Firefox Upgrade

Blogging can be so frustrating when you have to deal with tools that upgrade and then glitch for unknown reasons. This mornings security update for Firefox is a case in point.

The early morning is always a busy, deadline-rich time for me, and as it’s also summer and my kids are out of school, I have an added level of stress in the am. Of course, when you add to that the fact that Firefox downloaded the update without warning, you end up with one frustrated blogger. Now, to the credit of the Firefox developers, they did allow the restart to be postponed, but when I chose to postpone it my copy of Firefox (not sure if this is systemic) shutdown and the quality feedback agent popped up.

Now, of course, I was at the end of a lengthy and unsaved post that was due in a few minutes. So, I vented and restarted the software, only to have it happen again, half an hour later, at the end of another unsaved post. So, the Firefox upgrade cost me about an hour and probably, in terms of stress, a year off of my life. I hope it was worth it…. 😉

And, I lost my Roboform toolbar, which saves me from logging into the 50 or so blogs I manage (just manage, not write) for clients every day, so I have to manually enter in each of their logins later today when I check the blogs. That also is frustrating. I wonder how many other extensions I lost because of the upgrade?

I saw this post on the same topic and thought the author explained the opensource developer plugin problem therein well:

Well, you don’t. What this means is that different things break for different people when you upgrade. Case in point — I ran an automatic update to Firefox this morning, and I lost four extensions that weren’t compatible with the new versions. I hope that sometime in the future, compatible versions come out for those extensions, but until then, I’ve lost some functionality.

What gets worse for software developers is when someone writes a “killer extension” for your system — an extension that everyone uses. You may find yourself in a position of not releasing upgrades until you’re sure they’re compatible with all the killer extensions lest you really irrritate your users or they just refuse to upgrade rather than lose their beloved extension.

But, what can you do? Firefox doesn’t want to allow security issues out there as IE has done, but with independant developers that have not monetary reason to upgrade on your schedule? This is a problem that will certainly plague Firefox, especially if they continue with these automatically downloaded upgrades.