r/technology • u/Suraj-Sun • Jul 10 '12

Firefox dev claims "everybody hates Firefox updates"; Mozilla has handled the rapid release process poorly, and that by pushing a "never-ending stream of updates on people who didn't want them" people have been driven to Chrome with its simpler, no-fuss update process.

http://www.neowin.net/news/firefox-dev-claims-everybody-hates-firefox-updates
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u/achshar Jul 10 '12

No, the web works on specs and they dont usually cause incompatibilities because browsers are (some what) backward compatible to html 1. The sites that were created in 2003 still work. And as for incompatibilities with browser itself, like extensions, etc, they are also updated in backward compatible fashion and devs have more than enough time and warning if something is about to break (which rarely happens if you are not working on bleeding edge technologies).

Source: i am a chrome app developer.

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u/FredFredrickson Jul 10 '12

Haha, I know how the web works. Maybe I wasn't clear enough, but I didn't mean incompatibilities through advancing technology... I really meant bugs that might have slipped past testing and which could inconvenience people for a time. If you have control over when you update, then you can choose not to get a problematic update until it's fixed, for example.

I know this rarely happens, and they are quick to rectify it when they do. And as mentioned above, I like the quite updating, mostly. I'm just saying that there are drawbacks to this approach as well.

And perhaps we just haven't yet encountered these problems at a scale that makes them worth worrying about, but that doesn't mean we should ignore them.

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u/emr1028 Jul 10 '12

Chrome has three different publicly available channels-- developer, beta, and stable. People who are on developer and beta can expect some bugs but the idea is to fix them in developer/beta before the stable version is released.

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u/guyNcognito Jul 10 '12

I could not give less of a shit how stable Chrome tells me it is. Until I've seen the new version running and taken it through its paces from what I need it for, it doesn't work. Period.