Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firefox moving to 4 week releases

hacks.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 195 posts

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#171

Post by chrisseaton »

chopin wrote: post #168
chrisseaton wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are those users doing that can’t be automated and run in CI?

Test on exotic hardware, for example. Or exotic combinations of libraries in the OS which FF depends on.

Those should be in the CI test matrix then - we shouldn’t be relying on manual testing done specially for releases.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#172

Post by pingyong »

chrisseaton wrote: post #166
pingyong wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be more stable by having nightly users test it beforehand for a while and report any new bugs.

What are those users doing that can’t be automated and run in CI?

I'm guessing something the devs haven't thought of. As soon as you hit 10k+ users, chances are people are doing things you didn't expect.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#173

Post by diffeomorphism »

Grue3 wrote: post #167
pingyong wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Nobody wants to update their browser this frequently Uhh really? Pretty sure "most people" don't even notice when their browser updates.

I almost never restart Firefox, and having a pop-up nagging me to update sucks a lot. Sometimes I have to look at it for many weeks straight before Firefox eventually eats all the RAM and I have to restart it.

Clicking close and then clicking restore session takes 5 seconds or so. Why are you "almost never" restarting?

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#174

Post by chopin »

chrisseaton wrote: post #171
chopin wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Test on exotic hardware, for example. Or exotic combinations of libraries in the OS which FF depends on.

Those should be in the CI test matrix then - we shouldn’t be relying on manual testing done specially for releases.

If even Microsoft can't catch these, why should Mozilla be able to? I am admittedly not in the CI business for frontends but I'd imagine that the combinatorics vastly outnumbers the possibilities of any organization.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#177

Post by ashwoods »

chrisseaton wrote: post #161
uranusjr wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How can it be more stable than a build that passes CI? If they have some extra tests to run to check it’s stable why aren’t those in CI?

To begin with, it is probably released with a subset of the CI matrix, because I imagine that the full CI matrix takes more than a day. Second, it is nearly impossible* to cover all possible environments+addons+websites and test them correctly. This isn't a normal desktop app, nor a webapp that always is running relatively sandboxed in a more or less known environment. Browsers are platforms, as OS are. Lots of people doing wacky stuff on it. Very hard to realistically automate all that stuff.

*impossible with a limited constraint of time and/or money.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#178

Post by atroche »

chrisseaton wrote: post #166
pingyong wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be more stable by having nightly users test it beforehand for a while and report any new bugs.

What are those users doing that can’t be automated and run in CI?

It'd be pretty ambitious to have CI run against the variety of web apps that real users "test" against (including ones they're developing!)
Post reply on HN