytes. There's room to shrink things.

This is because Chrome has a little disassembler built into their binary-diff mechanism, so they can get really small diffs (at least on Windows; for Linux they fall back onto bsdiff).

http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/software... has some of the details. Note the ~90% reduction in size going from bsdiff to this.

I want to use this for my own stuff, because that's cool as hell, but the Courgette source has pretty major dependencies on the rest of Chromium.

Doesn't mean it's necessary. The size of the update matters little to the end user as long as it's small and 5 megs is small for most people.

The update server was delivering the ~8mb patch at about 4kb/s this afternoon. It took me several minutes to update.

Even when update servers aren't dying under heavy load, my internet connection isn't very fast. There are many people who don't have fast connections, both in the US and elsewhere. Programs downloading things in the background render web browsing noticeably slower and make voip unusable. Update size matters.

It matters for some people, yes, like you, but for most, it simply doesn't. I did say most in my original post as well.

Glancing at stats from Point Topic[1] and Internet World Stats[2], it looks like only a quarter of the world's internet connections were broadband in 2009. If one is building software for a global user base, a fast connection is not a given for most people.

1. (pdf) http://broadband.cti.gr/el/download/World%20Broadband%20Stat...

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_...

It automatically updated for me when I restarted it, without prompting. This is on Windows.

I can somewhat confirm this as well:

Ran Firefox, went to the about window and it was already downloading the update. It also does autoinstall, but you will get notified if you still have the default Vista/7 notification settings (i.e. 'Blah wants to run this. Yes or no').

Next time could we get a link to the list of changes rather than a download page?

Mozilla, just call it Firefox, and make it always updated to the last version.

Yes, that's our basic plan. Updates are automatic and enabled by default, and the official press release does not mention a version number anywhere:

http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/06/21/mozilla-delivers-new...

Thanks! That is a great move, only the latest and greatest version around.

But does FF5 work with firebug?

FYI: On install, Firefox 5 said it was not compatible with Firebug 1.7.3 and disabled it. I happened to be sitting next to 5 or 6 Mozilla devs at the moment (open source bridge conf) and one of them told me to install Firebug fresh from the site. I downloaded and installed the 1.7.3 xpi and it worked without complaint. No idea what's up with that.

Sounds like this problem is fixed now: https://twitter.com/#!/shaver/status/83595913628631040

Yes: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/firebug/

Clever! I didn't actually notice that when I read through it.

OK, before I go get this, I have just one simple question: Is it as fast as Opera 11.11? I just got done bitching about how slow FF4 is on my crap PC, while Opera 11.11 is like absolute lightning on it. Why can't Firefox be that fast if Opera can?!

What, questions like that aren't allowed? I wasn't being snarky. What is it that makes Opera so fast that Firefox can't do also? EDIT: And I want to be clear too: I do not use the Turbo feature of Opera.

Opera is a lot better at being scalable from my experience. It works just as well given limited resources and scales up to being able to use all the resources of a powerhouse computer.

Why can't Firefox do the same, though, is what I'm asking. Why cut off an entire segment of low-end computers? Don't talk about bridging a digital divide while also creating one!

Extensions! Lots of extensions (in my case anyway). But that's what I love firefox for :)

I actually tried extensions with Opera. It slowed it all down. Unlike Firefox, where it doesn't seem to make any difference. Fox is also stable as hell.

I was hoping to see the back button be clickable from the left edge of the screen. It's a large oversight, in my view.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=571454

If you right-click on the page, "Back" is usually the first item. It's a lot quicker to get to than the Back button, even if it were clickable from the left edge of the screen.

Long ago I removed all the navigation buttons from my Firefox toolbar; I much prefer having room for larger URL and search bars.

I'm actively working on this issue. Feel free to add yourself to the CC list so you can be notified of any changes.

For anyone who went to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/releases/ looking for release notes and didn't find them, here they are: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/5.0/releasenotes/

And a complete list of bug fixes: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/5.0/releasenotes/buglis...

