
Firefox 4, 5, 6 and 7 to be released before the end of 2011 - rkwz
http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/02/07/firefox-4-5-6-and-7-to-be-released-before-the-end-of-2011/
======
ecaron
To be able to support this, they're going to need to do some major overhaul of
how add-on versioning works. As a Add-On developer
(<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/font-finder/>), I shudder at
the thought of 10,000 different addons needing to keep having their support
version incremented w/ each upcoming release.

~~~
fligtar
Hi ecaron,

I lead the add-ons team at Mozilla. Add-on compatibility was definitely a big
consideration in our plans to switch to a faster release cycle, and we're
working on proposing some changes to the way it works. As you mention, the
current way of doing things won't work 4 times a year.

These changes will probably include automatic compatibility with certain major
versions. We'll have more to share soon on the add-ons blog.

~~~
catshirt
forgive me if i'm wrong, but i couldn't help but feel like the documentation
for upgrading addons from 3 to 4 was extremely scarce and scattered. i pieced
together several documents from MDC, the developer forum, and the Mozilla
blog, and still couldn't get a full view of the changes that affected my
addon.

revisiting the submission process itself is welcome and seemingly necessary;
but i'd be willing to deal with an inefficient submission process if the
upgrade was well documented.

------
code_duck
Sounds like the main story is that they're redefining what a major version
number means a la Chrome.

Chrome's numbers are not in the same scale as FF and IE too, of course. Users
can't tell the difference between Chrome 6 and 7 like one can distinguish FF 2
and 3, or IE 6 and 7. I wonder, though, if Google was just trying to catch IE
in version number with Chrome and once it's at 10, they'll stop increasing it
so rapidly.

~~~
eli
Chrome auto-updates and generally always looks the same. I can't imagine why
anyone -- users or developers -- would care what version number it's up to.

~~~
code_duck
My theory is that they wanted to avoid PHB types saying 'Internet Explorer is
at version 9 - this new Google browser, only version 3? Is it ready for the
enterprise?'.

~~~
philjr
There's that, but it probably fits better into their development model.

If they're continually adding features and not breaking backwards
compatibility on a "fixed" timeline, then the major version jumps that
Firefox, IE do etc. seem more pointless than anything.

If I've got this application that we're continually developing on and we're
using a 2 month lifecycle for development ... at what point does it make sense
to jump a major version? Never? What's the point of it then?

It's the fact that we've become accustomed to major versions representing
periods of time.

Version numbers should be representative. If it was the case that they used
the minor number to represent their two month cycles, then they'd be at 1.11.
What's the point of the 1 in that scenario? It's redundant.

The major version increments fit in better with their development lifecycle,
so why not use it?

~~~
didroe
I personally find larger version numbers a bit odd. Generally people tend to
work better with smaller numbers. I think the Ubuntu system is pretty good,
use the major version for the year and have the month as the minor version.
The Chrome 2 month releases could go 1.1, 1.3, 1.5, etc. That way they
wouldn't chew through so many numbers. Ultimately I guess projects must go
through a reset of their versions before they get to really ridiculous
numbers.

------
bengoodger
One interesting thing to note... Chrome operated with a 4-releases per year
schedule from beta launch until late 2010, before switching to the interleaved
12-week cycle mbrubeck mentions. While the quarterly release process
represented a definite improvement over the one release every 12-18 months we
had been familiar with before, it still had some drawbacks.

The period of time required to put together a release was still sufficiently
large that both engineering and management felt pressure to shoehorn stuff
into releases. The cost of missing a release was waiting another quarter. For
many engineers this means missing your quarterly objectives completely. The
temptation to ship unpolished features was high, and the morale hit for
missing a release was still tangible.

Moving to the interleaved cycle with 6-week updates is intended to break down
these problems by making the consequences of missing a release less severe to
both engineers and management. We are still in the early days of this approach
and the team is getting used to the adjustment.

I'm pleased to see Firefox is going to be trying to improve the frequency of
their releases. Staying fresh is critical to vitality in this modern browser
landscape. When I worked on Firefox prior to 1.0 we would do releases roughly
quarterly but the team size was much smaller. A high level of discipline in
engineering and management is required to maintain regular releases with a
large team size.

