Simplifying Firefox Release Channels | Hacker News Reader

Simplifying Firefox Release Channels

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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.

We have always had the potential to move that fast, but you can think of the difference here for features as: rather than scrambling to bring features to release faster if they're ready, we can choose to hold some features back for an extra 6 weeks in Nightly, for more development if they need it.

This is the same kind of confusing stuff as in the article. Give it to me straight: when I upgrade stable Firefox to version N, how many more weeks will I wait for a stable update to version N+1?

The same, a month and a half.

But if you're waiting for a feature that was just finished to get into stable, that time is faster. You will only have to wait for N+2 instead of N+3.

Stable Firefox will still update around every six weeks, the same as before.

You could also think of the change like this: if you report a bug in the current release version, and someone fixes that bug in Nightly, the fix will end up in a new release 6 weeks faster than before.

> 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.

I don't know about Nightly or the most recent release, but the following has always worked to open the profile manager and setup a new profile:

  firefox.exe -p

If you want to run two instances of Firefox side-by-side, start the first instance and then use the following command (again, untested on the latest releases and on Nightly):

  firefox.exe -p -no-remote

Please use --new-instance instead of --no-remote.

Not quite sure about this advice.

MDN documentation on the command-line options[0] currently references a WONTFIX'ed bug[1] - that option does not work on Windows systems. Unlike --no-remote which works consistently across platforms.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Command_Lin...

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=855899

Glandium is a trusted source of Mozilla command line information. https://glandium.org/about/

Actually friday20 might be right on this one. The remote code is very different across platforms. The way it works on non-Windows/non-Mac is very different, and it's possible that --new-instance doesn't work as expected there. On Linux/BSD/etc (everything that uses X11), --new-instance should be prefered.

Thanks, but why?

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

You can just use normal (stable) Firefox for that. It still has the same great devtools!

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.

Granularity is pretty good for the Nightly builds, since a new update is normally built and pushed out at least once a day. The mozregression tool is useful for narrowing down when a bug first appeared: http://mozilla.github.io/mozregression/

The Aurora channel never got as much traction as Mozilla anticipated. The original plan was for Beta to have 10x the number of users as Aurora and Aurora to have 10x the number of users as Nightly. Today, Aurora has only about 2x the number of users as Nightly and there isn't much difference between the types of user hardware or bugs found in Aurora compared to Nightly. Thus, there isn't much additional QA benefit when a Firefox release moves from the Nightly to Aurora channel. Most of the serious regressions are found in Nightly so Aurora is just six weeks of additional latency before new features and bug fixes reach the Release channel users.

The Beta channel is not representative of the Release channel user behavior or hardware either. About 60% of the Beta channel users are in India and Indonesia. The story I heard was that, years ago, someone distributed a CD with a Firefox 4 Beta among their friends in India. It went viral and those people have, unknowingly, been on the Beta channel since then.

Nightly is too unstable and beta is too late. Aurora was a more nuanced release, where it had some stability, while still had features that were long before beta appearance.

I run Nightly on all my machines, and in my experience its stability is good. YMMV, of course.

I had used Beta for years, mostly on Mac, but recently I switched full-time to Ubuntu. I wanted some Gtk+3 updates that were only in Nightly, and now I've been using it for several months with a couple of crashes I can remember.

Mozilla has some projects in place to try to improve Nightly stability and catch regressions sooner.

Chrome's Dev channel is a nice middle ground: Dev is just a ~weekly known-good snapshot of the Canary (Nightly) channel that has received some QA. Chrome Dev and Canary have the same major version number.

I'm not sure what "beta is too late" even means, considering that it now occupies the exact position that Aurora did, that you claim is a sweet spot.

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

There is, at least, the political niche of being truly open source, and not built by a for-profit corporation.

I'm always a bit skeptical when someone defends an organization by saying it's non-profit. AFAIK, the only difference between non-profit and for-profit is that the owners of a non-profit don't get to keep them money for themselves per se, although they're just like for-profits in all other ways, including the ability to name their own salaries and waste money frivolously and use their resources inefficiently. I don't know how Mozilla works internally, but I'm not about to give them the benefit of the doubt without cause.

Also, where is Mozilla getting money from in the first place? They only offer free products. The last time I checked, they're getting most of their money from Google. That doesn't automatically mean Google has Mozilla in their pocket, but it's definitely a red flag.

