Sorry for your problems with Firefox and those Add-ons. Add-on developers are, and always have been, responsible for keeping their Firefox Add-ons up to date as new versions of Firefox are released. You should have received a notice about specific incompatible Add-ons at the start of the update procedure, which had a cancel button to allow you to abort the update.

Contact Real Player and SpeedBit about the availability of Firefox 5.0 compatible add-ons, or what their plans are for providing the same.

Yes, I did get a message that it was incompatible with Real Player Plus, but their customer support does not appear to know anything about this. They messed with my computer yesterday for three hours downloading and reinstalling Real Player and obviously didn't fix the problem, so not only did they waste my time, they also in the process lost all my playlists, of which I didn't have backups, so I'm mad as **** as you might guess. Why is Firefox incompatible? The only solution I have is to downgrade. Do you notify these people when you are going live with an upgrade and what they will have to do to fix their software to work with it? How long in advance?

Transcript of chat with RealPlayer representative today.

: Hi, my name is Pxxxxx Xxxxxx. How may I help you? Are you there?

Martin Willcocks: Hi Pxxxxx. Yesterday I had a tech session re RealPlayer Plus and its addons being incompatible with Firefox 5. Your tech took over my computer and did a clean install, and in the process I lost 7 videos (which I've re-downloaded) but worse, lost all my playlists. I don't know how to save them or whether they can be restored after the clean install. WHEN will RealPlayer Plus be updated so that it works with Firefox 5.0? I had to revert to 4.0.1 to get the product to work.

: I'm sorry your playlist was deleted after a clean install of RealPlayer. Let me explain.

Martin Willcocks: About ten playlists, not one

: When you re-install RealPlayer, your playlists will be deleted, and they cannot be restored. However, you can now backup or save your playlist. Simply click on the diskette logo or icon at the bottom of the playlist on the right part of your RealPlayer library and save it to your desktop.

Martin Willcocks: And restore it the same way?

: Yes, Martin. The Mozilla Firefox 5 browser is already compatible with RealPlayer.

Martin Willcocks: Your tech should have done this before the uninstall.

: Sorry about that, Martin.

Martin Willcocks: The Firefox 5 browser is NOT compatible with RealPlayer Plus add-ons, SpeedBit etc. That's why I had to revert to 4.0.1 and why I reported that the tech had failed to solve the problem. Since I paid $40 for the addons I expect them to work 100% of the time year round, OK? When will you update the addons so that RealPlayer Plus will download from Firefox5. It WILL NOT currently. You need to fix this.

: Ok, our product development team is working on releasing a new patch to make our download plug-in compatible with Firefox 5 completely. Please check this at a later time or contact us again for updates.

Martin Willcocks: Send me an email when you've completed the updates.

: I will, Martin.

Martin Willcocks: OK. Any idea of how long that will take?

: As of now we don't have yet an exact time and date.

Martin Willcocks: Within a week, two weeks, a month, three months, a year?

: I believe it's just weeks or months.

Martin Willcocks: Months isn't good enough. Did Firefox advise you of upcoming changes and tell you how to make your product compatible in advance of the official release of 5.0? BTW they just released 5.0.1

 : Our product development team is currently working on releasing a new patch to make our download plug-in compatible with Firefox 5.0.1. Don't worry, I'll update you about this.

Martin Willcocks: OK

: Thank you for being so kind and patient. Is there anything else that I can help you with?

Martin Willcocks: Not right now. Thanks.

: You're welcome.

Martin Willcocks: Send me a transcript of the chat, please

: Thank you for using Real Live Chat. It was a pleasure assisting you.

What I get from this is that Real has not yet evaluated what changes they will need to make and it could be months before they restore the functionality of the RealPlayer Plus with Firefox 5.x

Why is is unreasonable for Mozilla to give these outside companies that use plugins to interact with Firefox all the information they need to make their programs compatible BEFORE the new update to Firefox goes live? Did Mozilla give this information to Real before the update? How much time elapsed before the update went live? Was it a reasonable expectation that the external plugin developers would have adequate time to update their plugins and test them before Mozilla released the new version? Why should users have to give up functionality they expect to be in place before the release occurs? I'm far from satisfied that this question has been answered adequately.

