Firefox Adopts a 6-8 Week Variable Release Schedule (mozilla.org) 249
AmiMoJo writes: Four years ago Mozilla moved to a fixed-schedule release model, otherwise known as the Train Model, in which we released Firefox every six weeks to get features and updates to users faster. Now Mozilla is moving to a variable 6-8 week cycle, with the same number of releases per year but some flexibility to 'respond to emerging user and market needs' and allow time for holidays. The new release schedule looks like this:
- 2016-01-26 – Firefox 44
- 2016-03-08 – Firefox 45, ESR 45 (6 weeks cycle)
- 2016-04-19 – Firefox 46 (6 weeks cycle)
- 2016-06-07 – Firefox 47 (7 weeks cycle)
- 2016-08-02 – Firefox 48 (8 weeks cycle)
- 2016-09-13 – Firefox 49 (6 weeks cycle)
- 2016-11-08 – Firefox 50 (8 weeks cycle)
- 2016-12-13 – Firefox 50.0.1 (5 week cycle, release for critical fixes as needed)
- 2017-01-24 – Firefox 51 (6 weeks from prior release)
Holy Cow (Score:3, Insightful)
Once again, I'm glad I don't work for Mozilla. Is their plan subtitled "How to create burnout in your workforce"?
Seriously: Great company; but I hope the punishing schedule doesn't cause their workforce to abandon ship.
Re:Holy Cow (Score:5, Insightful)
Release cadence is like a CPU clock speed.....it tells you nothing unless you know how much work is done during each cycle.
Re:Holy Cow (Score:5, Insightful)
QA still needs to test the entire product every single release, no matter what was added or changed.
And just because you *can* slip an unfinished feature to the next release, doesn't mean your bosses will be happy about it.
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Holy beef (Score:5, Insightful)
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I just wish Firefox could show how much CPU power a given tab was using. I normally have a bunch of tabs open, and the whole browser just dies sometimes. I know Amazon sucks for this, they really like periodically reloading the page and also run a crapload of javascript to track what you are doing on a given page, and ebay is only slightly less annoying.
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And that's not even talking about the 'infinite scroll' pages like Pinterest.
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It's not like they start a new version and then sprint to finish the entire thing and do QA and bugfixes all in 6 weeks. That would be ridiculous. If you look at their release history you see that after starting development on a new version it's 4-5 months before it's ready for release, which is quite a realistic timeframe.
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QA still needs to test the entire product every single release, no matter what was added or changed.
Ha ha, only in theory.
Re:Holy Cow (Score:5, Insightful)
This upgrade treadmill is getting ridiculous. Can't anybody build anything that will last more than a few weeks? Am I that old to believe long tern stability is a good thing?
Re:Holy Cow (Score:5, Interesting)
If you answer no to that question too often (or if an unbiased observer would answer no), then you'll just be pushing things around haphazardly, like Google (and more likely you'll be making things worse).
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Well, the whole architecture, including (especially?) the hardware, is more fragile than a house of cards. A browser capable of bringing down the whole machine, or even an entire network? I mean, please! How does anybody find this acceptable? We are doing technology the same way we do politics.
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"Does this feature clearly make the product better?"
You need to ask "better for whom".... better for the end user, or better for advertisers?
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In Mozilla's (and Google's) case that would definitely be the advertisers, they are the ones paying the bills. These 'upgrades' seem to be for their exclusive benefit. Truly necessary upgrades also go into Seamonkey, and that hasn't happened since November 8th. I have to assume that Firefox 'upgrades' are purely cosmetic and/or economic.
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In Mozilla's (and Google's) case that would definitely be the advertisers, they are the ones paying the bills. These 'upgrades' seem to be for their exclusive benefit.
TBH I don't even know what differences there are between Mozilla/Chrome/Safari compared to a year ago. The UI has moved around a bit, but mostly they seem the same (some people have complained about feature removal, but it hasn't affected me).
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You need to ask "better for whom".... better for the end user, or better for advertisers?
Better for your customers, of course. They're the ones who pay the bills.
So you're saying advertisers, then... because they _are_ the customers for most software these days.
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Am I that old to believe long tern stability is a good thing?
