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Firefox 3.7 Dropped In Favor of Feature Updates

Posted by kdawson on from the lessons-from-the-trenches dept.

Barence sends in a report from pcpro.co.uk that says "Under its original plans, Mozilla would roll out Firefox 3.6 and 3.7 over the course of 2009, each bringing minor improvements to the browser. However, a steady stream of delays to Firefox 3.6 has rendered that goal unobtainable, forcing Mozilla to rethink its release. As a result, Firefox 3.7 has been dropped and will be replaced with feature updates for Firefox 3.6 that will be rolled out with security updates. This should free up the team to work on the next major release, Firefox 4, slated for the last quarter of 2010, which is expected to follow the same development process." Updated 20100116 00:54 GMT by timothy: Alexander Limi, from Firefox User Experience, says that the PC Pro article linked above misinterprets the situation, and that 3.7 is still on the roadmap before 4.0. The confusion stems from a schedule realignment: the out-of-process plugins feature, originally slated to land in 3.7, will instead ship as a minor update in Firefox's 3.6 series. According to Limi, CNET gets it right."

3 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. Where's the meat? by girlintraining · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What purpose does it serve to skip version numbers, except for some political or media-relations reason? The Linux kernel and many other open source projects have release cycles of "it's done when it's done" -- and a predictable version numbering system. What next, Mozilla Firefox 2010 Professional Edition? Delays are inevitable in any software development project.

    Also, Slashdot -- this news post was like saying "X replaced by Y. Z reported jealous, but A and B are looking forward to bringing C onboard soon." Numbers should not be used in place of content. $WITTY_COMMENT. $RETORT. $TROLL. $VAGUE_REFERENCE_TO_SEXUALITY.

    --
    #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
  2. Et tu, Mozilla? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Security updates should never be combined with feature updates. Anyone who doesn't want the feature update is then in the unfortunate position to decide whether they'll get the unwanted features or keep the unwanted vulnerabilities. Bad Mozilla.

  3. You do want corporate support, don't you? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Small feature updates are not conducive to getting corporate support. With large updates, a company can say, "We support Firefox 3.5+", and they can be reasonably confident that they don't need to fully test every minor release of Firefox 3.5. With small updates they have to say, "We support Firefox 3.6.7", and can't be sure that they will actually be able to support 3.6.8 without fully testing it. If you want corporate support, you have to have feature freezes, or support stops being worth the testing time.