Firefox 5 In Aurora Channel

blair1q writes "Mozilla.org has added a new intermediate development state, Aurora, to its Firefox development chain. Coming between Nightly-Build and Beta, it adds a fourth sense to the meaning of 'the current version of Firefox' (the Release version fills out the trope). And now they have populated the Aurora channel with what will eventually become Firefox 5. The intent is to reduce release-version cycle times by allowing more live testing of new features before the integrated code gets into a Beta version. The inaugural Aurora drop includes 'performance, security and stability improvements.' Firefox 5 is scheduled to enter Beta on May 17, and Release on June 21. Downloads of all of the active channels are available from the Firefox channels webpage."

Comments

Only half as good as Chome

[Billly Gates]

I have Chrome 10!!!

Re:Only half as good as Chome

[Luckyo]

I have 3.6, and it seems I'll be sticking to it until this "my version number is bigger then yours" insanity finally ejaculates and comes back to being a quality release rather then "lookie how fast we can release miniscule updates" like a premature ejaculator competition.

Re:Only half as good as Chome

[Arancaytar]

Eventually they will all switch to a YYYYMMDD release number. Until someone first gets the idea to use a Unix timestamp instead.

Re:Only half as good as Chome

[Jugalator]

Won't happen. What *is* insanity today, however, is sticking to a yearly or bi-yearly release cycle when the HTML standards evolve faster than that. Shorter cycles implies less features indeed, but this also means that there's not as much to test before each release, so the risks of following the evolution of the web better isn't increased despite following it better.

This is basically a very simplified version of the Chromium dev's motivation to move to this.

But it's of course more fun to think it's a version number game. However, just wait 'til Chrome 27 and you'll see that version numbers will lose their meaning soon enough, just like Google and others intended.

Re:Only half as good as Chome

[Gadget_Guy]

What *is* insanity today, however, is sticking to a yearly or bi-yearly release cycle when the HTML standards evolve faster than that

Seriously? We are still waiting for CSS3 to be finalised 12 years after the first draft was released. The precursor to HTML5 began its life in 2004 and HTML5 itself had its first draft release in 2008.

As a web developer, I wouldn't want to create a site that relied on people using a browser that was only a couple of months old. Sure it might work for Firefox and Chrome users, but what about the smaller browsers that can't keep up or the ones in embedded devices and phones.

On the other side of the coin, as a web user I don't want to have to constantly upgrade my browser to suit the latest whiz-bang HTML requirements of web developers. I upgrade my systems to benefit me, not anyone else.

Re:Only half as good as Chome

[FatLittleMonkey]

I have 3.6, and it seems I'll be sticking to it until this "my version number is bigger then yours" insanity finally ejaculates

<Sigh> Just close your eyes really tight, and say "It's version 3.8! It's version 3.8! It's version 3.8!" and click download. And then stop whining about something that was completely arbitrary to begin with.

Re:Only half as good as Chome

[multipartmixed]

4.0 is a major upgrade from 3.6, not a miniscule update. I suggest you download it. There are significant perf improvements, in the JS engine and elsewhere.

Re:Only half as good as Chome

[FatLittleMonkey]

I would, but I, personally, can't stand Firefox4... ahem... 3.8.

FF4 would be 3.7, FF5 would be 3.8.

They [did bad things]

The OP was acting as if all those things were somehow caused by the change from N.n versioning to N versioning. I was trying to point out that the previous versioning system was completely arbitrary, and the new versioning system is completely arbitrary. Calling it version 5, or 4.1, or 3.8, or 1.12.2, doesn't make the slightest difference to the actual product.

willing to sacrifice their original base users (techies and geeks) for greater popularity among normal users.

Gasp! The monsters!

CSS3 Animations

[ablaze]

and it has -moz-animation and @-moz-keyframes support. Works great! Special thanks to David Baron for his work on this.

Re:I'm really getting sick of this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why Corporate America wont touch a .0 release and waits for service packs before upgrading.

Software quality has gone down the tubes. I would tend to argue (flameware here) that Ubuntu is beta level when it's releases have come out until a few weeks after the updates get it stable. Just my opinion since you cited it

Current version

[Malc]

it adds a fourth sense to the meaning of 'the current version of Firefox'

No it doesn't, most of us aren't testers. If you want to use the latest development build, alpha build, beta build or release candidate, do so, but don't pretend it's a release. That's just hyperbole at best. Me? I'll wait for the next release, and thanks to all you folks who are prepared to run intermediate builds in the form of mass QA.

This is all getting slightly ridiculous...

[DeusExInfernus]

I'm getting rather tired of everyone paying more attention to release dates, version numbers, and now the names of production and testing phases than the quality of the actual product/program.

Fourth Sense

[dimethylxanthine]

"it adds a fourth sense to the meaning..."

Is that like a fourth state of matter? What are the other three senses of the 'the current version of Firefox' anyway?

----
Sorry, you're foreign.

Oh god another version

[AmiMoJo]

So they want to have two months between major versions, and expect all add-on developers to update and test, all web developers to check their layouts, web site and magazine editors to update their tutorials, useful forum posts to be obsolete, people get used to the new UI...

WTF is this shit?

Re:Oh god another version

[gertin]

Shorter release cycles also means less radical changes from release to release. So, add-on developers should in theory have to do less work with each new version as compared to 3->4. The same goes for web developers, I doubt any radical changes will be done to Gecko in release cycles as short as 6 weeks.

