Firefox 4 the Last Big Release From Mozilla 236
nk497 writes "Firefox 4 will be the last major browser release from Mozilla, as it looks to mimic Chrome's speedy release schedule — echoing previous statements that Firefox 7 would arrive this year. "What we want to do is get the power into users' hands more quickly," said vice president of products Jay Sullivan. "For example, the video tag was shippable in June — we should have shipped it." That new schedule is also why Firefox 4 has had 12 betas, he said. Mozilla also said future versions of Firefox would feature a stronger "do not follow tool", as the current one is a "non-technical solution"," Sullivan said. "All you're doing is raising your hand and saying 'I don't want to be tracked.' There's no technical teeth.""
Bad Title (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like Firefox is dying (like BSD).
Plugin Support (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess I'll have to write a plugin that disables auto-update until all installed plugins are updated to support the newest version of Firefox.
I interpreted the headline the wrong way (Score:5, Insightful)
What about stability and known-working releases? (Score:5, Insightful)
Rapid-update philosophy sounds good for early adopters and hobbyist users (does Chrome have much traction in the corporate environment?)
But what about corporate environments that require software to stay stable and on fixed known-working versions? For example, Firefox 3.6 broke compatibility with a plugin that we have widely distributed at our site, and the solution to this issue requires another mass deployment. We've had similar issues with Java's auto-updater breaking compatibility with some applications (and no, we're not an IE6 shop).
Doug
Sigh.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:FF == the next Netscape? (Score:3, Insightful)
^^ Join the club.
In my case it's usually memory leaks related to having previously handled large amounts of images and also some addons.
Once Firefox has reached a critical mass between 1 and 1.5 GB it always finds ways to crash. Granted, it's a way of freeing up memory, but I'd prefer ones that don't include possible loss of data in open tabs.
Re:I interpreted the headline the wrong way (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>"Mozilla to have faster release schedule"
Even AFTER I understood the headline the thought, 'Mozilla is imploding like Netscape did, with stupid browser decisions,' was still running through my head. - BTW this article is a dupe. I read about Mozilla doing rapid FF5, FF6, FF7 updates around three weeks ago.
I don't want my browser going through a bunch of revisions so that I'm always fucking with my computer software/updates, instead of doing actual work (or play). I can't help thinking this is just Mozilla panicking because Chrome is challenging their #2 position, and it will end up being a major PITA for the user.
Re:Bad Title (Score:3, Insightful)
apple makes computers?
Re:What about stability and known-working releases (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, kudos to Google for finally going with MSI. It's like providing an RPM and makes everyone's life easier.
Now, that said, the situation with respect to delayed updates is fundamentally different because Chrome hasn't provide security updates for older versions. You're essentially running snapshots all the time. Any IT department would have be bonkers to follow that model.
#2 position-- mulit-core scaling (Score:4, Insightful)
all they have to do is make firefox scale to multiple cores. There's no reason the UI from the current webpage I'm browsing should grind to a halt because I loaded 5 slashdot discussions in the background using middle-click. Both Chrome and Opera 11 have no problem handling this.
And before someone chimes in and posts this [mozilla.org] saying that they're working on it, take a look again, that page hasn't been updated since May 2010.
At the moment I couldn't care any less about javascript benchmark speed. I just want multicore scaling from Firefox and then I'll be happy.
Re: Releases (Score:3, Insightful)
All they would have to do is call some of their betas number releases.
No. A beta release is (in general) bug fixes and improvements to existing code. They generally don't introduce swaths of new features, that's what the FIRST beta did, the rest are fixing problems with those features. The fact that they have had more than 11 betas of Firefox 4 is proof that what they are trying to do is necessary. They made 4.0 too big.
This is a trench op on the marketing side, to make pointy heads happy that Firefox can be in version 7 this year and version 10 next year. Apparently something pending about betas exhausted them.
They are going for more releases BECAUSE the betas exhausted them, and that's a good decision. What they are trying to do is go to a smaller, more focused release on a smaller number of changes at a given time, and get that version out as the regular version more regularly. It allows them to keep their release and development codebases closer together, meaning less effort for security backfixes into the release version. It allows them to manage the complexity of their changes so a new version of Firefox doesn't feel like a new version of Windows - something that comes out maybe twice in a decade and is so different from what you had before that it's basically unrecognizable.
They've been trying to bite off too much at each new major release, and as a result they've fallen victim to BPS (Perpetual Beta Syndrome) because the scope of changes they are trying to do simultaneously exceeds their development capacity. It's a nasty, unrewarding cycle to get into, and it makes support hard and expensive, and it makes the project stagnate and stagger under its own weight.
In order to dig yourself out of that cycle you need to pick smaller targets and set out to accomplish them, rather than taking on the world with insufficient resources and ending up with a version so buggy and unwieldy that you need a dozen or more betas to get to something you're comfortable won't actually find a way to kill your users, much less work correctly every time. So you'll see a pattern of smaller releases focused on smaller sets of new functionality.
Having said that, I've been using 4.0beta(latest) for a few months, and I find it pretty solid. But the point remains - if they had focused on one task at a time and released that feature, we'd probably be about where we are today, without the vast chasm between "production" and "beta" releases being so huge that a lot of people are going to resist moving to 4.0 for a long time (and keeping the development teams working on two very different codebases for bug fixes).
The bigger you make your changes, and the less often you release, the harder it is for your users to upgrade. And the harder it is for you to maintain two stable and increasingly-different codebases (one development, one stable).
Firefox should have taken 1/3 of the changes they wanted for 4.0, called them 3.7 or 4.0, and released them for beta quickly. Then taken the next 1/3 and made them 3.8 or 5.0. Then the final third and 3.9 or 6.0 (which numbering depends on whether you're in development or marketing, pretty much, but it really doesn't matter).
Instead, we're stuck with two Firefoxes - one that's a year old and is showing its age, and one that's so vastly utterly different in terms of UI and underlying infrastructure that you'll have people resisting the upgrade for at least six months.
Re:Ridiculous. (Score:4, Insightful)
If it means the resulting product is bug-free (read: well tested) and of higher quality--- so be it. That is what I want, not the latest white wall tires.
I DON'T CARE if FF beats IE[0-9] or Chrome by 3.2ms on some arbitrary and isolated metric or has some new gee whiz but unused feature. Don't be suckered into a rat race by obsessive blogger types. As long as the experience is good and snappy, and the performance (dis)advantage isn't too lopsided I'll go with the well tested version every time. Screw the competition. Quality sells itself. In a similar way, I don't care if KDE/Gnome# tracks the latest Windows7 ideas. In a way I wish they wouldn't if it's just for the sake of it. Do your own thing, make it better, learn from others when you can, and they will come.
I don't want bleeding edge. I want something I can trust my https connection to my bank, gets out of my way and is reasonably snappy, and does not leak memory or privacy left and right due to a quickly grafted new feature. That's it.
thanks for reading,
a humble user.