from Hacker News

Simplifying Firefox Release Channels

by digitalnalogika on 4/17/17, 3:37 PM with 59 comments

  • by domenicd on 4/17/17, 7:07 PM

    This seems like a good change. For Chrome, I only use Canary + stable. And having beta as a period for a wider audience with relatively lower bug tolerance to catch things before they hit stable makes sense. But Chrome's Dev channel/Firefox's Aurora never made much sense to me.

    I wish Firefox Nightly automatically did the new-profile thing like Firefox Dev Edition/Chrome Canary does, though. Not being able to run them side-by-side out of the box is quite annoying. (Maybe this has been fixed since I originally installed Nightly?)

    One thing that I'm having a hard time understanding from the article is whether this means Firefox is moving from a 18-week major version cycle to a 12-week major version cycle? Because features will no longer need the extra 6 weeks in Aurora? "Faster release cycles for platform features" kind of implies this, but it isn't stated anywhere explicitly.

  • by Animats on 4/17/17, 11:16 PM

    There should be a developer build of the currently shipping product, for when you need to find out why Firefox broke.

  • by LeoNatan25 on 4/17/17, 4:39 PM

    What was unclear in the previous model? Sounds like there is less granularity now on testing the different branches. This could have he effect of bugs being caught later in the development cycle.

  • by penpapersw on 4/17/17, 6:34 PM

    Considering Edge is improving steadily on Windows, and Chrome is pretty good and cross-platform, what is the niche of Firefox at this point?