Friday, November 06, 2009
upgraded to Firefox 3.5 today
I finally upgraded from Firefox 3.0 to 3.5 today.
Firefox 3.5 has been out for a number of months. My reasons for not upgrading right away is that I wanted stability issues to be addressed and I wanted to wait for upgrades the addons I use to be upgraded.
Another thing that pushed me to make the upgrade is that I do not want to get left behind.
Old versions eventually get less attention from maintainers, for one thing. So there can be new vulnerabilities arising. That is not good for a program whose job it is to display files from the Internet all the time
There is more support for new standards in Firefox 3.5. HTML 5 is gonig to be a good deal and I wanted to be able to start authoring some pages that take advantage the increased support for it in Firefox. CSS 3 is another area where things are getting better and better.
Last week, Firefox 3.5 was patched to fix some possibly exploitable flaws in the graphic media libraries that arose during a retooling of them as part of the 3.0 to 3.5 evolution. I feel as confident about 3.5 as I did about 3.0 now. The paint is not wet anymore.
Flash has become a real risk though much less for me than a lot of people. The folks that are getting harmed by it are running Microsoft Windows and IE.
Unless I am testing web pages I am developing, running Windows Update to install security updates and bug fixes from Microsoft, or accessing a work-specific portal I give IE a wide berth.
I have been using the web since back in the old days when there was no IE or Netscape, just Mosaic. I have learned a thing or two. One of them is avoid the highest risk places, software, and media.
I also found out recently that the addons I use were as ready as they were going to get for 3.5.
Unfortunately, I had to say goodbye to Google "Bookmarks" as Google announced last month they are no longer going to support it. I have not used it in a good while so as brilliant a tool as it is, I probably will not miss it anytime soon. So addons, one of the things that usually holds me up a while when a new version of Firefox comes out are no longer an issue.
One of my relatives recently upgraded to 3.5 too and I wanted to stay in sync with them to make it easier to give tech support when they had questions or problems.
Firefox 3.5 seems really fast. I hope it stays this fast. I have noticed for years that when I do a browser upgrade as opposed to a minor patch, it really speeds up. Then it gradually slows down. Not sure if this has to do with some disk caching of pages or RSS feeds or what. If Firefox 3.5 keeps operating at the speed it is right now I am going to be extremely happy.
Firefox 3.5 has been out for a number of months. My reasons for not upgrading right away is that I wanted stability issues to be addressed and I wanted to wait for upgrades the addons I use to be upgraded.
Another thing that pushed me to make the upgrade is that I do not want to get left behind.
Old versions eventually get less attention from maintainers, for one thing. So there can be new vulnerabilities arising. That is not good for a program whose job it is to display files from the Internet all the time
There is more support for new standards in Firefox 3.5. HTML 5 is gonig to be a good deal and I wanted to be able to start authoring some pages that take advantage the increased support for it in Firefox. CSS 3 is another area where things are getting better and better.
Last week, Firefox 3.5 was patched to fix some possibly exploitable flaws in the graphic media libraries that arose during a retooling of them as part of the 3.0 to 3.5 evolution. I feel as confident about 3.5 as I did about 3.0 now. The paint is not wet anymore.
Flash has become a real risk though much less for me than a lot of people. The folks that are getting harmed by it are running Microsoft Windows and IE.
Unless I am testing web pages I am developing, running Windows Update to install security updates and bug fixes from Microsoft, or accessing a work-specific portal I give IE a wide berth.
I have been using the web since back in the old days when there was no IE or Netscape, just Mosaic. I have learned a thing or two. One of them is avoid the highest risk places, software, and media.
I also found out recently that the addons I use were as ready as they were going to get for 3.5.
Unfortunately, I had to say goodbye to Google "Bookmarks" as Google announced last month they are no longer going to support it. I have not used it in a good while so as brilliant a tool as it is, I probably will not miss it anytime soon. So addons, one of the things that usually holds me up a while when a new version of Firefox comes out are no longer an issue.
One of my relatives recently upgraded to 3.5 too and I wanted to stay in sync with them to make it easier to give tech support when they had questions or problems.
Firefox 3.5 seems really fast. I hope it stays this fast. I have noticed for years that when I do a browser upgrade as opposed to a minor patch, it really speeds up. Then it gradually slows down. Not sure if this has to do with some disk caching of pages or RSS feeds or what. If Firefox 3.5 keeps operating at the speed it is right now I am going to be extremely happy.
Labels: firefox
Hopefully, someday I will get this page to validate!
