Yeah, the rapid release schedule came in response to Chrome's auto-updating itself at an obscene rate. IMHO the competition forces all browsers involved to innovate, which is awesome

Yeah, the rapid release schedule came in response to Chrome's auto-updating itself at an obscene rate. IMHO the competition forces all browsers involved to innovate, which is awesome

*shudders*

The rapid release schedule is all but nice... Firefox 7.0 is a good example of this - it came out with a major bug that needed a .0.1 update to get it fixed. Not to mention all the other little bugs that have cropped up, like the window resizing bug (it's late, but I'll try to get a pic up tomorrow), and another one that I can't recall offhand. Yes, with 7.0.1. That's scary.

It's a craze that needs to end. The rapid release schedule works for Chrome because there's a lot of people working on it, and paid to do so too, typically very well. Hundreds of people work on it everyday, as a day job. (And even still some bugs do slip through!) Mozilla et. al. (including one Canonical for Ubuntu) don't really have this magnitude of people and effort working on it. They can't catch bugs as fast, not mentioning be productive as fast. It just doesn't work.

Sure, they are working faster and better, but is a rapid release schedule necessary? If they are getting motivated because of the scheduling, not because they are self-motivated... there's a more serious problem at hand than their bugs and release schedules.

I'm hoping that this insanity will end.... hopefully. It's great that they are competing, but sometimes you gotta compete differently. And that's fine - because in the end, the final result matters, not how much time it takes!

Note: I am a long time, and still proud Firefox user. I also speak as a FOSS project developer, with some minor experience in project management. My comments are mainly based on experiences, and maybe a little bit of speculation. I do not intend to insult anyone with my above comments. If you feel these are insulting, contact me and I will edit/remove them. Thanks!

In other words faster releases are not any better if they're either:

1) rushed
2) contains fewer additions/fixes, just so the version number increases fasters, to artificially make the program look updated often.

It's a quality vs quantity issue there.

Hmm interesting. I was reminded of this topic when I went through my Onenote Notes and found a post I posted in this topic in my library of unfiled notes. It was a long post http://ourl.ca/13458/254645 so I had pasted it into OneNote. I also realised that I didn't ever get to read the replies after mine, and so I have 6-7 months later.
I wonder if the status bar is still working (I think it is last time I tried in Opera), but Omnom or the Channel itself has been less reliable recently with netsplits and whatnot.