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from the just-release-nightly-builds-oh-wait dept.
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.
Original Submission
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TheGratefulNet on Wednesday July 08 2015, @03:13PM
things pretty much work, extensions work and the browser stays up for months at a time even with dozens of tabs open on (almost literally) dozens of windows.
I'm sure there are security issues in the old version I run, but I don't click on stupid links, I run adblockers and noscript (and things like that) and I don't run as root, either.
FF has new software versions? I'd never know it. I stopped caring about 2 or 3 years ago, in fact. once I disabled auto updates for it in linux and in its own system, I stopped having to work-around its changes and re-do things just to keep old plugins working.
I honestly don't understand what keeps a browser team occupied. some things are really not that complex. does it takes 20+ years to create a browser to view web stuff? seriously, you guys are working just for the sake of working; but users have stopped needing any new features at least 5 years or so ago. sure, add html5 - that was a big deal - and fix your security bugs - but other than that, why are you guys still wasting time on a product that should have, long ago, been declared done and finished?
it really is true; engineers don't understand the word 'done'. I'm one of them and I 'get' that, but this is why you have product managers. those are the folks who are supposed to pull the stop cord when the thing is done.
this is why I stopped taking new updates. you guys are just creating more work for yourself AND for users who have to work-around your little gui experiments.
guys, if you need to work on something, there are tons of products that DO need lots of help. a browser is NOT one of the. stop fucking with the thing, clean it up, declare it done and move the FUCK on already!
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday July 08 2015, @03:28PM
The number of software packages that can be truly declared to be "done" are an extremely short list. The standard would be:
1. It is widely installed and used.
2. It has not been modified for years, implying that there's no work to be done either in fixing bugs or adding features.
3. It has no (known) security bugs or lapses, while being in extensive use (see point 1) for years.
The only software that really meet these standards are:
- open-source versions of old-school Unix utilities like GNU bc [gnu.org]
- mission-critical software built for NASA
The thing is, the kinda-finished software is usually useful, so we tolerate it, but that doesn't mean it's "done".
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheGratefulNet on Wednesday July 08 2015, @03:43PM
almost everything I use in a daily basis is clearly 'done'.
ls, vi, emacs, ping, traceroute, cat, less and even the o/s and ip-stack are, for most people, 'done'. window managers? done. user interface paradigms: all done and over done. compilers? done, too. we have more languages (in comp sci) than we truly need, to the point where its more work to do engineering than it should be due to the 'bored chefs in the kitchen' syndrome.
it would be hard to think of software that I use that really needs more features or work. graphic tools are done, cad/cam is done done done many times over, art tools, done, science and math apps, done.
I am seriously trying to think of a good example of some software that needs to keep being developed, other than bugs or security issues that come up from time to time.
and a browser is one of the more simple engineering tasks to implement. its not a one-man job, but its not a decades-long effort, either! we've put people in space, starting from scratch, in less time than that!
tl;dr: we have more than enough people willing to do work on software; but we don't have many good ones who can say STOP, ENOUGH, ITS DONE. that's the problem. not enough adults to law down the law and teach people what DoD really is (Definition of Done).
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday July 08 2015, @04:57PM
Have to agree with most of this, at least as far as single purpose software goes.
However, the internet is ever evolving, and what we expect of a web browser is too.
Some of that evolution is driven by people deciding "Oh wouldn't it be nice if we could do this", and coding up a mountain of stuff to do what ever "this" was.
But a significant amount of it was the use of the web is changing faster than the examples (elements of operating systems) you quote. Who, 15 years ago, would consider trusting their entire business to world wide collaboration on a web browser, or face to face teleconferencing, real-time document sharing, or gaming, movies, banking, or finding a mate, etc.
The always changing browser is due to always changing missions.
Add to that, the attempt to have ONE TOOL to do damn near everything on the internet. The most intense example of feature creep in software is both caused by, and the cause of, continuous expansion of expectations. By comparison this Makes Emacs look like paper and crayons.
Then there is Adobe Flash. What a steaming pile that is. It necessitated html5, and forced browsers developers to change mountains of code to get a text and images design to handle video and audio because the plug-in approach was chock full of vulnerabilities.
(If anybody deserved to be "done" and sent away to tend gardens it is Adobe programmers. I'd be hard pressed to find a more destructive bunch of ass-clowns in any single company on earth. What an incredible case of reverse-midas these guys have. It should have been terminal. Somehow they survive, and everything they produce is utter crap.)
So YOU may have stopped expecting anything new from the One Tool to Rule Them but don't be fooled into thinking everyone has.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday July 08 2015, @07:50PM
In other words: Mission creep.
