What Firefox trains are we in? | Hacker News Reader

What Firefox trains are we in?

whattrainisitnow.com

99 pointsjoebig31 comments

If you're curious what this means... years ago, Firefox took forever to hit 3.6, and the decision was made (mirroring Chrome) that releases would switch from "release when everything is done" to "the trains always run on time", where the release would go out at a predetermined time and anything that was ready would make it.

Mozilla also has a habit of simple question-based domains, such as "arewefastyet.com", for tracking progress.

Here's a list of sites. The Rust community has also (by extension) adopted the snowclone (e.g. arewegameyet.rs)

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Areweyet

Do they get a massive discount on domain, or why are they so wasteful with them?

I'm pretty sure this is just a list not necessarily owned by Mozilla.

They aren’t all official necessarily; lots of people at the company or community members make them.

A highly specific domain like this is what? $12 a year?

Thanks. Also makes it easy to browse between releases to check dev notes and in general 'What's new'.

Was it done because Mozilla thought that Chrome's increasing version numbers would make ordinary people think that Chrome was ahead of Firefox ?

It's definitely a common thought but there are other considerations too regardless if that's really true or not e.g. browsers needed constant security updates anyways, no reason to not also regularly deliver features that were sitting ready to be used with that update infrastructure.

It's easier to do small releases often. You have less chances to break multiple parts of the application. You also don't end up in a cycle of "Wait! I'll add just one more thing" which is very common with projects tend to less often.

Like what happened with Slackware 7

This was back when Internet Explorer was at version 7. Some Mozilla folks told me they used to get questions like "when are you going to upgrade to Internet 7 like Microsoft?"

If I remember right, after Firefox 4 they skipped a few versions and started the train model, while also trying to de-emphasize the version number in marketing.

Microsoft thought the same for naming their 2nd Xbox the Xbox 360.

So revolutionary. They took the Xbox strategy, totally flipped it on its head. Then they flipped it again.

Currently XBox seems to have inherited some folks responsible for Windows developer frameworks strategy.

Lot of people were saying that back then.

But… the 3.6 -> 4.0 release was just such a pain. We spent more than a year trying to cram too many features in v4.

Clearly feature-based releases were just not cutting it, especially as Chrome was shipping new versions fast.

For the longest time people were saying it was the wrong move, but really - that was absolutely necessary, and proved out to be the right thing to do. The Stable / Beta / Alpha ("aurora", was that the name?) channels massively improved our yield :)

>For the longest time people were saying it was the wrong move,

I detested Firefox from v4 onwards and finally got off the crazytrain at 12.

Other than the version numbering becoming vapid, the browser itself became vapid. No longer was Firefox about the users, it was about Mozilla.

That has remained the case to this day, and I have not bought a ticket to this day. I'm not counting the first ticket as a purchase since it was forced on me.

I'm hopping between the Pale Moon space station and (begrudgingly) the Chromium train now depending on what I'm doing.

Not that matters, but "what xxx" question really doesn't have the same vibe as "are we xxx yet" ones.

You're thinking about Firefox 4.

You’re right! It was 3.6 -> 4 took forever.

The numbers reported on arewefastyet.com seem to stop at July 15th though

Why is that site so poorly designed? I tried in both FF and Chrome. In FF I see nothing on any chart. On Chrome, I see a few data points in July and then nothing else.

I had to switch to "Platform: Windows 11 64bit"

Few related things I had to track down about this site recently:

1. This is an official Mozilla site.

2. Source is at https://github.com/mozilla/releases_insights, under MPL-2.0

3. Thanks to Pascal Chevrel for creating and maintaining this. https://whattrainisitnow.com/humans.txt

As far as I can tell, this is the only official page that documents Firefox 115 ESR being extended for Windows 7-8.1 and macOS 10.12-10.14 up to March 2025.

There's also https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-platform/c/ffR... , if that would count

There's also a nice website to see what landed in a specific Nightly build https://mrotherguy.github.io/fx-nightly-changelog/

Cool. Helped me track down the origin story of the 'dedicated search button' feature which, to me, mysteriously insinuated itself into Android FF:)

https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/07/18/100-webdriver-bi...

I finally gave up on firefox a year ago, after being a lifetime user. I can live with it being slightly slower than other browsers but it had strange hangs and very slow loading sometimes that made me switch and didn't find in other browsers. It could be an extension, that specific about:config setting or sometinhg else but i switched to have a browser that doesn't require me troubleshoot this stuff.

First time I hear about "train" analogy in release management. Interesting if someone is going to build this visualisation with actual animated train models and tracks ;)

Which of these trains is for the developer edition of firefox?

By default it is on the aurora update channel, seems to have the same version number as beta, but you can also change it ( https://wiki.mozilla.org/Software_Update:Channels ).

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