And do the same sorts of breaking changes get made, just distributed in smaller chunks through those six month releases?

And ubuntu and gnome and fedora and...

I can only comment on the specific llvm case, but I cannot say "it works" without listing the fact that I have to keep ~5-6 versions of llvm around _exactly_ for that reason.

You cannot compare an OS, or in general any product which is "complete by itself" (browsers), with a compiler which is then used to _make_ the end product. Your source depends on it, and as it grows it just becomes increasingly hard to keep up.

Rolling releases are /also/ a tradeoff. I'm not particularly pleased with llvm in this case. I genuinely prefer semantic releases, and yes, even the python2->3 strategy in this context.

That's been coming for years. XUL addons have never worked on mobile Firefox.

Firefox used to do the infrequent large change thing, then moved to frequent small breakage.

Specific to add-ons: every release has broken some and the XUL depreciation is to some extent to deal with that problem better.

Note that users hate both options proposed in the article passionately, it just seems that break early break often results in fewer users voting with their feet.

Do you have an example of what broke between 2.11.7 and 2.11.8?

I think they aren't a reasonable comparison because they're very young and warned up front that they'd break compatibility several times in the early years.