5 ms·

In my opinion, Mozilla should have put more effort into seamless background updates before starting their 6-week release cycles. (Unleash the fanboys...)

asadotzler 15y ago
I'm the Director of the Firefox Desktop product (I wasn't at the time of the move to the new release cadence) and I agree with you 100%. We've been busting our butts for the last couple of months to get our updates ironed out and smooth. We've already shipped some of this in Firefox, including not nagging users to restart, killing the "What's New" tab that would interrupt your start-up, and reducing the number of incompatible add-ons by helping users get rid of add-ons they never requested (add-ons that were sneakily installed without user consent.) We've got "install add-ons in the background" code finished and in testing. We've got "bypass the UAC prompts" code finished and in testing. We've got add-ons defaulting to compatible with a blacklist for broken ones (reversing from a default to incompatible with a whitelist) coded and it's in testing. We'll be shipping these in Firefox 10 and 11 so the remaining bits are going to arrive very early in the new year.
- bradgessler 15y ago
  This is awesome, great work. I hope unnoticeable updates become the norm for all desktop software. I have to ask, when do you plan on dropping the version number from Firefox releases?
  - slowpoke 15y ago
    >I hope unnoticeable updates become the norm for all desktop software. As long as you can turn that off, sure. I don't like software bypassing my package managers. Firefox is so far the sole exception I'm okay with since I'm using the Nightly builds and don't update as often. But for everything else, that would be a nightmare. I like to be in control of my updates, thank you.
    - daave 15y ago
      It's time to let go and trust the developers of the software you're using to know when updates are stable, or when you really need a critical bug or security fix (if you don't trust them, why are you running their software anyway?). Package managers are a great upgrade from having to manually update individual applications, and are still great for servers or other cases where upgrading can break crucial pieces of infrastructure - but for consumer desktop applications, there's no reason to waste your time doing sysadmin work. When everything is a web app you'll have to get over it anyway. :)
      - gcr 15y ago
        For some things? Absolutely. For everything I currently use? The three hours I spent last week downgrading my Xorg thanks to a botched nvidia driver update force me to disagree. Granted, it was an nvidia driver update; I should have known better. But that's exactly my point.
        darklajid 15y ago
        I don't get the point. Was the nvidia driver update forced upon you and done behind your back? Or - did you do that intentionally and broke (by accident) stuff? If the latter (and that's what it sounds like to me), isn't that totally unrelated to silent software updates and just anecdotal bad press about the nvidia driver and its stability?
        megablast 15y ago
        He is saying something he wants to control the updates on, obviously the important stuff. The video driver is very important, but the browser is also very important, since a lot of people would not be able to get work done without it.
        gcr 15y ago
        Exactly. I chose to update my video driver, so I knew what broke. Imagine that update had happened automatically. Perhaps the day before a big deadline -- a stellar choice for disaster to strike! Now I'd have no clue what just broke and now I'd have to spend hours fixing it. Intrusive updates shouldn't be automatic.
  - gkoberger 15y ago
    Already the version number isn't really advertised -- especially compared to Fx 1 through 4. However, it is an incredibly useful thing to know if you ever need support. Version number shouldn't be dropped, however it should be, has been and will continue to be deemphasized.
- melling 15y ago
  Can you say anything about the "push" to 3.6 users? It was suppose to happen last week. I just checked on http://gs.statcounter.com http://gs.statcounter.com and usage dropped .4% in the last week, but I'm not sure how accurate it is: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-daily-20111129-20111205 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-daily-20111129... I imagine that there are many 3.6 users who simply aren't into tech news like those of us here, and they simply don't know they should upgrade.
