I don’t usually write opinion posts so much here on gHacks, but I thought I’d share my views with you about all major Firefox releases (and all open source major releases in general). Since Firefox, Wordpress and other big-big community oriented projects rely so much on the community force behind them, when a new release comes, initially everyone is a bit lost.
If you’ve installed Firefox 3, chances are that half your addons didn’t work, after some tweaking and tuning you got some to work, but for many you will still need to wait until the author has time to update. Especially since much of the data is now stored in database format instead of simple text files, many of the extensions can’t work. Also, for me even with the very last release candidate Firefox shut down from time to time for no apparent reason, although I haven’t tried, only downloaded the final release.
These are the reasons I’m not upgrading, I’ll wait a month and then make the jump when all the extensions I can’t live without are upgraded. This hassle of upgrading is a problem with all open source stuff, however I think this can hardly be handled as “difference between commercial and open source” type problem.
If a commercial app gets an overhaul, no matter how great, you get maybe 20-30 new features, but even that’s pushing it. With Firefox that many features are added daily with extensions, themes and so on, so in essence when you have some problems upgrading, this isn’t a problem, but a sort of necessary evil. You can hardly expect all authors to jump every time there’s a new release, and anyway, many of them have developed their extensions prior to the final release, so you still have a lot to work with.
As an end note I want to say that despite the fact that this upgrading can be a hassle sometimes I have great respect for everyone involved with open source development and want to thank them for all the great extensions they’ve given us. If you can’t upgrade an extension, be sure to monitor the progress, even if you find a suitable alternative you can download the original when it gets its upgrade as a means of thanks to the author.
Tags: firefox 3, Open Source, opinion, upgradingRelated posts
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