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Mozilla Contemplating Five Week Release Cycle
MrSeb writes with an article in Extreme Tech about the ever quickening pace of Firefox development. Quoting the article: "Mozilla, not content with its monumental shift from four major builds in five years down to a new stable build every six weeks, is looking at outputting a new release every five weeks, or perhaps even less. Christian Legnitto, a project manager at Mozilla (and currently the 'release manager' of Firefox), announced the intention to shift to a shorter release cycle on Mozilla's planning mailing list. In response to one developer citing the success of the six-week release cycle, and asking whether it would be feasible to speed it up even further, Legnitto said: 'Yes, I absolutely think in the future we will shorten the cycle.' There are still some pains to overcome, though, such as add-on maintenance, testing, and localization — and ultimately, as browsers become more like operating systems, do we really want something as important as Firefox receiving a new major version every 5 weeks?"
In other news, it looks like Firefox is losing users faster than ever despite (because of?) the new rapid release cycle.
I've stopped using Firefox. I was a constant user of it since the Firebird days, but somewhere down the line the whole project has lost sight. I find Chrome a good deal faster and more agile. Maybe I'd feel differently if I were a plugin developer, but as it stands, Firefox seems to be a project that has lost its way.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Have they totally lost it? It's not like the browser world is making sudden great progress. It's a mature technology. The big problem today is getting stuff fixed.
I'm doing some Firefox extension development, and I'm finding documentation from versions 1.5 to the current one, all out of sync.
Sorry i have other things to do than repackage FF for deployment every 5 weeks.
Since they're pumping out versions as fast as Chrome, why not do what Chrome does and make the version # irrelevant?
How many people know what version of Chrome they're running? I sure don't know. But Firefox trumpets the "new" Firefox on every release.
If you're going to do a rapid release schedule, you've made the version number meaningless to your average user.
If they keep this up, I will remove it from our labs. I am not going to deal with this shit. Release bug fixes as often as you need to, but new features need to be something that doesn't happen too often. I can't go and test this shit every few weeks, nor do I want to deal with things that are outdated. I like FF, but this policy they have is pushing me to dump it. I haven't yet, but we'll see.
Extensions stop working at random without any good reason and in record time. So many of us use Firefox over Chrome because of extensions.
This plan is just terrible.
Mozilla addons getting shafted because one guy wants faster releases? Sweet.
Not when doing so continually breaks the things that the users you do have care about, no.
What FF user actually wants this model? Most of them don't. Releasing at the same speed as Chrome isn't going to win over Chrome users, but it will chase FF users off. That's what we're seeing here.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I'm amazed at how hateful and petty people are towards Mozilla over this. Google gets a pass though.
I guess the notion of "release early, release often" is dead?
Did Mozilla go hire some MBAs or something? That's the only rational explanation for this idiocy.
The userbase has rejected rapid release. They hate it. Users are leaving the browser faster then ever before ever since it started.
So Mozilla's response is... even faster releases? Is it possible to miss the point any more then this? People don't care about this shit, they just want a good browser.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Chrome scares my from a privacy standpoint. Firefox wants updated between every keystroke. IE is my new browser of choice.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
What if Firefox would check addons before updating to a new version. If the addon is incompatible with the release and there is no compatible update available, the user is informed about this and given the option to proceed or abort the upgrade.
This way sudden and unexpected breakage of addons is prevented. And addons are really what makes firefox so popular.
Other than the addon 'problem', I really don't see what people are complaining about. Fast release cycles is what we want, right? And version numbers are just numbers...
We are working to make updates silent and break less addons
And from a business perspective, that's even worse. I get to spend hours trying to figure out why 10,000 workstations are suddenly flaking out on me, and then finally explain to my boss that it was because a "silent update" went out completely untested and unproven.
If you guys really don't want any Enterprise use of FF, just say so up front so we can start looking elsewhere, instead of holding onto a few final shreds of hope.
We don't want massive changes to the function of the software all the time, it's a nightmare. Removing Major versions removes our ability to maintain a known stable release series and only perform bugfix/security patches. We now have to assume that any update, no matter how minor, could involve major component changes, and thus has to be put completely through the entire testing, approval, scheduling, and deployment cycle. That costs us time and money, and with the new release cycle we can barely get one version deployed by the time the next is out. So we're left with the choice of asking management to double our payroll budget for IT, or putting our asses on the line for releasing "untested" software into a production environment. That's not a good choice, so we're already looking elsewhere for alternatives since Mozilla is proving itself to be largely unreliable.