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Mozilla's 18-Week Release Cycle is Too Slow and Other Browser News

posted by CoolHand on Wednesday July 08 2015, @03:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-release-nightly-builds-oh-wait dept.

takyon writes:

Mozilla is planning to speed up Firefox's current 18-week release cycle, code in multiprocess support, and phase out the XUL and XBL languages currently used to build the Firefox UI (a change that may eventually break extensions):

Mozilla is planning big changes in how it builds its Firefox web browser, including speeding up its release schedule and – in the long term – getting rid of some of the Mozilla-specific technologies that have traditionally been used to build the browser's UI and add-ons. The decisions were discussed at Moz's "Coincidental Work Week" meetup in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada during the last week of June and were made public in a pair of forum posts by Mozilla engineering director Dave Camp on Monday. For starters, Mozilla plans to ditch its current 18-week release cycle in favor of something more agile. "We think there are big wins to be had in shortening the time that new features reaches users," Camp wrote. "Critical fixes should ship to users in minutes, not days. Individual features rolling out to small audiences for focused and multi-variate testing."

Firefox 39 was released on Monday. Changes include vsync (smooth scrolling) on Mac OS X, the addition of Unicode 8.0 skin tone emoji, removal of SSLv3, improving IPv6 fallback to IPv4, and support for the ECMAScript 2015 Proxy object. Mozilla has also unveiled a "Games Technology Roadmap," which sets out goals of further improving HTML5 + JavaScript performance relative to native applications, shipping the unfinished WebGL 2.0, and minimizing common issues like audio/graphics latency and "jitter".

Google says TurboFan, a new optimizing JavaScript compiler that will replace Crankshaft, will speed up various aspects of JavaScript performance (it currently shows a "29% increase on the zlib score of the Octane benchmark"). It has been shipping since Chrome 41, but will be improved and switched on in more code scenarios over time until it completely replaces the Crankshaft compiler.

Microsoft's new Edge browser will not include ActiveX and Silverlight support, and will instead use HTML5's Media Source and Encrypted Media Extensions for "premium media", as well as MPEG-DASH and Common Encryption (CENC). Internet Explorer 11 will retain Silverlight support.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2015, @07:34AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2015, @07:34AM (#206846)

    . Too many people are pandering after the new shiny thing for Firefox to just release new features once every 6 months.

    Where are all these people? If people really wanted all these breaking changes (sorry, "new shiny things"), people should have been moving from Chrome to Firefox in droves the last several years.

    Seems to me the users have been flocking the opposite way. From "shiny new things" Firefox to stable Chrome.

    (Oh, sure, Chrome has a pretty short release cycle, but they manage to do so without users actually noticing. It's like the Chrome release cycle is used to fix bugs, while the Firefox release cycle is used to break stuff, including the UI).