To be clear, "Mozilla" is two entities; the Mozilla Foundation ("Mofo"), which is a non-profit, and the Mozilla Corporation ("Moco"), which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Foundation. (I am an employee of Moco.) This is more of a tax/legal thing than it is a different mission between the two entities, as [1] says: "The Mozilla Corporation is guided by the principles of the Mozilla Manifesto."

The Google deal changed in 2014, at which point it became a five-year deal with Yahoo! in the US, and other partnerships (I don't remember the details to be honest) elsewhere, IIRC Yandex in Russia and Baidu in China?

1. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/

> the only difference between non-profit and for-profit is that the owners of a non-profit don't get to keep them money for themselves per se, although they're just like for-profits in all other ways, including the ability to name their own salaries and waste money frivolously and use their resources inefficiently ...

That overlooks the most important difference, the reason non-profits exist: For-profit companies exist to make money for their owners; non-profits exist to serve a public mission, such as protecting and furthering the free and open web (or feeding the starving or promoting peace or etc.).

Also, the salaries are not at all comparable. If the founders of Mozilla had made it a for-profit company, they'd be among the Silicon Valley billionaires (and the founders of Mozilla's predecessor, Netscape, are indeed among them or at least extremely wealthy). There are many very talented people who gave their careers to the free and open web, when I expect they could have been making a lot more money elsewhere. I doubt Mozilla competes with Google on salary.

I wasn't defending Mozilla so much as comparing, and specifically comparing a non-profit with two definitely-for-profit corporations. To me, it seems like even without knowing anything about Mozilla or the for-profits the balance of probability for which is least likely to be "evil" falls on the non-profit side. Additionally, the point about Google paying Mozilla is a little silly (even if it were still true): one of the corporations we're comparing here is literally Google, so whatever Mozilla is doing is rather unlikely to be worse than what Google is.

Of course, for this specific case of non-profit and for-profit, there's a decade and more of history bearing out the sense that Mozilla is far better than the corporations from this particular political/privacy/no-ulterior-motives stance.

Additionally, I don't see why monetary/resource efficiency is relevant: the thing that actually matters is the product, and while being efficient/nonfrivilous is likely to help make a good product, it doesn't actually seem like a relevant end goal. Everything else equal, I'm still going to buy from a company that "wastes" 99% of its money if its product is better than the one that doesn't "waste" anything.

Not being owned by a billion-dollar company interested in data mining? I also feel that the add-on library is still stronger, even if a lot of newer ones are sadly Chrome-only.

Last I tried to customize Edge I got held up at simple things like installing an AdBlocker. Once I got that installed, which I had to do through the Windows Store, it seemed to still load ads but not display them for multiple AdBlockers tested which defeats the purpose for me. I block ads to improve page load speeds. I also didn't have any customization of the bar that the URL block resides on. I wanted to remove basic things like the share button which I never use and could not.

Chrome is developed and maintained by an ad company that actively doesn't allow extensions on the mobile version. It also uses significantly more RAM on my small laptops than Firefox. I like to use Firefox on Android and my desktop computers/laptops so I can sync them all and have a browser that allows me to install extensions on mobile (like AdBlockers). This is less of an issue on iOS due to the native content blocking API which Google will never add to Android because they are an ad company.

This seems a bit anti-ad now that I reread it but I'm going to go ahead and post it anyways, replace AdBlocker with any extension or customization. So the answer is choice and freedom, if you don't see a problem with Edge and Chrome then use Edge and Chrome. You should support content creators and use what you like to use. I like to use Firefox because it uses less RAM, allows extensions across all platforms, and is developed by a company that I trust a lot more than the alternatives.

I prefer Firefox's developer tools & inspector.

What's the niche of Chrome, honestly? "It's fast"? That doesn't matter to everyone and long term, I can see Firefox getting as fast, if not faster, with all the recent work on overhauling the add-on system and porting bits of Servo over.

A bit of vendor lock-in as well at times (pragmatic reason for using Chrome and ideological reason to stay away from it). YouTube TV, for instance, currently only works on Chrome -- not on Safari and Firefox.

One thing I really like about Firefox is that the search bar is separate from the address bar. I don't necessarily want to be doing an online search when I type a URL into the address bar, especially when the URL goes to an internal LAN host.

