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Standards Make Rapid Software Releases Workable
jfruhlinger writes "There was a bit of a kerfuffle when the Mozilla Foundation's community coordinator brushed aside concerns from enterprises that Mozilla's rapid release schedule clashed with organizations' need to carefully vet software upgrades. One thing that could bridge the gap between these worldviews is a widespread adoption of open standards. After all, if IE 6 dealt with web pages in a standard way, it wouldn't have been so painful to keep it around as long as it lurked on many corporate desktops."
Firefox's release schedule isn't any more "rapid" than it was before just because they now change major version number instead. It's just taking away the real problem and trying to be push your software to the version numbers that long term projects like IE and Opera have got over the years. Same problem with Chrome.
They make things more workable until people start MacGyvering new ideas, throwing them into the public half done and start calling them the new standard.
and everyone here but I uses it!
*...*
Demonstrated and proven.
Standards are great in theory. If everyone developed their pages to standards... And if the browsers developed to standards.... And if the standards covered everything clearly, succinctly and completely... then there wouldn't be this problem.
But they don't.
They may try, but there are always bugs.
Application owners therefore must test their applications across the gamut of browser platforms. Even when everyone did the right thing and developed to the standard.
Not me! I use wget for page access and view the websites' code directly in emacs.
It's the only way to be sure.
Can't be stupid as the summary makes you believe.
And its not. Seriously who summerised it?
Newsflash: Using open standards means your browser won't suck. Wow!
I do printouts so I can read them in the bathroom.
The problem isn't really the browsers, it's the standards that can't keep up. If the browsers had to wait for the standards to be finalized, IE 6 would still be relevant. If the specification is incomplete what are you supposed to do, watch your users switch to a different browser, or implement the proposed feature in the best way you know how. Maybe the standards need to move to a rapid release cycle?
> It's the only way to be sure.
Other than nuking the site from orbit. Just sayin... ;-)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
telnet example.com:80
GET / HTTP/1.1
host: example.com
I do printouts so I can read them in the bathroom.
And you're reading those webpages for the articles, right?
God befuddled the languages of the world at the tower of babel because He was tired of His Firefox add-ons breaking.
"Well we can go with Internets Explorer 9 or Mozzarella Foxfire 5 and 9 is a bigger number than 5 so therefore that means it must be better right?"
Footnote: I actually have heard an executive refer to Firefox as "Mozzarella Foxfire"
with 10s thousands of users (large corp, gov't, uni) it's a significant effort to determine if every problem is/isn't related to a release version
.... anyway, what the hell do they change from version to version?
If they tell you "Changes are not *dangerous*, because we stick to standards", then that is bullshit. If a change is "not at all dangerous" then it is also "not at all necessary", since it would imply the change does not change anything. What I have seen in 15 years in IT is that even some pretty minor thing that changed in a software product can bring your work flow to a halt. And you can lose business for hours or days.
They wouldn't have security updates for Firefox 4 separate from Firefox 4.1 and you wouldn't complain about it but instead of calling it Firefox 4.1 they've called it Firefox 5
The problem here is that extensions don't automatically work on the next major version, especially if they have a component written in a language other than JavaScript.
I've been developing restartless addons all this year and have yet to report a single headache.
Do any of the restartless add-ons that you've been developing include a native code component?
So, why are Mozilla still patching FF 3.xx versions of Firefox?
That's pretty much based on the same open standards as FF5, so why not ditch it and support the most recent version only? Otherwise it's in danger of becoming Mozilla's XP/IE6...
RMS sends mail to a daemon which runs wget and mails the page back to him. It is very efficient use of his time, but it is slow in real time.
If you want standards to drive an industry, then the innovators have to be the ones setting the standard. Yet people are already afraid enough of de facto standards; even less will they hand control of a new de jure standard over to an innovator. Result: a committee is formed, most of whose members are there to see that their company does not get locked out of the market for the new functionality. Thus we get a standard that works 3 years after the innovation and is widely used and understood 5 years after that.
Standards aren't magic. It takes time for them to be understood, for the kinks to be worked out, and for widespread acceptance to be gained.
