Firefox moving to 4 week releases

Re:Firefox moving to 4 week releases by zepearl on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @02:27PM (#20998509)

In general I like more the classic/old way of versioning the releases, like for example "1.2.2" which has some embedded meaning of what is changing (e.g. <major_change>.<minor_change>.<bugfix>) which hints at how potentially dangerous an upgrade might be or if some new exciting stuff has been included. Jumping directly from 10 to 11 to 12 leaves me clueless without reading all release notes :(

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Re:Firefox moving to 4 week releases by d00bianista on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @01:43AM (#21002643)

Aside from versioning being clear about how big the change is, Windows Installer has this [0-255].[0-255].[0-65535] limit that I hope people do not learn about in the hard ways.

It's not so fun to work around because Windows Installer tries to be smart about things, as opposed to the others that take a more robust approach.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/msi/productve...

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Re:Firefox moving to 4 week releases by anticensor on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @02:27AM (#21002817)

Firefox has a custom installer.

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Re:Firefox moving to 4 week releases by Someone1234 on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @02:42PM (#20998697)

Semantic versioning is useful. Unfortunately the marketers have taken over and there's a numbers race going on.

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Re:Firefox moving to 4 week releases by sroussey on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @02:57PM (#20998853)

Semantic versioning is useful for libraries. Let useful for consumer apps. 2019-10 says more than 76.0.0

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Re:Firefox moving to 4 week releases by masklinn on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @04:39PM (#20999828)

> 2019-10 says more than 76.0.0

Neither says anything useful. 2019-10 is no more actionable or informative than 76.0.0. That 2019-10 was released in october 2019 is meaningless information and only "more" in the "babble" sense.

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Re:Firefox moving to 4 week releases by fnord123 on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @06:39PM (#21000800)

2014-04 is absolutely actionable for a browser.

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Re:Firefox moving to 4 week releases by MaulingMonkey on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @09:21PM (#21001679)

2014-04 is actionable for a lot of stuff - "unpatched" or "unmaintained"...

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Re:Firefox moving to 4 week releases by lenkite on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @05:25PM (#21000244)

Well, I don't get an idea if my extension would break changing from version 2019-10 -> 2019-11 without reading the release notes.

I would know it there is a big chance of breakage if I moved from 76.0.0 -> v77.0.0 and I am reasonably certain it won't break if I moved from 76.0.0 -> 76.0.1

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Re:Firefox moving to 4 week releases by diegoperini on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @12:40PM (#21007127)

But if a website breaks, you can get more idea about why it happened by comparing your current browser's calendar version to the latest update. For example, you will know you are behind x years of updates. With semantic versioning, you don't know how old you have not been updating your installation.

Since there are more websites than extensions, the utilitarian approach would be to choose 2019-10 over 76.0.0.

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Re:Firefox moving to 4 week releases by lenkite on Thursday September 19, 2019 @08:41AM (#21015591)

One approach is proactive and the other reactive. Unless, one checks the release notes every 4 weeks... I would argue the utilitarian approach is exactly the other way. Verify and test if there is an API break with a major version change. Whether the browser is 2 years or 10 years old shouldn't make a difference.

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Re:Firefox moving to 4 week releases by wott on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @05:47PM (#21000422)

And this supposed marketing advantage only lasted for the first handful of releases, when numbers where under or around 10. Now numbers are so big that they have become totally insignificant. 57? 63? 98? who cares any more?

Furthermore, as another comment said, it is impossible to remember on which release they started breaking this or that, since there is no more major version number change, which is usually handy to indicate backward-incompatible changes.

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Re:Firefox moving to 4 week releases by nirvdrum on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @10:17PM (#21001924)

They increase the major version because they don't guarantee backward compatibility. You may think it's foolish to only provide guaranteed API support for 4 or 6 weeks, but it's more than just a marketing gimmick.

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Re:Firefox moving to 4 week releases by sarah180 on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @10:19PM (#21001930)

The reality is that you must read the release notes for this to be a strategy that can even remotely minimize your risk.

On one side, relatively minor upgrades can have huge impacts for some use cases. Some changes are riskier than others, but SemVer and major/minor distinctions are not reliable signals for anything critical.

More important though, if you're skipping browser updates at all, you need to be tracking the security implications of every patch you skip. Otherwise you're increasing your risk by an order of magnitude more than you'd reduce it by deciding a change might be too buggy based on a numbering scheme.

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