[please keep any replies on dev.b2g]

Mozilla and the community have been on a roll creating new products and 
evolving existing ones. We now release multiple browsers across a multitude of 
platforms, including

* Firefox – three desktop pre-release channels alongside our shipping version 
for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows (soon with a redesign)
* Firefox for Android – compatible with thousands of phones and tablets, also 
shipping to four channels
* Firefox ESR – sometimes with two supported releases overlapping at once

All of these products share a single platform, Gecko, and collectively release 
to hundreds of millions of users almost exactly every six weeks. Like a 
well-practiced choir, we synchronize our technical and organizational heartbeat 
around releases. This heartbeat enables us to push a unified vision across the 
entire web, keep our users regularly delighted with new (many times 
cross-platform) functionality, and prevent any one product from lagging behind 
in security updates.

You may have heard that we recently added a new product to the litter, Firefox 
OS. To put it bluntly, the project as a whole has been an incredible 
undertaking but we’ve finally pushed our v1.0 out the door with the help of our 
community and partners.

Unlike our desktop/mobile releases, we’ve had to do go even further than 
delighting our users. We’ve also had to juggle the timelines and requirements 
of all of the OEMs, carriers, and chipset manufacturers that we’ve partnered 
with. These new variables lead us to standardize on Gecko 18 for our first two 
major releases of Firefox OS. It made us “skip a beat”, but for all the right 
reasons.

Now that we have our v1.0 behind us and we’re moving forward with even more 
partners, we’re going to do our best to bring Firefox OS back into our 
heartbeat and will make quarterly feature releases available to partners along 
with six-weekly security updates for the previous two feature releases. As far 
as I know, that’s the most aggressive mobile OS release strategy  out there 
(and may still require some tweaking).

This sort of alignment across multiple browser products, and now an OS, is 
unprecedented at the pace we’re moving. Keep it up, Mozillians.

[0] 
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2013/07/19/mozillas-heartbeat-quarterly-firefox-os-releases/
 (original post)
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23230411
[2] 
https://docs.google.com/a/mozilla.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmStZDZgJbV7dDhtMDZlQmRtdDB4a1plZXRwNXIzYWc#gid=0
 (will make it onto the wiki shortly)
_______________________________________________
dev-platform mailing list
dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform

Reply via email to