------
msmith
I'm pretty excited about Account Manager, the identity management feature,
that's scheduled for Firefox 5. It has the potential to make the web both more
secure and simpler to use. Usually those goals are opposing.

Of course, the biggest obstacle will be getting people to add support for the
feature to their site.

~~~
Perceval
That was a feature that was supposed to be in Firefox 4, but got pushed back
at some point.

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kgtm
"the main focus of Firefox development in 2011, is to make sure there is no
more than 50ms between any user interaction and feedback from the browser"

Quite surprised to see this, judging from the fact that empirically the
average human brain-hand response is around 200 ms. Only in competitive CS
have i seen <100 ms response times. Sure, f.i. 20 ms instead of 50 ms _network
latency in a non-LAN setting_ makes a difference in that scenario, but only
when you are not on the very top of the relevant Bell curve.

Seems like a moot bragging point. I'd love to hear from a more knowledgeable
person what i'm missing.

~~~
mrcharles
Brain-hand response is not the same thing as a perceived delay.

Once latency becomes greater than 50ms, it becomes human noticeable -- aka
"not instant."

Given that UI response isn't used to trigger human reflexes, you are just
misunderstanding the intent.

~~~
kgtm
From my first hand experience in FPS gaming in non-amateur settings the vast
majority of average users will not be able to notice a (say) 50 ms difference
in UI responsiveness. I covered that when talking about network latency in my
previous post.

Of course this is just _my_ experience, scientific findings may very well
dispute my ignorance.

~~~
mrcharles
Correction, the vast majority of users will not be able to explain that they
feel a responsiveness issue, but they do indeed feel it. Less hardcore gamers
will often just blame other things -- loose controls, or ignored button
presses, or what not.

I see it pretty regularly in playtests and such. Anyway, it's not something
someone can simply say "Hey, this app took longer than 50ms to respond!" It's
more of a gut feeling that something about it is slow.

They are likely aiming at the 50ms threshold because that's the point at which
you really can't notice it, most of the time. At > 50ms, it becomes more and
more noticeable, and by just 100ms people actively start complaining about the
slowness of response.

edit:

As for the FPS gaming issue, the reality is that you don't notice it in FPS
gaming because the games are built to hide it from you -- when you press your
fire button, your gun fires, regardless of net latency. And that has been true
for a very long time. I think the last game to really wait for server response
before doing anything was Quake 3, and probably some of the Quake 3 engine
games.

I could never stand Quake 3 for that reason, if you had anything higher than
30-40ms it started feeling like you weren't controlling the game.

~~~
emil0r
Old hardcore quake3 player here. Q3 didn't wait for a server response, but the
net-code was not that great and the interpolation did iirc not really take
into account server responses. You could end up with players teleporting
because of network issues. OSP was the first mod iirc that tried to fix it and
it was somewhat successful.

The one mod that made great strides to fix the issues with the Q3 net-code was
CPM (www.promode.org). 50-70ms to the server felt like 20-30ms in Vanilla Q3
and when you hit 20-30ms in CPM it felt like LAN play in VQ3. It fixed the
niggling issues of lost packages (caused players to warp) as well. You even
had some players that intentionally downloaded things in the background to
cause dropped/delayed packets so that they would warp.

Eventually the net-code in CPM got so good the community even had cross-
Atlantic competitions. The team I played in had 100-120 ping vs west-coast
American teams on NYC servers and it was actually playable to the point where
you could have fairly fair fights with them. Except against Team Abuse... :p.
Man what a schooling in team-play and lock-downs of maps they gave my team.

------
timtadh
From the road map it looks like their main focus will be on product polish.
They will be adding some features to the system. These features seem to
cluster around "Web Platform" features (ie. HTML5, CSS3, Social stuff, etc...)
and continued improvements to their add on system.

The polish focuses on improving interaction times for all user interactions.
Their goal as previously mentioned is to get it down to 50ms from user action
to visible response. They also say the have 50 common usage paths (identified
from testing) that need to be improved.

This looks like a reasonable though ambitions plan for Mozilla and if they
stick to it they will remain competitive and relevant.

------
ComputerGuru
_It looks like Windows 7 64-bit will be officially supported with FF5, too._

You're kidding, right? Do they REALLY not support the fastest growing OS
version + platform combo?

OEMs are finally paying attention to 64-bit computing, and Windows 7 has been
replacing Vista like wildfire.... and FF is still two releases away from
official Windows 7 64-bit support?

EDIT:

Oops. Seems stupid Aol/Weblogs/Switched/DowloadSquad (I don't even know what
it's called any more!) didn't bother to fact-check, and they're referring to
64-bit native builds of Firefox.

EDIT2:

So I'm really being downvoted because the original story got it wrong? I guess
that's one way to take out your anger on inaccurate writeups...

