The IT Nerd

Is it just me, or every couple of months there’s a new major release of Firefox? Version 7 of the open source browser has just hitting the streets this week. For those of you keeping score, here’s the release schedule for all the major versions of Firefox:

• Firefox 6 was released on August 16, 2011
• Firefox 5 was released on June 21, 2011
• Firefox 4 was released on March 18, 2011
• Firefox 3 was released on June 17, 2008
• Firefox 2 was released on October 24, 2006
• Firefox 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004

So. after Firefox 4 hit the streets, it’s been a release every two or three months. This is insane. Developer are going to get run ragged testing their web apps with each new release of the browser. Not to mention that enterprises who may want to use Firefox would run into the same issue.

The problem is that it may get worse.

The word on the street is that updates may become even more frequent:

“Yes, I absolutely think in the future we will shorten the cycle – releases. “We have some work to do to make 6 weeks smooth from a process, tool, and product side. When we get 6 weeks down to a science we can shorten as needed.”

Lovely.

My advice to Mozilla. Stop the insanity. Releasing major Firefox updates weeks apart is insane. Slow down and allow users to actually adopt the browser and only release bug and security fixes when needed. That I think would help you to gain marketshre. After all, most users don’t see the benefit of shoving all these updates down their throats so frequently as they only surf the net with a browser and watch YouTube videos. You might want to keep that in mind.

This entry was posted on September 29, 2011 at 8:53 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Firefox, Mozilla. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.