A five week release cycle? - mozilla.dev.planning

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Message from discussion A five week release cycle?
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Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2011 11:08:32 +0300
Subject: Re: A five week release cycle?
From: Henri Sivonen <hsivo...@iki.fi>
To: dev-plann...@lists.mozilla.org
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On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 9:13 AM, Christian Legnitto
<clegni...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> On Sep 18, 2011, at 7:30 AM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> I rather hope the big lever doesn't get pulled before we have silent
>> update.
>
> We aren't waiting that long. The good news is installing via the pop-up is opt-in, just like Major Update offers have always been.

Opt-in not "good news" from the Web developer point of view, because
giving users choice means they'll scatter across more versions. (But
yeah, I realize it would be bad for some user-side scenarios for this
not to be opt-in.)

>>> Firefox 4 is close to what we consider "dead" and dropping.
>>
>> What I'm hearing from my Web developer friends is that their customers
>> still expect QA with Firefox 4 and 5, because we aren't doing good
>> enough a job at making old releases disappear from circulation. That
>> is, Web developers don't consider Firefox 4 "dead", yet. While moving
>> the platform forward rapidly is nice for Web developers, having a
>> scattered tail of non-latest releases in use is not nice for Web
>> developers.
>
> I think this is an education problem rather than a numbers problem.

Education problem in the sense of educating users or educating Web
developers? It's a numbers problem in the sense that as long as a
Firefox version shows up in StatCounter's top 12 browser version list
globally or for the Web developer's country, the version isn't
considered "dead" yet.

> Web developers should in general see no difference except for new features and
> fixes between Firefox 4/5/6 (they are doing feature detection, right?).

The thing is that the developers or their customers aren't confident
enough in this that they'd skip testing older releases. Even if
feature detection is used, having to (i.e. feeling to having to) test
with a bunch of releases is causing unhappiness. After all, you don't
know for *sure* there's no difference before you've done the testing.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivo...@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
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