- zachwill 15y ago
  Nice work — that's definitely great to hear. Looking forward to the upcoming updates.
- resnamen 15y ago
  That's great to hear. Update-fatigue drove me away from Firefox. Chrome raised the bar with their seamless update system, I'm glad to hear that FF is up to meeting the challenge!
- ericabiz 15y ago
  I'm really hoping you can get the remaining 3.6.x users to force-upgrade. We still have a couple people using 3.6 on our web app (where some pages won't render properly--we've labeled this 'wontfix' in our system since Firefox 7.0+ renders these pages properly.) Any word on whether there is any way to get them to upgrade? Last I saw, it upgraded them to a newer 3.x version, but then opened a page on your site with a tiny-font-sized line of text that said "This isn't the latest version"--not exactly obvious that 3.6.x is pretty much ancient at this point.
  - rprospero 15y ago
    Firefox 3.6 user here. I'd love to upgrade, but the new versions don't run on PowerPC
    - gcp 15y ago
      I'm not a PowerPC Mac user, but I understood PowerPC Firefox is now entirely handled by the community in the form of TenFourFox.
    - pasbesoin 15y ago
      There are still extension issues causing me to wait. Also, I should probably start a fresh profile, and the effort is not something I'm particularly looking forward to. Plus, the "Chrome wannabe" interface changes just piss me off. ;-)
  - Karellen 15y ago
    Seriously? Heck, 3.6 isn't exactly a slouch when it comes to web standards, particularly compared to IE, Konqueror and some of the "smaller" engines. What features are you using that 3.6 won't render right? Also, FF4 was released only 8 months ago, and FF3.6 received a security update less than a month ago. "Ancient" my ass.
zobzu 15y ago
I'm a Firefox user and I agree with you. Now, it's not horrible, but it should have been handled better. They might have lost the battle to Chrome in the long run just because of that. (as Chrome has several advantages such as TV ads, billboards ads, included with all major software and often without an easy way to opt-out, ads on all major websites including the most major one, various lock-in attempts with major sites supporting stuff only Chrome provides, etc, while Firefox's advantage was just being there first) Note that it's the above that makes me stick with Firefox - and also that lately it's been actually better than Chrome in many areas.
- asadotzler 15y ago
  We've added millions of Firefox users since the move to the faster cadence. Another thing worth noting, we've been shipping updates about every 4 weeks from the beginning of the Firefox product's life. They were noisy and asked you to restart Firefox and prompted with UAC dialogs, and showed a progress meter when you were started. There's nothing new about all of that. We're probably showing that stuff less often now that we're on 6 weeks cycles and not 4 week cycles. We've also turned off the restart prompt for most users and the "What's New" tab for all users. So, what's different now is that add-ons must move faster to keep up because we're not just shipping security and stability updates frequently, but actual feature updates that can break add-ons. Our big problem is not the noisy updates, but the add-on incompatibility. We're hard at work on that but it's a tough problem.
  - zobzu 15y ago
    As you said some of the issues have been fixed already - and hopefully we can put all this in the past soon - but. Whereas Firefox still gains users, it doesn't gain them as fast as the competitors and it seems to me that it is due to the bad press (even if from uninformed users, or from Google 'evangelists'). The bad press mainly came from the update issues, even thus some are gone now. That's the point I was raising.
sabret00the 15y ago
I don't believe there are many people that will disagree with you on that matter. I read something today that described the release cycle as "increasingly erratic" and that was on a tech site which should know better. The improvements are there for all to see though, it's just a matter of whether users are willing to give each and every update a go.

