Mozilla released Firefox 15.0 today.
Seems like only yesterday that I was writing about version 4.0 being released. Here we are a year and a half later and the version number is already at 15, busy developers these Mozilla people are.
This whole rapid release cycle is very confusing, and all done to keep pace with Google’s Chrome browser.
Chrome may be an excellent web browser and is gaining a wide audience, but I painstakingly removed it from my system a while ago. I don’t care for applications that need to run start-up routines or kick off Windows services, and Google has a habit of doing both.
The only application that needs to run anything on start-up on my system is my anti-virus, that’s about the only one I’ll tolerate. For security reasons, avast! can run a service checking for a new definition update in case a threat is found to be making the rounds.
Firefox just introduced silent background updates, again to keep pace with the Chrome, but I don’t see that it needed to use an always running service to make this happen. While running the browser, go check if an update exists. Why couldn’t Google have done the same?
A well behaved application should:
a) Allow me to install it anywhere in my folder structure.
b) Allow me to turn down any extra bundled apps on install.
c) Allow me to turn off any extra features I don’t like after install.
d) Allow me to uninstall everything it just installed on my system.
Google Chrome is not a well behaved application, I just don’t see how it’s gaining popularity. It could render a web page before I’ve even thought of surfing to it, and I’ll still refuse to install it again. Chrome is a virus of an app, installs to your user directory, runs whatever services it likes, and it takes a deep knowledge of Windows to eradicate it from your system.
Five years from now, I’ll be happily running Firefox 147.0 ;)
When the devil came
He was not red
He was chrome