
Simplifying Firefox Release Channels - digitalnalogika
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/04/simplifying-firefox-release-channels/
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domenicd
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.

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lizzard
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
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?

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Dylan16807
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.

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

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

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LeoNatan25
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.

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cpeterso
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.

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LeoNatan25
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.

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nnethercote
I run Nightly on all my machines, and in my experience its stability is good.
YMMV, of course.

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abrowne
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.

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

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domenicd
Apart from the (fairly valid IMO) political reasons, Firefox is still the king
of UI customizability and good add-ons. Even without the old XUL system, there
are add-ons like those at
[https://testpilot.firefox.com/](https://testpilot.firefox.com/) which modify
the browser in pretty drastic ways. I can't really use a browser without some
form of tabs-on-the-side these days.

~~~
dsrajapaksha
Test Pilot Containers is the best innovation in a browser for me lately. I
used to create separate profiles in Chrome to have multiple logins for a
single website. Now I can just create another container and have a new profile
side by side in the same window.

Containers are supported in Firefox Nightly without the Test Pilot Addon.

