General Musings

Firefox 2, are you dead yet?

I’ve gotta hand it to Mozilla. I mean if you’re going to upgrade a browser as widespread as Firefox, and you’re going to change some core javascript and rendering differences, the least you could do is make it easy to upgrade.

And they definitely did exactly that, in fact they just keep asking you to upgrade until you do!

The day the upgrade was available, a little pop-up came up on everyone’s browser when they opened it, prompting them to upgrade. I thought, “well that’s a good thing, but I’m not going to upgrade just in case there’s a problem.”, so I selected the Later option at the bottom.

As the weeks go by, I start to notice some of the differences in the new browser, certain pages would appear fine to some Firefox 3 users, only for it to not work in my Firefox 2. This basically results from the upgraded DOM and new javascript functionality. (e.g. getElementsByClassName does not exist in Firefox 2). So I steadily refused to upgrade, since I wanted to be able to quickly check to make sure everything looked right in both browsers.

The pop-up asking me to upgrade returned, and this time I said “never” upgrade, since I wanted to do it on my own. Well that’s not good enough for Mozilla….

Low and behold every few days the pop-up returns, asking that I upgrade now, because of security vulnerabilities within Firefox 2, and that Firefox 2 will no longer be supported. So basically, if you don’t want to upgrade, Mozilla is going to keep bugging you until you do.

Granted, I’m fine with this, because while some people might enjoy testing a website in IE 6, IE 7, Safari, Firefox 2, and Firefox 3….I think testing in 4 browsers is enough…..

I’m going to ignore Google Chrome exists as long as possible, and hopefully the rest of the world will, too…..

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