I hope glow.mozilla.org will be back. I really loved watching those download numbers fly by :).

Probably won't be trying it, I've been using FF4, and then Nightly, but the memory leakage is so hideous on FF since 3.x that i finally gave up -- after 6 hours use, FF4 and nightly would use 1GB ram, even after closing all but one simple tab. Forced browser restarts.

Chrome is where I've ended up. If FF ever get the memory leaks straightened out, I may switch back.

Mozilla has launched a dedicated group to tracking down memory usage problems: http://www.internetnews.com/skerner/2011/06/mozilla-launches...

Kind of nice to have Flash working again. It had stopped working for me when I upgraded to 4 (Ubuntu 64 bit). I'd tried a few suggested fixes, none of which worked, so I'd just resigned myself to having to open up Chrome any time I wanted to view something that used Flash, which isn't often, but I'm glad that issue is resolved.

Flash has been rendering badly for me on Ubuntu 64 bit since Firefox 4. It's annoying enough that I just use Chrome. Firefox 5 has the same problem, unfortunately.

Performance was fine for me, when it would work. It just wouldn't work. It kept telling me I didn't have the plug-in installed.

That said, my computer has pretty beefy specs, so that may have something to do with it.

What the.... I just ungraded to Firefox 4 not long ago, haven't even got used to 4's interface (I use Chrome 99% of the time) and Firefox 5 is out...

I wonder what's the logic behind this release schedule

Firefox has incremented the main version number rarely up till Firefox 4, but planned to change this for 2011. An explanation of some of the benefits and drawbacks are outlined here: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/02/is-mozillas-...

In general it is always wise to not waste too much time interpreting version numbers, as they often fail to reflect the pace of development that is actually happening. The Linux Kernel has been around forever, but only recently got bumped to 3.0rc1; Chrome on the other hand is already stable at 12.x.

From a personal marketing perspective i guess they do this version rush because the dummy "consumer" looks at a big number for comparison. Chrome started pulling big numbers to surpass IE, and now firefox is doing the same.

This is really not about marketing.

First off, Google rarely even mentions Chrome version numbers in its marketing material, and neither will Mozilla. The http://blog.mozilla.com/ post announcing Firefox 5 does not mention the version number, and neither does the main web site at http://firefox.com/ - also see Chrome's release announcements at http://chrome.blogspot.com/

We actually care much more about delivering features and performance improvements in a timely way than about having a big number before the dot. "Just add one" is a simple rule that saves us from arguing about versions and lets us spend that time improving the browser instead.

Non-technical users rarely even know about version numbers. Meanwhile, people who have any experience in software know that version numbers are and have always been arbitrary. Neither group would be "fooled" by a higher version number, so why would we bother trying?

(Did MacOS really have "more" changes from 8 to 9 than from 10.3 to 10.4, or does Apple just really like the number 10? Did Linux stop getting major changes during the 2.4 series and suddenly start again with the release of 3.0? Is the Solaris 11 release more significant than the SunOS 5.11 release even though they are the same thing? The "real" meaning of a version number has always been whatever the developer wants it to mean.)

I read in Torvalds "Just for fun" that the version numbers for the Linux kernel were always supposed to indicate how far to the next major release it is. In the book he mentioned that it really tough when he bumped the version number up to 0.95 because he "only" had to implement the network stack..

its moving more towards chromes rolling upgrades, luckily you are already familiar with them

The interface wont have as massive changes during faster releases

Is FF planning on coming out with a auto-upgrade system?

It's had one for years, and it's enabled by default. Firefox will automatically download a binary diff in the background, and apply it the next time you start the browser. If you don't restart for a while, it will eventually prompt you to restart. (Much like Chrome, except that Firefox currently uses a dialog box prompt while Chrome has a more subtle toolbar icon.)

Previously there were two types of releases: "minor" releases which were installed automatically because they contained security fixes, and "major" releases which prompted the user to choose first.