It is separate? I haven't seen a separate search and address bar in about 5 years. Or at least, the address bar will always run a search if you don't enter a real URL.

How does one get back the separate functions?

It is separate. You can disable searches for the Awesome Bar by setting keyword.enabled to false on about:config.

The address bar in Firefox will run a search if you enter something that doesn't look like a URL.

But it won't send whatever you're typing to the search engine looking for search suggestions, for example. You need to use the search field to get search suggestions.

In contrast, in Chrome, you can either have search suggestions and your search engine seeing every URL you type, or no search suggestions at all, depending on how you set your prefs.

Though it seems increasingly too 'niche' to be viable, being fully open source and putting the end users interests first by default is pretty valuable.

XUL plugins that can modify the browser's interface and open up infinite possibilities to improve the user's experience...

Oh, wait, Firefox's removing that too.

XUL based applications were so much nicer than the current Electron abominations.

Apart from the (fairly valid IMO) political reasons, Firefox is still the king of UI customizability and good add-ons. Even without the old XUL system, there are add-ons like those at https://testpilot.firefox.com/ which modify the browser in pretty drastic ways. I can't really use a browser without some form of tabs-on-the-side these days.

Me neither. I am really hoping that Tab Center "graduates" from Test Pilot into core FF sometime soon.

Test Pilot Containers is the best innovation in a browser for me lately. I used to create separate profiles in Chrome to have multiple logins for a single website. Now I can just create another container and have a new profile side by side in the same window.

Containers are supported in Firefox Nightly without the Test Pilot Addon.

Personally, I use Firefox because I'd rather support Mozilla than Google.

Also, I have it set up exactly how I like it, and I know how everything works, despite the fact that Chromium does seem to be faster in most cases.

Mozilla is only company I feel fairly confident won’t sell my data or do other things that violate my privacy. This is more than a niche, but most users don’t care enough about privacy.

"Trust".

Edit: thanks for the downvotes! The parent basically described trust, so I summarised.

It's still better then google or MS and as you see, this is important to FF users. So it's in their own interest not to fuck up here.

Indeed. Firefox is the only major browser that where the rendering engine isn't owned by a large manufacturer, ie Apple, Google or Microsoft. It's also genuinely open source.

> Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It has lower memory requirements, great developer tools and once Servo is integrated in Firefox, I think it has potential to really beat Chrome performance-wise.

Of course, until that happens Mozilla needs enough funding from search engines to keep the lights running so it's my main browser.

It's the only browser on Android with AdBlock support that can seamlessly sync with desktop.

This is my use case too. It makes such a difference.

Opera does all that as well.

Yes, if you don't mind contributing your usage data to Qihoo's new "Big Data Analytics" platform, which will be "leveraging [Qihoo's] large user base, which consists of 514 million PC users and nearly 800 million mobile users to gather a tremendous amount of demographic and geographic data as well as search and behavioral patterns for data mining purpose"[1]. And surely they won't use it for anything nefarious, like their subsidiary's emission of backdated certificates[2].

[1] http://www.marketing-interactive.com/qihoo-360-expands-its-b...

[2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1C6BlmbeQfn4a9zydVi2UvjBG...

My answer was to: "It's the only browser on Android with AdBlock support that can seamlessly sync with desktop."

Not to weather it collects your data or not.

It seamlessly syncs, alright!

A killer feature, the Chinese media say! ;)

So essentially exactly the same as what users of Google Chrome do, except that it's significantly less likely I'll enter China in my life and be prosecuted and locked up on the border due to my browsing history? :)

I'm not sure about Edge (I stay away from IEs, just out of habit), but comparing to Chrome Firefox uses less memory (I use 100+ tabs). And it has nicer UI than Chrome.

EDIT: And as others mentioned it has adblockers on the mobile version (which syncs with my desktop one).

If you look real close, you may notice how Edge is a closed source application limited to use on one platform, and how Chrome, albeit being nominally open source, is utterly under the control of one major corporation for which it functions mainly as an aggressive marketing platform.

Firefox has a niche as a uniquely customizable web browsing application until later this year, by which time Mozilla has decided it should self-immolate.

Some of us are far too close to running out of browsing options.

Mozilla is the only company that builds a browser because it genuinely wants to, rather than as a market defense tactic.

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