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Firefox moving to 4 week releases

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Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#121

Post by flukus »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #54

I don’t really like these quick release cycles. When things get released every year or half year I have the time to read about the changes but if I work with several packages that release all the time I don’t even have the time to read about the changes. I also think that quality tends to suffer. Over the last two years windows 10 has released several buggy updates that caused our in house apps to stop working.

Notice that almost all the positives of quick release cycles are about how they make it easier for developers? I think is telling of where tech culture is these days.

IME frequent updates terrify non-technical users, any given update might change the UI, remove a feature the use or add some other complication (like simply not working) at an inopportune moment. Big fat updates give them a chance to prepare for these changes at a time of their choosing.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#122

Post by flukus »

lizzard wrote: post #61
Ididntdothis wrote: post #54

I don’t really like these quick release cycles. When things get released every year or half year I have the time to read about the changes but if I work with several packages that release all the time I don’t even have the time to read about the changes. I also think that quality tends to suffer. Over the last two years windows 10 has released several buggy updates that caused our in house apps to stop working.

Firefox ESR exists for exactly this reason. It gets periodic security fixes but not much else and you can stay on the same major version for a year or so. https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/enterprise/

> Extended Support Release (ESR): receives major updates on average every 42 weeks

It feels like they're just taking the piss when the life cycle of an extended support release is just 42 weeks.

Still a step in the right direction though.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#123

Post by nickm12 »

JohnFen wrote: post #116
jillesvangurp wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It actually does the opposite. It's big, infrequent releases that are risky, less stable. Users update automatically; they barely notice it today. Most non techie users have no idea that it is happening. A few years go we had these big bang releases with browsers, operating systems, etc. and things were much worse. Anytime you unleash millions of new lines of code on users it's almost guaranteed that there will be so…

Yes, I'm well aware of the arguments in favor. It's just that I don't see it playing out much in the real world. In my experience (on the whole -- there are exceptions), rapid released software tends to be of lower quality. Even if that weren't true, though, rapid release means a lot more updates, and updates are a pain in the butt.

Can you give concrete examples? For the software I use that is on a rapid release schedule, (Firefox, Chrome, Dropobox, probably others I'm not even aware of) I don't notice any sort of quality issue. The only "pain in the butt" is having to restart my browser.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#124

Post by nickm12 »

fluffything wrote: post #57
lucb1e wrote: post #46

I've always wondered this: why release on a schedule at all? If people demand a certain new feature ("[this will] bring you new features more quickly"), it can just be brought out as it's ready, instead of having to wait an average of 3 (now 2) weeks before it can be released? And why does this have to increment the major version, since when is every single update backwards incompatible?

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 eve…

Right. Desktop software is also much more difficult to QA than server software because of the lack of control over the environment and the difficulty of rollback.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#125

Post by nickm12 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #99
JohnFen wrote: post #25

I think this is sad news, but that's because I view the current "rapid release" trend and being, on the whole, a bad thing for everyone. It decreases software quality, decreases stability, and increases hassle and stress for everyone from developers to users.

It actually does the opposite. It's big, infrequent releases that are risky, less stable. Users update automatically; they barely notice it today. Most non techie users have no idea that it is happening. A few years go we had these big bang releases with browsers, operating systems, etc. and things were much worse. Anytime you unleash millions of new lines of code on users it's almost guaranteed that there will be so…

+1. Another benefit of rapid releases is being able to release major refactors behind feature gates. This approach was taken when Mozilla shipped an mp4 parser written in Rust [1]. By having rapid release cycles, they could spend a cycle or two verifying that the new component produced identical results "in the wild" before enabling it by default. If they had 1-year release they never would have been able to verify their implementation at such a scale.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/07/shipping-rust-in-firefox/

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#126

Post by nextos »

nickm12 wrote: post #124
fluffything wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eve…

Right. Desktop software is also much more difficult to QA than server software because of the lack of control over the environment and the difficulty of rollback.

Also, for desktop software, I have found that small releases are a lot less risky.

You experience small issues, one by one, instead of a massive amount of bugs coming all of a sudden.

For example, last time I updated a Linux distribution with 6-month releases this was the case. Whereas with a rolling release one, it's just much more pleasant.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#127

Post by Ididntdothis »

flukus wrote: post #121
Ididntdothis wrote: post #54

I don’t really like these quick release cycles. When things get released every year or half year I have the time to read about the changes but if I work with several packages that release all the time I don’t even have the time to read about the changes. I also think that quality tends to suffer. Over the last two years windows 10 has released several buggy updates that caused our in house apps to stop working.

Notice that almost all the positives of quick release cycles are about how they make it easier for developers? I think is telling of where tech culture is these days. IME frequent updates terrify non-technical users, any given update might change the UI, remove a feature the use or add some other complication (like simply not working) at an inopportune moment. Big fat updates give them a chance to prepare for these c…

That’s what I am thinking. I hate it when my browser or a phone app suddenly looks different without warning.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#128

Post by wpietri »

cpeterso wrote: post #77
kenhwang wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox probably had bad memories of when they "released when it's ready" during the FF3 -> FF4 days where a couple of features held back everything. With fix released cycles, they have more of a motivator to cut off things that aren't ready yet so that the things that are can go out.

With shorter release cycles, there's also less pressure to ship half-baked features. If you know the next release is just four weeks away, then slipping a feature one release is rarely a huge deal. But if the next release is one quarter or one year away, teams rush to ship now and fix bugs in production later. Overall product quality will take a hit at every release.

Totally. I think of this as the "next bus" effect. If you see your bus pulling up, do you run for it? If the next bus is in 5 minutes, no. If it's once a week, hell yes.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#129

Post by batmansmk »

lucb1e wrote: post #46

I've always wondered this: why release on a schedule at all? If people demand a certain new feature ("[this will] bring you new features more quickly"), it can just be brought out as it's ready, instead of having to wait an average of 3 (now 2) weeks before it can be released? And why does this have to increment the major version, since when is every single update backwards incompatible?

For quite a few products, releasing takes time. QA, auditing the security, localizing, generating the builds, executing exhaustive in-depth unit tests, flushing caches, writing release notes, publicating on different websites... it can take a while!

When the cost of the release goes above a certain amount, due the sheer number of features or the thoroughness of the release process, it starts to make sense to mutualize release tasks between a bunch of features.

Bundling those features on a time basis is quite often a local optimum between an acceptable delay for the product team and an acceptable cost for ops/release/qa/...

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#130

Post by acdha »

boring_twenties wrote: post #91
Ajedi32 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't going to significantly increase the speed at which new features are developed, just the speed at which they're released. The overall risk of you encountering a new feature you don't like won't be higher.

It's not necessarily the number of features but the process of preparing oneself for changes likely to be surprising, unpleasant, require workarounds or length research as to workarounds, etc. Even if it's just a matter of reading the release notes, having to do that twice as often is a non-zero burden. Of course there is Firefox ESR but I seem to remember Mozilla's website basically explicitly recommending against i…

> process of preparing oneself for changes likely to be surprising, unpleasant, require workarounds

Do you actually do this? Do you think the percentage of users who do exceeds 1%? I mean, I do read the release notes for new web features but that’s because I know from the stats that almost all of our users will be updated shortly after release.

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