Ask Slashdot: Life After Firefox 3.6.x? 807
Mooga writes "I am a hard-core user of Firefox 3.6.x who has chosen to stick with the older, yet supported version of Firefox for many years now. However, 3.6.x will soon hit end-of-life, making my life, and the lives of similar users, much more complicated. 3.6.x has been known for generally being more stable and using less RAM than the modern Firefox 10 and even Chrome. The older version of Firefox is already having issues rendering modern websites. What are others who have been holding onto 3.6.x planning on doing?"
Why the anxiety? (Score:5, Insightful)
I do not understand techie luddites. Why didn't you upgrade? Why the anxiety? It's a fucking WEB BROWSER. Life will go on.
Sounds familiar (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't seem too long ago that I was having the same questions about Netscape Navigator 4.5. I survived.
Just upgrade (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop being a pain the ass and upgrade.
It's a browser, not some server software.
Not an issue (Score:5, Insightful)
I have switched to Chrome and am happy with seamless updates.
Really, what advantages do you have with using an old, outdated version? Smaller memory footprint, well, are you actually low on memory? RAM is cheap. You already said that version 3.X is slower than modern builds.
The only suggestion I have is live with the new version progression, stop being concerned with it and live with what the developers are doing. Either that or move to gentoo and compile you own!
Get over it already (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox 9 is perfectly fine. No problems.
Who gives a shit if it uses a little bit more memory. I just bought 16GB of RAM for $75. It isn't 1991 anymore.
I don't like the bullshit upgrade schedule where they make a few minor improvements and call it a major new release. That's why I'll probably stay with 9 for a while. But there is no reason to stay with 3.6.
I don't see a reason to stay on 3.6. (Score:5, Insightful)
Let it die.
(Then again, I became a Chrome user recently and haven't looked back. Their plugin and web app support is fantastic and built-in Firebug capabilities are great. Really love how well it synchronises with Google services and their Android version is looking very promising.
Re:Google Chrome (Score:2, Insightful)
If Flash is causing kernel panics, it's an issue with your kernel. Nothing in userspace should be able to cause a kernel panic, and it's unreasonable to expect anything running in userspace to fix a kernel panic.
Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Making your life "much more complicated"? It's an outdated web browser. Update to something modern and move on with your life.
Fucking fusspot nerds (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want to browse the current web, use a current browser. You may *want* to use an older browser, but clearly it's not working out for you. I may *want* to spread butter with a screwdriver, but I'd be better of using a tool appropriate for the job.
I'm sure you're feeling indignant about being "forced" to upgrade, and I'm sure you think your reasons for wanting to hang onto an old piece of software are valid. Nobody else cares. Either fix it for yourself or move on.
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except this Luddite's primary arguments, RAM allocation and stability, are apparently bullshit. Why even humor him with a Slashdot submission?
Firefox 3.6 has lower RAM usage? (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually don't agree with your premise. While Firefox had some issues around version 4, Firefox 10 is actually faster and more stable than Firefox 3.6 was, and RAM usage is on a downward trend. I understand that Firefox ~4 turned you off because I was really irritated by the regressions that came around that time, but things *did* get better. If you give it another try and make sure you give it a fair shake without already having decided it's worse, I think you'll find it's actually an improvement over what you're using right now. It's not like Firefox 3.6 was a speed demon in its day either... Firefox's memory hog problems go back way further than that.
Luddite refuses to upgrade. News at 11. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless you're being forced to run obsolete software by some perverse corporate mandate, you have no excuse nor valid reason for running such outdated software. You are the smoking clunker on the highway of the internet. You are the grey haired granny in the fast lane of the web. The road hazard. The surfing security hole.
Are you getting it?
You are the security risk.
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:5, Insightful)
I could have sworn back in the 3.6 days that everyone was complaining about its RAM usage, and that some pined for the 2.0 days of better RAM usage.
Isnt there a saying about the grass being greener?
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:4, Insightful)
there's a reason for that. It's unsupported hardware. It's been abandoned as a platform. You'd be wise to replace it.
Re:wow, really? (Score:4, Insightful)
(Acrobat reader here of course exempted, because it reaches the remarkable achievement of managing to go slower AND using more RAM.).
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:4, Insightful)
Firefox Sync is pretty awesome if you use multiple computers, requires version 4 and above.
The UI is a huge reason not to upgrade. (Score:3, Insightful)
The benefits you mention are immediately negated by the horrible UI that Firefox has had starting with version 4.
They threw out decades of experience, knowledge and convention, for absolutely no gains whatsoever.
Getting rid of the menu bar by default was just plain stupid. Then they followed it up with the status bar bullshit. These are among the worst UI design decisions ever made in an application that's so widely used. They both harmed usability significantly, with no benefits. The 20 extra pixels at the top and bottom of the screen, when most users (even laptop and netbook users) have over a thousand vertical pixels to work with, are not worth the loss in usability.
There have been many other stupid and unnecessary changes recently. What was one an effective browser to use is now a mess. Any performance improvements in the past few releases have been completely negated by these UI screw-ups.
