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."

Comments

Re:Version numbers

[hairyfeet]

Wow, you are STILL an idiot, I should be amazed but considering you think a beta OS which is so bleeding edge it should have stigmata, aka Ubuntu, is ready for noobs? Naah. If you are gonna use my quote at least use the entire sentence dipshit. THERE IS NO COMMAND LINE IN WINDOWS FOR THE USERS and I stand by that statement. Has your grandma ever had to launch .cmd? little Suzy down the street? The checkout girl at Walmart? Of course not because unlike your moronic OS the answer to every fucking question ever asked isn't "open up bash and type". If you don't like the fact that Linux is a CLI OS, change it. That IS the point of it, yes? Otherwise STFU when someone points out other OSes like Windows and OSX have no need for a CLI if you are not an admin of several machines or a programmer. IS that REALLY so hard to understand, or do you need someone to write a bash script to explain this to you?

As for TFA the big selling point of FF was extensions. We all know this. Mozilla has been changing the guts (and the developer TFA on /. a couple of months back announced more with regards to memory and CPU usage) means there will be even more. They have also by changing from 4.01 to 5 have done a fundamental change as 4.01 would be security fixes, whereas a major release would include feature changes. Now one can't test and plan ahead simply because there is no way to tell when things will break as the next release may be bug fixes, may be gut changes, you just won't know until you try it and see what breaks.

This is simply unacceptable both to the enterprise and to the extension developers, many of whom do it in their spare time for donations, so naturally they are gonna to Chrome where they don't seem to have this problem. We shall see if their strategy works but I bet the only winners in this will be Chrome, who will gain momentum through the increased adoption by business and added extensions.