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Mozilla 1.7 to Become New Long-Lived Branch

Posted by michael on from the long-live-the-gecko dept.

iswm writes "MozillaZine has announced that the Mozilla 1.7 branch will become the new long-lived stable branch, replacing 1.4. The stable branch is intended to act as a baseline for developers building Mozilla-based products, with critical bugs fixed on the branch as well as the trunk. Mozilla Firefox 1.0, a new milestone of Mozilla Thunderbird, a new Camino release and several third party Mozilla based products will be based on Mozilla 1.7, so the Foundation is making efforts to ensure that it is high quality."

6 of 407 comments (clear)

  1. Contension by Jack+Comics · · Score: 5, Informative

    What the article fails to mention however that there appears to be a point of contension between Mozilla developers over whether or not the next long-lived stable branch of Mozilla should be 1.7 or 1.8. Many feel that it is too late in 1.7's development cycle to make it the next stable branch after 1.4. For more information, see here. It's a shame that the Mozilla Foundation apparently feels pressured to make decisions based on time frames instead of quality.

    --
    "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
  2. Problems... by arvindn · · Score: 5, Informative
    The blurb doesn't mention it, but quite a bit of dissatisfaction has been expressed about 1.7 becoming the next long lived branch, rather than 1.8. The issue seems to be that the APIs for this version are rather half-assed, which means that those who develop on the platform won't get a clean interface and will need to get used to some hacks and kludges.

    On the other hand people are happy that there's finally something to replace 1.4 which was showing its age.

    Note that this means that the next version of Netscape, if there is one, will be based on 1.7 etc.

  3. Re:how exactly do they crash Mozilla? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    1) Go to about:config.

    2) Select "Print Preview"

    3) Crash.

    On Firefox 0.8 on Windows 2000.

  4. Re:No OS9 port means 60% of mac users stuck with 1 by Gerv · · Score: 5, Informative

    The biggest problem such a person will face is the build system - as in, there isn't one for OS 9 any more.

    Gerv

  5. Re:No OS9 port means 60% of mac users stuck with 1 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you hack macs, please do the silent majority a favour and port a stable version of mozilla for us!

    They have! It's called Web and Mail Communicator (WaMCom). They have produced a version of Mozilla 1.3.1 with hundreds of additional bugfixes that works on Mac OS 9.

    Sure, it's only based on 1.3.1 (though with extra bug fixes), but it's better than nothing.

    More details availble in these MozillaZine articles: 1 and 2.

  6. Re:What about the previous roadmaps for Firefox? by steeef · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here's your answer (from the roadmap):

    We are not retiring the SeaMonkey [Mozilla] application suite, or its XPFE front end, in the foreseeable future. Several companies have shipped and will ship products based on this venerable component of the application suite, and on the entire suite. Many organizations deploy it or a derivative of it, such as Netscape 7.x. We intend to keep supporting these deployments in at least a conservative, sustaining engineering fashion. However, we still intend to focus on evolving Mozilla toward the more flexible application architecture pioneered by Firefox and Thunderbird. That's where our innovative engineering effort should go.