Mozilla Unveils 'Aggressive' Firefox OS Schedule: Quarterly Feature Releases

An anonymous reader writes "With Firefox OS version 1.0 out the door, Mozilla has decided that it's time to unveil its strategy for new versions. The company is planning to make feature releases available to partners every quarter and push out security updates for the previous two feature releases every six weeks. 'As far as I know, that's the most aggressive mobile OS release strategy out there,' Alex Keybl, Mozilla's Manager of Release Management, said in a statement. 'This sort of alignment across multiple browser products, and now an OS, is unprecedented at the pace we're moving.'"

Comments

Re:what is it?

[Billly Gates]

Firefox has had shitty browser releases. Firefox 4,5,6, and even 3.6 were all bloated, slow, buggy, and broke updates every month. Worse Asa Dolzter told us who work in corporate I.T. to fuck off and even logged on slashdot begged a user to go back to IE 8 when he complained?!

On my Turion with 2 gigs of ram system Firefox quite frankly is unusable in Linux. even with 3 tabs open it uses all 2 gigs of ram back when I ran it in 2011. Chrome runs smoothly back then.

IE is the browser we love to bash here but when Chrome hit the scene Firefox became the new legacy and slow browser. Many of us went to bat and put our reputation on the line to put Firefox in at work explaining how it doesn't break every release unlike IE. I did not like Chrome spying on me so I held my nose and used IE 9 for the first time in many many years until I gave up for Chrome eventually. ... low and behold the MS bigwigs said see I told you so after Asa broke the plugins! It made web developers angry too as they hated IE 6 with a passion, but need to certify there apps. Guess what? You can't recertify your app every 6 weeks! So now IE is more entrenched than ever.

So yes there is some resentment and even hostilality towards Mozilla here.

But the positive is Firefox ESR 17 and later are great! Firefox no longer breaks add-ons with the latest versions and uses 1/3 the amount of ram. Slashdotters should try Firefox again? However at work I am a die hard IE supporter now, :-( No group policy and no way we can know an update will break our intranet apps means too much risk.

Re:Isn't all of it ridiculously aggressive now?

[hjf]

I just wish they worried about things that REALLY matter. See bug 392073, opened in 2007. I just can't believe this is so low in Mozilla's priority list. It's just silly.

The new Flickr design, for example, looks very nice. Except on firefox it hangs for a couple of seconds with 100% CPU usage every time you scroll down. Buggy JS code? Maybe. But it kills the browser completely. They could at least try to run every tab as a separate process (maybe they should have shut the hell up instead of criticizing the competition when they did that? Anyone remember the "heat" google got for making Chrome run each tab as a separate process? Doesn't sound so silly now, does it?)

Re:Ignoring nasty resource leaks 4 times a year

[foniksonik]

That's the problem with Firefox though. It gets backed up with user data which fills up RAM and eventually starts to leak out causing odd auto-immune reactions in the host OS. Google solved this problem in Chrome by passing that data through to their servers which have a much greater capacity to hold all your personal data.

Sure now that I've said it, it seems obvious.