So it seems Firefox usage is shrinking. Maybe that’s surprising for some but not for me. Why? Because they’re really bad at fixing actual issues that affect actual people.
It wasn’t too long ago that Firefox was finally bearable enough to use on Mac OS X and thus became my universal browser (used on Linux, Windows and Mac). The thing is though, it’s not the browser itself that made me do this, it’s the cross-platform extensions that made it such a compelling option and that’s one of the problems with Firefox.
They released 3.6 two months ago? I still haven’t upgraded because it’ll break some extensions I use and I haven’t yet had the time to check if they’ll work anyway.
This is a real problem with Mozilla apps. Their usage of a single version number instead of component versions means that extensions either work or they don’t. There is no way for an extension to say what it uses (and thus for the browser to know if the extension will work with it) so instead the extension has to say what versions it works with and then has to be updated every time a new release comes out.
This same problem has kept me from upgrading Thunderbird to 3.0 but there it’s worse because while FF 3.6 is an incremental update to FF 3.5, TB 3.0 is a rewrite compared to TB 2.0.
I’ve been watching the development of Chrome with some interest. It’s available for Windows/Mac/Linux and the most important extensions I use seem to be available. The only problem? My machine at work runs openSuSE 11.0 which is not able to run Chrome.
