Firefox 6 is Out… But Does Anyone Care?

Well, it is out. I downloaded it. It doesn’t look different. It is faster. But, still not as fast as Chrome. Yawn.

Firefox 6 ships, but we shouldn’t really pay attention

“The Mozilla organization has shipped Firefox 6, eight weeks after the release of Firefox 5. Just as with Firefox 5, not a lot has visibly changed. The domain name in the address bar is now highlighted, to make phishing more apparent—mimicing a similar feature already found in Internet Explorer—sites with ‘extended verification’ certificates appear slightly differently in the address bar, and Mozilla is claiming that there’s some speed improvement. And that’s about the extent of it. More substantial improvements are in the pipeline for Firefox 7—most notably a JavaScript engine that uses much less memory—but nothing so substantial is evident in version 6.

This smaller release—bug fixes, behind-the-scenes improvements, but little user-visible difference—is likely to be the norm for future Firefox versions. Bigger features will still arrive from time to time, but for the most part, users will just experience a continuous improvement. Firefox updates should be automatic and essentially invisible. Even articles such as this one, which attach some significance to the new release, are probably not what Mozilla wants—press coverage should focus on features, not version numbers. Mozilla—as with Google—wants developers to cease targeting specific browser versions, and instead target standards; the regular releases are one step towards achieving that goal.

Another key part is downplaying version numbers. Again, Chrome is the obvious example here; if you look at the Chrome download page, for example, there’s no indication of which version of Chrome you’re going to get. It’s just ‘the latest.’

However, Mozilla wants to take this a step further. A feature request entered into Mozilla’s bug system (feature requests aren’t bugs in any traditional sense, but Mozilla uses one system for managing everything) calls for the removal of the version number from Firefox’s ‘About’ dialog. Instead, the intent is to make the About box do two things; show the product name and links to legal information, as it already does, and show how long ago Firefox checked that it was up-to-date, with some kind of provision to check right now. There won’t be a version number—just an indicator of whether the browser is up-to-date or not.”