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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday July 08 2015, @03:04PM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Wednesday July 08 2015, @09:29PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday July 08 2015, @09:29PM (#206618) Journal

    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.
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