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Speeding up Chrome's release cycle
- hartator 6y agoI rather them to slow down and address the performance issues.
- lukifer 6y agoHave they given any follow-up to the https://chromeisbad.com https://chromeisbad.com fiasco?
- jasonvorhe 6y agoHas there ever been a deeper investigation into this that goes beyond "I did a thing on my computer and something changed somehow"?
- coldtea 6y agoWell, if by "fiasco" we mean "a random person wrote some random observations about his computer and chrome on some random website" then, probably they don't really need to follow up on it...
- vinger 6y agoI think it's important and may explain a lot. The fact that they started looking into this is a good sign. I've always wondered what the slowdown with having chrome or not was and this could explain it.
- lukifer 6y agoLoren Brichter is a long-time Mac developer and hardly a "random person"; and his claims were based on anecdata from multiple machines and Twitter reports. Pareidolia is certainly a reasonable null-hypothesis (similar to 99% of computing rain-dances, like repeated defragmentation, or "closing" iOS apps). But assuming the problem isn't completely coincidental or imagined, it would still be good to get to the bottom of it, whether the root problem is Apple's or Google's. Just now noticed the bug-tracker thread: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1158402#c18 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=115840...
- smoldesu 6y agoLooks like a MacOS issue to me. I used Chrome for years on my x201 with i3, it idled only a few degrees above room temp with Chrome open.
- war1025 6y agoRelease cadence and performance issues are orthogonal. Frequent releases just mean you get updates as they become available. That doesn't mean they can't take on longer-term issues that need several release cycles to complete.
- jeffbee 6y agoChrome project has a pretty robust system of continuous benchmarking where regressions are automatically detected and filed as bugs, and the causing CLs are automatically found by bisection. For example, a recent regression: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1176565 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=117656... What, in your expert opinion, is missing from this regime?
- duhi88 6y agoNow if Safari would only do the same...
- alphabettsy 6y agoFor me, Safari is much better with resources and generally faster. If longer release cycles is what maintains that I’m fine with it.
- bemused 6y agoso Chrome 94 will be released on 09/21 and Firefox 94 on 10/05 .. what a coincidence, seems like 'my version number is bigger then yours' is still a thing in 2021 ;) anyways, I like having these aligned - one number less to keep track of
- zerocrates 6y agoI don't know that I'm ready for these to be in triple digits.
- capableweb 6y agoMaybe we'll see versioning ala Ubuntu in the future, "Firefox 21.03.04" for todays release. Append more digits if you start doing more than one per day.
- kubanczyk 6y agoAnd... Fail when you reach 256 releases per day, or the year 2256.
- cma 6y agoPerformance has gotten really bad recently, I don't know if it is GPU drivers or Chrome's fault, but it has gotten very stuttery.
- Chris_Newton 6y agoI wish the evergreen browsers would ease back on the pace of releases. Most sites and apps can’t use bleeding edge features in production anyway for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons is low quality of implementation, for example if a feature is supported in theory but the rendering looks awful in one or more major browsers when it’s used in practice. Another is inconsistent implementation across browsers that need to be supported. Both of these areas have suffered noticeably in the modern era of rolling updates and the dubious concept of “living standards”. With the increasing significance of the web as an application platform and not just a medium for content delivery, developers need stability and clear specifications or the quality and longevity of their own products will inevitably suffer.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoI mean, Firefox ESR works pretty well.
- Chris_Newton 6y agoBut developers need to support the browsers their audience choose to use, and as sad as it is, Firefox simply doesn’t have the market share today that it once did. Even if my amazing new web app runs perfectly in Firefox ESR, that isn’t going to help me if Chrome pushes out an update that breaks something for half my users.
- AshleysBrain 6y agoI always thought that for a project this size, a 6 week release cycle was already super aggressive. We came from pretty much annual releases back in the IE days, so it made a huge difference to go to rapid releases. Does trimming another 2 weeks off really make a big difference to how quickly features arrive? I feel kind of sceptical that it's a meaningful difference. I would also guess a risk is that with less time on the pre-stable channels for testing, there might actually be more bugs and issues as a result. I'd be interested to hear the arguments in favour, which the blog post doesn't seem to go in to any real detail about.
- cle 6y agoI believe it's a mistake to assume that this change is solely to deliver features to users faster. There are all kinds of other things in Chrome other than end-user features. One important thing would be security updates. Chrome also has mechanisms that feed back into core Google businesses, so this also might improve Google's ability to iterate on those faster, gather feedback and make business decisions faster, etc. Personally I want to avoid Google's "core business" as much as possible, so if that's a major reason for this change then it's even more motivation to stay off of Chrome. (This is all speculation, since Google doesn't really have any credibility to me anymore, so I won't believe any official reasons they have for doing this.)
