Silicon Shecky

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Firefox 5 is out, this is not good.

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Mozzila decided to be aggressive with Firefox releases. Not a problem, just keep the old version till add-ons are all compatible. Doesn’t work that way if you want to be secure.

Mozzila announced that Firefox 5 is the security update for Firefox 4. There will be no other updates unless there is a major, and they mean major, security hole. Fine, I have no issues with doing that, keeping people on the latest version, making sure people know that is the way it is. Except for one thing. Only about 80% of the add-ons out there are going to work on Firefox 5.

The issues I have are now pretty simple, but extremely important. They are also why I think Firefox is trying to push itself to extinction. First, Firefox 5 came out today, same day as the announcement about Firefox 4 security updates. Second, one of the add-ons that don’t work in Firefox 5 is for LogMeInRescue, which I use on a very regular basis. I am now forced to use a different browser for supporting clients, because Mozzila decided that to be secure I had to update and break what I need. Not very smart on Mozzila’s part.

This also leads to another issue. People will stop upgrading, just so their add-ons will work. Of course, if they don’t upgrade, they are open to more security problems. Firefox becomes a security threat due to its aggressive upgrade policy. Someone better explain this to the keepers of Firefox.

Firefox 4 – Did they get it right?

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Firefox 4 is out. For a browser that re-sparked the browser wars, Firefox had been falling behind lately. Can 4 bring back Firefox?

I have a tendency not to download betas of web browsers. I’m not much of a bug hunter, haven’t been able to establish myself in those communities, don’t have a ton of time for actual hard core testing, and I’m not a developer. I just like having things work, especially where web browsing is concerned. So when I heard that Firefox 4’s final release was going to be the exact same as the last Release Candidate, I decided to actually jump the gun and start using it. I figured it couldn’t be any worse than using 3.6.

I’ve been using Firefox as my main browser since version 2, and overall have liked it. There have always been some issues with it, such as the memory hole it has, but they were things I could mostly live with. As  Firefox 3 kept getting updated though, it was all getting worse and worse. To open my iGoogle home page, which is set up with a bunch of news widgets, would take 5 minutes. Not only that, but the whole browser would be slow and unresponsive until it fully opened.

So I finished downloading Firefox 4 and installing it, expecting the same sluggishness. Surprisingly to me, my iGoogle paged opened in under a minute, and I was all set to go to other websites in other tabs, even while the iGoogle page was loading up. This is starting to look promising.

I continued on my browsing way, going to sites I frequent such as Tech Republic, ZDNet, Krebs on Security, and many more. All rendered faster than in Firefox 3.6. I did run into an occasional site which just wouldn’t open in Firefox 4 (Buffalo Wild Wings being one), but considering that there have been a lot of changes in Firefox 4, this doesn’t surprise me.

Everything isn’t all roses though. Java rendering (I enjoy playing Text Twist) and some Flash rendering is slow and painful. The Java being the worst of them all, as it slows to a crawl with a java game on Yahoo’s website. Once loaded, it works ok, but still a bunch of issues. Also, Firefox still uses a lot of memory, and doesn’t have the best memory management in the world. I have also heard reports of people who have had issues with it upon install, although the percentage seems to be small.

Is Firefox 4 an improvement? Definitely. Is it a game changer? No. Can it fend off Google Chrome? Maybe. Personally, I’m not going to Chrome unless I have to (Google has enough info on me from Android, Gmail etc, they don’t get any more if I can help it), and I don’t care of IE, Safari, or Opera. In the end, its really about what you are comfortable with and what works. On that, Firefox 4 is a solid, fast browser.