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Comment by flocial | Hacker News Reader

This new release policy just doesn't make any sense. Sure Chrome is flashy and their release cycle is fast but they're also consistent (also young). OSX and Ubuntu release like clockwork. People appreciate consistency.

Also, when 5 was announced the state of extensions support was uncertain (I finally got the Delicious add-on back working again without compatibility fiddling and definitely didn't want to mess with it).

Having said that, the unrealistic and bureaucratic IT policies of backwards companies are their problem and not for open source to solve (are they donating?). If they're so concerned maybe they should hire someone to contribute to the project full-time so they can stay abreast of changes and maybe have a say in the direction of development.

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This new release policy just doesn't make any sense.

Speaking as a Mozilla developer - sure it does! We release every 6 weeks, and don't hold new releases for features. In the past, we ran into far too many cases where new feature X that wasn't ready held up a release for all the other features that were ready. Now, we'll just remove or disable that new feature and ship.

OSX and Ubuntu release like clockwork. People appreciate consistency.

Two things: 1) OS X releases at the whim of Apple, not "like clockwork." 2) Every 6 weeks is "like clockwork"! :)

Weeeeel, osx was on an 18 month cycle of releases up until about 10.5ish. Then they toned it down, mainly I think due to there not being much to do oswise. (COUGH, memory dedup in the vm subsystem COUGH).

I think of any software an OS would benefit the most from a timed release schedule. Ref: Linux/*BSD, don't ref: Hurd.

How are Mozilla developers like you going to keep my Evernote add-on working in Mozilla now? You guys will be breaking all the add-ons every 3 months, too.

Mozilla developers needs to be thinking about more than what is convenient for Mozilla developers. There's a whole of eco-system of add-ons, themes, etc that other people provide that makes for Mozilla you are going to be breaking every couple of months now.

It’s 6 weeks, not 3 months. Still, addons that are hosted on addons.mozilla.org are now automatically tested. Ones that don’t touch code that changed in that release timeframe have their max version automatically increased.

There is the Firefox x for developer documents which Mozilla publishes in advance: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Firefox_6_for_developers

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