On Wednesday 2013-01-23 11:19 -0800, [email protected] wrote: > We have not made any announcements around the availability of > updates (Mozilla-provided or otherwise) at this time, and no > overarching decisions have been made for the life of Firefox OS. > What I would like to note is that phone OS updates are not > synonymous with browser updates on other platforms - they have > their own very specific requirements and we can expect differences > in their implementation. For instance, each update needs to be > qualified by multiple partners. Think legal certification > requirements as well as full stack quality checks externally. As > for security updates specifically, the security and release teams > are working closely with partners to ensure that they understand > the necessity for frequent security updates on a regular cadence. > We'll keep you all updated as things solidify.
I think it's also important to work with partners to ensure they understand why more than security updates are needed on a regular cadence, in particular, why updates to newer Gecko release trains are needed on a regular basis. When people develop applications for the Web, they're generally testing that their application works on a certain set of browsers, basically the set of browsers that have enough market share for them to care about. When developers can depend on new features is a function of when *all* of these browsers support the new feature (or at least enough that they're willing to sacrifice the market share for the rest). When developers can depend on performance improvements that improve the performance characteristics of the Web as a platform again depends on when *all* of these browsers support the new feature. And how consistent these browsers are with each other has a big effect on how easy or difficult the development experience is. On the mobile Web today, there's a big problem with out of date browser engines, but today it's out-of-date WebKit. When Facebook said that HTML5 wasn't ready, my *understanding* (which may be wrong) is that they weren't talking about the technology in current browsers being ready; they were talking about old versions of WebKit that are extremely common on phones and other mobile devices. Populating the world with significant numbers of devices running outdated browsers cripples our ability to move the Web forward and the ability of the Web to compete with other platforms; shipping new versions of Gecko users of Firefox OS phones is critical to our ability to move the Web forward, which I believe is a key part of our mission. -David -- š¯„˛ L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/ š¯„‚ š¯„¢ Mozilla http://www.mozilla.org/ š¯„‚ _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
