Firefox 6 silently released ahead of official unwrap date

Fixed it for ya.

Firefox 4.02

Expected beter from El Reg

Joining the horde of crappy "news" sites after a few advertising dollars by being "first" to announce a new release?

As always, the appearance of a build on the FTP servers does not mean it has been publicly released. The FTP servers aren't load-balanced and are not intended for end users to get release - it the mechanism for pushing the release files to the various international release HTTP servers so that when the release is officially announce they don't have a server meltdown.

Thats weird

My mac prompted me yesterday morning to upgrade so it's already been running 6 for over a day now. Somehow at one point the update servers must have had it up.

Saying that this has now broken most of the plugins as they are now reporting incompatible etc :-(

I'm not sure what this fad about releasing major versions every time is but it's not going to end well at the rate

Support

Does this mean that the version 5 I'm running today will no longer be supported tomorrow? Oh good, more reinstalls,

IE9 looks better every day - if I could just find a decent ad blocker.

Mozilla haven't quite got it on marketing, have they?

Surely the idea is to get a load of sweaty geeks queuing outside a store at 2am, ready to walk off with the merchandise!

(Oh, sorry, that was ten days' ago...)

I suggest...

I happen to know a little about the history of pinball machines (a friend of mine is one of the bigger pinball collectors in Italy). In the fifties, pinball machines had scores that advanced by one when you hit some target. In the sixties, they advanced by ten. In the seventies, by one hundred. The latest ones, by thousands. I call this the "score inflation". It's psychologically pleasing for the player to score "1 billion, 234 millions and 9 thousands" points instead of "12.349" points. But if you look at the pinball machine code (or mechanical relays, depending on the year) you will see that the two scores need the same effort to be reached.

Now, it seems a little silly, but I believe that later on we will see version numbers increase by ten, then by a hundred, and so on.

Now we have Firefox 6. In 6 months we will have firefox 12, then Opera could switch from 12 to 22 to play "catch up" with Firefox, and IE from 9 to 19... then Firefox will release version 23, and Opera version 40 (to make it even, they will jump over version 32), and eventually Firefox vill release version 100, and so on.

I suppose I will see somebrowers release "345K" (as in 345.000) before I die.

"In 6 months we will have firefox 12"

How about Firefox 201204 ? That way you can have a major release every month without resorting to decimals and everybody will know precisely what it means and how old it is.

Bah

Most 'users' don't understand Multiple decimal points and they should not be used by anything Non SysAdmin/Programer only!

Real men do. I'm using FF 6.0.1.2

Chrome Ignorance

So chrome does major updates constantly? What of it, they don't blow a trumpet, call a press release or even push dialogues to the user (unless you don't shut down chrome for days). To most users it's the most awesome update model ever.

It never bugs you.

Except when the Google monster decides to make a UI change you don't like! Then it's a horrible case of update rape.

FFS, You do realize....

That the same codebase was released awhile ago as Firefox 6 beta 5. Its not exactly brand new. If you're on the Beta Channel you've been running the same build as the release-version Firefox 6 for nearly two weeks. Nothing major's landed since.

And Doug, you might want to upgrade, there are several trunk level vulns, most of which have PoC code, that the 3.x branch hasn't fixed and may not be able to without blocking further release on that branch.