January 15, 2010
Posted by beltzner
Of rumours and broken telephones
I’ve spent the past week speaking with community members at development and product management meetings, as well as speaking with members of the technical press about the upcoming release of Firefox 3.6, which I truly believe to be the best browser for users. Of course everyone wants to know what’s next for Mozilla, and what the future looks like. Despite doing my best to be as clear as possible, what gets written can be more or less accurate.
The rumours of Firefox 3.7’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Nobody’s planning on “dumping” features or the hard work of our passionate and tireless community.
The shape of the Internet changes every day. Our mission is to develop the best open source implementations of web technologies and ship them in an excellent browser so that our users and the entire Web can benefit. That means always thinking about how we can deliver technology as efficiently and quickly as possible. Sometimes it means challenging our assumptions.
One assumption we’ve had for a long time is that the only way to ship new technology – such as improvements to downloadable web fonts or support for new standards like CSS, SVG and WebGL – was through a full Firefox version update. Until recently, our infrastructure prevented us from being able to be as agile as we would have needed to be in order to deliver something isolated like the “Lorentz” project (which aims to improve product stability and security by running plugins in their own process) to our users. Now that we have better test automation and the ability to develop on project branches, we can better isolate changes with continuous integration testing, nightly builds and the ability to deliver smaller pieces continuously through the regular maintenance cycle (“minor updates”) of a product. This means that we can, without the user being disrupted or disturbed, improve stability, security, and capability for the 25% of the Internet users who browse using Firefox. One day they’ll start up their web browser and it will be better. Maybe it will crash less, maybe it will be improve typography support on the web.
This is a powerful change, but we must also be careful to keep users in control of their software. Improving the open video engine is something we should feel comfortable doing, as it preserves (but improves!) the existing user functionality. Changing the way the browser looks or interacts with users is something we should avoid doing. I think of it this way: if I take my car in for service and it comes out with better fuel efficiency, that’s great. If my gearshift has changed location, I’d be pretty surprised and upset. We shouldn’t be doing anything in a maintenance release that could leave a user surprised and upset, period.
So instead of thinking of “Firefox 3.7″ and “Firefox 4.0″ and being rigid and proscriptive about what technology improvements will come in which specific months, I’m encouraging us all to think about what we’re trying to improve, and how those improvements can be most efficiently delivered to our users and the Internet. Improvements and support for new technology originally slated for Firefox 3.7 in a draft roadmap long ago may now find their way into users’ hands even earlier. Risky interactive changes that could benefit from multiple iterations and betas can safely do so without worrying about “missing the boat.”
Software development is chaotic, and due to the open nature of our community you (and the press) are getting to see exactly how the sausages are made. It may look like a bloody mess at the start, but once it starts to take shape it’s obvious that you’re making something delicious.
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24 Comments
January 15, 2010
Are there still going to be releases called “Firefox 3.7″ and “Firefox 4.0″ and what would be the currently planned time frame for their release?
January 15, 2010
As soon as we know, we’ll tell you and make as much noise about it as possible. So far we’ve got proposals and ideas, and the only thing for certain is that we’ll try to ship out of process plugin support on the 1.9.2 branch to Firefox 3.6 users sometime after its release.
January 15, 2010
But I’m a vegetarian??
Just kidding.
I think that this was all made clear in the computerworld.com article. Of course (and perhaps apparently) many people didn’t read, or were aware of that article.
It amazes exactly how open Mozilla truly is, and people are always welcome to join in on (most) project and product discussions and provide input on plans and goals from start to finish on things, but since Mozilla has expanded greatly, it isn’t always easy to stay up to date on exactly what is going on and where so perhaps there is a communications issue that creates an inaccurate perception that Mozilla has just radically and suddenly made a policy, product, or project decision and change.
The facets (marketing, add-ons, development, testing, support, etc) to Firefox alone are tremendous and those who are interested in the Firefox project may find it difficult to stay up to date on its progress and future goals, and if they’re anything like me (God help them), they find it hard to choose exactly what to follow and focus on. I’ve tried following it all but it is nearly impossible.
Mozilla (and individual project) meeting notes are probably the best current way to know what’s going on so perhaps building something off of that and providing good visibility for it would be helpful.
January 16, 2010
Good to know that dev progress might be sped up. I’d prefer the smaller changes over time instead of waiting for some big release in 12 months.
January 16, 2010
I really like the subtle way you slipped in the phrase: “… 25% of the Internet users who browse using Firefox …”
January 16, 2010
Thanks, mom. That’s my job and all.
January 17, 2010
So, one day you start your web browser and your important intranet site just won’t render because it was made dependent on an earlier bug/misimplementation. Excellent!
Developers will love Firefox even more than before because corner cases change silently from one day to another. This will do wonders for Firefox web dominance in the future.
