firefox update has been broken for regular (“limited”) users for a long time, and in fact, it got broken even worse in firefox 2.0.0.4, which likes to keep downloading over and over the update, and trying and failing to apply it over and over for regular users.

It is rather a nightmare to deal with firefox on more than one windows machine, unless you work in the old Win95 model.

I keep hoping someday they’ll fix firefox to work with modern windows operating systems (such as NT, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista).

Some people like me would prefer to wait until I upgrade my Linux distribution to get the latest version of Firefox, so right now I’m still using Firefox 1.5.x which is what came with Ubuntu 6.06. I won’t be using Firefox 2.0 until I upgrade to Ubuntu 7.04 (which will hopefully be within the next month.)

First, most people that use Firefox are of a technical nature. I do not think that anti-phishing is a big thing for them. I am generally wise enough to realize that my bank isn’t going to ask for my password out of the blue or be at the am3r1can3xpr355.com URL.

I still open most links in new windows(but I do use tabs to open multiple links on the same site) and I still find news feeds with web methods instead of RSS. (Yes, I’m 37 and old-fashioned.)

The fact is, some people prefer lean and mean to the kitchen sink approach. After a product has been around for a while people tend to add more things and feature bloat occurs. I remember Firefox was started as a lean alternative to the feature bloat of the Mozilla suite. I am happy that the extensions allow people to pick and choose what the do or don’t want to install, but how come some extensions are now being incorporated into Firefox? Tabs used to be an extension, so was anti-phishing, I’m not positive but I thought RSS was as well. Yes, I see benefits to them but does everyone need and desire them?

Yes it is easier to install and enable them by default for a new user, but everything gets added at a price… longer download time, greater startup time, larger memory footprint, and more CPU usage. Why I am a developer and I usually have more CPU and memory than I need, it adds up when I am running multiple programs at once.

I am sure that some people will label me as a luddite, can you honestly say that you use every new feature of Firefox 2?

Browsing is not something that makes these particular businesses much money. Add to that, Firefox really isn’t geared toward business IT — it doesn’t (easily) support basic IT functions, like Active Directory integration. Thus, the cost of updating is even greater.

Home users have less overhead, however, but perhaps the benefits are not sufficient, or not obvious, to them.