Mozilla Developers Question 6-Week Release Cycle For Firefox

too* short.

They are going to burn a lot of their devs out with such an insanely short product cycle. That or there are going to be a lot of bugs that slip through the cracks, Id rather they take a little longer, and deliver a fully baked product, so to speak.

yes, 5 weeks is TWO short!

Hello Opera browser

I question it too, have been ever they instituted this policy. So do all the people switching to Google. 6 weeks is too short to accomplish anything, certainly not enough for QA testing.

You'd figure after all this time they'd figure out how make FF stop crashing with Flash...pretty sad.

I'd figure that after all this time YOU'd figure it out, because it doesn't do it for me... ever...

They need to stop all current development and focus on making a multithreaded web browser. (PS the browser in the HP touchpad can use both cores to load a single web page)

Why cant firefox make their browser multithreaded.If they want to improve their benchmarks then make the browser multithreaded and get a nice 300-500% performance boost.

Google chrome is half way there to being multithreaded, each tab has it's own thread and the browser distributes the tabs equally across the CPU cores.

(want to test, in google chrome, open a large number to tabs very quickly, chrome will load each core to 100% and multiple tabs will load faster, but do the same on firefox and only 1 core will hit 100% and the browser will load much slower)

I like firefox because of the extensions and UI, but I don't like how outdated the browser engine is becoming.

Razor:
HTML is a very sequential language, and thus cannot be split into multiple threads even if the browser allowed for it, unless the page coder designed it for multi-threading, which I do not believe current HTML allows. This may change with HTML5 based programs, and things like NaCl where they are doing things much more complicated, and will take more advantage of the computer hardware. Then again I am no programmer, and may be wrong in this assumption.

Also, take into account the internet connection speed. Sure running apps and media could take advantage of a multi-thread design, but the average web page is so bottle necked at the internet bandwidth level that there is no conceivable way for a modern processor to speed it up (though perhaps there would be a difference on a tablet or smartphone). As we saw in the last roundup review, Google's multi thread design only gives minimal advantages over other browsers, it is hardly a game changer.

+1
is it too difficult to make a multithreaded browser? i'd rather have multithreading than some fancy-ish html5 gpu acceleration.

ever open a web page, and its so crap that it kills your browser? back when i was still running a p4, i had that kind of crap happen all the time. do i want an Internet browser to run 4 cores just so one douche can make a web page that everyone links to that will slow your computer to sub snail speed?

here is a fact, web browsers DO NOT need to be threaded... 1 core is more than enough.
chromes approach, while multi core... kind of, isolates pages, and if one dies it doesn't take the system with it, at the expense of being retardedly resource dependent. other browsers... firefox namely, would love to not be resource heavy, because that and extensions are the main reason to use it, and most people can live without extensions.

you use nightly? im using 8.0a1 (2011-07-24)
as far as i can tell, there is only one bug, and thats that it closes all tabs without warning when you press the x, as this happens to me every now and than, its an issue but not a bit one.
i can tell you that this browser is finished.
and do you think they throw away all the old code and work from scratch?
instead of waiting a year on a build, and giving out .X upgrades to existing builds they implement their ideas, and make them better. take the progression from 6-8 it got faster and less resource heavy each release. and instead of going from a to b in 1 years time, they went from a to b to c to d in a FAR shorted period of time, giving you an upgrades along the way.

from my own personal experience, firefox 8 is done. and it wound be a non beta for how long? with this alone, i can see them stepping up the release scheduled as a good thing.

but there should be 2 versions of firefox. home and business.
home can upgrade fast,
business can upgrade every year or so. or business can auto upgrade because i cant see them using extensions and having compatibility problems there.

to me, it does seem that when loading a web page, it seems to break up elements that are loaded across both cores (the HP touchpad browser does that, (eg load tomshardware.com and watch both cores clock up, (but if you have 1 core disabled, loading certain pages literally slow down by 50% (eg 4chan.org)

