I keep hearing many complaints on how Mozilla is moving too fast with the Firefox updates with Rapid Release. I have said time and time again, that nothing has changed, other than the numbering. Mozilla was releasing updates every six weeks even before Rapid Release. Consider this Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was released in November 2004 and version 10.0 was released at the end of January and Google Chrome was first released on September 2008 and just released version 17.0.963.56 a few days ago (complete release history). The amount of releases are fairly similar, but based on how people interpret the…
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As we had posted earlier this week there had been rumors of a new ‘Windows 8’ logo coming. It is now official, Microsoft posted the new logo (as seen below along with the past logos) on Friday afternoon. So the color has gone from a teal to more of turquoise now (or is that Microsoft Blue?) However, as Tom’s Hardware points out, Microsoft still hasn’t acknowledged that ‘Windows 8’ is going to be the official title, not just the code name. …Microsoft hasn’t ever confirmed that Windows 8 will be what the next version of Windows will be called, but…
Adobe released an update to Flash on February 15th to address an exploit that affected Internet Exploiter users. Even if you don’t use IE, you should still update your Flash plugins. Also this would a good time to check on the ‘health’ of your other Firefox plugins. You can do this from within Firefox by going to Tools > Add-ons and then clicking the link Check to see if your plugins are up to date. This will open the Mozilla plugin checker site in a new tab where a quick scan will tell you which plugins needs to be updated.
Big changes are coming to the way Firefox updates. With these improvements users are going to be able to start running the updated version and the update process is going to be a lot smoother for Windows Vista and 7 users. Changes include how the updates are downloaded and installed as well being able to apply updates without Windows Vista and 7 users having to continually giving the application ‘permission’ to update (UAC prompts). More technical details can be found on Laurence Mandel’s Blog.
Found this over on Tom’s Hardware and it has me wondering. First off, keep in mind nothing has been officially released by Microsoft, but rumors are that they are going to give the Windows Logo a makeover for the upcoming Windows 8. Now a couple things that this new (and again unofficial) design have be wondering about. First off, I had heard a while back that Microsoft was saying that ‘Windows 8’ was just a code name and the official version may be called something else. Keep in mind Windows 3.1 which was released 20-years ago this March was the…
Interesting post over on Tom’s Hardware about Mozilla’s plan to create a special Firefox to support the upcoming Windows 8 (or whatever Microsoft ends up calling it) Metro Interface. For those not quite familiar with the planned Metro, interface it is going to very similar to the Windows 7 Phones. Mozilla plans on making a special version of Firefox that will support tablets and other touch devices running Windows 8 Metro. More details on the project “in progress” are listed on the Mozilla wiki.
There has been a lot happening this week with Firefox and a result a lot of activity on this blog recently. Here is a brief summary of what has happened so far: Firefox 3.6.26 Released Firefox 10.0 Desktop and Android Released Firefox ESR (10.0.0) Released Firefox 3.6.x support ending April 24, 2012 Mozilla-Central (Nightly) Channel moving to MSVC2010 / No more support for Windows 2000 or Windows XP (RTM and SP1) (Firefox 13+) As promised, more information on the Firefox ESR. Firefox ESR was created to address concerns with the current Rapid Release Process by Enterprise Users. The first Firefox…
Back in July we wrote that support for Windows 2000 and XP SP1 would be ending with the Firefox 8 release (November 8, 2011) due to Mozilla moving to C++ 2010 compiler. Firefox 10 was released on January 31st and still supports Windows 2000 as well as all versions of Windows XP. Bug 563318 (switch trunk builds to use Visual C++ 2010) has had landed on the Firefox 13 Nightly builds (has been temporarily backed out to address some crash issues). So those who are wanting to use the Firefox 13 Nightly builds will need to be running Windows XP…
From the January 9th, 2012 Mozilla Weekly Status meeting was mention that “The biggest piece of Silent Update landed: a Windows service so updates don’t require UAC prompts.” The link takes you to the feature page, but really doesn’t provide much more info. I am not even certain if the entire feature is done yet. If it is then we would likely see this in the Firefox 12 release on July 17th, 2012.
While it is easy to make customizations via Firefox’s about:config manager, it can also be easy to really mess things up. Hence the reason Mozilla has the below warning (which replaced Be Careful,This gun is loaded! warning starting with Firefox 3) the first time you enter about:config manager. You can always change a preference back to the default by right-clicking on the preference name and selecting Reset from the context menu. This is useful if a change has borked (technical term) all or part of Firefox. But what if you have made several changes and are unsure or do not recall…