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Firefox 8.0 is Released

mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#2

Post by hozzer »

Dear Mozilla. Why do you keep doing all these full version releases? Seriously it's just annoying. Just because IE is on version 10. Doesn't mean you have to be. Why are you doing this.... You've gone from 3-8 in a year. That's not right.

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#3

Post by sp332 »

hozzer wrote: post #2

Dear Mozilla. Why do you keep doing all these full version releases? Seriously it's just annoying. Just because IE is on version 10. Doesn't mean you have to be. Why are you doing this.... You've gone from 3-8 in a year. That's not right.

"Full" version releases? There will be a new release every six weeks. Whatever features are ready to be shipped at that time will be released. There was a discussion about removing the version number from the "About" box but it was left in for debugging purposes. That's all the version number is for now. Since there are no "long-term support" versions, just make sure you're up-to-date and don't give the version number any mind.

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#6

Post by skl_ »

hozzer wrote: post #2

Dear Mozilla. Why do you keep doing all these full version releases? Seriously it's just annoying. Just because IE is on version 10. Doesn't mean you have to be. Why are you doing this.... You've gone from 3-8 in a year. That's not right.

Although I've not looked into exactly why Mozilla have adopted the rapid-release cycle, I'd imagine it may be something to do with the ability to quickly drop backwards-compatibility and support. That way the code base can mature faster and less time is spent on redunant versions.

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#7

Post by eCa »

hozzer wrote: post #2

Dear Mozilla. Why do you keep doing all these full version releases? Seriously it's just annoying. Just because IE is on version 10. Doesn't mean you have to be. Why are you doing this.... You've gone from 3-8 in a year. That's not right.

I sort of understand their reasoning. It's easier to get people interested in a "full" release, than some 3.0.21 version every three mongths.

It also was more wrong to stay on 3.6.* for over two years.

A middle road might be to start a year with a full release and then do point-releases doing that year, so in 2013 we would have, for instance: 13, 13.0.1, 13.1, 13.2, 13.2.1, 13.3.

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#8

Post by joenathan »

recoiledsnake wrote: post #5

Just got the notification, but didn't upgrade because a lot of my very useful extensions for HTML dev weren't compatible. I don't think the new features in 7->8 make up for the lack of my extensions.

Use this extension to "make" your extensions compatible https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat...

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#9

Post by DEinspanjer »

skl_ wrote: post #6
hozzer wrote: post #2

Dear Mozilla. Why do you keep doing all these full version releases? Seriously it's just annoying. Just because IE is on version 10. Doesn't mean you have to be. Why are you doing this.... You've gone from 3-8 in a year. That's not right.

Although I've not looked into exactly why Mozilla have adopted the rapid-release cycle, I'd imagine it may be something to do with the ability to quickly drop backwards-compatibility and support. That way the code base can mature faster and less time is spent on redunant versions.

The most important reason for it was to keep new features from being stuck in limbo just because they happened to be part of the same branch as a feature that was taking a long time to be production ready. This is what killed us with 4.0. There were big and nice features in 4 that were actually ready more than 6 months prior to release, but they couldn't go because they were "full release" features and they were waiting for other features that were considered to be "must have" for 4.0.

With the rapid release cycle, when features start development, they have the ability to be easily configured out of the release product if they aren't ready for a particular version. We have a reliable release schedule that we expect to hit every 6 weeks. Obviously, we do our best to have as many new features as are ready be part of each release, but we don't leave people wondering when it will finally happen because we keep to the schedule and release the features that are ready.

Some of the biggest parts of this release were actually groundwork improvements to make the add-ons ecosphere more comfortable in the context of rapid release.

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