Firebird

[trolly]

To find out if a new or changed feature has side effects. Sometimes bugs shows up at first after a few days.

[James]

why are there a gazillion old Nightly versions hanging out there in a repository ?

They are not available for people to use them in every day use like you are doing with a old random nightly but for so the devs and reporters can try and narrow down say when a regression or bug first occurred so they can find what checkin(s) is the culprit. I have done this a few times and one time for example was much easier as I knew the build day when the minor graphical change first occurred on Linux Nightly then. I waited for a while to see if it got fixed directly or indirectly by another fix as it was a minor annoyance at most and then finally reported the bug a month later as it was not fixed yet. I went through the builds between the date then hourlies until I found a small period and listed the build config periods and another person confirmed it shortly after and helped along with a couple devs in narrowing down the checkin that caused the issue and it was reverted. It turned out it was a glitch on Thunderbird also as somebody reported it for Thunderbird shorty before me.

[patrickjdempsey]

Once HTML5 is getting speed your old browser is junk.

It's already getting that way. Many websites are no longer compatible with Firefox 3.0... sites *might* support IE7, but *nobody* specifically supports old versions of non-IE browsers because only IE users are assumed to be so ummm stubborn as to not update.

I'm also extremely skeptical about claims of 4.0 being faster than current versions as even on my very ancient machines 4.0 was just flat out a dog with noticeable problems compared to 3.6. It had serious issues with memory handling, was crashy, and was notoriously slow at startup. Current versions are stable, fast, and secure... even on old machines.

There's also several layers of underlying security issues here because current versions of plugins like Flash are not compatible with old old versions of Firefox. So even ignoring the hundreds if not thousands of known, published security exploits in the old versions of Firefox you are using, old plugins are a serious problem. And spoofing your user-agent-string doesn't bring you any kind of security... it's easy as pie to find out what version of what browser someone is using with a few basic CSS tests.

[SnoutSpout]

I'm also extremely skeptical about claims of 4.0 being faster than current versions as even on my very ancient machines 4.0 was just flat out a dog with noticeable problems compared to 3.6. It had serious issues with memory handling, was crashy, and was notoriously slow at startup. Current versions are stable, fast, and secure... even on old machines.

Yeah, pre MemShrink I've been extremely skeptical that Fx performs better than 3.6.28. It took at least 5-6 iterations under rapid release since 4.0 before it got noticeably better.

There's also several layers of underlying security issues here because current versions of plugins like Flash are not compatible with old old versions of Firefox. So even ignoring the hundreds if not thousands of known, published security exploits in the old versions of Firefox you are using, old plugins are a serious problem. And spoofing your user-agent-string doesn't bring you any kind of security... it's easy as pie to find out what version of what browser someone is using with a few basic CSS tests.

Considering Adobe's record so far, I won't be surprised if current Flash plugins introduce stability/security issues if you go back far enough with your browser. And to be fair, you can't expect an ISV to support your platform ad inifinitum into the past.