I just moved to FreeBSD for everything in my house. I'm too old for dicking around with 'bleeding edge'. When I was 17 'bleeding edge' was the latest Alpha or Beta release I could find of OS X. Anymore it seems like Windows is just the latest Alpha or Beta.
With FreeBSD it may be old or 'out of date' with the latest and greatest but it works.
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/sarcasm Don't you know? Releasing more often magically fixes all the (old) bugs! :-)
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well..
I suppose some boss has bonus riding on how many releases gets out.
but not riding on what features if any get included in them.
this looks like a plan to make releases, not to make development.
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In fairness they have an Extended Support Release that lasts a year. This is better than Chrome if that's what you want.
Re:Holy Cow (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, the key word now is "improvement", isn't it? That seems to be a matter of perception. I would love to know where the "improvements" are in a program that is no faster than, has grown just as fat as, and still has less than a quarter of the user features of its ancestor. Most of the processing is used to hide the garbage.
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I have seen the change logs, and in my opinion they reflect no improvement over the decades old all inclusive program that preceded it. And for those who remember, when it first came out Firefox was supposed to be lean and fast and *stripped of cruft*. It's not any of those things now. I don't know of any single browser right now that is not a 30+ megabyte download, and they all run about the same speed. I see no disadvantage of sticking with something a bit more familiar that I can run for years without ha
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I see no disadvantage of sticking with something a bit more familiar that I can run for years without having to think about "upgrades".
So why not just do that then? You're free to do that and let others do what they want.
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Didn't you get the memo? Mozilla is uncool now, so anything you can think of to bash them with, go right ahead, don't worry about facts.
You needed a memo???
Wake up, Mozilla morons (Score:4, Interesting)
You keep on doing what YOU want, while ignoring what the USERS want.
Year after year, your popularity goes downhill. Do you even stop to think about that?
Somehow you've been frittering away over $500,000 every DAY for the last several years, and for what?
Your deliberate self-destruction is annoying and pathetic.
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What do the users want that they aren't supplying?
Long term stability would be nice. A system that needs constant upgrading and maintenance is not a very good system. Imagine if you have to go out and get a new fridge or replace the drywall and siding on your house every month.
Re:Wake up, Mozilla morons (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds like you want Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) [mozilla.org]. ESR releases receive a major update only once every 10 months, but still receive the same bugfix and security patches as the regular releases. Also, when you do get updated to a new ESR version, you know that it's one that's already been supported as a regular release for 2 months, so there's very little chance of surprise problems.
The current version is Firefox ESR 38, which was released as ESR on 11 August last year. The next one is ESR 45, coming on 31 May, which will last all the way until 21 March next year.
Hope that helps you.
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It's better than vanilla Firefox, but it's still crap.
I hate it on small screens. You can't get rid of the huuuuuuuuge zoom %age thing, even though it's taking up half your screen. There are other things that can't be changed, even if you install third-party stuff. Classic theme restorer is a decent college try, but it's fighting a battle that should never have happened.
And if you like rounded tabs, it's so you can stick them up your butt easier.
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Updates every 10 months if they are mandatory, is still too rapid. Remember when we could go a year or two without a major update that completely changed the UI or broke your plug ins?
Re:Wake up, Mozilla morons (Score:5, Insightful)
Users want a consistent interface, which is to not be arbitrarily mucked with, or copy annoying features of That Other Browser, which do not serve the User. They want their browser not to routinely dumb down features to better accommodate the lowest common denominator.
They want a lightweight, extensible, secure browser that respects their right to privacy, and enhances their privacy on the Internet. So far, they've done just about everything in their power to make sure Firefox does not supply these features; for example: Pocket. No reason for it to be anything other than another extension. Promising to do away with the extension framework down the road. Doing absolutely nothing about browser fingerprinting, when they're in the ideal position to fight it. Not allowing power users to whitelist sites that don't abuse Javascript. Etc. Etc.
They want the extensions that attracted them to Firefox in the first place to continue to work, which is again something they've promised to do away with in some future release.
In other words, if you had a goose which laid golden eggs, you'd probably want to take care of it and stuff, right? These guys do anything in their power to neglect and annoy that goose. The goose is going neurotic and plucking its own feathers and banging its head against the wall, and they think it's great.