It does us no good if pages now load a half-second sooner due to performance improvements to the JavaScript engine, if simple actions that were easily accessible via the traditional menus now take us 30 seconds or more to figure out how to do, if we can even do them at all, since the UI changes have been put in place.
Re:Get over it already (Score:5, Insightful)
You have a very poor memory as in 1991 memory usage was not 300-500 MB just for a silly webbrowser.
And your argument that memory is cheap is true for DDR3, but if you've got a bit older machine like I have that's perefctly fine for everything I use it, using DDR2, it's a lot more expensive.
Memory use of applications and Xorg too is just insane these days. Even Xemacs that I often use, I've got one editing a html file and it uses 32 MB (and that's a low value, it's often 100MB). Why? What the hell does it all load and do compared to the mid-late 1990s where you could use it without hogging all RAM on a 32MB machine?
Always the arguments by people like you is 'memory is cheap', but it's not really. Not needing new memory is cheaper than new memory. Not needing to waste time on 'why the hell is my memory not enough any more' is better than wasting time on it. Sometimes you even need to upgrade your PC to get affordable new memory. That's the case esp. for a slightly older PC of my niece. Your argument is also the reason why developers don't seem to give a shit about memory footprint, whatever they claim. 300MB for browsing some webpages? Absolutely ludicrous. Thunderbird seems to have a complete built in webbrowser in it to display HTML stuff. Nuke all that crap and let it do emails! Then it wouldn't need 200-300MB.
It's a vicious circle of upgrades that are not really necessary as quickly as they would be if applications didn't load so much useless crap and do so much useless crap.
Re:Get over it already (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not an issue (Score:5, Insightful)
That argument is disingenuous and irrelevant. On the same hardware, Chrome 16 would run for seven days and only edge up to about 450MB RAM use. Firefox 10, after over two weeks of continuous operation is hovering in the 350MB range. There is no excuse for a web browser process to hit the GB mark, none.
As for 2GB of RAM being cheap, that's a poor excuse. When Chrome hits 1GB of RAM, it causes my entire system to begin to slow down. It affects Firefox, GNOME, even my terminal windows. The instant I kill it and restart, everything is happy again, until it creeps up there and starts thrashing the memory manager again.
Opera welcomes you (Score:5, Insightful)
Opera is where I went after I stopped feelin' Firefox. Tab groups, notes, mail/irc/bittorrent/rss clients built in, Opera Turbo for those times you're tethering and need to conserve on your wireless cap, gestures, widgets and extensions (including AdBlock and NoScript), speed dial, session preservation, private browsing, reasonable memory usage, skins and themes, configurable download behavior, configurable keyboard shortcuts, a sane release schedule, and performance that frequently rivals Chrome. Also, it runs on basically anything - Windows (as early as 2000 with the current version, I believe), OSX, virtually every flavor of Linux, and Solaris (and basically every mobile operating system ever developed), and the Windows installer for Opera is nearly 33% smaller than the most recent edition of Firefox. While it's not Richard-Stallman-Free, it is freeware now.
To be fair, the only issues I've had were with some IE specific sites. The most prominent example is...basically every version of Outlook Web Access Microsoft ever released, even though the more recent versions have worked correctly on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. The Sharepoint at work does work correctly, however lists aren't rendered in database view the way they are in IE. Opera tends to take standard compliance to the point where it seems as if the browser says, "if I don't render it right, the site is wrong". While technologically correct, in practice Firefox handles these kinds of sites with much more practical grace, in no small part because FF is almost invariably a part of website design testing, while Opera is less frequently tested. Still, it's the rare exception for websites to not display correctly in Opera, at least to the point of getting the content you need, but even these discrepancies are relatively infrequent.
Re:Waterfox 64bit (Score:4, Insightful)
If they were smart, they would make ALL plugins run in a separate process, with the option to jail it. There's no reason for Flash to have access to even the files in your home directory. Jail it in its own process with an empty chroot directory. Then even I wouldn't have issues with it. I don't WANT to hate Flash. I just hate the way it gets used. And I don't install it because of that. I would install it if it were run the safe way.
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:3, Insightful)
If the developers of Firefox properly understood just how many things BREAK when upgrading a browser, maybe then they would design things to make it easy for two or more versions of Firefox to co-exist ...
I ... what? ... Are you crazy?!?
Assuming you're a developer building apps for multiple versions of Firefox releases, ... What!?!
You're woefully ignorant of basic features that your target platform provides out of the box. Got it.
This is the stupidest /. discussion EVAR!
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:5, Insightful)
10.0 is twice the disk size as 3.6, but again it's going to be WAY faster, but perhaps not much different on the memory landscape.
10.0 has HTML5 support and a totally different, much faster JS engine. I'll give them a break if it takes up a little more diskspace.
Re:As users, we're getting fucked over. That's why (Score:5, Insightful)
So, basically, everyone else was lying about how advanced they were, so Firefox should, too?
