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Simplifying Firefox Release Channels

LeoNatan25 9y ago
What was unclear in the previous model? Sounds like there is less granularity now on testing the different branches. This could have he effect of bugs being caught later in the development cycle.
- lizzard 9y ago
  Granularity is pretty good for the Nightly builds, since a new update is normally built and pushed out at least once a day. The mozregression tool is useful for narrowing down when a bug first appeared: http://mozilla.github.io/mozregression/ http://mozilla.github.io/mozregression/
- cpeterso 9y ago
  The Aurora channel never got as much traction as Mozilla anticipated. The original plan was for Beta to have 10x the number of users as Aurora and Aurora to have 10x the number of users as Nightly. Today, Aurora has only about 2x the number of users as Nightly and there isn't much difference between the types of user hardware or bugs found in Aurora compared to Nightly. Thus, there isn't much additional QA benefit when a Firefox release moves from the Nightly to Aurora channel. Most of the serious regressions are found in Nightly so Aurora is just six weeks of additional latency before new features and bug fixes reach the Release channel users. The Beta channel is not representative of the Release channel user behavior or hardware either. About 60% of the Beta channel users are in India and Indonesia. The story I heard was that, years ago, someone distributed a CD with a Firefox 4 Beta among their friends in India. It went viral and those people have, unknowingly, been on the Beta channel since then.
  - LeoNatan25 9y ago
    Nightly is too unstable and beta is too late. Aurora was a more nuanced release, where it had some stability, while still had features that were long before beta appearance.
    - nnethercote 9y ago
      I run Nightly on all my machines, and in my experience its stability is good. YMMV, of course.
      - abrowne 9y ago
        I had used Beta for years, mostly on Mac, but recently I switched full-time to Ubuntu. I wanted some Gtk+3 updates that were only in Nightly, and now I've been using it for several months with a couple of crashes I can remember.
    - cpeterso 9y ago
      Mozilla has some projects in place to try to improve Nightly stability and catch regressions sooner. Chrome's Dev channel is a nice middle ground: Dev is just a ~weekly known-good snapshot of the Canary (Nightly) channel that has received some QA. Chrome Dev and Canary have the same major version number.
    - dralley 9y ago
      I'm not sure what "beta is too late" even means, considering that it now occupies the exact position that Aurora did, that you claim is a sweet spot.
penpapersw 9y ago
Considering Edge is improving steadily on Windows, and Chrome is pretty good and cross-platform, what is the niche of Firefox at this point?
- dbaupp 9y ago
  There is, at least, the political niche of being truly open source, and not built by a for-profit corporation.
  - penpapersw 9y ago
    I'm always a bit skeptical when someone defends an organization by saying it's non-profit. AFAIK, the only difference between non-profit and for-profit is that the owners of a non-profit don't get to keep them money for themselves per se, although they're just like for-profits in all other ways, including the ability to name their own salaries and waste money frivolously and use their resources inefficiently. I don't know how Mozilla works internally, but I'm not about to give them the benefit of the doubt without cause. Also, where is Mozilla getting money from in the first place? They only offer free products. The last time I checked, they're getting most of their money from Google. That doesn't automatically mean Google has Mozilla in their pocket, but it's definitely a red flag.
    - steveklabnik 9y ago
      To be clear, "Mozilla" is two entities; the Mozilla Foundation ("Mofo"), which is a non-profit, and the Mozilla Corporation ("Moco"), which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Foundation. (I am an employee of Moco.) This is more of a tax/legal thing than it is a different mission between the two entities, as [1] says: "The Mozilla Corporation is guided by the principles of the Mozilla Manifesto." The Google deal changed in 2014, at which point it became a five-year deal with Yahoo! in the US, and other partnerships (I don't remember the details to be honest) elsewhere, IIRC Yandex in Russia and Baidu in China? 1. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/
    - hackuser 9y ago
domenicd 9y ago
This seems like a good change. For Chrome, I only use Canary + stable. And having beta as a period for a wider audience with relatively lower bug tolerance to catch things before they hit stable makes sense. But Chrome's Dev channel/Firefox's Aurora never made much sense to me. I wish Firefox Nightly automatically did the new-profile thing like Firefox Dev Edition/Chrome Canary does, though. Not being able to run them side-by-side out of the box is quite annoying. (Maybe this has been fixed since I originally installed Nightly?) One thing that I'm having a hard time understanding from the article is whether this means Firefox is moving from a 18-week major version cycle to a 12-week major version cycle? Because features will no longer need the extra 6 weeks in Aurora? "Faster release cycles for platform features" kind of implies this, but it isn't stated anywhere explicitly.
- lizzard 9y ago
  We have always had the potential to move that fast, but you can think of the difference here for features as: rather than scrambling to bring features to release faster if they're ready, we can choose to hold some features back for an extra 6 weeks in Nightly, for more development if they need it.
  - domenicd 9y ago
    This is the same kind of confusing stuff as in the article. Give it to me straight: when I upgrade stable Firefox to version N, how many more weeks will I wait for a stable update to version N+1?
    - Dylan16807 9y ago
      The same, a month and a half. But if you're waiting for a feature that was just finished to get into stable, that time is faster. You will only have to wait for N+2 instead of N+3.
    - lizzard 9y ago
      Stable Firefox will still update around every six weeks, the same as before. You could also think of the change like this: if you report a bug in the current release version, and someone fixes that bug in Nightly, the fix will end up in a new release 6 weeks faster than before.
Animats 9y ago
There should be a developer build of the currently shipping product, for when you need to find out why Firefox broke.
- samtoday 9y ago
  You can just use normal (stable) Firefox for that. It still has the same great devtools!

