Firefox moving to 4 week releases

I've always wondered this: why release on a schedule at all? If people demand a certain new feature ("[this will] bring you new features more quickly"), it can just be brought out as it's ready, instead of having to wait an average of 3 (now 2) weeks before it can be released? And why does this have to increment the major version, since when is every single update backwards incompatible?

I don’t really like these quick release cycles. When things get released every year or half year I have the time to read about the changes but if I work with several packages that release all the time I don’t even have the time to read about the changes.<p>I also think that quality tends to suffer. Over the last two years windows 10 has released several buggy updates that caused our in house apps to stop working.

According to my calculations, this means Firefox 100 will be released on 2022-03-08.

There&#x27;s an incidental benefit here. There&#x27;s at least one system (I think Duo + Okta?) which, when configured to check if your browser is out of date, makes a logic error. It should check if your browser is the most recent, and, if it isn&#x27;t, if the _new release_ is over N days old. Instead, it checks if your browser is the most recent, and if it isn&#x27;t, if the _old release_ is over N days old. So, if you run Firefox and you get it from your Linux distribution, that breaks during the two days or so in between a new release and e.g. Fedora shipping it.

The thing that scares me about this change is that it seems like the only reason they are doing it is &quot;we’ve had many requests to take features to market sooner.&quot;. Where as the rest of the blog entry is to assuage our fears and otherwise placate everyone that things won&#x27;t explode.<p>I don&#x27;t know if 4 weeks is or isn&#x27;t the right answer (after all some SaaS companies update dozens of times a day), but I know that I tend to leave my browser windows open until it crashes or the computer reboots. While I don&#x27;t regularly use Firefox right now, I can imagine that I could skip entire versions with this behavior.

For comparison, Chrome updates &quot;every two-three weeks for minor releases, and every six weeks for major releases&quot;.<p>I guess Beta is moving to daily releases? I suppose it&#x27;s good, generally I have to restart Firefox once a day for resource leaks and restarting through the update UI is easier than opening the browser console.<p>I was using Nightly for a while but it turns out that even daily updates aren&#x27;t fast enough for that. If a new patch breaks something, typically the offending patch isn&#x27;t backed out and it takes 6-12 hours to get fixed, meaning the fix isn&#x27;t available in the next nightly and you have to suffer for several days.

I think this is sad news, but that&#x27;s because I view the current &quot;rapid release&quot; trend and being, on the whole, a bad thing for everyone. It decreases software quality, decreases stability, and increases hassle and stress for everyone from developers to users.

Wrong decision. Nobody wants to update their browser this frequently, and the release overhead is a constant factor. So you&#x27;re basically having a lot less productive time where you actually produce value. But hey, not my call I guess.

This is great news. I recently started using Firefox (out of principle mainly). I find it pretty unstable, and whatever needs to be done to grease the bug-fix chutes - so be it!

Please Correct me if I am wrong.<p>&quot;We’re adjusting our cadence to increase our agility, and bring you new features more quickly. &quot;<p>Does having faster release cycle really means having new features more quickly? The original 6-8 Weeks are already pretty damn fast. So I this pcs as marketing to general new site rather than technical.<p>Firefox, ( And Google Chrome ) already has Alpha and Beta Channels with fairly large number of audience testing it in real world. And features requires time to think, design, bake, tested in real world and refine, having a few more releases in between those process doesn&#x27;t make the features come out any quicker.

4 week releases will create 13 versions by year. We will use Firefox 211 in 2030 (if they don&#x27;t change rules).

Oh no, not this. Every new release means hours spent on rebasing patches, investigating why the new version won&#x27;t compile and then create more patches. When Firefox finally builds, I now have to find out what they have removed&#x2F;changed that worked fine before, and what new crap that should be disabled in about:conf. I need LESS of this, not more..

Why do I seem to get a firefox update on ubuntu on a daily basis?

should i use firefox or chrome?

Hmmmm. I don’t really like these quick release cycles

As a user I also now need to keep up with the updates more frequently. Either deal with a more frequent risk of getting an update I don&#x27;t like, or get nagged more frequently with annoying pop-ups to update if I don&#x27;t want to, or turn off everything and miss out on the critical security updates.

&gt; We’re adjusting our cadence to increase our agility, and bring you new features more quickly. In recent quarters, we’ve had many requests to take features to market sooner.<p>Mozilla has been tweaking their process forever, but all of it is for naught if they don&#x27;t work on what users want. The latest FF brags &quot;we are shipping a new “New Tab” page experience that connects you to the best of Pocket’s content&quot;, while standard keyboard shortcuts have been broken for well over 10 years. This is not a problem with their release cadence.<p>Users have a curious way of asking for what they <i>believe</i> is feasible. I&#x27;ve seen users encounter an obvious bug, and work around it by hand, and turn around and ask for something completely different, like an alternative workaround. (Just add a macro system so I can record this sequence of 7 steps to work around this weird thing...) They literally don&#x27;t think to ask &quot;Fix this bug&quot;.<p>I wonder if that&#x27;s what&#x27;s happening here. As an occasional Firefox user, I know that keyboard shortcuts have been broken since the Bush administration, and the codebase is far too complex for me to work on even the simplest features (I&#x27;ve tried). I can absolutely see a user thinking &quot;If they can&#x27;t do what we want, at least they could do it faster&quot;. That feels like a change that&#x27;s feasible in a way that &quot;Fix the massive complexity problem&quot; or even &quot;Fix keyboard shortcuts (which are apparently massively complex)&quot; do not.<p>Firefox itself was created by a couple programmers chatting late at night in a Denny&#x27;s. They made a far better browser than the Mozilla organization of the day could. It&#x27;s an important organization and it&#x27;s impressive they can regularly ship useful free software, but user interfaces have never been a strong point for open source, in the way that compilers and runtimes and databases are. Tweak away, but I don&#x27;t hold much hope for the situation to improve. The next great open-source browser is going to come from 2 or 3 people chatting in a Denny&#x27;s, not Mozilla with N-week releases, for any value of N.