Guest post by Firefox 10 Arrives Today with Extended Support for Businesses. Though the software does bring an array of tweaks and enhancements for both users and developers, it’s perhaps most notable for the fact that it marks the debut of the business-oriented Extended Support Release (ESR) program. One can check out what’s new and known issues for this version of Firefox by reading Mozilla’s release notes. Perhaps the most important change from a user’s perspective is that add-ons and themes are assumed to function, rather than not function as assumed by previous Firefox versions, meaning that the update process won’t leave a user with familiar extensions disabled and needing updates.
If a couple years ago someone came from the future and told me they were using FireFox 10 and Linux 3.3 I’d think they were from the year 2040, not 2012
About the same topic; I think I’m old-fashioned, but the major.minor schema is far more informative than having a big number that does not say actually anything.
A minor increment should mean some small features have been added to an application and it is supposedly backwards compatible with its predecessors; meanwhile a major increment suppose several new additions, maybe some architectural changes and maybe some backwards compatibility breakage.
I’m wondering the same thing. The old versioning carried some important information. As far as I can tell, the new versioning scheme tells us nothing. Does anyone know why they changed it or what value they thought this change had?
Long story short:
Software makers are now under the impression that everyone should always be using the very latest version and that older versions are just irrelevant.
So far, that seems to work quite well for consumers and services, but not so well for business so once in a while a “long term support” version is created
I think that is the most insightful and important comment of this whole thread. You should have 10+ points.
Isn’t that why Extended support release came out together with Firefox 10 ?
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/
Good answer. I think I could agree with the software vendors’ view if they only auto-installed after making an auto-backup first. What if their new release messes up, effectively taking away my browser? I make my own backups, of course, but it’s difficult to cover silent auto-installs when you don’t have a schedule or know when they’re coming.
I would disagree. The previous version numbers(4, 3.6, 3.5, 3, 2, 1.5, 1 etc.) were close to being time based. The longer you work on something the higher the jump of the version number. With 6 weeks you know there can’t be a lot of changes and if there are important changes you can read about them in the changelog 12 weeks before it reaches the users.
I disagree. First of all releases that are far away from 1.0 often tend to be great and whenever there is a .0 release you are unsure about whether it’s really stable, which is ridiculous. For example Firefox now has a Nightly, an Aurora, a Beta and a Release channel. Thinking a .0 release wouldn’t be stable is a wrong assumption. Also there are lots of project that say something like “We won’t have a certain .0 release until we implement a certain feature”, which again means nothing. NetBSD for example has been in the 1.x track from 1995 to 2005″ and other software, like Tor has a version number like 0.2.2.35.
Also most projects implement certain new features in minor releases that affect you much more than the major ones.
Oh and then there is Perl, which will (probably) never reach Perl version 6, because Perl 6 is a “completely” different language (or language specification). Also Perl 5.8 has been released in 2002 and it took five years to get to 5.10. 5.12 has been release in 2010 and 5.14 in 2011. It is really hard to tell how big those changes have been.
Also when you frequently release minor enhancement that don’t introduce new bugs you can end up with a ridiculous minor version number.
In the case of Firefox it only means that they are releasing finished stuff more often and most people benefit from it, now that the updates are more silent.
I like the concept of version numbers based on dates or a build number. This tends to be tell you much more about how much development took place.
Of course the isn’t true for everything. There is a lot of software, especially small, simple one doing only one thing where something like a major release for new features/bigger changes and a minor one for bug fixes makes sense, but in case of Firefox, which has a good reason for a fast release cycle this would just lead to pushing the numbers into the decimal places, which really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
The usual madness. How do you tell them that you are not a happy user? I had troubles especially with Thunderbird 10, everything stopped working properly, until I reverted to version 9.0.1
Why didn’t Firefox just go with an Ubuntu style version numbering system? So that this release would be version 12.2: Alpha, beta, stable, or ESR depending upon which channel you are using. They could even change over to this system once Firefox hits version 12 in a few months.
The transition from Firefox 9.0.1 to 10 has been all that smooth. The biggest issue was with Java. My wife logs into work using a Java based Citrix connection on a Debian Squeeze computer using Iceweasel and OpenJDK with the Icedtea plugin. What worked in version 9, crashes with version 10. Firefox from Mozilla is similarly affected.
The only way I got things to work was to use Sun’s (Oracle’s) Java from java.com. What a mess.
When I saw ESR, I thought Mozilla will be going to launch an Eric S Raymond program where people who donate money to Mozilla Foundation, can throw apples and bananas at ESR.
But ESR actually stands for Extended Support Release. I don’t know if I should be disappointed or not.