Firefox - new is not always better

May 21, 2012 4:45 AM

Firefox - how to be only a little bit up to date ? Selenium (and a whole swag of other plugins/addons/extensions) don't work under FF 12 - what to do ?

I'm being nagged by Firefox to upgrade to the latest and greatest version (I'm currently running 3.6.28 on Windows Vista).

Everytime I've gone to do so I've found that a lot of the plugins I use won't work on the latest Firefox.

So advice on what to do !

* Ignore nagging, carry on with last years version ?
* Somehow find version 10 of FF (which would at least support Selenium) ?
* Something else ?

My favourite would be "somehow find FF10" but I've looked and I can't find that on the FF website - any clues ?

Alternatively - just how bad would it be to stay with 3.x ?

posted by southof40 to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Firefox 10 -- as well as other versions -- can be found here.
posted by ringu0 at 5:04 AM on May 21, 2012 [1 favorite]

I'm running FF12 and Selenium IDE 1.7.2 works OK for me. I presume the website only says up to FF10 because FF updates its version numbers so frequently (another browser might go 10.1, 10.2, 10.2.7, 10.5, 11, Firefox goes 10, 11, 12, 13, 14...) and they just haven't updated their website yet.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 5:32 AM on May 21, 2012

You can add the Web Developer Tools Extension and in it you can disable compatibility checking for extensions. That does introduce a danger that your browser could be unstable due to a flaky extension, bit I've never had a problem.
posted by COD at 5:54 AM on May 21, 2012

We've been using Firefox Extended Support Release. With it, you can get security patches without getting on the new feature roller coaster that has broken stuff repeatedly.
posted by advicepig at 7:43 AM on May 21, 2012

Whatever you do, please don't stay on an unsupported version like 3.6. It's no longer receiving bug fixes, including security fixes, so browsing the web with it will be increasingly dangerous to the health of your computer and to your privacy.
posted by vasi at 10:09 AM on May 21, 2012

Starting with Firefox 10, add-ons default to compatible. This means if you have an add-on that says in its manifest that it works with e.g. 4.0 - 9.0, it will silently continue to work in 10.0 and beyond as long as a few criteria are met:

• It doesn't use any binary components (very few add-ons do)
• Its author hasn't explicitly opted out of compatible-by-default
• The curators at addons.mozilla.org haven't explicitly flagged it as not compatible

That page is demonstrably out of date -- on the release notes page it says that the 1.8.0 version of the add-on, released a month ago, supports Fx 12. And here you can see one of the developers talking about supporting up to version 15 soon.

I used to agree with you that Firefox updates were a pain, but with the rapid release schedule and the compatible by default policy, most pains have evaporated. Having a release every 6 weeks means that there are no huge jumps where vast swaths of functionality are added, as was the case for 1.5 -> 2.0 and 2.0 -> 3.0 and 3.0 -> 3.5 and so on. This means fewer surprises, as features are rolled out incrementally instead of in huge bursts. And for the most part, the kind of changes that used to break add-ons have subsided, so even if the add-on author doesn't update the code every 6 weeks, it still continues to work despite a manifest saying it doesn't support that version.
posted by Rhomboid at 11:23 AM on May 21, 2012

Response by poster: Thanks very much for all the answers, very useful. Pleased to hear that Selenium will work with 12 and interested to read about the extended support release.

Thanks again to all of you.
posted by southof40 at 4:34 PM on May 23, 2012