Now there will be no more "major" or "minor" releases. All new releases will be installed automatically, though I believe there is an exception if any extensions are broken by a new release. (EDIT: I mean, if any extensions that you already have installed will be disabled by the update.)

> All new releases will be installed automatically...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH.

...

Mind if I ask how you guys arrive at decisions like this one? We provide IT support services to individuals & businesses in three counties; automatic updates are, by far, not their favorite thing.

...actually, scratch that, nevermind. We have a new product coming out in six months and I think you just helped us sell it. Big time.

> auto-upgrade

he means silent.

That would be a hell of a achievement then, since Chrome doesn't have silent upgrading either. It still requires a reboot.

I don't think Chrome requires a reboot on OSX

A restart*

As in, Chrome must be closed, and restarted.

Gosh, wish I had noticed that during the edit window.

Ah, true. I guess a restart and a reboot are effectively the same on Chrome OS.

That's being worked on, yes.

> "I believe there is an exception if any extensions are broken by a new release"

Are you talking about extensions that I already have installed or any extension on AMO that might not work with the new version?

Congratulations. My first contact with Firefox still holds the #1 position for the greatest impression a piece of software has ever made on me (sorry, Linux :) )

It was called Phoenix (0.3 ?) then and was the pinnacle of elegance compared to the uber-crappy IE and bloat-loaded Mozilla. If I remember correctly their policy then was to make every consecutive binary release smaller than previous one.

That looks pretty cool and I want to switch from Opera to Mozilla (can't switch to Chrome as it doesn't work in Windows 7 64bit for me) and I want to import my Opera's information to Mozilla. I click File->Import...->Opera->Next and it shows just empty field. When I try to do the same with Explorer, it works. So, what is the problem, could you give me a hand? Thank you.

I need my vertical tabs on the right side of my screen, which is why I am still stuck in Firefox 3.6 land.

TreeStyleTabs is working fine for me in FF4 (and mostly did throughout the betas), does it not work on the right hand side?

And it is already marked compatible with Firefox 5, as well as Firefox 6 (currently in testing on the Aurora/alpha channel) and Firefox 7 (currently in development on the Nightly channel):

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/

Alright, took the plunge. I never liked tree style tabs much in the past, but I've tweaked it abit here in Firefox 5, also got FireGestures & Firebug updated too. Good stuff, we'll see if I stick with it.

The IE team sent the Firefox team a cupcake poking fun at the new release cycle ... http://www.geekwire.com/2011/cupcake-firefox-5-microsoft-fun...

Yes, but now I have to wait 4 months for all the extensions I'm using to update (ie, change the "maxVersion" string) to v5.

That shouldn't be necessary. addons.mozilla.org and automatically bumps the maxVersion string for extensions that don't touch features that changed in the new version.

I'm currently using an Aurora build (what will be Firefox 6), and most of my extensions are already marked compatible.

That's great! Didn't know about that change.

App tabs seem like a pretty cool feature.

I have been using them since FF4, they are really nice.

Using it now. Looks the same as 4. All add-ons worked fine. Seems a little faster but that might be because my previous firefox process had been up for about 3 days and had gotten all slow.

Yes there must be some kind of memory leak or fragmentation that makes ff slow after a few days of running. I see the same thing on os x mbp.

Yes, there were a number of leak bugs fixed between 4 and 5, and the Mozilla guys are chasing after tons more. They've created a project specifically to chase down leaks and bloat issues, and you can see the various tracking bugs there:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink

More fixes will be in Firefox 6 and 7, it looks like. Here's a particularly fun bloat fix that should be headed for 7:

http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/06/21/you-make-what...

Had the same problem although Firefox usually crashed before I got a few days out of it.

Thanks guys, but I'm not sure how you lost to Chrome

Thmbs Up Mozilla Team !!

Still no flash auto-update like Chrome? Then I'm still Chrome-y!

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