COMMENTARY | The team at Mozilla has kept the promise it made back in March to deliver an update to Firefox every 16 weeks or less. Firefox 6 became officially available for download Tuesday, just eight weeks after Firefox 5 hit the proverbial Internet shelves. The lightning-fast release pace is a response to browsers such as Google Chrome, which updates itself more regularly than traditional browsing applications.
Even though the official release of Firefox 6 was scheduled for Aug. 16, the final version became available for download through Mozilla’s FTP servers for Windows, Mac and Linux as early as Aug. 13, according to Technobolt. Director of Firefox Engineering Johnathan Nightingale has alluded to a release cycle closer to six weeks than the 16 weeks promised in March. It still takes 24 weeks to develop a full version upgrade of the browser, so the current timeframe has Mozilla working on up to four releases at any given time.
I predicted that Firefox would be more susceptible to losing market share to Chrome simply because Firefox users had already switched browsers before. So far, Mozilla’s marketing plan, add-ons and overall quality have shielded it from losing any substantial amount of users to new entries in the PC browser game. Firefox users have hovered at around 20 percent since August of 2010, according to StatOwl.com, while Chrome’s share of the market has increased from 6.84 percent to 12.58 percent in the same period. Internet Explorer went from controlling 62.66 percent in August of 2010 to 55.26 percent currently.
The variety in how we search the Internet has made it much harder for hackers to write a single virus that infects the majority of computers that is loaded into your PC just by visiting a website. I still prefer Internet Explorer for the majority of my browsing needs, but use all four of the main browsers at times for different reasons. My main use for Firefox comes from its many add-on features, most importantly iMacros for Firefox. With new versions of the browser coming out every month and a half, the add-ons which are written by third party publishers will surely suffer.
A recent post in Nightingale’s blog stated:
“We may decide that 6 weeks is the wrong interval, for instance, though it’s worth remembering that Firefox maintenance releases have been released on 6-8 week intervals for years, and sometimes included major changes. We’re also paying close attention to the impacts this cycle has on our ecosystem of add-ons, plugins, and other 3rd party software that interacts with Firefox.â€
I honestly do not believe there should be three versions of the same software in development at once. Major updates where a whole version number is added should come yearly, or bi-yearly. The aggravation of updating software every six weeks is not worth small fixes and patches that amount to several updates, not a visibly improved upgrade.