January 17, 2010
Please dont do this.
It is my computer not yours, and therefore only I get to decide when to add more features.
January 17, 2010
@jonasb: you’re making some assumptions there about the type of changes that we’d take, but also pointing out that we’ll need to continue to analyse such changes carefully in order to ensure that they’re not changing the way in which we interact with the web at large. It’s an additional change to our process that we’ll have to employ for this model to work, to be sure, and definitely something we’re thinking about.
@anon: Firefox will continue to be completely under the user’s control. Automatic updates can be turned off, and users can decide to manually download updates and new versions if they wish. Take my word, though, the new features will not be the sort of thing that you notice. They will be platform features that allow the web to do more, or that make the browser more efficient and stable.
January 17, 2010
Hey I’m wondering what affect (if any) that this will have on add-ons compatibility especially for add-on developers?
January 17, 2010
Was Theora 1.1 incorporated into FF 3.6?
By the way, when will sump the ancient Gecko and start something fresh? Something like Gecko 2 which will be able to perform close to Chrome?
Thanks.
January 17, 2010
Theora 1.1 was incorporated, yes.
I’m not sure I understand the second comment. Gecko is currently performing close to Chrome; better in some situations.
January 17, 2010
It is great news that OOPP is coming early. I am really looking forward to it. Recently I lost several pages of text typed up in a sudden flurry of inspiration, because of a plugin crash. (Didn’t think about saving in all the excitement… I’m more cautious when typing boring stuff, but losing those wouldn’t be nearly as big a pain as this was.)
January 17, 2010
Drazick: Regarding performance, I use Chrome sometimes, but don’t notice that it performs generally faster than Firefox. For example, Firefox 3.6 loads Google Wave noticeably faster than Chrome. I think the main reason people perceive Chrome as fast is its startup time. Firefox startup really is very, very slow here, and I hope that will be fixed. But once it has started up, it flies like a swallow.
January 17, 2010
Sultanus, Google Chrome DOES startup faster than Firefox, Safari and IE on my XP computer and that computer is relatively slow. I’m beta testing the latest Chrome 4.0 dev build right now. As for a faster Firefox startup, try out the latest Firefox 3.7 nightly build. I tested one nightly build of FF 3.7 a few months ago and it starts up barely as fast as Chrome.
note to beltzner, after the final release of Firefox 3.6 comes out, what will become of Firefox 3.0? I’ve heard that support for Firefox 3.0 will end very soon; perhaps at the end of January 2010.
January 18, 2010
@Ken Saunders
I would assume none. Enhancements don’t cause problems. If you can suddenly use some cool new feature, such as for example a new CSS3 property, it will not effect any extension, since none of them are using it.
What causes problems is when they change some API. Which I would presume they would never do in a minor release.
January 18, 2010
So if let’s say some GFX bugfix is checked in right now into the main branch, it won’t appear until Firefox 4.0, which is a year away?
January 18, 2010
3.6 is great, looking forward to the process isolation update.
I was initially sceptical on the new minor updates idea, but as use have outlined it it looks to be a winner.
Cheers.
January 18, 2010
@ep: as always, we’re trying to move our users from Firefox 3.0 to newer versions for a variety of reasons. Right now we have no firm end date for security updates on the 3.0.x product line, though.
@laststop: precisely the opposite, should this plan go forward. In fact, such a fix would be in users’ hands sooner than ever before.
January 18, 2010
Ah, Firefox becomes a rolling distro?
January 18, 2010
What I meant is Firefox carries (Seems at least) a lot of “Past” in it.
I do notice performance difference between Firefox and Chrome. The latter is noticeably faster. The amount of people I know which have replaced Firefox with Chrome will testify that.
The only reason I started to use FF 3.6 is the file API (Which I hope will catch fast) and its Video implementation (Which is better than Chrome’s).
I know little about it, yet it seems it’s time to leave the past behind and a fresh start for a new rendering and JS engine…
It might be only my feeling, it might be wrong…
January 19, 2010
ok mr. beltzner. if you look at the Firefox 3 page:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-older.html
(quote)
“Firefox 3.0.x will be maintained with security and stability updates until January 2010.”
and if you look at the mozilla wiki releases page:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/releases
an upcoming Firefox 3.0.18 is planned for mid-February 2010. I guess support for Firefox 3.0.x will be extended for sure – past the original Jan. 2010 date.
As for the so-called Firefox 3.7, if all those rumors of Firefox 3.7’s “demise” are greatly exaggerated, will there be an upcoming Firefox 3.7 release or not?
January 24, 2010
I think he would be fighting comparable fighters in the UFC…
January 29, 2010
It’s pouring down rain here too hard to barbecue, looks like every day this past month.
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