“Many wonder why Microsoft doesn’t offer nightly builds – or at least something fairly frequent – of Internet Explorers. Ars talks to Microsoft’s general manager for Internet Explorer, who says the IE9 development cycle will look much the same as previous versions. We don’t think that’s a great idea.”
Nightly Builds makes more sense for opensource projects, that’s what I think.
Nightly builds make sense for a company with basically infinite cash, and that such a large percentage of the web relies upon still, and with developers targeting this software.
Is it _really_ Microsoft’s intention to literally spring IE9 as surprise on companies and developers and expect them to ‘clean up the web’ in an incredibly short time just because MS can’t get their act together and do something so insanely difficult as compile something once a day. (Mozilla’s build farm is doing hundreds of builds an hour across four platforms and several branches).
Not at all. That’s part of the reason they release preview & beta builds every few months. By the time they get near the end of the development cycle, things aren’t changing that much.
The problem is IE is integrated into the OS, and lots and lots of software is dependent on it. They’re not going to release a build into the wild that hasn’t had heavy regression testing. Releasing nightly builds would be a support nightmare, both for MS and other developers.
That’s nonsense. There’s no reason why MS can’t build IE to have parallel installations for non release builds. I think it would actually be more beneficial for them to seed pre-releases that can install in parallel.
From the Ars article: “God, where to begin.”, indeed.
It seems that people are not aware of what a ‘hotfix’ is.
Don’t get me wrong, but it’s very basic for any Microsoft user to expect for hotfixes. The software is very modular, so a hotfix is released to update just part of the software; there is no need to do a completely full build of it again.
It’s impressive to see articles like this, it’s like people are completely unaware of Microsoft Update, what scares me to death about the health of their systems.
I think our friend Emil at Ars isn’t quite sure about how this works, also.
One last thing: the people at Mozilla should seriously take a look on this. It’s just ridiculous to download the whole browser again when there is small revision on the software. On my point of view, their process is wrong, not Microsoft’s.
Edited 2009-11-20 22:24 UTC