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Reboot, again


I’ve confessed before and I’ll confess again.  I like to tinker and play around, particularly when there’s something new that catches my attention.

This morning, it was about the updates to Firefox.  Once, my absolute go-to browser, it had been surpassed by other browsers in terms of speed and just the modern look.  Fortunately, we live in an ever changing world where nobody stands still – including Mozilla.

So, when I was reading and poking around, I read about the upcoming releases of Firefox and the changes that will be made for better speed, battery life, modern interface, and memory management.  This all sounded awesome.  Plus, you can play around with the development of the product if you’re so incline.

Inclined I was.

Off I went to kick the tires on the Quantum release.

After a quick download, I was up and running.  I was pleased to see that it remembered my history and settings, etc.  As always, I head off to the preferences to see what tick boxes I could play around with.  Nothing particularly caught my attention although I did reflect on how clean and organized things looked.

Then, I was off and browsing.  It was here that I paused for a second.  The black background was different but the whole layout looked scarily clean.  I couldn’t put my finger on it until I started to go through my morning computing routine.  Then, I got it.

The cleanness was a consequence of most of the add-ons that I regularly use not being there.  There were a couple left though.

Hmmm.

Maybe they just weren’t visible.  Or maybe I just have to redownload them.

Off to the add-ons page I go.  I find the missing add-on and …

2017-09-27_0715

Uh oh.  Well, you know what they say about getting into things too quickly.

While I had done some reading and was getting excited, I never even thought that there might be a reality check with add-ons.  After all, they’re one of the reasons people flock to Firefox in the first page.

But a read of this page reveals that the game is changing for add-ons.

In the end, things will even out.  The add-on developers are just a bit behind the development of Firefox.  It’s probably not a bad approach as things change and you want to be 100% go on release day.

So, if you’re excited like I was when you read stories like this, you can learn from my experience and decide whether or not you want to proceed at this time.  At the very least, I’d recommend having both the old and new versions of Firefox around, particularly if it’s a mission critical use.

In the meantime, the new version does seem to deliver and I think it’s ultimately going to raise the bar once again for browser developers.

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OTR Links 09/28/2017


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.