Re:Oh god another version

[delinear]

For most sites Firefox traffic is much higher than Chrome traffic. Add to that the fact that Chrome is using Webkit anyway so will benefit from prior testing and development for Safari and it's far less risky to churn out major releases. At the moment Firefox is in a sweet spot where it's stable enough and with a big enough user base that I can justify supporting it to clients. If we get to the point where I'm having to support 3 or 4 versions of it with the later ones potentially breaking stuff that was working previously it's going to be a lot more difficult for me to make that case. Besides, Chrome has always pitched itself as leading the way on the experimental side of things (see Chrome experiments), while Firefox is meant to be the stable, open source alternative to IE. I expect things to occasionally break in Chrome but I'm always surprised when they break in FF.

Re:Oh god another version

[delinear]

The issue isn't the bigger number, it's the risk that the tendency to want to justify the bigger number will lead to bloat, and that the smaller timescales will lead to bugs. With a minor revision nobody cares if all you did was tidy up some code to execute a little more efficiently, but with a major release people will want to know what added benefit it brings - that means a drive for additional functionality which needs sufficient time for implementation and testing (and no, that doesn't mean using your audience as guinea pigs). It doesn't matter how well you've coded your site if the browser is introducing its own bugs (see IE6 for evidence of this).

Re:Oh god another version

[Bert64]

Less testing to be done since each update will bring with it less changes...
You won't need to do more testing, you will need to do less testing more often.

Re:Oh god another version

[BZ]

1) There will be work going into handling add-on compatibility more smoothly than before. There are plans to bump the compat version on AMO-hosted add-ons automatically, unless they're flagged as possibly being broken. In the latter case the add-on developer will be asked to update it, of course.

2) There should be much less in the way of churn between versions for web developers, reducing the need to check layouts.

3) There should be much less in the way of UI churn between versions, reducing the need for updated tutorials and people getting used to new UI.

In particular, Chrome has been on a rapid release cycle for a year now; how much has their UI changed in that time?

Re:I'm really getting sick of this.

[atari2600a]

Damnit I knew spell check was lying to me D:

Please win back the long-time users

[scragz]

I've been with Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox from the beginning; custom builds, bug reports, tech evangelism, extensions/userscripts; I have made more than one offline XUL application for personal use (JS application programming before it was cool!); the whole ten meters. It had been so good for so long.

In 2008 a few things happened. 1. The extremely sensible and welcome features added in the 2.x release cycle, coupled with the unique browser landscape, ended up derailing the original goals of the project (streamlined browser, minimal yet viable for mainstream use, with robust extension capabilities for anything else anyone could want) back into some ridiculous browser arms race; 2. I switched to OSX and I think the memory problems are even worse there; and 3. Chrome started shaping up to be everything I wanted technically, with its new extension and built-in userscript support (even if it was inferior), its sandboxing, and its sort of remotely sane memory usage, even if it didn't have the warm fuzzy feeling I had from my closeness to the Mozilla project.

I am still so guilty about my switch to Chrome but I spend so much of my life in a browser window that I really had to go the practical route.

And since then it's just been getting worse and worse, with all resources going into either JS performance to keep up in benchmarks or features to be able to add some more bullet points to a release announcement. All anyone wants is better memory management, and then tab sandboxing would be nice after that since Flash/Silverlight can really bring down an embedding process. Give us some core improvements that aren't marketing driven and move all the AWESOMENESS into extensions that can be disabled after install! That's all anyone (on /.) wants.

Firefox 5? Fix firefox 4 first.

[Co0Ps]

What the fuck Mozilla... Firefox 4 is crashing 20 times a day for me. I'm not even joking, here's a copy paste from the 7 last entries of my about:crashes

bp-... 2011-04-14 20:01
bp-... 2011-04-14 19:59
bp-... 2011-04-14 19:05
bp-... 2011-04-14 19:05
bp-... 2011-04-14 19:00
bp-... 2011-04-14 19:00
bp-... 2011-04-14 18:31

Basically I've switched to chrome now to be able to to my work. Your new strategy is fucking ridiculous. Build a quality browser instead of jumping onto the "we must increment the major version number faster than the others" bandwagon. Once upon a time the major version number was only incremented when you restarted a project from scratch. Nowadays that number doesn't mean anything anymore - to anyone. I don't know what major version number chrome is and I don't care either - and I don't think most people don't know or care.

You can start plan new features when you've fixed all the bugs. Planning for version 5 when your browser can't even run 10 minutes without crashing is ridiculous.

Re:Firefox 5? Fix firefox 4 first.

[KozmoStevnNaut]

This is my entire crash log dating back to when I originally installed FF on my current work laptop:

11-04-2011 09:19
21-03-2011 14:18
23-12-2010 09:09
29-11-2010 09:34
09-11-2010 12:29
09-11-2010 12:28
08-11-2010 11:25
03-11-2010 09:51
22-09-2010 12:48
22-09-2010 12:48
28-07-2010 16:00
23-07-2010 04:44
29-06-2010 13:49
29-06-2010 13:49
27-11-2009 14:47
01-09-2009 14:21
19-08-2009 11:14
27-07-2009 15:33
24-06-2009 10:07
15-05-2009 14:53
26-03-2009 12:53
29-07-2008 09:41
20-06-2008 08:57
02-06-2008 10:33
21-05-2008 10:46

25 crashes in a span of 3 years and I use plenty of extensions. You must be doing something very wrong.