29 Jun 2006
FireFox 1.5 Upgrade

I finally got around to it: I've upgraded the browser on my Windows box from FireFox 1.07 to the new, improved FireFox 1.5. And I wanted to detail my experience here, mostly because I was intensely annoyed, but also as a counterweight to my frequent screeds on Microsoft products: it's really not the company I object to, it's their poorly written software and lapsed security. But they are far from being the only software organization with "issues"...

First off, I should say that FF15 really is new and improved: the various updates and patches that'd I'd applied to my old installation were beginning to show signs of wear and tear: pages wouldn't load correctly sometimes, and the browser would occasionally die for no apparent reason. The new implementation is, as far as I can tell, virtually flawless. A few handy new features were added, too. But the problems with FireFox are not really problems with FireFox the software: they're problems with the organization and distribution of extensions, and problems maintaining a consistent API for the writers of these extensions.

FireFox extensions are applications designed to plug into the FireFox environment and add certain functionalities, and they supply some incredibly useful tools. For example, the spell checker that I'll use when I complete this post is an extension. Even more useful is an extension I have that synchronizes the bookmarks on all three of the computers I use at home. Another favorite is a XML formatting tool that let's me view RSS feeds in a coherent way within the browser.

When I installed FireFox 1.5, it cheerfully informed me that these installed extensions were incompatible with it, and disabled them. It seems as though some API calls had been "rearranged" between versions, and many extension authors had not updated their code accordingly. Shit! Technically not a FireFox issue, but it certainly impacts my use of the browser!

Alrighty, then. First thought, revert to the old version. Easier said than done, unless I wanted to lose my stored passwords, cookies and other data (except bookmarks). OK, so let's see if there are replacement extensions that offer the same functionality, perhaps by different authors, for the ones that were disabled.

After about an hour and a half of searching and scrounging, I had all of the updated versions of my disabled extensions installed and working perfectly. It seems as though they existed after all: the FireFox updater just couldn't find them, or didn't know where to look.

The spell checker is actually better in this version, highlighting misspelled words as they're typed. The bookmarks synchronizer no longer returns various spurious errors on closing (which I suspect was the cause of some of my problems with my previous installation). So I'm happy.

But I'm incredibly annoyed that it took a manual search and install effort to find what should have been apparent to the FireFox updater. This isn't a software problem, it's a problem of organization and coordination, of maintaining websites and links, of updating lists and doing a bit of QC on submitted extensions.

I know FireFox is Open Source, and coded and maintained by volunteers. Nonetheless, if you're going to climb in the ring with the Big Boys (and M$ is a BIG boy), you've got to make sure your ducks are all in a row. If I had the time, I volunteer to do it myself: but with the volume of FireFox installations, that would practically be a full time job. And they couldn't afford to pay me, since the browser is given away, and they're dependent on contributions (which I have made in the past) and volunteers. With lots of free time.

This really leads me to question how well open source software scales in the real world: not from a coding standpoint, but from the organizations and structures needed to support such an effort. Open source coding (or information efforts like Wikipedia) work because the number of volunteers required is relatively small. Distribution and organization require much larger numbers, and I'm not sure they're available.

I'll stick with FireFox because I consider it a superior product. But I'm not sure I'd install many extensions for my mom, nor am I sure I'd even tell other folks about the wonderful added functionality they offer: which is a shame, as they're one of the reasons I use FireFox in the first place.

Are we going in circles yet?

09:53 /Technology | 1 comment | permanent link