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What do the users want that they aren't supplying? I haven't noticed a problem.
Don't be silly!
The next release fixes the tagalog [wikipedia.org] rendering issue. Everyone needs to upgrade!
Re:Wake up, Mozilla morons (Score:4, Insightful)
What do the users want that they aren't supplying? I haven't noticed a problem.
Performance and reliability. Graphics updates are slow and after I resume from suspend I have to restart the browser or it chokes every few seconds. Sadly, I went to Pale Moon and it has the same problem.
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Not to trivialize your problem, but if there's one nice thing I can say about Firefox is that it's been exceptionally reliable. I've had about 1 crash throughout all of 2015, and that's with Flash installed. Seriously.
I do know that Firefox's hardware graphics acceleration gave me many issues over the years, though that seems to have been resolved since I got my latest nVidia graphics card a couple years ago. My best suggestion is to disable hardware acceleration. Indeed, I can't think of why plugins, e
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It might be possible that you're suffering from an operating system driver problem, e.g. from your graphics driver. It's worth checking if there is a graphics driver update available for your system.
It's persisted through multiple driver updates and indeed multiple graphics cards. It's probably related to some plugin, but why should a plugin even know that the system has been suspended?
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Re:Wake up, Mozilla morons (Score:5, Insightful)
It's more what they are taking away. It started with the status bar, then there was the ill-conceived move to Australis, version 44 removed fine-grained cookie permissions, next they're planning to kill off extensions.
Over the past few years they've spent countless hours on integrating features few people cared for, and more hours taking away features we actually used.
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Firefox OS user here.
Dropping the platform for starters.
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Firefox OS user here as well. You'll be interested to know that they're only dropping it internally on smartphone, though not until after 2.6. There's nothing stopping manufacturers from moving forward with it on their own, without specific support from Mozilla. A bit like how manufacturers can use Android without specifically involving Google.
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Stability. It's a nice thing to have. But Firefox is adding NEW features every release, features that no one asked for. So instead of 6 to 8 weeks between security or bug fix releases, we have 6-8 weeks of major releases with 1 to 2 weeks in between for hot fixes.
Of course, if you are from the viewpoint that the customers are the advertising industry then perhaps you are right, they are being given everything they want.
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... and at some point, someone will start fixing bugs in Thunderbird that have been there for years.....
The resources of my computer are going to waste (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, whatever man.
Firefox is falling off the wagon technologically anyway. You can feel the single-threaded model limiting things. Everything freezes from time to time and browsing is choppy. Google Maps is painfully laggy. Video playback uses huge amount of CPU. Screwing around with version numbers and release cycles are meaningless tweaks when there would be much bigger fundamental problems to solve.
Chrome and Edge is where the rippin' development is happening.
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CHrome and Edge are rolling release just like Firefox.
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Yes, the point is to complain about Firefox, regardless of the merits of those complaints. Never mind that this schedule is actually lighter than the old schedule, nor that they've been doing rolling releases for ages. If Mozilla does anything, including something you've wanted them to do for a while, you've got to tell everyone it's the worst decision ever, and that the world is coming to an end.
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The biggest hurdle they have to cross with solving those problems right now is: addons. Yes, that's right, addons are keeping us from having the performance/multi-process upgrades we so desire in Firefox, because so many of them were written to depend on a slow and single-process Firefox.
Nonsense. You just announce that a new version is coming that will not support the old addons, and start releasing alphas a year (or so) before actually abandoning the old browser for the new one so that people have time to port the popular plugins.
cool story, bro (Score:2)
Firefox Adopts a 6-8 Week Variable Release Schedule
Thanks for the info. Around here we dump our garbage on Tuesdays. Or Wednesdays if there's a three-day weekend.
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I thought of something similar, but it has to do with regularity of sitting on a porcelain plumbing fixture. Really, Mozilla has gone off the rails of sanity.
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"it will be done when it's done?"
That's great if you're the only person working on a project*. In the real work, people are trying to schedule their work on X that depends on Y and Z versus their work on A that depends on B and C. Are you just going to sit on your thumbs fro Y, Z, B, and C to all finish?
*Actually, it isn't great if you're the only person on a project either, because somebody is waiting to use your project. That's what make it work rather than wasting time.
