RSSMozilla developers readying one more beta cycle for Firefox 3.1
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published November 26, 2008, 11:28 AM
Serious issues evidently remain with recent builds of the latest edition of Firefox, leading developers to propose a new Beta 3 cycle, but with the aim of not delaying the new browser's final release.
With quality assurance tests now under way for Beta 2 of Mozilla's open source, cross-platform Web browser, the general public may see the latest fruits of developers' labor the second week of December, according to the findings of an organizational meeting yesterday. That's a few weeks later than originally anticipated, though delays of that short a period are not unprecedented.
But one possible reason for that delay, which could end up producing further delays down the road, is a steady rise in the number of blockers -- catalogued bugs that are deemed serious enough to prevent code that contains them to be "frozen" prior to a milestone release. The blocker count goal, naturally, is zero; but a graph released yesterday shows that number now approaching 250, with the nomination count for prospective new blockers as of yesterday standing at about 130.
It's a situation serious enough for lead engineers on the project to recommend the introduction of a Beta 3 milestone, which the organization had not originally planned for.
"We don't have full clarity into the nature of our remaining blockers, some of which likely require beta exposure," wrote Mozilla engineer and resident "phenomenologist" Mike Beltzner in his official report yesterday. "In order to close this release, a re-triaging (like we did around Firefox 3 Beta 4) is required both to identify the severity of the remaining blockers and the time required to address them properly. Further, the impact of late Beta 2 landings such as Private Browsing Mode, Worker Threads, Speculative Parsing and TraceMonkey will benefit from multiple beta releases."
"Landings," in this case, refer to new features that the team floats around the release schedule in order to find the best place to premiere them. Private Browsing Mode is perhaps the most eagerly anticipated of these landings, especially with Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 and the current builds of Google Chrome already featuring their own versions.
But also, worker threads will give JavaScript programmers functionality that's typically been delegated to the C++ realm: essentially, the ability to fork a thread for code that does not directly access content on the page, as a way of introducing parallelism and increasing performance. (Chrome has been experimenting with this as well.) Speculative parsing will enable Firefox to give more educated guesses as to the meaning of an entry in its all-purpose address bar, based on partial entries. That, coupled with the browser's new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine -- which uses just-in-time compiling for the first time -- could potentially accelerate version 3.1 by orders of magnitude for some operations.
That makes the 3.1 version perhaps at least as important for Mozilla as the 3.0 version. So an extra beta cycle may very well be warranted. The problem, however, rests with supporting all those other developers who support Firefox -- those who have to adjust their add-ons. You see, add-ons are (like much of Firefox itself) JavaScript apps; and with a much faster JavaScript interpreter under the hood, add-ons' behavior could be severely affected.
If Mozilla adjusts Firefox's development schedule, outside developers may need to be re-informed as to what milestone version they should target when making their behavioral adjustments. That was on developer Michael Connor's mind yesterday.
"I think that if the current way is broken, and this enables a more stable and reliable addon, we should tell addon authors that this specific piece needs work, and [Beta 2] should not be their target for that specific functionality," Connor wrote. "If the implementation of a new feature is flawed, we should tell addon authors that we're fixing it and just do it, rather than ship a substandard [implementation]. This would obviously need to be done by b3, of course."
At this rate, Mozilla's Beltzner suggested, the "code freeze" for Beta 3 could be set for January 2009.
What could be the harm to postpone the release of v3.1? When time is a constraint, I observed in my work that delivering quality late wins over shipping crap on time.
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BTW, the author this article COMPLETELY blew what speculative parsing is. Kinda makes you wonder how credible the rest of the article is when he gets the basic facts wrong...
https://bugzilla.mozilla.../show_bug.cgi?id=364315
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they always move "blockers" to next cycle when approaching the final release date.
There is nothing new, when approaching release. Everybody is adding and nominating blockers.
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I am very glad that Mozilla is willing to take the extra time to do it right. ^__^
Better to have a small delay and an even better browser than to release one that is not ready...
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Better to take there time and get it right than rush a not ready for public version of this.
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I'd rather see them add another beta and get things right rather than rush to get a release out before it's ready. Good call, Mozilla.
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im just happy they continue to develop in a way that is positive to web developers rather than releasing subpar browsers that negatively affect development time like microsoft keeps dumping on us all. ie8 in ie7 rendering mode != ie7 which begs the question, what the hell is the point of ie7 mode in ie8. ah, it's one more thing to debug. WOOHOO!
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I'm Testing the MineField Browser, and as of this mornings nightly update, all the plug-ins, have been disabled. So, they are clearly working on the problem. Time will tell.
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Add-Ons are generally disabled anytime a new version is released in this case beta 3. It has to do with the version they say they're compatible with and that you've just updated to a newer version.
You should install the Nightly Tester Tools Add-On, this allows you to override the computability and force install Add-Ons.
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You can also use the Mr. Tech Toolkit extension...helps you get extensions installed and allows you to make them compatible "version-wise" as well. ^__^
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