Comment I'm Going For It (Score 1) 368
Anyone have any invites to spare?
Steve
It helps Mozilla by reducing the amount of code they have to maintain at one time. With a six-week release schedule, if they had to maintain each version for a year, they'd end up supporting eight or nine version simultaneously.
But it's simply not realistic for the software to change significantly in 6 weeks. Web standards don't change that much in 6 weeks to warrant this much changing in the browser. Therefore, they're supporting largely the same codebase for months and months, same as before. At some point they add major new features and these are the ones that should get the new major version number.
Simply incrementing the major version every 6 weeks will hurt Mozilla and Firefox.
Can you cite any examples where something worked in Firefox 4 but not Firefox 5?
Asking what is broken within *this* particular version is completely missing the point. The point is that someone needs to now go back to their PHB and say that FF is now at new version. Resources for the business need to be taken to examine what changed and how those changed bits will affect the organization's web site. And now this process needs to be repeated every six weeks.
At some point, something major *will* change between versions. In the past, one could look at it and say "ok, version 4.0.1 came out, probably just addressed something minor. Version 5 just came out, must be a major new release, we should look at what changed." The new numbering scheme and release schedule makes it much more time consuming to support Firefox because now every release needs to be examined with the care and attention previously only reserved for major versions.
Well-publicized schedule? New version every 6 weeks.
You missed the word "sane" in my post. Six weeks != sane release schedule for major versions of this software. And yes, the version number incrementing *does* indicate a major version.
You're right again in that people don't want to update their software, that's why Firefox (again like Chrome) does it automatically.
Hmm. Not sure if FF actually does update automatically between major versions, I didn't think so. In any event, major version changes in Firefox have broken add-ons which is a failure for the user.
I don't care if Mozilla releases every 6 weeks, every 3 weeks, or every 3 hours. I do care about supporting the browser on multiple web sites and having to work with developers and users alike. Keeping the version numbers on a major/minor/bug fix scheme actually does work; it wasn't a broken model. This version number bouncing is not for the benefit of the user. Seems to be Mozilla with a case of version number envy; their number is smaller than IE and Chrome and they want to fix it, regardless of whether it benefits anyone.
Who, exactly, is the rapid release schedule helping? It's certainly not helping web developers and organizations who try to list their supported browser versions and actually try to code towards those versions. The quickest path to get the corporate PHBs to stop supporting your browser is to have the IT staff say "Guess what, the next version of Firefox is already out so we need to make updates." At some places, support for browsers other than IE is tenuous at best, so making it more difficult to support these browsers only hurts the browser manufacturers.
Want to gain more support? Release a stable product, with wide support for standards and add-ons, and do so on a sane, well-publicized schedule. People don't care about version numbers; updating software isn't something people want or like to do. Why are you making it more difficult and cumbersome for users to use your product?
I broke the cardinal rule and read TFA. From TFA:
"Hickson mentions that the group will be dropping the HTML5 name immediately, but it we have not received a confirmation that this will happen over at the W3C as well."
So WHATWG will no longer be using numbers? WHATWG can call it "Hullapuhjelpus" as far as I'm concerned as long as W3C still continues using version numbers. Version numbers provide excellent reference points to featuresets and are useful to implementers, developers, and end users alike.
From the WHATWG Blog:
"However, shortly after that we realised that the demand for new features in HTML remained high, and so we would have to continue maintaining HTML and adding features to it before we could call "HTML5" complete, and as a result we moved to a new development model, where the technology is not versioned and instead we just have a living document that defines the technology as it evolves."
Because there's demand for new features you no longer want to use a numbering scheme? Many standards are evolving. Why not just increment the minor version when new features are added? HTML version 5.1 added this cool thing, 5.2 this cool thing, etc.
If we're dumping version numbers then why bother calling it Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8, and 9? Why not just call it "Internet Explorer"? We all know that each of those versions render pages the same, right? Hmm. I just realized that I invoked Internet Explorer in a discussion about standards. Mea Culpa.
How does removing the version number help the people who need to implement and work with the standard?
It's my job to count these. There are over 16,000,000 hosts that respond to ping on my network alone. If everyone does this I can see how the number would grow exponentially.
nmap -sP 127.0.0.0/8
Microsoft seems to have a long history of not understanding the Internet. Witness them being very late to the party with Internet Explorer, and then not being smart enough to figure out that they should set a default home page to their sites with early versions of IE. And then the various attempts at lock-in and biased search results over the years.
I can't help but think this is yet another example of Microsoft attempting to make the Internet into something that they want it to be, something that benefits only them, rather than something that benefits society as a whole. People won't change their habits so easily, they'll just use whatever sites come up in Google. This will be a boon to those sites that remain in the Google index.
8 Catfish = 1 Octo-puss