And the cost of this is bad security. It used to be that there was a program for each purpose. You read mail with a mail reader, chatted in IRC, etc. The web browser was for displaying information. It was not meant as an application platform, and it was not designed for that purpose. All of it has been bolted on, with the result that even if you view a simple document, there may be processes running behind your back, without you having installed any software. This is one of the main sources of security problems on the web.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday July 08 2015, @05:27PM
Yeah. Or in other words, "If it ain't broke DON'T fix it!" The same rule should apply to law-making in most so-called democracies. We don't need new laws being made. There's almost always an older more sensible one that would apply in similar circumstances if the new law is in any way relevant or useful. The same goes with most types of software. I think the only common area we keep needing new software is the stuff that needs bleeding edge technological progress (for me that shouldn't include a web browser) - games, simulations, ground breaking graphics, serious number crunching that hasn't been attempting before due to hardware limitations, etc.
Modern business really seems to live by the mantra "If it ain't broke, BREAK it!". It also makes me laugh the hypocritical, paradoxical nature of product marketing spin. When their new software product is out, it's just perfect, it's a must-have, it's the best ever. Then, a year later (or even a month or two), their old product is suddenly stale, obsolete, useless, even laughable. You simply must have the new one, because they sure as hell got everything exactly right THIS time! Just look at the comments MS made about the UI styling changes between Windows 7 and 8 for example (I can't find the quote). Suddenly rich, 3D skeuomorphic artwork is terribly, laughably dated, and tiny, flat, monochrome icons that could've taken 20 minutes to create in 1991 are the future!
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Wednesday July 08 2015, @06:32PM
I'm working on a personal project that involves a dedicated remote control for home automation (audio is my main focus, but it can control many more things). it has real buttons, a small display that is NOT touch screen and it does not have an actual o/s in the usual terms, so it does not have the problem of updates or security issues or bloat. there's no cloud and no info leaking. its lean, its fast and its custom built to be very usable.
"where is your phone app, though?" is the common question. sigh. ok, there will be a web back-end for you folks who just seem to love 'pressing on glass' instead of buttons. but I don't prefer that, myself.
long after your phone is out of style or not supported, my dedicated handheld remote will still be working, still have the same features and they will still work and be applicable in much the same way that my 25 yr old amp and preamp are still quite applicable, today (at least the UI is). I won't worry about some update changing the screen around or moving buttons or breaking things. I won't have to worry about ads or blockers or data rates and overages. I won't have to worry about a thing. I press buttons and things happen, 100% under my control (and yours too, its diy and fully open on hw and sw).
I do see a return to dedicated boxes rather than the 'generic one-box touch screen full of software'. those never do as well as dedicated things. it was an interesting experiment but it was a failure. we just have to admit it, use it for what its good at but stop trying to shoe-horn every single thing into being a glass touch screen app on some general purpose pocket computer.
while your phone is still booting or garbage collecting, my remote control has powered on, gotton device status and is now ready to let you modify it. from power off to ready in 1 second or less. when I press buttons, its spending all its time listening to ME, not polling some fucking ad server on a wan, somewhere.
phones have fooled the young kids who never had dedicated devices; but the adults in the room do remember what it was like to use actual tactile buttons and have stable well-thought out interfaces that last decades, not months.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by schad on Wednesday July 08 2015, @04:30PM
The reason so little software is "done" is because people keep adding shit to it. Why was Firefox's UI changed? What deficiency did it address? The deficiency of staleness and nothing more. The Firefox devs had been staring at that same damn UI for years and years and they were bored with it. So they decided to throw it all out and start from scratch. The result is a UI paradigm which is not really either better or worse, but merely different. But because the old UI had so many years of debugging and the new one, of course, does not, the new UI's implementation is markedly worse. So the Firefox guys will work on it for a few years, fixing and polishing it. Then they'll be bored of the "new" UI and replace it with something completely different. And the cycle will begin again.
I'm picking on Firefox but it's really a plague on our entire field. Every ten years, all the knowledge we've accumulated is thrown out and we start from scratch. Time sharing! Peer-to-peer! Thin clients! Smartphones! Cloud computing (which turned smartphones into thin clients)! Every time we coin a new term and act like we're doing something revolutionary, and the impressive part is that we've convinced most of the world that we are. The reality is that we're just slapping a new coat of paint on something that somebody -- generally IBM -- did back in the 60s. (And usually better than we're doing it today.)
I'd say it's pathetic, but it's making me a lot of money. I spend more time these days reading up about the history of computing than I do about new technology. The former is a far better predictor of where we're going next. So as long as it's not my money being frittered away on reinventing the wheel for the nth time, let's keep that gravy train rollin'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2015, @04:43PM
Interesting, I've done the same for science. Although no era is free of good ideas, it is much more productive to examine the theories from pre-WWII. Often what can be done now with new tech and old ideas is much better than new ideas and new tech.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Wednesday July 08 2015, @05:06PM
So they decided to throw it all out and start from scratch.
