Please no. Mozilla shouldn't slow down the release cycle just because big corporations can't keep up with it.
Alternatively, what would help those big customers to keep up would be the opposite of what they require. Instead of having infrequent "big" releases every few months, having continuous updates ala Chrome where each increment in almost compatible with the next one could help to mitigate the problem. There will be no big breakages and everyone that wants will be able to keep up when time comes.
> Mozilla shouldn't slow down the release cycle just because big corporations can't keep up with it.
No-one can keep up with it. Not big corporations. Not people who make web sites and web apps. Not even people who make extensions for the browser itself.
The only people who can keep up are users who ticked the "update me whenever you feel like it" box. They only benefit in practice if the people providing the content can take advantage of any new functionality. Otherwise, it's just a no-win/lose proposition, a significant risk of breaking stuff that used to work for no real benefit.
Its a vast improvement for web developers who have to develop for 1 version of chrome versus 4 versions of ie, Its a vast improvement for web developers who get to use new functionality to deliver better experiences to their users, Its a vast improvement for users who get a faster, smoother, more featureful web experience.
The only people it sucks for is large corporations who for some reason have applications that are tied to 10 year old technology and for extension developers, its a shame but certainly not worth holding back the web for
> Its a vast improvement for web developers who have to develop for 1 version of chrome versus 4 versions of ie, Its a vast improvement for web developers who get to use new functionality to deliver better experiences to their users, Its a vast improvement for users who get a faster, smoother, more featureful web experience.
It would be a vast improvement if any of those things were actually true, but unfortunately none of them is.
Web developers aren't developing for one version of Chrome or Firefox now, they're developing for one version every three months. That is far worse than supporting, say, IE8 and IE9. (Please can we drop the IE6 nonsense now? The remaining market share is negligible and the arguments are academic outside of niche markets.)
Web developers can't use the new features if they can't keep up with them, and in any case they are typically not portable, robust or future-proof enough for production work when first released.
That means users don't get a more featureful experience. If anything, they get less, because trendy web sites use trendy CSS3 features and the like to save time, and those features don't work for a very substantial proportion of the web-surfing public where the older but tried-and-tested techniques did.
The list of fatal regressions both chrome and firefox have introduced is pretty close to 0, developing a new version of a web app every 3 months for both browsers is beyond obtuse to the point of outright lying.
Web developers arent as utterly hopefully as you seem to think, my gmail supports drag and drop attachments, my irc client supports websockets when available, my task tracker works offline (and on a mobile), my maps support geolocation.
And I personally dont support have to support ie6, but a lot of people still have to. I havent heard of anyone that has to support Chrome v1.
> The list of fatal regressions both chrome and firefox have introduced is pretty close to 0
Well, if they've only introduced a few here and there, I suppose that's OK then. </sarcasm>
> developing a new version of a web app every 3 months for both browsers is beyond obtuse to the point of outright lying.
It's a good thing that's not what I said then, I suppose.
> And I personally dont support have to support ie6, but a lot of people still have to.
A few people still have to, I'm sure, but the market share has dropped like a stone over the past year or two. For most projects that aren't in-house jobs in the organisations that haven't managed to leave it behind yet, it is no longer relevant.
Please no. Mozilla shouldn't slow down the release cycle just because big corporations can't keep up with it.
Alternatively, what would help those big customers to keep up would be the opposite of what they require. Instead of having infrequent "big" releases every few months, having continuous updates ala Chrome where each increment in almost compatible with the next one could help to mitigate the problem. There will be no big breakages and everyone that wants will be able to keep up when time comes.