What was unclear in the previous model? Sounds like there is less granularity now on testing the different branches. This could have he effect of bugs being caught later in the development cycle.

lizzard 9y ago
Granularity is pretty good for the Nightly builds, since a new update is normally built and pushed out at least once a day. The mozregression tool is useful for narrowing down when a bug first appeared: http://mozilla.github.io/mozregression/ http://mozilla.github.io/mozregression/
cpeterso 9y ago
The Aurora channel never got as much traction as Mozilla anticipated. The original plan was for Beta to have 10x the number of users as Aurora and Aurora to have 10x the number of users as Nightly. Today, Aurora has only about 2x the number of users as Nightly and there isn't much difference between the types of user hardware or bugs found in Aurora compared to Nightly. Thus, there isn't much additional QA benefit when a Firefox release moves from the Nightly to Aurora channel. Most of the serious regressions are found in Nightly so Aurora is just six weeks of additional latency before new features and bug fixes reach the Release channel users. The Beta channel is not representative of the Release channel user behavior or hardware either. About 60% of the Beta channel users are in India and Indonesia. The story I heard was that, years ago, someone distributed a CD with a Firefox 4 Beta among their friends in India. It went viral and those people have, unknowingly, been on the Beta channel since then.
- LeoNatan25 9y ago
  Nightly is too unstable and beta is too late. Aurora was a more nuanced release, where it had some stability, while still had features that were long before beta appearance.
  - nnethercote 9y ago
    I run Nightly on all my machines, and in my experience its stability is good. YMMV, of course.
    - abrowne 9y ago
      I had used Beta for years, mostly on Mac, but recently I switched full-time to Ubuntu. I wanted some Gtk+3 updates that were only in Nightly, and now I've been using it for several months with a couple of crashes I can remember.
  - cpeterso 9y ago
    Mozilla has some projects in place to try to improve Nightly stability and catch regressions sooner. Chrome's Dev channel is a nice middle ground: Dev is just a ~weekly known-good snapshot of the Canary (Nightly) channel that has received some QA. Chrome Dev and Canary have the same major version number.
  - dralley 9y ago
    I'm not sure what "beta is too late" even means, considering that it now occupies the exact position that Aurora did, that you claim is a sweet spot.

penpapersw 9y ago

Considering Edge is improving steadily on Windows, and Chrome is pretty good and cross-platform, what is the niche of Firefox at this point?

dbaupp 9y ago
There is, at least, the political niche of being truly open source, and not built by a for-profit corporation.
- penpapersw 9y ago
  I'm always a bit skeptical when someone defends an organization by saying it's non-profit. AFAIK, the only difference between non-profit and for-profit is that the owners of a non-profit don't get to keep them money for themselves per se, although they're just like for-profits in all other ways, including the ability to name their own salaries and waste money frivolously and use their resources inefficiently. I don't know how Mozilla works internally, but I'm not about to give them the benefit of the doubt without cause. Also, where is Mozilla getting money from in the first place? They only offer free products. The last time I checked, they're getting most of their money from Google. That doesn't automatically mean Google has Mozilla in their pocket, but it's definitely a red flag.
  - steveklabnik 9y ago
    To be clear, "Mozilla" is two entities; the Mozilla Foundation ("Mofo"), which is a non-profit, and the Mozilla Corporation ("Moco"), which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Foundation. (I am an employee of Moco.) This is more of a tax/legal thing than it is a different mission between the two entities, as [1] says: "The Mozilla Corporation is guided by the principles of the Mozilla Manifesto." The Google deal changed in 2014, at which point it became a five-year deal with Yahoo! in the US, and other partnerships (I don't remember the details to be honest) elsewhere, IIRC Yandex in Russia and Baidu in China? 1. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/
  - hackuser 9y ago

domenicd 9y ago

This seems like a good change. For Chrome, I only use Canary + stable. And having beta as a period for a wider audience with relatively lower bug tolerance to catch things before they hit stable makes sense. But Chrome's Dev channel/Firefox's Aurora never made much sense to me. I wish Firefox Nightly automatically did the new-profile thing like Firefox Dev Edition/Chrome Canary does, though. Not being able to run them side-by-side out of the box is quite annoying. (Maybe this has been fixed since I originally installed Nightly?) One thing that I'm having a hard time understanding from the article is whether this means Firefox is moving from a 18-week major version cycle to a 12-week major version cycle? Because features will no longer need the extra 6 weeks in Aurora? "Faster release cycles for platform features" kind of implies this, but it isn't stated anywhere explicitly.

lizzard 9y ago
We have always had the potential to move that fast, but you can think of the difference here for features as: rather than scrambling to bring features to release faster if they're ready, we can choose to hold some features back for an extra 6 weeks in Nightly, for more development if they need it.
- domenicd 9y ago
  This is the same kind of confusing stuff as in the article. Give it to me straight: when I upgrade stable Firefox to version N, how many more weeks will I wait for a stable update to version N+1?
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    The same, a month and a half. But if you're waiting for a feature that was just finished to get into stable, that time is faster. You will only have to wait for N+2 instead of N+3.
  - lizzard 9y ago
    Stable Firefox will still update around every six weeks, the same as before. You could also think of the change like this: if you report a bug in the current release version, and someone fixes that bug in Nightly, the fix will end up in a new release 6 weeks faster than before.

Animats 9y ago

There should be a developer build of the currently shipping product, for when you need to find out why Firefox broke.

samtoday 9y ago
You can just use normal (stable) Firefox for that. It still has the same great devtools!