4 ms·

That said, I think there is absolutely no chance that the Firefox team will, after significant internal effort to speed up and become more agile, slow down to p

by Flenser 15y ago

That said, I think there is absolutely no chance that the Firefox team will, after significant internal effort to speed up and become more agile, slow down to please IT groups. It's not the speed of development that's the problem; it's the speed of obsolescence. If they supported older versions for longer there wouldn't be a problem.

raganwald 15y ago
Nothing is free. You have so many hours of development time available. The more old versions you support, the less time you have available for new development. The very fastest thing to do is to only suport the latest version. I'm not saying this is the best or right thing to do, just that there is a natural trade-off between supporting old versions and developing new functionality.
- Flenser 15y ago
  But if the release schedule is faster, and there is less in each release, then surely they can support more releases. I'm assuming that the amount of code change relative to the latest release has more impact than the incremental burden of supporting each additional release.
vessenes 15y ago
I think this is functionally why the Chrome team hides the version number. They wanted it to be more like a utility, or web app. What version is your version of Hacker News running? In order to get that kind of instant deployment for a distributable executable, you have to really solve distribution down the chain to (especially) the windows desktop. The Chrome guys did that, it rocks, and it works. Versions probably originally existed to allow marketing teams to sell more. I wouldn't be surprised if FF eventually drops the version number thing and just has a 'stable' and 'exciting' branch type system for their users.
- ultrasaurus 15y ago
  True, I'm vaguely aware that I run Chrome 13 (Stable) and Chrome 14 (Canary) for testing -- but I'm surprisingly vague on that awareness -- in fact I got it wrong (I thought it was 12 that was stable)
  - vessenes 15y ago
    Ooh, now I'm jealous. I'm on 12 for Mac. Boo!
- zpao 15y ago
  > I wouldn't be surprised if FF eventually drops the version number thing and just has a 'stable' and 'exciting' branch type system for their users. That's pretty much what we're going for. The version number is still there, but we're phasing numbers out of the discussion when we talk about Firefox. There's the release channel, the beta channel, and the Aurora channel. There's also the Nightly channel and some projects builds (these sets are targeted at developers). Check out https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel/ https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel/ And yes, we were definitely influenced by what Chrome is doing, though we've adjusted to what's going to work better for us.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
phillijw 15y ago
Isn't it open source? I'm sure you could pay somebody to support it.

by Flenser 15y ago

raganwald 15y ago

Nothing is free. You have so many hours of development time available. The more old versions you support, the less time you have available for new development. The very fastest thing to do is to only suport the latest version. I'm not saying this is the best or right thing to do, just that there is a natural trade-off between supporting old versions and developing new functionality.

Flenser 15y ago
But if the release schedule is faster, and there is less in each release, then surely they can support more releases. I'm assuming that the amount of code change relative to the latest release has more impact than the incremental burden of supporting each additional release.

vessenes 15y ago

I think this is functionally why the Chrome team hides the version number. They wanted it to be more like a utility, or web app. What version is your version of Hacker News running? In order to get that kind of instant deployment for a distributable executable, you have to really solve distribution down the chain to (especially) the windows desktop. The Chrome guys did that, it rocks, and it works. Versions probably originally existed to allow marketing teams to sell more. I wouldn't be surprised if FF eventually drops the version number thing and just has a 'stable' and 'exciting' branch type system for their users.

ultrasaurus 15y ago
True, I'm vaguely aware that I run Chrome 13 (Stable) and Chrome 14 (Canary) for testing -- but I'm surprisingly vague on that awareness -- in fact I got it wrong (I thought it was 12 that was stable)
- vessenes 15y ago
  Ooh, now I'm jealous. I'm on 12 for Mac. Boo!
zpao 15y ago
> I wouldn't be surprised if FF eventually drops the version number thing and just has a 'stable' and 'exciting' branch type system for their users. That's pretty much what we're going for. The version number is still there, but we're phasing numbers out of the discussion when we talk about Firefox. There's the release channel, the beta channel, and the Aurora channel. There's also the Nightly channel and some projects builds (these sets are targeted at developers). Check out https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel/ https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel/ And yes, we were definitely influenced by what Chrome is doing, though we've adjusted to what's going to work better for us.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

phillijw 15y ago

Isn't it open source? I'm sure you could pay somebody to support it.