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Removing features faster than ever (Score:4, Insightful)
With the new faster release cycle they can alienate the existing user base with more efficiency and at a faster pace than ever before!
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Like it or not but webconferencing and push notifications have been implemented in the major competitors' browsers.
One human's bloat is another's functionality.
Dumb (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Dumb (Score:5, Informative)
You don't think they're figuring out what features they're going to build into a release when they start the 6-8 week cycle for that release, do you? I suspect that, like any other sane engineering organizations, they have a large backlog of features and issues to pick from for each release.
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unlikelike any other sane engineering organizations, nothing in that backlog is useful or improves the product in any sort of way
Re:Dumb (Score:5, Funny)
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They'll do what they've always done, release a minor update to deal with the security issue or critical bug.
They've had a release schedule for ages, you know, it's right there in the summary.
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Re:Dumb (Score:4, Insightful)
Conversely, if you have no planned cadence, you can land in development hell, churning eternally without actually releasing because in the time feature A has matured, you decided to squeeze in feature B and decided it can't release without B, rinse and repeat.
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"What if you didn't have any compelling features to add?"
If there really are no new features and no bug fixes, then you can change the plan and not do a release on that date.
There is vast difference between a changeable plan and no plan at all.
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You think say the Linux kernel isn't useful? They've been on a three month cycle for ages, roughly one month merge window and two months of release candidates. Basically what you want is for everybody to time box what they can do before the next release, but you can't know if you don't know how long that'll be. Maybe if it's two months you'll do some quick enhancements and fixes but if it's six you do a deeper restructuring. If 90% of your developers have finished according to plan and 10% is threatening to
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It's not a 'six-week' release schedule. (Score:3)
It's a small but important difference.
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It's a 42-day release schedule.
It's a small but important difference.
Cool, just in time to to pose the question to life, the universe and everything else.
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Next month theyre going to rename the organization to The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation
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What about instead waiting until it's ready? (Score:3, Insightful)
Pushing out releases just to check a checkbox off is very Agile. Instead, you should work towards making better software instead of trying to hit metrics.
Re: What about instead waiting until it's ready? (Score:4, Insightful)
The end result is that sometimes programmers run around like mindless monkeys, following process, and trying to figure out what is wrong with their process and what change they need to make to make things better.
In reality, it's not the process, if you want a good team and a good product, you need to focus on improving the programmers: the process is secondary. The best Agile proponents actually do focus on improving the skill of the team [jamesshore.com], but too many of the consultants out there are focused on process, process, process,, which leads to mindless monkeys.
But getting back to MMM, Fred Brooks pointed out that unless you have a giant team, the exact processes you use are kind of irrelevant.
My rule of thumb... (Score:2)
If a group embraces the terminology of the most popular 'process', it's probably bad. In other words, most teams are bad and use whatever is most popularized as a stand in, and tend to act however they want, but pay lipservice to the popular process to make themselves look like they are following industry best practices.
I'll add to the 'unless you have a giant team' that if you have a giant team, you've *probably* done something wrong. Most software development teams I've seen with over a hundred full tim
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If a group embraces the terminology of the most popular 'process', it's probably bad. In other words, most teams are bad and use whatever is most popularized as a stand in, and tend to act however they want, but pay lipservice to the popular process to make themselves look like they are following industry best practices.
Yes, and instead of giving them a new process (which will fix nothing), it would be more effective to train them to be better programmers. Focus on the individuals, not the process.
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people try to throw something together to talk about in scrum.
Thanks. You just reminded me of the months I've spent sitting in pointless 'standups' waiting while people say mindless things to other people who aren't listening. Good times.
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That's what I've always hated about people's approach to status meetings (scrum and before scrum). People take up my time talking at length about what *they* successfully did at a detail level I do not need. Tell me things that are done, and don't give me details of how arduous it was to get there. Tell me if you are having a problem and would like to have some help.
I've always viewed things like I've done a good job if there's not much to say about the work done.
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Status meetings are especially a waste of time when you have a status tracker. Why do I need to w
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That has been a long standing problem with many companies, that they strive to make software developers interchangeable cogs through process. Apply enough process and you'll get great products whether you use experienced and enthusiastic people or bottom of the barrel people who can't make more money another way.
