New Milestone Schedule AnnouncedThursday May 20th, 2004Asa Dotzler has posted a new milestone plan which outlines some changes being made to the release schedule of point releases of the suite and platform going forward. The main change is the now longer periods prior to a final release, with two longer Alpha periods, and a longer Beta period. This allows for more time to land large changes and get them stable prior to a final release. Along with these changes, there will now be at least one release candidate prior to each final release. More information can be found in some of Asa's recent weblog postings. Update: Some of the text and links above have been updated to provide more information. In a market where changes constantly happen, 5 months is a long time for a feature to wait to be in an official build. I think this is going to push more people to use nightly builds (which is maybe a good thing). > In a market where changes constantly happen How often do Opera, Konqueror, Safari, IE major releases happen? Well, some people are still waiting for such-and-such feature in IE and its last release was when? :) And it's next release? :) IE is sooooo out of date. A longer time between offical final releases might be better for web developers as they have to verify compatibility with new releases. Of course I always use the nightly builds anyway. "Well, some people are still waiting for such-and-such feature in IE and its last release was when?" August 2001, or August 2002 if you count IE6 SP1. "And it's next release?" Not too long actually. Later this year. It will include a popup blocker (enabled by default), an add-on manger and possibly a download manager. Alex For most users, upgrading is a chore, and for many businesses upgrading often can be expensive, especially if problems arise. Hi, Will this affect 1.7? This is a very good thing. It should have a nice beneficial impact. By slowing the pace of development down, we can get new features into Mozilla a lot easier, for example. The newsgroup post says "[image removed - can now be seen at http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html#milestone-schedule ]". Neither the image nor the table of the schedule has been updated -- both show only one alpha release for Mozilla 1.8. That was my fault (I made the newsgroup post quoting Asa's post and added that note) - I posted too quickly and didn't check carefully enough. From the drawing of the new roadmap, it looks like the release candidate would be built from the code as it exists at the time of branching. Is that the plan? If so, that's a great idea -- I often grab the last nightly build before branching so I can see if a bug was added before the branch or after. This would mean I could just download RC1 instead of trying to search for that nightly build. The only thing that matters is when Firefox 1.0 is coming out. Is that on any roadmaps? "The only thing that matters is when Firefox 1.0 is coming out. Is that on any roadmaps?" Yes. http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.html Alex There are many people (say gecko embeddors or users of embedded gecko products) who care about the Gecko development cycle a lot more than about the Firefox development cycle... The main text/links of this article have been updated. The newsgroup post link nows goes to Gmane, rather than Google Groups, as Gmane includes the image. The link to Asa's weblog now goes to the May 2004 Archives, which will make this article more useful for when you reread it in June 2006. Alex Thanks for listening to user feedback. This was suggested a while ago in one Mozillazine comment, and peaked people's interest. This should please developers, and provide more stability. To "Long Time" author, they don't have to use nightlies; they can use the alphas and betas. Here Here! Now bugs can actually get fixed. Previous to this there were 4 releases a year. Meaning each release got 13 weeks, 4 of which were Alpha development. Then everyone got paranoid and didn't want big fixes in Beta so they had to wait 2 months to get back into the trunk. Now we get 12 weeks of Alpha before people get paranoid. This will be good. Helps with marketing as well. 2 releases a year, people can focus the marketing push. People can implement Mozilla in a corportate network without feeling like it's out of date when they are done installing. Thanks for the new development cycle! |