Mozilla speeds Firefox development
The development team behind the popular Firefox browser hopes that their 'sprint cycle' development will bring new features to users more quickly.
According to an article over on InfoWorld, Firefox architect Vlad Vukecevic has described the new practice as "'sprint' development," a system whereby "[Mozilla has] a bunch of projects [new features] that we assign to one or two people, who then have two to three weeks to maybe finish [it] or at least get some data on it."
Vukecevic explains that the sprint development cycle method will hopefully make the development team "more nimble" and allow the team to work on "a lot of great improvements we want to do every week and every month."
While the development team might be working on getting new features to users as soon as possible, the release schedule for future versions is still somewhat tentative with Vukecevic stating that the company will "do at least one release a year from now on, but whether there's a second release this year [...] that's up in the air."
The current release roadmap shows Firefox 3.6 due for release in October-November this year, with Firefox 3.7 following around March next year. Firefox 4.0 - the next major revision - should be due October-November 2010. Vukecevic has been tight-lipped on whether the new sprint-cycle development will affect these dates.
Hopefully the new development techniques at Mozilla will help the company stay on track for release dates: Firefox 3.5 was plagued with delays as more and more features were added to what was originally planned to be an incremental update.
Are there any major features missing from Firefox that you think the development team should be 'sprinting' with, or are you just excited to see what version 4.0 will bring? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyBookmarks are waaaay better, the history is simply awesome and download manager sweet and simple.
Mozilla is going to need to do alot to get me back!
Google has done to the browser what Apple did to the smartphone.
Its not all perfect, chrome maximised bleeds a vertical blue bar over to my 2nd monitor and logmein throws up errors but thats logmeins fault i assume.
After first month it was obvious that:
- these small tasks aren't independent,
- giving one task to team no. 1, then giving their results to team no. 2 isn't a good idea, because every developer has his way of solving issues,
- in the end we got way beyond schedule.
Yeah, I know - everyone has to learn his own way, but hey! Why we are the ones that will be punished? :P
Apple did virtually nothing for the smartphone market... Google has done more for smartphones.
And what did Google do for smartphones? Android? :|
In theory it works really well but it all comes down to how it's managed and how good the product owner and the developers have to be disciplined and keep to the plan. In a product I'm currently doing integration for we have managed to cut the development ccle time for a new UI down by more than half, whilst improving on regression and bugs that get into the baseline.
Let's hope Mozilla did their homework.
If FF2 was more stable than FF3, then why Mozilla keeps patching it? In my experience, FF2 isn't very stable, I could never able to use it for a few days without it crashing, and that while I'm not using any addons or opening a lot tabs (like I usually do in Opera). With Opera, I could open 1400 tabs (in 40+ windows) at the same time and it will stay stable for weeks! FF2 is the single reason I've switched to Opera for these 2 years. FF3 doesn't change that for me because IMO, Opera UI is so much more intuitive. I haven't tried Google Chrome but I don't think they will make me switch haha.
Can they store the bookmarks online so I can access it anywhere (even from my mobile phones) like Opera Link? If so, I might be interested in trying it.