What's the schedule for reducing bloat? (Score:2)
.
This is a good thing, how?
Does this schedule leave time for listening? (Score:2)
Over the past few years Mozilla has made tons of unpopular changes despite vociferous complaints. Will the new release schedule give them time to find out what their remaining users actually want?
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Look at this thread. If you were to believe every comment about what "the users want", then they want deeply contradictory things.
What you mean is "why doesn't Mozilla listen to me?" "Why aren't they tailoring their browser to meet my specific needs?"
We've got people here claiming that all Mozilla does is remove features. We've another camp complaining that all Mozilla does is add needless features. Then you have the camp that isn't happy even when they get what they want. They complain about the plugi
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Windows 10 is a pretty good sign they were paying *some* attention to the Windows 8 reaction.
To be fair, until they released, they couldn't gauge the reaction from the market they *wanted* in Windows 8, mobile/tablet users. Yes the desktop users may have made it quite clear how screwed up it was, but MS doesn't really need to care about them, they are a captive audience. They wanted to capture the market they couldn't get before.
Flexibility? (Score:4, Insightful)
some flexibility to 'respond to emerging user and market needs'
(snip)
2017-01-24 – Firefox 51 (6 weeks from prior release)
I don't understand where they'll get the flexibility from when they're planning releases a year ahead...
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Making a plan does not mean that you cannot change the plan.
I'm impressed (Score:2)
They already know, 11 months in advanced, they'll need a critical fixes release then - and have planned ahead - so we can count on smoooooth sailing until December.
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No. They already know 11 months in advance, that they will do a bug-fix fix only release a week before the christmas/new years holiday season; when everyone takes off for a few weeks.
They will not release anything major that release.
And they will make it a short cycle (5 weeks) because by the next week, the 20th of December, people will already be taking off.
you never bothered to ask whether or not you shoul (Score:2)
Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
My children will be using Firefox ver 7,462,354,846.01
They'll need to buy more memory just to keep the version number from using up all the RAM.
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My children will be using Firefox ver 7,462,354,846.01
Lessee, Firefox's is at version 44, so you expect your children to be alive (7462354846-44)*7/52 = 1,004,547,761 years from now. But, after they've downloaded their consciousness into asteroid-sized computers, will they actually need a web browser? At that point, they should be able to just accept the raw ZPHTML42 text and render it mentally into the appropriate N-dimensional conceptual structure.
Here's an idea for a feature (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's an idea for a feature...make it stop inexorably sucking up more and more memory until it slows to a crawl and then crashes.
Now that would a cool feature.
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Yesterday I caught Firefox using 2.6 GB of memory with only three windows (not tabs) open. I used the profiler to track what was causing the long, regular 2-3 second freezes, and it's always the garbage collector. 95% of any web page's rendering time was caused by the memory manager choking. I closed all but one window, and set the last window to "about:blank." Memory usage didn't even budge. Almost all of that RAM was used by the Javascript heap.
The only time I've ever seen applications use more memor
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"Now we know why"
We have always known why: APK is an idiot.
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"I don't see that problem."
Therefore that problem cannot exist for anyone.
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To compliment radarskiy's comment, I'll add that awful memory management has been a well-documented problem in Firefox for over 8 years.
Saying that a plugin/extension is causing obscene memory usage in a browser is in the same league as blaming a virus for an OS crash. It's a cop-out, and flat-out wrong.
Re:10 days should be enough. (Score:4, Insightful)
Brendan Eich, then working for Nestcape now still at Mozilla, defined created and demoed the first version of Javascript in ten days.
And it shows. The web would have been better if he'd spent a little more time thinking about it.
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Replacing a fixed 6 week schedule with a 6 to 8 week schedule and having the same number of releases a year is mathematically impossible
Veracity isnt one of the metrics that they were "optimizing."
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Posting this with Pale Moon, 64-bit version. (Score:2)
Usually Firefox add-ons work perfectly with Pale Moon.
Pale Moon has tools for migration from Firefox and for backup. Adblock Latitude [palemoon.org] blocks ads. There are other Pale Moon add-ons [palemoon.org].
Nice