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Mozilla seems to be hell-bent on alienating users, as they did it again:
An update to the Android flavor of Firefox left fuming punters thinking a bad experimental build had been pushed to their smartphones. In fact, this was a deliberate software release.
A Reg reader yesterday alerted us to an August 20 version bump that was causing so many problems, our tipster thought it was a beta that had gone seriously awry. "To sum it up, on 20th of August, Firefox 79 was unexpectedly forced on a large batch of Firefox 68 Android users without any warning, way to opt out or roll back," our reader reported. "A lot got broken in the process: the user interface, tabs, navigation, add-ons."
Meanwhile, the Google Play store page for the completely free and open-source Firefox has a rash of one-star reviews echoing similar complaints: after the upgrade, little seemed to work as expected.
Among the complaints are a missing back button, frequent browser crashes, and extensions not working.
Sounds like a buggy release for sure. But:
Unfortunately for our source, and the other Firefox for Android users, this isn't a mistaken release or a broken beta build: it's the new version of Firefox for Android, and it's set to hit the UK today, August 25, and the US on the 27th.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @02:50AM (3 children)
No conspiracy theory needed. Mozilla is a non-profit, and they're acting about as well managed as is par for the course in the non-profit world.
That they ever got to be worth mention in the first place just says a ton about the other browser that had any popularity whatsoever when it came on the scene (before Chrome existed and when Apple was mostly known as that other computer manufacturer that did something like make Fischer-Price computers...nobody really knows because it was about as popular as desktop Linux at the time).
For what it's worth, when Firefox had its heyday, browsers did a lot less, and they did what they did far better than they do now. Open source projects that try to do too many things are particularly fragile things, as the more complex the tool, the more managerial juggling there is to do, and unlike the for-profit world, there just isn't much managerial expertise in the non-profit sector.
Just be glad systemd and pulseaudio at least have for-profit enterprise maintaining them; the sort of havoc that'd come from them being in the hands of an organization like Mozilla would be enough to have me missing the days when the only thing I had to worry about with my OS was a weekly BSOD...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @08:42AM
That's a load of BS right there. Written most likely by someone that has zero clues about software, never mind FOSS.
Then I shall be very glad that a very "for profit" organization is managing the Linux kernel or GCC.
Now please go back to the rock you crawled out of.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @09:07AM
> Just be glad systemd and pulseaudio at least have for-profit enterprise maintaining them
We wouldn't have systemd in the first place if it wasn't for a certain enterprise. Should I really be glad?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2020, @03:45AM
The Browser developer is *ACTUALLY A FOR-PROFIT* company. Which is how that whole sleazy Pocket deal got pushed through. The Non-profit Mozilla Foundation has basically nothing to do with the Browser development and any donations made to it are not used for browser development, but for all the libtardy SJW stuff the useless foundation does while the corp does its circle jerk at Google's beck and call.
Mozilla is literally only there for the Dog and Pony effect of keeping Google out of Antitrust scrutiny in the Browser market. Come to think of it, it would be curious to find out where Brave gets its funding from...