Firefox's new rapid release schedule drawing fire

[vinism]

It took Firefox three months to move from Firefox 4 to Firefox 5. And according to Mozilla, this short turnaround between Firefox releases is going to be the norm for them. Lots of businesses are unhappy with the idea of new versions coming out every few months, especially because Mozilla plans on dropping support for the older versions. (see here, for example: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/mozil...drop-dead/3497).

I know we have a lot of Firefox users in the GPWA. Are you keeping up with the Firefox releases? And do you think they're a good idea?

[pgaming]

Love Firefox!!! But been noticing over the past six months their performance has dwindled with no clear fix in site. I constantly must reload pages, page freeze, very slow and the list goes on. I figured Firefox 5 was the fix and nope the same performance as version 4. And no way I am doing IE or chrome like control over my browser lol.

greek39

[xecutable]

Big news this time is, no addons for FF4 had compatible issues with the new FF5. Before that, themes would stop working, important addons would stop working. This time it was just like a regular patch update.

New versions of FF fixed some issues I had in the admin panel of my Wordpress site. FF3 was opening Datatables (a table plugin for jQuery) way too slow, over 30sec. Thanks to the new versions FF4+, it opens for like a second or 2.

[rak]

google hasnt caught up to the FF5 with its toolbar addon/plugin.

Wonder why the quick release into firefox.. must have been a major security or memory leak.

[genich99]

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/837711 - here one of the guys explains how to fix the toolbar incompatibility problem. It helps.

[RayUK]

As far as I can tell from changes in functionality, FF5 is really FF4.1 or something. I think they went for the 'brand new big version number *5*' more for marketing purposes than reflecting large changes in the codebase. Just a guess, IMO, etc.

[Nandakishore]

I do use FF, but not as the standard browser, so it won't bother me if they upgrade every month, but generally speaking, I don't like such rapid version change, unless it happens due to bug fixing-

[Leo]

Between the beginning of 2010 and now, Google's Chrome has gone from version 4 to version 14 - in just 18 months! No doubt Firefox is wanting to play catch-up because otherwise it makes them look like their progress is slower than Chrome, but the actual changes between versions is going to be much less than previous version changes.

I constantly must reload pages, page freeze, very slow and the list goes on. I figured Firefox 5 was the fix and nope the same performance as version 4.

Problems like that are almost definitely due to badly written addons or problems with your firefox profile. Try disabling ALL addons temporarily then restart, most likely the problems no longer exist but if they do then create a new profile and try that. I had similar problems but now everything is fine again. Of course the same thing can happen with any browser, I had much worse problems with Chrome, although now they're fixed and I'm loving the speed of Chrome for part-time browsing, but Firefox still wins in customizability.