This issue isn't about standards though. All large software vendors have to deal with the innovation vs. stability problem. If Mozilla can't figure out how to fork a stable release off its development branch once in a while, then they'll lose the enterprise; it's really as simple as that.
As long as 'open standards' are open to different interpretations (as HTML is/was) we still have big problems, we still see different results between different browser with the latest HTML standards..
And what are 'standards'? personally when I see stuff like 'bold' being replaced with 'strong' I get a big feeling of 'wtf, which moron decided something like that', and that's something I see in more and more standards, instead of keeping it simple and clear, they make it illogical and difficult...
and even if standards are used, who says the new build doesn't have a bug in it, which normally is the reason why there are 'exceptions' build into webpages, because you still want it to run on that particular build as you have no idea when the bug will be fixed..
In projects that have stable branches actively maintained, developers tend to do a good job of discipline in not doing large changes. When they do have a large, potentially long term change to enact, they push it to a branch with 5-6 months of time to release, and maybe push minor feature additions to a minor feature release.
Now firefox has dispensed with all that and all major features, minor features, and bugfixes/security issues into a single cycle. That release cycle is sufficiently short such that major tweaks will inevitably destabilize a 'release', and generally every release will have one or two major changes that *should* undergo a few months of being restricted to the adventurous before being spewed out to the masses.
Linux gets a pass simply because organizations like Debian, RH, Novell, and Canonical designate maintenance branches (with varying degrees of restraint in backporting risky things).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Sure, implementing standards in *theory* should mean the browser choice doesn't matter. The problem is the difference between theory and practice. You think you write in standards, but you only validate that in one browser, you may accidentally not be standards compliant. Conversely, you may fairly be totally standards compliant, but a browser defect results in your site not behaving correctly. Or a standard could be sufficiently vague as to have multiple implementations vary in behavior without being able to point at any particular one as non-compliant.
All this is ignoring that things like browser crashes, memory exhaustion, and security issues are critical issues to worry about that generally have no bearing on standards compliance.
If standards meant the choice and version of a browser wouldn't matter, then why would there be a choice of browser and version in the first place?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Firefox's decision to change UI elements for *existing installs* (from 3.6 to 4, aping IE 8 and Chrome) caused our trainer/support team angst. We want to keep autoupgrade for security but when we get a volley of "wtf" calls from users that is a problem.
The real problem is that organisations/the enterprise/etc.. are still THIS carefull with upgrades. My has alot of pc pools. All those still run XP.. which might be ok. All of them also run outdated versions of Firefox, Java, Flash and whatnot. (and not even like a few days outdated, it s worse. They dont even run the most current version of Fx 3.6. Why is this a problem? Because of the internet, the existance of security holes and the fact that exploting these has another dimension than 10 years before. It s organized crime these days and tons of scriptkiddies instead of just few hundred. Yes that s still original hackers around.. but those never were a real risk to begin with. So as long as you re letting a pc in your organizations network connect to the internet, having security software running on the client and the gateways just is not enough. While not being enough aswell, it s also neccesary to have all known security holes patched (if there is a patch available). PERIOD. The paradigm you may not risk to have incompatibilites and instabilities and patch more conservative might have been the right conclusion at the end of the 90s or at the beginning of the millenium. But it s different these days.Even more if your organisation is a corporation which needs to have buisness secrets protected.
My personal hunch is that IE 6 was intentionally crippled.
Under Gates, Microsoft has been known to make things intentionally proprietary and crippled to make adoption hard so people only stick with Microsoft products. When slashdotters were debating who should replace Balmer, my first reaction was Gates even though as a user I do not want him back. I have read comments from old Unix geeks here on slashdot who even accused Xenix of being crippled on purpose as it is so hard to port Unix software to Xenix/Sco that MS hoped you would simply keep using it. I can't prove that, but I can prove MS crippled DOS to make Lotus 123 incompatible.
But, think about the damage proprietary software has done to favor Microsoft? How many businesses would even consider a Mac or any other platform? Alternative office product? Anything without the MS logo? It is because of lock in and history of macs and wordperfect not opening certain documents and software running only on Windows is why no company wants to touch anything else even if it is cool today with Apple having a comeback. It is why IE is so popular. There are deployment tools now yes, but MS won before they took off. Even if Mozilla had these deployment tools business users love that letter guaranteeing that 10 years of support for obsolete software.