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are people really running machines with that little ram? I have 4GB on my 2 year old computer. Heck my last computer (which was work supplied and circa ~2008) had 2GB (Mac Leopard) and was fine. 400MB is a lot of RAM for a browser put it is rare that I'm anywhere's near my system RAM limit so I don't care.
For example right now I have: VS 2010 pro, Vuze, VLC running a video, iTunes, and FF 10 running on a Win 7 box which is notorious for being RAM happy (actually a good thing if the ram is there it might as well have stuff loaded in it just in case you ask for it later), anyways 2.8GB of RAM used. FF is using 200MB of that, I really don't care that 1/19th of my used RAM is my browser. The quick access to streaming porn is more than worth it to me.
Re:As users, we're getting fucked over. That's why (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, you can mod my posts down if you like. Fine. Just remember, though, that when you start talking your product up, you're elevating it from "community project' to "this is ready for prime-time". That means it'll get criticized. It doesn't matter what the price is, that door has been opened.
"You get what you pay for" is a common cop-out with complaints about OSS. When you do that, you're not saying "see, OSS really can replace proprietary software", you're saying "It's inferior, you know that already, don't bitch."
Don't play that card, it only hurts OSS.
Re:I am also a 3.6 user who refuses to upgrade (Score:4, Insightful)
"Example the back and forward buttons in Firefox 3 has a small downarrow, showing you a quick convienient history of the last 10 pages per tab. (I hear that's removed in 4 onwards)"
yes it was removed, now you just right click the big ass back or forward button to get that same menu. Now this may seem like a inconsequential change, but on my crappy ass laptop, or on our netbook, or my buddies tablet, its much easier, quicker and less frustrating to right click a large target, rather than try to nail a 16x16 pixel icon with a pointing device that takes input as a general suggestion.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You aren't even seeing the web (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, that browser is ridiculously outdated and web devs shouldn't (and often don't) have to cater to people who willingly choose to be so far behind standards. Fine, you don't like the new Mozilla, go find another modern web browser you do like. Either way, get over it and move on.
And what version do you think was current just ONE year ago (relative to your post and my reply on 2012-03-04)? Hint: 4.0 had not even come out yet. [wikipedia.org]
Don't be confused by the strange new numbering system the Firefox devs started to use at 4.0 and beyond just because its competitors were using accelerated release numbering. Under the traditional numbering scheme, the current version today (2012-03-04) would be around 4.6.1, making 3.6.27 merely one major version behind.
Or maybe we should be using release numbers based on year-month (like Ubuntu). Then we'd be seeing major release numbers 04.xx, 06.xx, 08.xx, and now 11.xx. Sure, it is time to be moving off of 08.xx. But it is NOT yet time to have expected everyone to complete that move, especially if they just got ON to 08.xx right before 11.xx came out (less than a year ago today).
At the very minimum, upgrades should not be required more often than every 2 years. 3 years is more reasonable. Ubuntu LTS releases are supported for 3 years (5 years for server versions). Slackware has been doing security updates to releases as old as 6 years or more.
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:2, Insightful)
The internet is accessible to all kinds of machines and operating systems. Just because you're using the latest and greatest popular platform doesn't mean everyone else is. I sometimes use XP, Win2K, Win95OSR2, various flavors of Linux, and even old classics like BeOS 5 from time to time. Why should that concern you?
Luddite. Piffle. Good multithreaded GUI software used to run in 1MB of RAM. I would rather be a luddite than dependent in the horsecrap that substitutes for good software these days. :-)
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox 3.6 will continue to work on the web. It may not work perfectly but it works so if you want to stay in the past you can but buying an extra 512 meg of ram and putting XP on it is a trivial and cheap task.
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:5, Insightful)
My phone too outpowers his PC but his point is still correct: His PC is perfectly adequate for browsing the web.
Just because Win2k is out of support doesn't mean that it's suddenly inoperable. It means you wouldn't run business systems on it due to the corporate risk involved.
It's not luddism to decline to upgrade something that's working effectively, especially when the upgrade has high cost and questionable benefits.
Switched to Chrome (Score:3, Insightful)
My laptop only has 2GB of RAM, so I can't run Firefox anymore anyway, so I switched to Chrome.
A browser should not consume 1.2GB of RAM (and Firefox 10, 11, 53, 1275, or whatever they're up to now, WILL consume that much if you leave a GMail tab open long enough)
Re:WinXP SP3 will run just fine on 512MB (Score:1, Insightful)
IE6? No. Absolutely not. Any web site that requires IE6 and will not work on something newer is a site that nobody should ever visit, and probably is residing on a server somewhere that somebody left plugged in and didn't realize it.
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue shouldn't be if a 10 year old computer is still operatable. Chances are, it runs just fine. I got a Commodore 64 that still runs like it did the day I bought it. The computer should be fine for running 10 year old software. However, if you are trying to run modern software on it, you need a modern computer. And if you are trying to go to websites that are in HTML5 and CSS and Flash, you need a modern webbrowser. And that seems to be the issue - I bet there is nothing wrong with his decade-old computer, he is just trying to run modern stuff on it. If you want to run modern software, than freakin' upgrade your computer already!