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

Posted by Soulskill on from the foxes-are-frequently-aggressive dept.

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.'"

9 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Ignoring nasty resource leaks 4 times a year by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Remember when Mozilla just made a good browser? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

  2. Re:Isn't all of it ridiculously aggressive now? by Hamsterdan · · Score: 3, Funny

    Firefox ME won't be so stable.

    --
    I've got better things to do tonight than die.
  3. Re:what is it? by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm posting this using Firefox. Running under Linux. On a an old laptop with a Celeron processor, from the Good Old Days when a CPU was a CPU and we didn't need no steenkin' "cores"! 2GB RAM, about 1.5GB of that showing as free. 1, 2, 3, ... 9, 10, 11 tabs open. No issues here.

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    Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
  4. Re:Carriers will eat Firefox OS alive. by Enry · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It depends, at least in the US. T-Mobile is moving towards a "bring whatever device you want" approach, and Google has started directly selling their Nexus phones to consumers. I think this will start to improve once most carriers standardize on LTE-only and the phones are a bit more universal than they are now. With the Qualcomm CDMA patents out of the way, the barrier to entry to the Verizon network goes away and their phones will drop in price and more vendors will want to sell for the Verizon market.

  5. Churn for the sake of churn by msobkow · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Churn for the sake of churn is the most asinine strategy I've ever heard of. Look at how slow vendors are to actually release updates for Android for their devices. Mozilla is shooting themselves in the foot if they think their hardware partners for Firefox OS want to see point updates anywhere near as often as they're proposing. They want something tested and stable that they can ship, not an always-in-development "product."

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    I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
    1. Re:Churn for the sake of churn by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      Just like the Linux kernel, the partners don't have to ship every update. Just like the Linux kernel, features are added and bugs are fixed in Firefox on a regular basis, and it makes sense to ship updates. But since the whole phone is based around it, updating it might as well be an OS update.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  6. Re:what is it? by Arker · · Score: 2

    "Spying" might be too strong a word but it's creepy as hell. It wants to run all the time, and from wierd oddball directories it shouldnt be touching to boot (what is this, chrome or datamgr?,) and it was constantly begging me to sign in for easier tracking. It doesnt want to keep my local settings local, it clearly wants to store them somewhere outside my control. And when someone tried to make a noscript for chrome, they found the architecture wouldnt allow it! (I know there is a noscript-like extension for chrome, but unless chrome has been fundamentally re-architected recently it's only blocking scripts AFTER it wastes bandwidth downloading them.)

    So it may not be spying on me, but it certainly acts like that is what is on its mind.

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    =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
    Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
  7. Re:what is it? by Blaskowicz · · Score: 2

    Sounds like the flash plugin hijacking the keyboard? That's nothing new, and I thought it was by design. Just use flashblock, which makes the issue both less common and more obvious - you can't do ctrl-t when in a flash object, but hell you don't expect every key combo to work when you're running a VM in virtualbox or something, either. Your key presses are trapped by the VM.
    As for the Firefox UI it's stayed the same since Firefox 4 and you've been able to move buttons and bars around since even longer than that.

  8. Re:Beta Testing? by caspy7 · · Score: 2

    Since you seemed to have a potentially genuine question in there, I'll give it a shot.
    Firefox has three 6 week long prerelease phases before a final release (Nightly, Aurora & Beta). Nightly is reserved for larger changes and then subsequent phases have increasing restrictions for code landings (always getting more strict before moving to the next phase). Each phase, of course, has an increasing number of users, with Beta having the most.
    This way most of the code that's changed gets between 12 and 18 weeks of testing.
    Mozilla has thousands of automated tests they run daily looking for stability, correctness, etc (and of course security reviews).
    Chrome uses this same basic model.

    Oh, I just saw you said "a schedule like this" referring to the new Firefox OS schedule. That would mean that the final releases will have been in testing for 30-36 weeks.
    This does not seem "run and gun" to me.