If IE followed standards then why would business users want to keep IE around 10 years ago during the first browser wars? Businesses would have been using Firefox more by now or at least a more modern IE. That is bad for profits as it encourages people to use things like other platforms and tools. If I were the CEO of Microsoft you bet, I would make IE a worse browser and use something retarded like XAML to replace HTML and have it only work with Visual Studio (TM) + Sharepoint Designer (TM). ... more money! This is how the old Microsoft used to operate and the lack of this is why the Blackberry, Iphone, and now Andriod is eating the corporate mobile market for lunch. Not making Exchange proprietary using encryption was a bad move. MS could have owned 80% of the smart phone market if they did.
IE 6 was a success because of its horrible code and support is a big win for Microsoft. It stopped all competition cold and brought money from more companies that now can't switch to Macs because of ActiveX control intranet sites ... goal! If you try to refute me and say you use firefox just remember Microsoft doesn't care. IE is a loss leader for the benefit to sell its backoffice and developers tools to corporate users. That is IE's core market and how it brings in revenue and poor quality is key to making more money and something MS is losing track of with IE becoming good again and supporting open standards.
http://saveie6.com/
Even for small business, upgrading firefox on every station is a huge headace, an admin (aka IT staff) have to log in to update a major version of firefox.
Well, the problem I'm having is that FF5 doesn't work at all on my Windows system at work. The Linux version at home works fine, but the Windows install at work hangs constantly and is unusable (even with all extensions disabled), something that's never happened to me with a Firefox update (FF4 worked well on this box). So, despite the 'fact' that this is just a case of a trivial 4.1 update being called 5.0 for some marketing reason, it seems like *something* big has changed.
I guess I'll eventually try wiping my profile and reinstalling (really nasty to have to do for an official release), but in the meantime, I've become a (somewhat satisfied) Chrome user. Nice going, Mozilla.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
*That should be
/. for stripping out my nonstandard HTML.
And how was <blink> and <layer> standard html?
Thank you
I'm seeing a lot of folks saying Chrome may be the big winner out of all of this, but not much comment about Opera making gains. I confess to being a bit out of the loop when it comes to browser alternatives, but my impression was that Chrome isn't entirely open source. It uses WebKit, but that licensing does not seem to cover the whole of the browser - wikipedia at least cites some sort of "Google Chrome Terms of Service".
Are the "GCTS" open source, or is the current sense of the community that Chrome is "open enough" to displace Firefox, despite not being fully open? If I were a business and needed to replace Firefox, and didn't care about open source, my first thought would have been Opera - is the recent management change there (along with the comments about "quarterly" focused management) enough to cast a shadow on Opera as well?
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
After doing a lot of research, I can say it is amazing how many people forgot IE6 actually improved standards compliance over IE 5.x. The original name of a Quora question for example was "Why did MS release IE6..." which later was renamed. Most IE-specific features actually came from IE 4.x and IE 5.x. IE6 introduced DOCTYPE switching. The problem is that IE then stagnated for five years, and guess what people did with the IE6 "standard mode" during that period?
Don't aim for one or a few browsers, aim for standards.
I'm sorry, but that argument doesn't get any more sensible as more people parrot it.
For one thing, there are no standards that cover a lot of the newer technologies yet, and if you're going to force updates every few weeks then "This is in beta and is subject to change" just doesn't cut it.
For another thing, even if there were, standards are only ever a means to an end, and that end is producing useful tools that help people get things done. Firefox can push for trendy new standards all it likes, but it's not written by super-human developers who can avoid regressions, and those regressions hurt.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
That's one of the major points in this change.
Keeping API compatibility slows down development. On the other hand, from what I can tell it's not that hard to update your extension to the new APIs.
I think what they mean is:
If the big corporations stick to using browser-/webpage-features which are actual standards their code won't break.
That means real standards: Things that are done, ready and _stable_.
Not some new, shiny HTML5-/CSS3-effect.
New things are always on the horizon