No, Mozilla doesn't "give" information to anyone. Firefox is open source, and is available for anyone who wants to download either the source code or pre-release versions of Firefox to test their Plugins or other Add-ons with. Nothing is held back (except for information about unpatched security issues, and that is need to know) from anyone - individuals or companies. Anyone can participate in the development of Firefox, either writing code or testing and submitting Bug reports.

When a company like Real decides that they want to make a Plugin or Add-on for Firefox, Firefox is the primary application that they are adding something to. When Firefox changes something or a new version is released, the person doing the adding on needs to follow Mozilla's lead - they make the rules and the add-on developer has to follow Mozilla's rules.

Real better not take "months" evaluating Firefox 5, because Firefox 6.0 is due to be released in just over two weeks! Under the new Fast Release schedule for 2011, a new version of Firefox will be released every 6 weeks. If Real and other plugin developers can't get with Mozilla's schedule, they need to get off the train and tell their customer's that they unable or unwilling to keep up with Mozilla's schedule. If they don't both they and Mozilla are gonna continue to have unhappy users.

Thanks very much for your clarification, "the-edmeister"! However, what you're saying is that I can look forward to not being able to use the features of RealPlayer Plus for most of this year because of Mozilla's Fast Release schedule for Firefox. Not likely that every other company will choose to release a new version of their plugins every six weeks. This will make Firefox no longer the choice for users. We'll have to live with Safari, IE10, Chrome, and all the other browsers out there!

You can take that bassackwards mindset if you care to, but if Real Player is selling a product with a Firefox add-on that they can't update in a timely manner for their customers, they are they are the one who is at fault. When you sell software that is made to work with another product, and that product changes, you have two courses of action; either keep up with the changes in the base product and a keep your customers satisfied or fall behind and leave your customers without a working product that they paid you for. If you have to spend more time fixing stuff than you originally bargained for and that costs you money- tough, that's what business is all about. Blaming the other guy for your misjudgments or making your customers wait is the "wimp out" approach.

Look, I don't work for Mozilla, I'm just another user, and I am not happy with this new release scheme either. I am still using a 3.6.20pre tester version as my primary Firefox installation, mostly because I use 60 extensions. Most of those extensions have been updated for Firefox 4/5/6/7, a few look to be abandoned, while a few more are extensions that "died" many versions ago and I was able "fix" them so I could keep using them when their author abandoned them. Long term Firefox users have been thru this before, I am still using Firefox 2.0.0.20 for part of each day for specific websites due to extensions that were abandoned by their developer when Firefox 3.0 came out.

Are you aware that Google Chrome is also on a 6 week update schedule? Most users are blind to that, because Chrome's update routine is hidden and doesn't tell users that an update is even being installed, AFAIK. That's the main reason I don't have Chrome or Chromium installed on my Windows PC any longer. With Firefox at least it's still possible to turn off automatic updates and stay with whatever version you want.

I totally agree i was using 4.0 then the upgrade to 5.0 started to download and in the middle of it it asked me if i wanted to continue the download because 5.0 would not compatible with Real Player and i had canceled the download but when i shut me computer down the next day i started it 5.0 was installed! I'm not only having all the problems that you are having but when i try to start Firefox it takes around 10 minutes to open. I have tried to get my questions answered but the support page keeps taking me in circles. HOW DO I GET THIS CRAP 5.0 BACK TO 4.0 AND BLOCK ANY ADDITIONAL UPDATES! I have just come back to Firefox I had used it on my old computer then i started having nothing but problems with it so i stopped using it. Well i guess here we go again.

"jmvftw72" Go to "ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/"And choose your version you want to download.

edit: replaced random unofficial download site.

While I take the point that the-edmeister made, why would Mozilla want to fast-track all these updates in the first place. if the product works better than its competition to begin with? What s the point of inflicting constant updates on Firefox users and changing all the time, from 3.0 to 4, to 5, to 6, to 7, etc. all in a short period? Why not bundle all the updates together to make a major release (i.e. from 3.x to 4.x) and also why does Mozilla assume that every other company can suddenly, without warning, increase its staff and resources to cover the necessary updating of their products to meet Mozilla's schedule. The most innovative companies tend to be small, and don't necessarily have the funds or capability to keep updating their products on Mozilla's schedule.