At the expense of functionality and features to keep up with our expectations of what can be done on the web.
There are far too many of these detours induced by designers in software. KDE was brought to its knees for 4 years by this. Gnome has been in a perpetual cycle if insulting the intelligence of its users.
To be sure, there were improvements in the code base of KDE, and maybe to Gnome. But if we handled our housing this way, we would all be living in tents with wrecking balls hammering away on one side, and carpenters banging and sawing on the other, and plumbers with their butt-cracks perpetually arguing about the color of the toilet paper in the overflowing outhouses.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by zugedneb on Wednesday July 08 2015, @04:48PM
it really is true; engineers don't understand the word 'done'. I'm one of them and I 'get' that, but this is why you have product managers. those are the folks who are supposed to pull the stop cord when the thing is done.
So, are they really engineers?
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Freeman on Wednesday July 08 2015, @05:05PM
Running outdated software for anything other than private use is irresponsible. Sure, I could wish that Firefox went back to their 1 or two releases a year, but I don't see it happening. Too many people are pandering after the new shiny thing for Firefox to just release new features once every 6 months. I do get annoyed with all of the random UI changes for the sake of change. Some things are better suited to being dull, but constant. Please see Windows 7 vs Windows 8 Menus for ways to innovate vs ways to destroy every rational thought.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Wednesday July 08 2015, @05:10PM
Running outdated software for anything other than private use is irresponsible.
Bullshit.
Outdated is NOT a criteria. It is the perfect definition of a FAD.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday July 08 2015, @05:26PM
So you enjoy old and fixed security vulnerabilities with your browsing?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by shortscreen on Wednesday July 08 2015, @06:05PM
Who created the vulnerabilities? Devs are pretty much universally saying "you MUST update, because SECURITY" about everything these days. Yet, they continue to spend their time fucking things up for the user, meanwhile the software continues to have security holes. They've found a slick way of enhancing their job security, which is fine for them. And if you are administering someone elses box and gotta run the latest version so that your ass is covered, that's fine for you. On my personal machines I'll run whatever I want and not have it dictated to me.
Web browsers are the most glaring example of this disfunction. The majority of the development work has been for the benefit of web developers (not users), with the remainder being for their own amusement, apparently. Look at all the progress that has been made in... tracking the user, shoving ads in the user's face, and DRM. Yeehah. Opera had a better UI back in 2004 FFS, compared to any browser now. Browser developers are definitely on my shitlist.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday July 08 2015, @06:45PM
I can't say that I really notice all the horrible things that happen in these week-by-week new browser versions, although I do use Chrome, Firefox, Firefox, and Opera for different tasks. But there is a huge market for finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities now. Even if getting pwned usually requires you to visit dodgy sites (or not run an adblocker [theregister.co.uk]), web browsers are probably the riskiest old software you can run.
Here is Opera's "successor". It's still on technical preview 3 and it's proprietary code like the old Opera (except for the Blink rendering engine, which is open source):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivaldi_(web_browser) [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Wednesday July 08 2015, @09:29PM
I would prefer security fixes instead of new versions. Note that security fixes normally don't get a new (major) version number. A new version means someone changed the functionality (and probably introduced new security issues that way).
Note that the version number of TeX converges to π as bugs are fixed. That's what makes TeX so useful: You can rely on your TeX stuff to give the same result also in twenty years (while I doubt that you can take e.g. a Word document from twenty years ago, load it into a current Word, and expect it to look the same).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday July 08 2015, @06:39PM
Outdated is pretty much synonymous with Full of Security Holes that Should be Patched. Why? Because we live in the real world where there are humans that code and other humans that push the coders to maximize output. While you have a somewhat valid point, the problem is that it's an extremely dangerous way of looking at things. At least in a Windows World, not having an Up-to-Date system will screw you in the long run. Unless you are totally disconnected from the Internet, which is an unlikely scenario. Even in a Linux World we have things like the Heartbleed bug and some Serious stuff that would cause major problems, if left outdated.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2015, @07:39AM
Firefix bugfix versions are named x.0.1. Versions introducing new bugs as well as moving the UI around and breaking extensions gets a new x.
The changes we are discussing here is the "new x", aka. major version. Nobody argued against installing the bugfix versions, it's just that bug fixes are so rare in Firefox, where bugs tend to sit as "new" for years.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Joe Desertrat on Wednesday July 08 2015, @05:39PM
Every piece of software that touches the internet is being or has already been redesigned to be smartphone/tablet friendly, whether it needs to be or not. Annoying to those of us that still use a PC for work.
(Score: 2) by fnj on Thursday July 09 2015, @02:47PM
Not every. My site is not mobile ready. It never will be.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2015, @07:34AM
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).