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Firefox moving to 4 week releases

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Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#131

Post by wpietri »

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?

They're clearly moving gradually in this direction, but I think it's an open question how far they can get.

For server-side software, it's easy enough to do multiple releases per day, because you have full control over the environment, and all the work is internal. But for desktop/mobile software like this, having multiple releases per day won't be efficient in terms of bandwidth, load, or user experience.

And each browser version has other external costs, like documentation and support. Right now it can be hard to solve a problem like, "How do I do X with Firefox" because the answer varies by version. The more versions you have, the harder that is.

Or can you imagine trying to triage and verify bug reports if there are, say, 3 new Firefox releases per day, and people could be on any one of dozens of versions because they don't quit and restart the browser very often? We can imagine solutions to these problems, of course. But I think getting a release cadence below weekly for desktop apps will be a very long road.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#132

Post by MaulingMonkey »

fnord123 wrote: post #109
masklinn wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2019-10 says more than 76.0.0 Neither says anything useful . 2019-10 is no more actionable or informative than 76.0.0. That 2019-10 was released in october 2019 is meaningless information and only "more" in the "babble" sense.

2014-04 is absolutely actionable for a browser.

2014-04 is actionable for a lot of stuff - "unpatched" or "unmaintained"...

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#133

Post by roca »

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?

One issue with releasing every day or every hour is that that would mean users downloading massive numbers of updates. Sure, you ship deltas, but there's still a cost to each update.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#134

Post by roca »

flukus wrote: post #122
lizzard wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The lifetime of each ESR is one year, there's an intentional 10 week overlap.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#135

Post by roca »

boring_twenties wrote: post #43
maxerickson wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a concrete example of a broken shortcut? The shortcuts I use work fine, so I don't understand the complaint.

Some shortcuts I use -- like Alt-$NUMBER to jump to a specific tab -- are frequently overridden by websites, which I view as a browser breakage because this should simply not be allowed.

Obviously this is a tough one since most users don't know those shortcuts exist and will get upset if those shortcuts stop working in a Web site.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#136

Post by nirvdrum »

Someone1234 wrote: post #40
zepearl wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general I like more the classic/old way of versioning the releases, like for example "1.2.2" which has some embedded meaning of what is changing (e.g. . . ) which hints at how potentially dangerous an upgrade might be or if some new exciting stuff has been included. Jumping directly from 10 to 11 to 12 leaves me clueless without reading all release notes :(

Semantic versioning is useful. Unfortunately the marketers have taken over and there's a numbers race going on.

They increase the major version because they don't guarantee backward compatibility. You may think it's foolish to only provide guaranteed API support for 4 or 6 weeks, but it's more than just a marketing gimmick.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#137

Post by blaesus »

kevingadd wrote: post #112
LinuxBender wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention, different builds per language for each OS. [1] This has never really made sense to me, but I'm sure there must be a good reason. [1] - https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/68.1.0esr/linux...

My educated guess is that the localization data for every language is pretty massive, so per-region downloads can include the text for their region without dragging along a few extra megabytes of text/images for other regions. If you swap regions after installing it can probably download on-demand. Historically reducing your download size by a couple megabytes has had measurable positive impact on conversion rates (f…

`zh-CN` and `zh-TW` are generally just old-school ways to say "simplified Chinese" and "Traditional Chinese" (two similar writing systems). The confusion comes in as the Chinese language family has multiple dialects and variants, and there are multiple writing systems.

The current practice is really a dimension-reduction, where a N×2 matrix [(CN, TW, HK, SG, MY...) × (simplified, traditional)] collapsed into a 2×1 vector (TW, CN).

The language labels should have been `zh-hans` and `zh-hant` if one means to differentiate the writing systems, and not the underlying linguistic variants.

According to Beijing government, Taiwan absolutely exists, it's just that it is not a sovereign state. Hong Kong has been handed over to China for more than twenty years and people in Hong Kong continue to use zh-HK – Beijing government seems to be OK with that.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#138

Post by sarah180 »

zepearl wrote: post #32
chaosmachine wrote: post #2

According to my calculations, this means Firefox 100 will be released on 2022-03-08.

In general I like more the classic/old way of versioning the releases, like for example "1.2.2" which has some embedded meaning of what is changing (e.g. . . ) which hints at how potentially dangerous an upgrade might be or if some new exciting stuff has been included. Jumping directly from 10 to 11 to 12 leaves me clueless without reading all release notes :(

The reality is that you must read the release notes for this to be a strategy that can even remotely minimize your risk.

On one side, relatively minor upgrades can have huge impacts for some use cases. Some changes are riskier than others, but SemVer and major/minor distinctions are not reliable signals for anything critical.

More important though, if you're skipping browser updates at all, you need to be tracking the security implications of every patch you skip. Otherwise you're increasing your risk by an order of magnitude more than you'd reduce it by deciding a change might be too buggy based on a numbering scheme.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#139

Post by efiecho »

Oh no, not this. Every new release means hours spent on rebasing patches, investigating why the new version won't compile and then create more patches. When Firefox finally builds, I now have to find out what they have removed/changed that worked fine before, and what new crap that should be disabled in about:conf. I need LESS of this, not more..

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#140

Post by untog »

efiecho wrote: post #139

Oh no, not this. Every new release means hours spent on rebasing patches, investigating why the new version won't compile and then create more patches. When Firefox finally builds, I now have to find out what they have removed/changed that worked fine before, and what new crap that should be disabled in about:conf. I need LESS of this, not more..

You're not obliged to update every four weeks. Why not continue updating as often as you currently do?
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