- dralley 6y agoIf your goal is faster security updates you need bugfix releases, not faster major releases.
- deadmutex 6y ago> I would also guess a risk is that with less time on the pre-stable channels for testing, there might actually be more bugs and issues as a result Is it also possible that a shorter window would allow less number of features being in flux in each release? Perhaps that actually leads to easier bug triaging, etc. Disclaimer: Work at Google, but not on Chrome.
- 6y ago
- antisthenes 6y agoWhy aren't browsers feature-complete? I know someone has to justify employing those people, but honestly, where is the browser that just works by default for the 99.9% of simple use cases and isn't a resource hog? We don't need a separate sandboxed OS eating 4GB of RAM just to display 5KB of text (and 2MB of javascript). Maybe focus on that, if any Googlers are reading.
- kibwen 6y ago> Why aren't browsers feature-complete? Because other browsers keep adding features, and then web sites start using those features. Any browser that stops adding features eventually finds itself unable to display certain sites, and loses users to browsers that can display those sites. Which is to say (channeling Zawinski's Law), any browser that fails to add features will eventually be replaced by a browser that does.
- jakub_g 6y agoGoogle's strategical view is to make web browser as capable as the native apps on mobile (mostly to counterbalance the iOS native apps' walled garden). It's called Project Fugu. I don't expect them to stop shipping any time soon. (Meanwhile Firefox's agenda is to push web forward but keep the balance; and Apple's agenda is to keep browser fast with minimal bloat, and lately privacy as an anti-Google selling point; and evolve the browser in other aspects just to not become the next IE and avoid lawsuits for blocking other rendering engines on iOS). Up to you to choose your preferred one.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y agoThank you, but this is not necessary. If you ever asked for feedback (but you haven't) and based your actions on it (which you won't), you would make the release cycle much slower, you would inform the user about the upgrade, you would tell them which options are going to disappear and what will be broken, and you would give them the option to at least delay the upgrade. You also would ask their permission to run the Software Reporter tool, and it wouldn't report its findings to you.
- vxNsr 6y agoBut you don’t understand google engineers know best, they know what’s good for you my sweet summer child, you’re just a toddler who needs to be cradled and kept from ever being able to make decisions.
- exac 6y agoJust because the release cycle is faster, doesn't mean that features spend less time in alpha/beta channels. Evergreen browsers release features behind flags, and those features can sit sometimes for years before they're turned on by default in the public release channel.
- caslon 6y agoGoogle: Making it even less likely there's anything other than Blink that implements the most recent HTML* spec since 2013.
- 0xDEEPFAC 6y agoGreat, just what we need... more updates, downloads, and EULA changes. I am tired of updating everything, and it often leads to rushed/less performant software because - hey we'll fix it soon anyway as long as we meet the deadline right? Or, even worse, like Microsoft openly using customers as beta testers. Also, anyone notice these days how we used to be excited about buying or getting an "upgrade" and now we get pestered about "updates"... interesting semantic difference..
- remus 6y agoMaybe it's just me but I can't remember the last time I had to think about a chrome update/download/EULA change. Personally I think that's great, they aren't things I want to spend my time on so if they're automated than all the better imo.
- 0xDEEPFAC 6y agoJust because they don't make it explicit doesn't mean its not changing. I could be wrong though.
- SkyPuncher 6y agoDo you restart your computer often? I don't restart that often and I almost constantly have the nagging "update" button in chrome.
- Bjartr 6y agoI think means a restart of chrome is necessary, not a restart of the whole machine.
- SkyPuncher 6y agoYea, I understand. I personally never restart Chrome, unless I'm doing a full computer restart.
- baggy_trough 6y agoExtended support release = 8 weeks? lol
- londons_explore 6y agoThis seems like it might be some middle management trying to make a big 'impactful' change that won't really change anything... Changing from a 6 week release cycle to a 4+8 week release cycle seems to be exactly that - in reality, nothing will really change.
- nickhalfasleep 6y agoThis is an arms race to keep control of their browser market share.
- minikites 6y agoGoogle wants to own the entire web just like Microsoft did when they shipped IE6, but somehow the people who were mad when Microsoft did it actually love that Google is doing it.
- jdxcode 6y agoEvery time that Chrome updates I have to give it macOS permission to access my location (if I want my location available to any web page at least). Is there a way to make this permanent anyone is aware of?
- heisenbit 6y agoEven if they managed to make releasing easier for themselves and can keep the pure release overhead the same this can impact development. These shorter release cycles can make it harder to make larger changes and can add overhead for breaking and coordinating changes across releases.
- dataflow 6y agoAre there any upcoming versions where they plan to do something in particular? Like force manifest v3 perhaps? This sounds like a move to make some transition happen sooner.