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Firefox moving to 4 week releases

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Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#151

Post by d00bianista »

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 :(

Aside from versioning being clear about how big the change is, Windows Installer has this [0-255].[0-255].[0-65535] limit that I hope people do not learn about in the hard ways.

It's not so fun to work around because Windows Installer tries to be smart about things, as opposed to the others that take a more robust approach.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/msi/productve...

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#152

Post by flukus »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #143
Ididntdothis wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Just got an Office 365 update. Suddenly all icons are different for no good reason and without warning.

Fortunately I don't do family tech support anymore, but that's exactly the sort of thing that would result in a panicked phone call and a user having to "learn it all over again". And that's for a purely cosmetic change.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#153

Post by chrisseaton »

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…

They must already be doing a full build, test, and benchmark for each platform for each PR to their codebase in CI, presumably in parallel to make it run reasonably fast. It doesn’t seem like much of an extra step to release those binaries they’re already building hundreds of times a day.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#154

Post by ajsnigrutin »

kingofpandora wrote: post #71
aquabeagle wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla only provides binaries for Linux 32-bit, Linux 64-bit, macOS, win32, and win64: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/69.0/ All of the various Linux distributions just repackage those binaries. iOS and Android are distributed only through the App Store and Google Play. The BSDs and other ("tier 3") platforms have to compile from source and distribute their own packages: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-…

> All of the various Linux distributions just repackage those binaries. Source please. Never mind, it's simply wrong so don't even worry about it!

Gentoo does it for firefox-bin:

/usr/portage/www-client/firefox-bin/firefox-bin-69.0.ebuild

    MOZ_HTTP_URI="https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/${MOZ_PN}/releases/"
    ...
    SRC_URI="${SRC_URI}
        amd64? ( ${MOZ_HTTP_URI%/}/${MOZ_PV}/linux-x86_64/en-US/${MOZ_P}.tar.bz2 -> ${PN}_x86_64-${PV}.tar.bz2 )
        x86? ( ${MOZ_HTTP_URI%/}/${MOZ_PV}/linux-i686/en-US/${MOZ_P}.tar.bz2 -> ${PN}_i686-${PV}.tar.bz2 )"

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#155

Post by anticensor »

d00bianista wrote: post #151
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 :(

Aside from versioning being clear about how big the change is, Windows Installer has this [0-255].[0-255].[0-65535] limit that I hope people do not learn about in the hard ways. It's not so fun to work around because Windows Installer tries to be smart about things, as opposed to the others that take a more robust approach. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/msi/productve...

Firefox has a custom installer.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#156

Post by Khoth »

nwah1 wrote: post #42
WoodenChair wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're addressing the pain for the developer but not the pain for the user and society more largely. The user (who may be on a slow internet connection) has to deal with the bandwidth of the more frequent downloads. Society has to deal with additional network congestion costs and electricity usage.

True, but by using binary deltas you can minimize that cost. And failure to upgrade may mean running more inefficient algorithms, wasting more processor cycles, or transferring more data in general. For instance, if you are on a browser that doesn't support Brotli compression then you'll miss out on the dramatic compression improvements provided by that algorithm.

In my experience I'm more likely to be running more inefficient algorithms, wasting more processor cycles, or transferring more data in general if I do upgrade software than if I don't.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#157

Post by uranusjr »

chrisseaton wrote: post #153
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…

They must already be doing a full build, test, and benchmark for each platform for each PR to their codebase in CI, presumably in parallel to make it run reasonably fast. It doesn’t seem like much of an extra step to release those binaries they’re already building hundreds of times a day.

They already do that with Firefox Nightly. But most users expect a more stable product than that.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#158

Post by padenot »

chrisseaton wrote: post #153
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…

They must already be doing a full build, test, and benchmark for each platform for each PR to their codebase in CI, presumably in parallel to make it run reasonably fast. It doesn’t seem like much of an extra step to release those binaries they’re already building hundreds of times a day.

We do exactly this for people who want. A reasonably stable build (including full testing, and benchmarking, which takes multiple hundreds hours, parallelized of course) is available twice a day (0:00 and 12:00 UTC). It self updates (either differential or full download depending of what landed on the past day).

I've been using only this for the last 10 years or so (on windows, Linux, Mac and Android), and I can count the number of time things really broke on one hand.

We call these Firefox Nighly, and they are available at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/nightly/all/.

Release notes at available at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/71.0a1/releasenotes/, but they are not always updated for each version, sometimes batched (its quite some work due to the amount of commits that are pushed per day).

There is a cool blog at https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/ that talks a bit about the new stuff.

All this is really experimental and probably not for everybody, but helps us to deliver something good at the end. Filing bugs and giving us feedback is of course particularly appreciated, as always!

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#160

Post by yes-except-no »

iagooar wrote: post #102

Wrong decision. Nobody wants to update their browser this frequently, and the release overhead is a constant factor. So you're basically having a lot less productive time where you actually produce value. But hey, not my call I guess.

>Nobody wants to update their browser this frequently

hi, I run nightly and get prompts that my browser has updated daily. I simply ignore them, and it'll be patched by the time I start up firefox the next time, because it updates in the background. And so does regular firefox.

You don't see Chrome updating, and yet they're pushing out more releases than firefox ever did.

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