"Bad: Firefox 4 instead of the up-to-date Firefox 7!"
Official releases:
- Ubuntu 11.04: 28 April 2011
- Firefox 5: 21 June 2011
- Firefox 7: 27 September 2011 (5 days ago)
Yes, that's a valid criticism: I used a 6-month-old official installer and didn't get last month's software without doing any form of update whatsoever! Clearly a failing of ubuntu!
I think the author has a point: it would be nice if Firefox advised the user that a newer version is available (or, alternately, simply upgraded silently a la Chrome).
I've been a Ubuntu user for a few years now, and it generally ranges from cumbersome to downright difficult to upgrade to the newest Firefox version. There's a reason hacks like Ubuntuzilla exist.
If you give it longer than 7 minutes, Ubuntu will prompt you to update - not just firefox, but a whole range of things. Firefox is just another part of the system, and doesn't really have any reason to update RIGHT NOW! as opposed to once a day when the usual updates come through.
In any case, if you're the kind of person that knows what actual features you will gain from FF7 over FF4 (other than just "sweet, a higher numbah"), you're a power user and should know better than to make the complaint he did - you should be able to do the extremely mild googling required on your new, unfamiliar OS to make it happen.
On another tangent, this kind of comment in the article is one of the big problems with FF deciding to do away with minor numbers and make every release a major number. "But FF 4.0 is so old, we're up to 7.0 now!! Bad!!" when it was the current release a mere 103 days ago.
Comments
"Bad: Firefox 4 instead of the up-to-date Firefox 7!"
Official releases:
- Ubuntu 11.04: 28 April 2011
- Firefox 5: 21 June 2011
- Firefox 7: 27 September 2011 (5 days ago)
Yes, that's a valid criticism: I used a 6-month-old official installer and didn't get last month's software without doing any form of update whatsoever! Clearly a failing of ubuntu!
I think the author has a point: it would be nice if Firefox advised the user that a newer version is available (or, alternately, simply upgraded silently a la Chrome).
I've been a Ubuntu user for a few years now, and it generally ranges from cumbersome to downright difficult to upgrade to the newest Firefox version. There's a reason hacks like Ubuntuzilla exist.
If you give it longer than 7 minutes, Ubuntu will prompt you to update - not just firefox, but a whole range of things. Firefox is just another part of the system, and doesn't really have any reason to update RIGHT NOW! as opposed to once a day when the usual updates come through.
In any case, if you're the kind of person that knows what actual features you will gain from FF7 over FF4 (other than just "sweet, a higher numbah"), you're a power user and should know better than to make the complaint he did - you should be able to do the extremely mild googling required on your new, unfamiliar OS to make it happen.
On another tangent, this kind of comment in the article is one of the big problems with FF deciding to do away with minor numbers and make every release a major number. "But FF 4.0 is so old, we're up to 7.0 now!! Bad!!" when it was the current release a mere 103 days ago.
Firefox does this by default, but its built-in update mechanism is disabled in Ubuntu-shipped versions in favour of Ubuntu's package management.