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Comment by InclinedPlane | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps you misunderstand the purpose of software development.

There is a stable version of Firefox (version 3.6), you can download it at http://www.mozilla.org/firefox/. Mozilla is also adding new features to Firefox in an effort to enable web developers to do new things in new ways. Development and stabilization of these new features is ongoing, which is why it's restricted to a beta program in the next version.

What would you prefer? That Mozilla abandon innovation completely and concentrate utterly on stability? That you not be allowed to participate in beta testing the next version of the browser? If you don't want to test Firefox's new features in the unstable version then perhaps you can avoid running the beta and just stick with the older version.

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This made me laugh, WTF does "purpose of software development" actually mean? That phrase is itself a misunderstanding waiting to happen. :-)

Yeah... Ok, I probably deserved a bit of a snarky reply -- I missed the 32-bit requirement for silverlight in the release notes (apparently their sandboxing for 64bit is broken). Just for that oversight, I'll take my lumps.

I do think, however, that you're thinking in a binary way about this. It's possible to add new features and fix bugs at the same time, ya know. It's possible to prioritize stuff even in a beta... you don't just pile on the shiny new because you slapped a "beta" sticker on it.

It's a beta release, not an alpha, and the eighth beta release. Right on the durn frontpage is says it should be stable enough for normal use in most cases. I would classify youtube as one of those cases.

As soon as the 7th release came out, it was broken in an obvious way vis a vis youtube video on some platforms. They had months to fix it. Mozilla obviously decided that WebGL bling was more important...

...and that's fine, they can do what they want and yes, it's a beta release and webgl is cool, but I still think their priorities are screwed up.

Okay, so it sounds like you misunderstand the process of software development.

You can't completely rewrite various subsystems for performance and fix bugs at the same time. There is more going on than just 'adding new features'. New software is bound to be unstable while it is in development. If you have a problem with this, do not download beta versions.

Personally, I haven't had any issues at all with stability or compatibility on Beta 6 or 7 (on Linux).

(Since I don't particularly care about my karma at the moment, I guess I'll continue beating this dead horse :-))

And here's my snarky rejoinder: Hey look! There are bug fixes and new features in the latest beta. How did they do that? Perhaps they misunderstand the software development process!

What you have described is some ideal model of the development process based on something you think should happen. It doesn't exist, and it doesn't happen that way.

No one is reading what I wrote: their priority is messed up (in my opinion). Software development is very much about priorities.

You can decide that youtube functionality might be important for mac users for them to even continue testing the beta (e.g. no they(I) aren't(am not) going to keep launching another browser for every you tube video when they could just use safari). Or you can decide WebGL and audio (audio? really?) bling which a precious few will be using even in a year, is somehow more important.

I think their priority right now is to not fall so far behind Chrome that catching up becomes a serious challenge.

Honestly, I think your priorities are messed up — or at least inconsistent with your actions. You seem to just want a stable browser for watching YouTube without regard for cutting-edge technology, but for some reason are using a piece of beta software that is currently focused on other things.

As far as the final product is concerned, I'd bet that YouTube does have higher priority than WebGL. But that isn't the current focus of development.

Excuse me, are you using IE6 ?

> Hey look! There are bug fixes and new features in the latest beta. How did they do that? Perhaps they misunderstand the software development process!

> What you have described is some ideal model of the development process based on something you think should happen. It doesn't exist, and it doesn't happen that way.

Do you actually do any programming yourself? I'm really not sure what you're talking about.

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