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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: 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.