On the mobile platform the main push for dual core was web browsing since sites have gotten more CPU intensive, but for desktop there doesn't seem as much of a push to multithreading since modern desktop CPU's are fast enough to handle even the most demanding websites. The issue is when you make the browser do multiple difficult things such as having 50 tabs open, then clicking on reload all tabs. chrome handles this much more efficiently as it will use all available CPU cores, but true multithreading will allow each tab to have access to all CPU cores thus a better sharing of resources as you wont have the issue of having like 10 demanding flash intensive pages ending up on a single core and all other cores having simple sites with mostly text (chrome has this issue)

better listen to what the developers are saying especially in informal forums. they're the people putting in the hard work. if they get burned out or disenchanted then be ready for a future update where the update is only on the version number.

What?! When I saw the title I thought they finally came to their senses, but it turns out they shortened the release cycle even further? I don't know what positive I could say to that

The new release cycle actually makes sense to me, Provided they use it as best to suit them, For example, Using it as a "We'll throw in whats ready but not what isn't" system, Smaller release cycles mean that Dev's don't have to be too obsessive about getting it in this release because the next will be out soon anyway, Not the other way around.

Mozilla seems to be stuck in extremes. Development of Firefox 4 was prolonged to the extreme - and now they want to implement a 6-week release cycle, which is on the other extreme.

Learn to take the middle road, Mozilla.

A bunch of idiotic hipsters took over Mozilla. Its over...

In this case, that would be positive. If someone can get the current management to resign it would considerably improve FF long term viability.

All software should be released 'when it's ready' not set release dates 6 weeks/months in advance, if a major bug is found just before release putting the date back is embarrassing, if it's ready sooner why wait.
No release date = less pressure, more flexibility for the developer & better product for the consumer

As for firefox, as far as im concerned such rapid cycles are meaningless, I know FF4 was all about HTML5 support, but 5,6,7 ?? It can't anything significant if it's only taken a few weeks to develop.

6 ---> 7
10% preference increase, less resource hog
7 ----> 8
10% preference increase, less resource hog

in total, its about a 20% performance increase, putting it on par with i think chrome 13 in speed, and its using less resources as it upgrades.

firefox 9 is suppose to be a massive increase on resource management.

Anyone heard of continuous delivery/deployment? This is the way the industry is going.
Martin Fowler and the other industry bigwigs have been on about this for a while, it makes sense. People just need to move away from the old enterprise way of thinking.

I think every 6 weeks in fine, hopefully the can get it down even shorter.

Anybody very worried about web browsers being resource hungry must have really old PC's...seriously...Mozilla must keep us safe like it always has, we need some speed as well but everything else should be a distant second.

90% of people just want a safe, stable browser without the bells and whistles. They should keep things simple and effective and they will always have support. I've been running Firefox at work on about 60 PC's for roughly 4 years and it works very well in a corporate environment, but recently with all these updates...it's getting annoying.

i open a few hundred tabs at a time... dont ask...
i have to keep firefox under 1.5gb of ram otherwise it locks up a bit, and gets unusably slow.

the less resources it uses the better.

and lets also take this into account. i have 10 win rar archives, mirc 2 acdsee 8's open an acdsee pro 4 , 4 explorers 5 frefox windows with about 40 active tabs, and about 250 inactive, task manager, zoom player and photoshop cs3... all on xp with 3gb of ram... any less resources the better.

seriously, who wants needless bloat?

No one wants needless bloat, but that's not what I'm saying, I'm saying the majority of people don't open 40 tabs in firefox. Feel free to do that but most people just want a safe and stable browser (stable includes a resource friendly browser) You don't need to update a browser every second to improve small things which most people will not even notice.

Mozilla should absolutely look at improving their browser constantly but not at the expense of inconvenience, so much so I'm considering removing firefox from our LAN and replacing it with Chrome only because chrome is starting to improve their network management and their updates are less intrusive. Had our environment been win7 I would go with IE because it's management over a network is just better.

Well I just read something that proves my point right here on Tom's

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/m [...] 13509.html