Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Kicking And Screaming

I was browsing slashdot earlier and read a story, then I found a link to a question that made me waste the next hour and a half (check the time stamp on this post). Life After Firefox 3.6.x?

I hate firefox for its memory holes but it's better for my use for everything else. The progress from version 3.6 to (weeks away from) version 14 in the space of a year and change has left me unimpressed and with a bad taste in my mouth about the whole affair. I used it for two major releases and it must say somewhere in the US Constitution that Firefox only gets updated big-time so they change the version number every few years, but now we're on Firefox 11? I've got 3.6.x running how I like, thank you very much and I'll keep it! Except that it's about to be as unsupported as Windows 3.11 (for workgroups) is, and you really ought to keep something like up to date with security patches. So I started digging. For at least the next year or so I will likely be using Firefox 10 ESR and thumbing a rhetorical nose at the rapidreleasecyclefrenzymania until Firefox 17ESR becomes the next least-new thing out there.

Along the way I found that I will probably be able to keep using the same theme and user interface that I know and don't-hate. I also found out that some people actually think so much of security updates that they would consider forcing your software to break than to allow you to use it without installing security patches. What a mess.

Whatever happened to the good old days when you could buy a computer and run it for a decade with no security worries? Oh, wait, that never really happened, did it? I look forward to the time when Jesus comes to show us how to really run a planet. I betcha there's no computer virii then, eh!

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