Updated Mozilla Firefox Roadmap Targets 1.0 Release for September 14thMonday July 12th, 2004Ben Goodger has updated the Mozilla Firefox Roadmap with the latest information about the path to 1.0. Development will remain on the AVIARY_1_0_20040515_BRANCH (itself cut from the Mozilla 1.7 branch) until 1.0, with three releases candidates planned. The launch of Mozilla Firefox 1.0 for Windows and Linux is currently scheduled for Tuesday 14th September. The Mac OS X version will be released a little later, following additional work to make Firefox fit in the Aqua look and feel. Further details about the updated Roadmap, including information on nominating blocker bugs, have been posted to the Firefox General forum. Well, I don't know if there are similar threads elsewhere in Mozillazine nor I want to be flamed. But, imho, there's no way of implementing a stable release at the proposed date. At least, not with the quality characteristics of Mozilla 1.0. There are still some features going into the branch and it makes sense to have a month for release candidates. The extension/theme management system issues have not been totally fixed and the update mechanism is not tested yet. Besides, I would expect August to be be a dead period for many people involved. Mozilla 1.0 made an impact with its maturity. I would like FF to follow,despite the reduced recources. In any case, the community will try to follow but 14th of September is overly optimistic to me. Note that in the roadmap document it does say "We have picked an ambitious target release date for Firefox 1.0 - 9/14. While it is possible that we may slip past this we want to set that date now so that it gives us a near term goal to target and then slip from, rather than wait for things to "fall into place" or setting a later date that will result in further slipping." Which seems to acknowledge that the chances of slipping past the date are fairly high. There are a couple of weeks for testing after RC2 - if things aren't looking good then (or if RC2 is late), they have the opportunity to push the release back. MozillaZine's headline is accurate - September 14th is a target date, it won't necessarily be the release date (although of course lots of people will take it as that and moan when it's late...) I think the days are over when anybody can screw around with that kind of stuff. It wasn't that big of a deal when Time Warner was in the picture. But now Mozilla is a truly independent organization, and I don't think it'll fly anymore. If you tell people something is going to be released on a certain date, it'd better be so. If not, simply explain the situation ... which hasn't really happened the way it should. Better communication procedures need to be implemented to inform people of what is going on. I know the main focus now is on releasing Firefox 1.0, but what are the plans - if any - post 1.0? Ben Goodger's work on the roadmap is great, and goes into great detail about the plan and schedule for the 1.0 release, but there is no mention of anything after that point. I think a lot of the localizers are going to be really upset if 1.0 is released without proper localization support - the extensions mechanism isn't sufficient - see the l10n newsgroup for more rants :-) Does this mean that the Gnome Integration work that was on the roadmap for 1.0 is out too? No, bryner has patches for default browser, etc. Please fix the dumb installer issue before 1.0. I mean, who wants to see firefox trying to get installed in a temp dir, and having to go to the root drive in order to be able to make a directory just like it is intended? The installer needs to improve its usability. Brought to you by bugmenot.com You only see that with a custom install, and it's not the end of the world to have to put in a few extra mouse clicks - you'd need to some clicking to select your chosen location anyway. This is bug 241282 http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=241282 - it's not a blocker for 1.0, but if someone comes up with a patch (which shouldn't be too hard), it would be accepted. |