Perhaps it is just me, but it appears that, with the exception of the recent Pwn2Own contest, browsers have lost quite a bit of marketing traction.
Perhaps we are in a phase of browser version fatigue as Chrome is marching quickly toward edition 20 and Firefox 14 is currently laid out by Mozilla on the browser roadmap. You can't blame anyone who really does not want to keep track of minor changes from version to version anymore.
Of course, browsers still improve and capabilities shift here and there enough to make you rethink whether your current browser is the best browser you can use for your specific purposes. Firefox, for example, has been taken down to the mat for its unrestrained usage of memory that slowed down an entire computer to a crawl as soon as a certain number of tabs was opened. Mozilla launched a program called Memshrink that exclusively dealt with this problem and is still trying to find ways to make Firefox much more memory efficient. Product manager Asa Dotzler noted earlier this month that Memshrink has been hugely successful and Firefox 13 Nightly is two to three times more memory efficient than Chrome 17 - on a set of 18 tabs. The result most certainly will vary depending on the tabs and number of tabs in use, put I found Firefox to be using at least 25 percent less memory on the tabs that I usually have open during an average day.
Firefox 13, however, isn't due until June 5, as Firefox 11 will replace the current Firefox 10 soon and Firefox 12 will launch on April 24. The big news for Firefox 11 will be the integration of Chrome migration capability, which is a critical tool for Mozilla to win users back from Chrome, as well as the likely incorporation of Google's SPDY protocol that should provide a substantial boost of speed on Google websites and others that are using SPDY on their servers. If you have been waiting for silent updates, you will disappointed as the feature is now planned not to arrive until Firefox 13, with some clean-up to do in Firefox 14.
While Firefox 12 shapes to become a maintenance update with minor additions such as new media controls, Firefox 13 will be the most significant refresh of the year: Besides silent updates, the browser will see web apps integration, a new New Tab page, as well as the Home Tab application and memory improvements via incremental garbage collection. Further out this year, Firefox 14 is scheduled to receive the Windows 8 metro interface, a panel-based download manager and a faster session restore and browser startup.
"Oh, but I shouldn't NEED an add-on to handle my memory issues!" Well, yes you should. Add-ons are created so people will stop whining and get back to work. So do just that, people!
Do you have to keep updating and setting up your add-ons with each update of firefox?
Add-ons tend to update on their own as necessary, and the browser update process will notify you if an extension you're using is not compatible with the newer revision. Then it'll ask to check for a newer version of the add-on, or if you want to disable it until a newer revision becomes available.
Firefox runs as a dead dog today if you have a few decent plugins and tabs open at all times. And this on a high end i7 with 24GB RAM... I am not saying Chrome (which I use) is the perfect browser - far from it, but if I had to choose between the black plague and the ebola I have to choose the one that kills me with the least amount of pain.
We should be seeing it in firefox 3587763498276456590678487435897 coming out later this year.
Later they plan to finally introduce multithreading which will mean 3-4 times the performance on a quad core CPU
(version 5487875485458466789456725476547636495104501435-056145613405134591345138045387045)
But do you have to keep tweaking the settings with each update? I remember going from 3 to 4 I lost a ton of extensions for a long time, and the ones that I kept I had to set up all over again. It was a huge hassle.
"Oh, but I shouldn't NEED an add-on to handle my memory issues!" Well, yes you should. Add-ons are created so people will stop whining and get back to work. So do just that, people!
I say something is wrong with your own system then, because I don't have any of these issues on a Core 2 Duo P8800 notebook with 3.25GB usable memory.
Firefox's interface and engine can be easily tweaked for further speed and to have a more streamlined look. You can even adjust how much memory and hard drive space it allocates.
Sure, Chrome comes out faster in benchmarks with things like Javascript. But truth be told, most webpages seen by the average user do not contain enough javascript to make a noticeable difference between Chrome and Firefox.
Moving from 3 or even 3.5/3.6 to version 4 was a massive step in changing the look and coding of firefox. Many older plugins were no longer compatible, or had to be updated.
It used to take a long time between 1 .... to............ 2 ......... to ....................... 3..... etc...
Now is like every month there is a "new version" which are really just minor patches.
Opera spent 15 years to get to version 11... ff goes from 4->13 in a year?
In a two years... "Man, can't wait till firefox 69 comes out!"