Firefox moving to 4 week releases

It's important to ensure that the parasitic cryptominer that will sooner or later get bundled with it remains evergreen.

There are two questions you should ask: will this change the odds of a new feature I don't like being developed, and will an extra few weeks mean that they'll do anything other than complain? History suggests the answer to both is no, which means there's not much value discussing it.

Good point, but factor in build/release, then deployment. We all know what some companies are like in their desktop real estate rollouts - if you have too frequent updates, you end up with greater disparity in releases with a template support of - oh that's not the latest, pls try again.

Then feedback, if you rollout release too frequently you also can be several releases in and get feedback of some bug in a release prior to current release, albeit only a week or so. So by having organised releases, allows better management and a better experience overall. It's a fine balance, but for those who needs it, there will always be nightly builds of most things they want with last second updates, also self-builds for those inclined.

But I get the whole artificial timeframe does seem somewhat odd, but the further you look at the overall usage, management and support factors et all, you start to appreciate such regular timeframes.

On the other extreme, I've worked in an environment in which a whole suit had to be retested and go thru all the hopes as a full stop was missed of a comment and that change caused the whole testing, management/release cycle to go thru the motions again. That you would like, ignore and package up with other small things into a full release - which is what many do these days in most environments. After all - would you want to go thru a rollout of a new release that may contain a fix you want, or equally may just be adding a full stop to a comment in the code and yielding no binary level changes, albeit that it went thru the whole hoops and hurdles as a full release and that is what you got.

So from my experience, a 4 week release cycle is good, fixed, something that you can plan around. Also kudos for not just picking a day a month and doing monthly updates like most, that tends to seem more arbitrary unlike 4 weeks, which has an air of less arbitrary and feels like it was thought out more. Though an element of personal experience does come into play.

Firefox ships ~100 binaries for 100 different targets, from mobile phones, to desktops, tablets, ... x86, arm, sparc, ppc, riscv, ... X linux, windows, macos, freebds, openbsd, netbsd, .... X arch linux, debian, ubuntu ..

At some point you need to say this is what we want to ship, and branch, and make sure that not only all tests pass, but that the installers work, run the benchmark suite that might not be run on every PR, make sure the updates work on all systems, appstores, etc. Accept new patches to fix bugs, etc.

I suppose they might have a release team that does nothing but releases, and if creating a full release takes a week (no idea how long it takes honestly), then maybe they could release each week.

But I don't think they can release a new version every day, because probably running their whole CI takes longer.

E.g. before shipping a version of Rust, the RC is used to build and run tests of all packages in the Rust package repository. This takes 4 full days. One could probably throw money at the problem and speed it up, but at least right now, releases just cannot technically happen faster, unless you are willing to compromise on quality.

"probably had bad memories"

Speaking as someone who was at Mozilla at that time, you can change "probably had" to "definitely has". In hindsight I'd go ahead and call it a disaster. The X weeks release cadence solves so many problems.