Re: Firefox 2.0.0.1 trashes Java Console

Oliver Wong wrote:
Actually, I think what you experienced was the intended behaviour. You mentioned elsewhere in the thread that you were using "1.5.7". "2.0.0.1" is not considered to be an automatic upgrade for "1.5.7", but "1.5.9" *is*. It's like how Apache 2.0 and Apache 1.3 are separate products, and both of them are still actively developed.

Let me get this straight. You're claiming that the intended behavior is to nag the user about every single minor bugfix or tweak update, but not to bother informing them about a major upgrade's availability?

That would be equivalent to Windows XP Update constantly nagging you about bugfixes (which it does on a weekly basis) while Microsoft quietly stocked store shelves with shrinkwrapped boxes of Windows Vista without any fanfare and simply hoped people would accidentally stumble onto them while shopping some day.

Mind you, having Windows Update nag you to upgrade to Vista would be annoying, because Vista costs money and is as much a downgrade (performance, DRM) as an upgrade, but Firefox 1.x to 2.0 is a straight upgrade, and free, rather than a lateral move that costs money.

It should be "first version NOT supported", like String's "substring(begin, end+1)" interval idiom, so Sun would have said "need a new version for 2.1" rather than "OK up to 2.0" and everything would be fine. :)

Except that Sun (and other plugin developers) probably can't predict the future. How will they know whether or not a new version of the plugin will be needed for 2.1, unless they have a copy of Firefox 2.1 to test with? Contrast this with the fact that they DO have a copy of Firefox 2.0, so they can state "It works OK with Firefox 2.0. Anything higher, and we're not making any promises."

The claim was that Sun should have said it would work with 2.0.0.* or 2.0.* or similarly. The latter definitely amounts to "it may not work with 2.1" and the former to "it may not work with 2.0.1". It's a matter of whether you specify the end point or one past the end point, and in this case it looks like requiring specifying the end point was the more confusing choice.

More generally, plugin developers would have the problem of guessing exactly what the first future version would be where it no longer worked (or the last where it did). Maybe Mozilla should take a page from Sun's book here, and just publish an interface that plugins will always work if they adhere to, and keep a separate version (like serialVersionUID) for just the interface, which changes only when an incompatible change to the interface is made that won't work with old plugins.

Better still, they could have done what most software has been doing since the 80s or earlier, and been backward compatible with older versions. Any plugin that worked in Firefox x would then work in Firefox x+1, but changes to the interface, when such were made, would mean some plugins designed for x+1 might not work in x.
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