~~~
orev
Firefox is far from becoming "more and more irrelevant". Just because you've
switched to an alternate browser doesn't mean the rest of the world has.
Chrome may be incrementally gaining some share, but it's mostly at the expense
of IE. Firefox has almost 25% of the market, while Chrome is 5%.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Chrome currently has 16.5 percent global usage share, IE has 45 percent. FF's
share remains stable at 31 percent. Chrome gained ten percent points in the
last year, while IE lost ten percent points. At its current growth rate,
Chrome will pass FF in 15 months.

<http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-201002-201102>

~~~
BrandonM
And just six short years after that it will eclipse 100% usage!

------
Ygor
One subtle message I got out of this: Web applications are a good choice.
Stick with it.

~~~
christonog
Honest question, can you possibly expound on how you got that message? Does it
mean web apps are necessarily better than developing for browsers via
extensions?

~~~
true_religion
Probably because Mozilla explicitly said their focus would be on web apps,
particularly javascript improvements.

~~~
Ygor
Yes, that too. But even if not for the explicit mention - rapid development of
a certain platform is usually a sign of a strong and lasting ecosystem of
applications for that platform. And browsers are certainly an important
component of the web platform.

------
athom
When I read that headline, the first thing that came to _my_ mind was
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_of_the_Four_Emperors>

Presumably, the course of Firefox will run a little less bloody. =)

------
MatthewDP
Does it seem like Mozilla is lowering the bar as to what will constitute an
integer release (4.0, 5.0, etc.)? It was July 2008 when FireFox 3.0 came out,
19 months later, 4.0 hasn't come out yet.

~~~
dochtman
No, it seems like they want to ship major releases more often and don't want
to think hard about what version increment the new release's features merit.

------
Cyranix
If version numbers weren't useful for marketing, I'd suggest using a hash of
the codebase as a true version identifier. It'd be a consistent umpteen
alphanumerics long (no more squabbling over who has the biggest number) and
could actually serve a technical purpose under the hood.

------
bhousel
Great, now I'm going to need to learn a bunch of new CSS selectors.

~~~
code_duck
The new stuff in CSS3 is so useful that this is an opportunity, not a curse!

------
halo
I find it awfully sad that they are turning Firefox into Chrome. If I wanted
to use Chrome then I would have switched already.

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l0nwlf
Isn't the development cycle a bit too fast. 4 major versions in a single year.

~~~
mrseb
Both Firefox and Chrome are hoping to catch Emacs before 2014.

~~~
nagnatron
I just spilled coffee all over myself

~~~
mrseb
Not a vi user, then :P

------
tomlin
I won't be excited until they reach 9 or 10. That's when it _really_ gets
good.

------
ck2
Oh. So they are going for the completely fracturing the user base approach.

Meaning since people will learn that upgrading major versions will constantly
break things, they will stop upgrading and consider other browsers like
Chrome.

~~~
farnsworth
Yes, Chrome, to avoid changing major versions.

~~~
ck2
LoL, okay so they will go back to IE8 for infinity.

Do Chrome major version number changes break their plugins?

I don't understand this rush to double-digit version numbers.

Do they think because IE is at version 9 that newbie users will also want
their other browser to be at version 9 ?

