There is a lot of discussion lately about the new rapid release model adopted by Mozilla. As an add-on developer and "power user", I had some concerns, but am really starting to love it.
Here are some of the reasons I like it:
- New features and improvements are being delivered faster than ever. We can clearly see considerable performance improvement since Firefox 4.
- Add-on compatibility has been always an issue when deciding to upgrade. When Firefox 4 was released it took a lot of time to get compatibility for all the extensions I use. With the new release model and automatic compatibility bump, extensions that do not have incompatible code are being updated automatically, so we don't need to wait for the developers to take action.
- Because of the new release model, the Ubuntu MozillaTeam provides a firefox-stable ppa and firefox-next ppa. Additionally, Ubuntu official repositories are now delivering Firefox updates that we wouldn't get without a ppa.
- When a new version was released before, there were so many changes, that I had to re-write many things in the extensions code. Now, show stopper changes between versions are less common and most of the time I don't even need to edit my extensions.
- When Firefox 3.6 gets retired, there will be only one Firefox stable branch and users will move faster to newer versions, thus there will be less need to keep backwards compatibility code in my extensions.
Here are some interesting articles to read:
http://www.oxymoronical.com/blog/201...-break-add-ons
http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2011/...apid-releases/
http://www.conceivablytech.com/8649/...-and-ie-is-not
http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/07...working-group/
http://www.conceivablytech.com/8186/...ss-for-mozilla
For support see Firefox 9 & Beyond Mega Thread
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