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Comment by acqq | Hacker News Reader

> In recent quarters, we’ve had many requests to take features to market sooner.

Surely not from the users.

> Feature teams are increasingly working in sprints that align better with shorter release cycles.

Poor guys. At least the process “guarantees” long term quality as the result.

> Shorter release cycles provide greater flexibility to support product planning and priority changes due to business or market requirements.

Translation: marketing managers want to change their minds faster than up to now.

I’d prefer more stable, less CPU and battery hungry browser than one that shovels to my desktop the newly decided features from the marketing as soon as possible. But it’s just me.

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> Surely not from the users.

I'd love for the recent changes to rendering which fix long standing performance issues on OSX to hit release as soon as possible. https://twitter.com/whimboo/status/1168437524357898240 . Many users are running nightly right now to take up these changes because they are so valuable. As a user, I'm requesting Firefox take features to market sooner :)

> Poor guys. At least the process “guarantees” long term quality as the result.

Philosophical question: does letting code incubate for a longer period of time with the same test/user load (same nightly/beta users, same integration test suite) really enhance stability?

> Translation: marketing managers want to change their minds faster than up to now.

This is just blanket cynicism - do you have insight into the Firefox development process that suggests this is true?

I actually took those changes in 70, so they should make it to the release version at the end of October. If you can, please try using 70 Beta and see how the power use improves!

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1574538

Thank you so much! The nightlies have been good and I will try the beta.

Your first comment implies you speak for all users; certainly you don't.

Your second comment is antagonistically sarcastic.

Your third comment is easy cynicism. As a counterpoint, Firefox does put a lot of effort into stability, reducing CPU power (read the recent change on OSX in that regard). You seem to be suggesting a shorter release cycle will prevent them from continuing that work.

> Your first comment implies

It doesn't.

> certainly you don't.

I don't. I speak just for all the users that don't benefit from the more frequent release cycle.

Note that the more frequent release cycle doesn't mean that any development will take less (especially absolute) time. It can even take more, as more frequent release cycles mean that administrative work related to every release increases.

> You seem to be suggesting a shorter release cycle will prevent them from continuing that work.

No. Again you construct what I haven't said, because you don't have valid arguments against what I've actually said.

I'm claiming that the total work by both the developers inside of Mozilla and by all the users who have to respond to the event of the new release increases with this management decision. And I quote the argument of the management, written in the release, which I consider to be weak compared to the said costs:

"Shorter release cycles provide greater flexibility to support product planning and priority changes due to business or market requirements"

> I’d prefer more stable, less CPU and battery hungry browser than one that shovels to my desktop the newly decided features from the marketing as soon as possible. But it’s just me.

Patches welcome.

People say they want better software internals and don't care about visual improvements, but people are empirically wrong about what they say they want:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040525-00/?p=39...

>I wouldn’t be surprised if these are the same people who complain, “Why does Microsoft spend all its effort on making Windows ‘look cool’? They should spend all their efforts on making technical improvements and just stop making visual improvements.”

>And with Calc, that’s exactly what happened: Massive technical improvements. No visual improvement. And nobody noticed. In fact, the complaints just keep coming. “Look at Calc, same as it always was.”

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