July 1st, 2009
FireFox 3.5, Add-ons and Backwards Compatibility
On a whim, I updated one of my systems from Firefox 3.0.11 to 3.5 yesterday. I wanted to personally experience the speed improvements that industry reports have said Firefox 3.5 provided over previous versions. After working with the software for a short time, I have to agree that the browser seems more responsive and Web pages render more quickly. That’s all well and good, but my update experience was not as good as I had hoped. A number of my add-ons wouldn’t load. Unfortunately, one of them is the tool I use to create posts for ZDnet.
So, I’m faced with finding other ways to accomplish every-day functions. Although I can understand that this incompatibility can be attributed to changes in the underlying APIs. I would also guess that no attempt was made to provide some sort of backward compatibility so that things would continue to work while developers of these add-ons updated their code. I find it irritating.
Although this is ancient history now, I remember working with applications that were developed for early versions of Digital Equipment’s VAX/VMS operating system that worked quite well five versions later. Digital spent a great deal of time and energy thinking about backward compatibility. It appears that kind of thought has fallen by the wayside in today’s rush to get a product out the door.
Don’t you think that backward compatibility should be part of all software supplier’s thinking and development processes?
8:30 AM update
You just have to love the ZDnet audience! A wonderful reader, jjhanna, sent the following message shortly after my post went up this morning.
Simply download Mr Tech Toolkit extension
It makes anything compatible with Firefox Upgrades…
I did and it does!
Thanks, jjhanna!
Daniel Kusnetzky is a member of the senior management team of The 451 Group. He is responsible for research and publications on a broad array of technology topics. He examines emerging technology trends, vendor strategies, research and development issues, and end-user integration requirements. You can follow Dan on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 07/01/09
