Firefox moving to 4 week releases • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#191

Post by lenkite » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 12:41 PM UTC

diegoperini wrote: post #186

lenkite wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I don't get an idea if my extension would break changing from version 2019-10 -> 2019-11 without reading the release notes. I would know it there is a big chance of breakage if I moved from 76.0.0 -> v77.0.0 and I am reasonably certain it won't break if I moved from 76.0.0 -> 76.0.1

But if a website breaks, you can get more idea about why it happened by comparing your current browser's calendar version to the latest update. For example, you will know you are behind x years of updates. With semantic versioning, you don't know how old you have not been updating your installation. Since there are more websites than extensions, the utilitarian approach would be to choose 2019-10 over 76.0.0.

One approach is proactive and the other reactive. Unless, one checks the release notes every 4 weeks... I would argue the utilitarian approach is exactly the other way. Verify and test if there is an API break with a major version change. Whether the browser is 2 years or 10 years old shouldn't make a difference.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#192

Post by bytematic » Fri, Sep 20, 2019, 3:43 PM UTC

re4ctor wrote: post #184

bytematic wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my work the culture is just to ship changes as soon as they improve the product/codebase

Doing that for a binary release that is in dozens of platforms, configurations, locales, etc. is incredibly time consuming. Uptake on binaries is also usually on the order of days-weeks before most of your user base is up to date. It's easier for say a website or service that can deploy to millions of users within minutes.

Yeah, I agree for sure. I get tons of updates for spotify, discord, and other applications that don't need to do complex binary distribution

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#193

Post by Mathnerd314 » Sun, Sep 22, 2019, 3:07 AM UTC

gorhill wrote: post #26

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked a while ago and it seems to be due to some of the webextensions I have installed, probably uBlock Origin but I can't be sure (28 extensions). Basically some things get cached that don't need to be, and then the cheap 5400rpm disk drive makes the browser stutter swapping between tab content processes. I'm waiting for the hard drive to die so I can justify getting a new SSD or laptop, which I'm pretty sure wil…

> probably uBlock Origin but I can't be sure (28 extensions). Why "probably"? I fail to see how uBO is related to "things get cached that don't need to be".

It's the largest extension I have installed, 2.5 MB. It could also be Stylus or Tampermonkey, but I saw uBO in the performance profiles I made, running the JIT and blocking some threads.

The main issue is capturing a decent profile, the lag caused by the profiler makes it hard to trust anything.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#194

Post by fluffything » Sun, Sep 22, 2019, 1:35 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #187

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 build downloadable binaries every 12 hours, called Firefox nightly, which is to say the bottleneck for full releases isn't building or automated testing. Mind you, the nightlies are experimental, and not for general use.

Building is in general just a small part of the release pipeline.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#195

Post by fluffything » Sun, Sep 22, 2019, 1:39 PM UTC

padenot wrote: post #158

chrisseaton wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coun…

Are nightlies tested on CI for all platforms that Firefox supports ? I only see Tier-1 in that matrix (Linux, Windows, Mac). No iOS, Android, *BSDs, etc.