Mozilla Unveils 'Aggressive' Firefox OS Schedule: Quarterly Feature Releases 87
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.'"
Isn't all of it ridiculously aggressive now? (Score:1, Funny)
Firefox browser is already aggressive, and it sounds like this is going to be more so.
I expect Firefox OS 95.0 out by the end of the year, and Firefox OS 98.0 a week later.
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Zing!
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I thought the same thing when I first read the title, but from what I tell, there is a subtle difference. Instead of a "major" Firefox release full of nothingness basically every fucking month like it is now, they intend every third release to be less boring and actually bring new/major features. So... they're bringing back the "major versions" they threw out on their Google copying spree, only they won't be designated by major version numbers... they'll be designated by every third major version number.
I
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I don't think it goes far enough. If they really want to beat Google, they need to switch to powers of 3 for the version numbering.
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Article is about Firefox OS, not the browser.
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But Firefox OS is implemented by the very same people.
IOW, expect the same attention to details and customer-friendliness.
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But Firefox OS is implemented by the very same people.
And it's running the very same browser. And the browser is the basis for everything you see. So bugs/holes in Firefox are more relevant when talking about Firefox OS, not less.
Check your details (Score:2)
Your math would check out if you had your details right.
Firefox cuts a release every six weeks (not four). So a FFOS feature release would correspond with *every other* Firefox version (not every third).
Mozilla keeps backing up and making their release plans more like the old
In what ways have you seen this?
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In what ways have you seen this?
A prime (though now older) example: Extended Support Release. A.K.A., let's finally bring back what people and businesses wanted all along: an end to this extension breaking/updating chaos, constant unnecessary UI changes with minimal new features of actual value, with a forced rapid-update cycle. But only after endless Microsoft-style "we're right, everyone else is wrong" shitslinging.
This news, of a distinct "feature" release every couple versions/months, just screams of the next step in bringing some s
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Re:Isn't all of it ridiculously aggressive now? (Score:4, Funny)
Firefox ME won't be so stable.
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Firefox ME won't be so stable.
Firefox Me - that sounds like a marketing slogan.
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When it reaches 32767 will it wrap back around and become negative?
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and then it will merge with Emacs.
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Which Chrome? The one that has a fox with a fiery tail for a logo? Oh, wait...
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(for those who don't understand the reference, http://fireemblem.wikia.com/wiki/Chrom [wikia.com] )
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Re:Ignoring nasty resource leaks 4 times a year (Score:4, Funny)
Remember when Mozilla just made a good browser? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
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I said exactly the same thing about Android after I found out how much data my handset mined from me.
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WTF? I don't think Firefox has crashed on me in almost 2 years.
Perhaps Google Chrome never crashes, but I prefer a crash per year over a browser that sends all my data back to head office for archiving.
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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.
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Exactly. And Mozilla will have none of the leverage of the major players to even get updates pushed. Google struggles enough with it as is. Apple and Microsoft only are able to do it better because they have more platform control. I can't see how Mozilla will have anyway to push a carrier or handset maker to push out these constant releases since they are just given the entire thing away with no strings.
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I think I read/heared somewhere that they can do this because the top part is handled by Mozilla and only the bottom part, like the kernel is handled by the carriers.
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LOL, that's a good one. Google has a hard enough time with the carriers from bloating the hell out of the Android handsets as it is, and Mozilla is seriously expecting to have any say at all in what happens after they RTM?
I guess they aren't Chrome supporters, they're insane.
what is it? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm interested. What is it that bothers people about Firefox? Sure Chrome loads up quicker...but my browser tends to stay open for days at a time anyway. There are a lot of great add-ons etc.. It doesn't seem slow using it generally....It doesn't FEEL as slick, but is tha
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Soon you won't even need an addon. Alex Limi is doing his best to make Firefox as dumb as Chrome. The latest brilliant decisions include moving the menu to a button that looks exactly like in Chrome, and removing the ability to disable scripts/images from Preferences... supposedly because people would forget about it and then think their browser is broken m/
Re:what is it? (Score:4, 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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So, you hate what Fx has become, and then you switch directly to the browser that Fx most wants to be...
And you don't see anything wrong with that line of reasoning?
I'm seriously concerned because Fx is the last not terrible browser out there and they're working hard to copy every ill conceived and stupid design decision that everybody else is doing, without considering the fact that people chose to start using Fx, which suggests that it had something right.
