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.

Re:System Admins Contemplating ditching FireFox

[0123456]

What's wrong with auto update?

If you don't use auto update, you're potentially using vulnerable browsers.

If you do use auto update...seriously, what could break?

At an absolute minimum, every new release seems to move UI entities around or delete them altogether and then you have 1,000 users asking you what happened to their web browser because the status bar went away and can you come and fix it for them.

Mozilla seem to be committing suicide right now for no reason anyone can adequately explain.

Re:Incredible

[dAzED1]

No, google doesn't get a pass. A number of us weren't using chrome for reasons just like this - do you see a lot of enterprises pushing out chrome? Nope. If FF does the same thing as chrome, why use FF? The market needs versioned (6-9+ months minumum) browser other than IE. Guess that's going to have to be Opera instead of FF now.

Re:System Admins Contemplating ditching FireFox

[Urban Garlic]

> If you do use auto update...seriously, what could break?

FF5 broke my employer-mandated SSL VPN plug-in, which made me unable to telecommute.

They had a fix deployed about five weeks later...