Where the author laments recent updates to Firefox 5 and later versions…
First, let me start by saying, we love Firefox. That’s a sincere statement. We’ve championed them in the past and likely will again in the future. However – as I’m prone to tell my kids when they’re misbehaving – right now we’re disappointed. Here’s why.
Firefox 5+ all have serious regressions that, for customers of MindTouch, make us look bad. We have advanced features like drag-and-drop attachments of files and a slick WYSIWYG editor for editing content from your browser. Those features work brilliantly in Firefox 4 and in the current versions of Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer. Because Firefox 5, 6, 7, … are broken, we’ve seen an increase in support tickets related to capabilities that are now suddenly broken in MindTouch. That makes us look bad. As a company with a browser-based product in the cloud, that’s our lot in life. We get it. Suck it up and move on.
Not so fast.
Firefox has been at pains to improve its development and deployment schedule to move at web speed. So have we. They release their product once every six weeks. We release ours once a week. If they have a serious regression, they seem content to release the product. If we discover a serious regression, we do not. We missed our last release as a result. We did a “make-up” release yesterday after having addressed those regressions and to get us back on schedule. Given our customer’s needs, we could come up with a workaround for versions of Firefox that are now “broken” or we can wait for them to fix it. Given their rapidity, it would make little sense for us to work around what they will (hopefully) fix themselves in the coming weeks. Indeed, since we started seeing their regressions, they’ve gone up two whole versions of their product from Firefox 5 to Firefox 7.
Let me repeat: we love Firefox. But – and this is a big But – we won’t be developing workarounds for Firefox 5 or greater. Instead, our efforts will continue to develop our product in a standards-based approach which Firefox 4 and the latest versions of Safari, Chrome and IE all seem happy to adhere to. We hope Firefox continues to make improvements to their development schedule and focuses more in the immediate term on regression testing. When we have more confidence in their releases, we’ll commit to supporting them again. For now, we’re considering Firefox 5 and later an unsupported browser. Use it if you must, but don’t expect us to fix issues you have with it.
What we support and what we don’t
* We support Firefox 5.0+ for Community members to read and access content.
* We do NOT support Firefox 5.0+ for Pro members (editor, analytics, etc.).
* We DO support Firefox 4.0 and 3.6 for Pro members.
Further reading
Mozilla hardcore contributors to leaving Firefox
Mozilla is acknowledging that their process is broken and asking for patience until they figure it out