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> What is it that bothers people about Firefox?
* Lack of each browser tab running as a separate process. One "hung" tab and it freezes all the other ones. /sarcasm That's real bright in this day and age.
* Lack of a tab overview to see how much EACH tab is using CPU-wise, Memory-Wise, and FPS. Google Chrome: Tools - Task Manager. Enough said.
* Leaks memory like a sieve. The running joke is that FF is a memory hog. The bigger problem is closing tabs doesn't restore memory! WTF? The ONLY way to "fix" th
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Riiiight .... says the 7-digit UID to the 5-digit UID person who has been browsing & contributing to /. for 10+ years and programming since the 80's.
Are you even able to stay focused for more then 2 minutes and actively engage that brain of yours or do just like to make yourself look a bigger idiot with the immature ad hominem attack which adds nothing constructive to the discussion at hand?
When did /. turn into Reddit retard mode??
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Leaks memory like a sieve. The running joke is that FF is a memory hog. The bigger problem is closing tabs doesn't restore memory!
Maybe it deliberately leaves page elements in memory cache for faster access in future and thus isn't even supposed to free all the memory used by a tab?
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Ah, the old days where the mods shoot the messenger instead of listening to the message.
Glad "about:memory" reclaims all memory when there are no tabs open. Oh Wait, it doesn't.
What is the equivalent of "Chrome's Tool - Task Manager" in FF again? .. Oh wait, there isn't one.
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Well I am still using firefox at the moment, but actively looking for another option. I just hate all the others as well, and use each when necessary of course. But firefox is the ONLY browser I know of where you can open a tab, type a few keys and pull out a video from url history, enter, then press ctrl-t for a new tab and it does not work. It's a basic UI bug that's been reported many many times over more than a decade, and how many times have they screwed their users over with gratuitous change-for-the-
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"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 f
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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
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Yes, it's blocked because of the braindead way firefox handles plugin (not specific to flash either.) No, it's nothing new, they've been studiously ignoring it for over a decade as I said. Your attempt to justify the bug is very mozilla-ish, but in fact this is not a VM running a different OS, it's a browser plugin, there is no reason the plugin needs to break the UI, and every other browser on earth outside of mozilla actually seems to handle this correctly.
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Well I tried it just now and either I was mistaken in thinking that youtube was the site where it would assert without even clicking, or if youtube changed something on their end to quit doing that. But once you click the player to pause, change volume, etc. the bug reasserts. This breaks on tons of other sites with many different plugins. Other browsers dont seem to have such problems with it, but from reading countless pages of bug reports and discussion I get the idea there is something particularly bad
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Try to fix a bug in Firefox and get back to me.
Carriers will eat Firefox OS alive. (Score:1)
This would be a great strategy if carriers actually released these versions. Instead, what will happen is what happened to Android. Every carrier will be on a different version of Firefox OS and all will be out of date.
I am all for more competition in this space. But, only iOS can roll out updates across carriers at the same time and their penance is major carriers are now abandoning the iPhone because of their tactics.
A rolling release model with a rarely updated core OS that sticks to only plumbing but
Re:Carriers will eat Firefox OS alive. (Score:5, 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.
Churn for the sake of churn (Score:3, 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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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.
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One big difference: The supporters for Linux systems release updates that can be installed automagically on a regular basis. They may not deliver the latest release of the Linux kernel, but they do backport patches and fixes and roll those out on a regular basis. The handset vendors do not.
The only reasons to "update" any product are... (Score:2)
...to fix defects and to add features.
If you must constantly update, your product is broken and your users are beta testers.
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If you must constantly update, your product is broken and your users are beta testers.
All products not mathematically proven to be bug-free, and not containing every feature that the users could ever want, must be broken to you. So, are you computing on some of NASA's old cast-offs, or what?
Weeeee! (Score:2)
I don't care what anyone says. The simulator is fun to play with. That alone is worth the price of admission.
Beta Testing? (Score:2)
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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
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Pluggins, not featuritice (Score:2)
I like the idea of pluggins for special features instead of building in gazillion features. Improve the meta model to make it easier to create pluggins rather than hard-code them all into the browser. Otherwise, the menus and dialogs will be Bible-sized.
Too aggressive (Score:1)
I don't need more aggressive people, now I'll fear people with smartphones are out there to stalk me and shoot me and that the devices are concealed weapons. I know they have "point and shoot" cameras.