asadotzler 15y ago

I'm the Director of the Firefox Desktop product (I wasn't at the time of the move to the new release cadence) and I agree with you 100%. We've been busting our butts for the last couple of months to get our updates ironed out and smooth. We've already shipped some of this in Firefox, including not nagging users to restart, killing the "What's New" tab that would interrupt your start-up, and reducing the number of incompatible add-ons by helping users get rid of add-ons they never requested (add-ons that were sneakily installed without user consent.) We've got "install add-ons in the background" code finished and in testing. We've got "bypass the UAC prompts" code finished and in testing. We've got add-ons defaulting to compatible with a blacklist for broken ones (reversing from a default to incompatible with a whitelist) coded and it's in testing. We'll be shipping these in Firefox 10 and 11 so the remaining bits are going to arrive very early in the new year.

bradgessler 15y ago
This is awesome, great work. I hope unnoticeable updates become the norm for all desktop software. I have to ask, when do you plan on dropping the version number from Firefox releases?
- slowpoke 15y ago
  >I hope unnoticeable updates become the norm for all desktop software. As long as you can turn that off, sure. I don't like software bypassing my package managers. Firefox is so far the sole exception I'm okay with since I'm using the Nightly builds and don't update as often. But for everything else, that would be a nightmare. I like to be in control of my updates, thank you.
  - daave 15y ago
    It's time to let go and trust the developers of the software you're using to know when updates are stable, or when you really need a critical bug or security fix (if you don't trust them, why are you running their software anyway?). Package managers are a great upgrade from having to manually update individual applications, and are still great for servers or other cases where upgrading can break crucial pieces of infrastructure - but for consumer desktop applications, there's no reason to waste your time doing sysadmin work. When everything is a web app you'll have to get over it anyway. :)
    - gcr 15y ago
      For some things? Absolutely. For everything I currently use? The three hours I spent last week downgrading my Xorg thanks to a botched nvidia driver update force me to disagree. Granted, it was an nvidia driver update; I should have known better. But that's exactly my point.
      - darklajid 15y ago
        I don't get the point. Was the nvidia driver update forced upon you and done behind your back? Or - did you do that intentionally and broke (by accident) stuff? If the latter (and that's what it sounds like to me), isn't that totally unrelated to silent software updates and just anecdotal bad press about the nvidia driver and its stability?
        megablast 15y ago
        He is saying something he wants to control the updates on, obviously the important stuff. The video driver is very important, but the browser is also very important, since a lot of people would not be able to get work done without it.
        gcr 15y ago
        Exactly. I chose to update my video driver, so I knew what broke. Imagine that update had happened automatically. Perhaps the day before a big deadline -- a stellar choice for disaster to strike! Now I'd have no clue what just broke and now I'd have to spend hours fixing it. Intrusive updates shouldn't be automatic.
- gkoberger 15y ago
  Already the version number isn't really advertised -- especially compared to Fx 1 through 4. However, it is an incredibly useful thing to know if you ever need support. Version number shouldn't be dropped, however it should be, has been and will continue to be deemphasized.
melling 15y ago
Can you say anything about the "push" to 3.6 users? It was suppose to happen last week. I just checked on http://gs.statcounter.com http://gs.statcounter.com and usage dropped .4% in the last week, but I'm not sure how accurate it is: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-daily-20111129-20111205 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-daily-20111129... I imagine that there are many 3.6 users who simply aren't into tech news like those of us here, and they simply don't know they should upgrade.
zachwill 15y ago
Nice work — that's definitely great to hear. Looking forward to the upcoming updates.
resnamen 15y ago
That's great to hear. Update-fatigue drove me away from Firefox. Chrome raised the bar with their seamless update system, I'm glad to hear that FF is up to meeting the challenge!
ericabiz 15y ago
I'm really hoping you can get the remaining 3.6.x users to force-upgrade. We still have a couple people using 3.6 on our web app (where some pages won't render properly--we've labeled this 'wontfix' in our system since Firefox 7.0+ renders these pages properly.) Any word on whether there is any way to get them to upgrade? Last I saw, it upgraded them to a newer 3.x version, but then opened a page on your site with a tiny-font-sized line of text that said "This isn't the latest version"--not exactly obvious that 3.6.x is pretty much ancient at this point.
- rprospero 15y ago
  Firefox 3.6 user here. I'd love to upgrade, but the new versions don't run on PowerPC
  - gcp 15y ago
    I'm not a PowerPC Mac user, but I understood PowerPC Firefox is now entirely handled by the community in the form of TenFourFox.
  - pasbesoin 15y ago
    There are still extension issues causing me to wait. Also, I should probably start a fresh profile, and the effort is not something I'm particularly looking forward to. Plus, the "Chrome wannabe" interface changes just piss me off. ;-)
- Karellen 15y ago
  Seriously? Heck, 3.6 isn't exactly a slouch when it comes to web standards, particularly compared to IE, Konqueror and some of the "smaller" engines. What features are you using that 3.6 won't render right? Also, FF4 was released only 8 months ago, and FF3.6 received a security update less than a month ago. "Ancient" my ass.

zobzu 15y ago

I'm a Firefox user and I agree with you. Now, it's not horrible, but it should have been handled better. They might have lost the battle to Chrome in the long run just because of that. (as Chrome has several advantages such as TV ads, billboards ads, included with all major software and often without an easy way to opt-out, ads on all major websites including the most major one, various lock-in attempts with major sites supporting stuff only Chrome provides, etc, while Firefox's advantage was just being there first) Note that it's the above that makes me stick with Firefox - and also that lately it's been actually better than Chrome in many areas.

asadotzler 15y ago
We've added millions of Firefox users since the move to the faster cadence. Another thing worth noting, we've been shipping updates about every 4 weeks from the beginning of the Firefox product's life. They were noisy and asked you to restart Firefox and prompted with UAC dialogs, and showed a progress meter when you were started. There's nothing new about all of that. We're probably showing that stuff less often now that we're on 6 weeks cycles and not 4 week cycles. We've also turned off the restart prompt for most users and the "What's New" tab for all users. So, what's different now is that add-ons must move faster to keep up because we're not just shipping security and stability updates frequently, but actual feature updates that can break add-ons. Our big problem is not the noisy updates, but the add-on incompatibility. We're hard at work on that but it's a tough problem.
- zobzu 15y ago
  As you said some of the issues have been fixed already - and hopefully we can put all this in the past soon - but. Whereas Firefox still gains users, it doesn't gain them as fast as the competitors and it seems to me that it is due to the bad press (even if from uninformed users, or from Google 'evangelists'). The bad press mainly came from the update issues, even thus some are gone now. That's the point I was raising.

sabret00the 15y ago

I don't believe there are many people that will disagree with you on that matter. I read something today that described the release cycle as "increasingly erratic" and that was on a tech site which should know better. The improvements are there for all to see though, it's just a matter of whether users are willing to give each and every update a go.