On 11-08-05 11:21 AM, Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote:
Robert, is there evidence to support the hypothesis that
Seamonkey users /want/ Mozilla to "ship progress regularly" ?
From my reading of this list (which is, of course,
biased by my own perspectives), it seems to me that
the majority of Seamonkey users would prefer stability
and security in preference to regularly-shipped progress.
(Note that I'm not Robert, but...)
There are often times when users complain about something in the latest
release, but fixed in a pre-release; then they have to wait almost a
year before they see that fix in an end-user release.
In many cases, when a security/stability update was released, people
would ask "Is this issue fixed...", when the fix was such that it wasn't
allowed in a security/stability update, or the issue itself wasn't about
stability.
For example: Crashes.
The majority of crashes were caused by plugins, so Mozilla developed a
crash-protection feature where plugins were contained in a separate
process, so when the plugin crashes, it doesn't take Firefox - or in
this SeaMonkey - down with it. There's an obvious stability win there,
but it's such a major change that it typically wouldn't be allowed in a
security/stability update. Mozilla in fact thought the code was
self-contained enough to try porting it to a previous release, and
learned a lot from that experiment.
See <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Qq9fp-b07k>
Another obvious example is performance.
There was a ton of work done on performance in the past year or more,
but those changes could not be applied to a security/stability update.
JavaScript performance improvements go back even further. From what I
understand, those performance improvements were tested and ready to ship
back in November. (don't quote me on that :) )
And of course, there's standards compliance.
A big part of Mozilla's mission is to keep the web open. Shipping the
WebM was very important to that end. It was ready to ship a year ago.
SeaMonkey users didn't get it until a little over a month ago.
Also note: security/stability updates were released every 6 weeks, so
there's no big change in the frequency users receive updates.
--
Chris Ilias <http://ilias.ca>
Newsgroup moderator
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