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On stabilityOn stabilityPosted Sep 9, 2010 8:46 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769)In reply to: On stability by roelofs Parent article: Debian squeezes out Chromium
What do you mean by 'compatibility-busting'? New Firefox releases (and, I assume, Chrome and Chromium) have pretty good compatibility with everything except old plugins. A new release may add features, but the web being what it is, it's rare for browsers to break compatibility with existing sites or web applications.
That is why most distributions, including the commercial ones with long support windows, are happy to package the latest browser versions as they come out. Keeping your users on the same four-year-old browser (with only security fixes backported) is not long-term support worthy of the name.
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On stability Posted Sep 9, 2010 9:29 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] A new release may add features, but the web being what it is, it's rare for browsers to break compatibility with existing sites or web applications.Actually Opera 10.60 sometimes crashes on gmail, so I went back to 10.10. Bug report was sent.
On stability Posted Sep 10, 2010 23:43 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] A new release may add features, but the web being what it is, it's rare for browsers to break compatibility with existing sites or web applications.Actually Opera 10.60 sometimes crashes on gmail, so I went back to 10.10. Bug report was sent. I assume accidental incompatibility, which this surely is, isn't what the OP had in mind when complaining of compatibility-busting updates. One thing I thought of when I read that is compatibility with user procedures. If the user knows how to use Opera 59, will he be able to use Opera 60 the same way? In the eight years or so I've been using Opera, both on Linux and Windows, I've upgraded two or three times and each time features I used disappeared. Sometimes they disappeared for good; other times they went into hiding, bound to a different key or something. Consequently, my policy now is not to upgrade. If I were using a system where updates were essentially mandatory, I'd be pretty bothered.
On stability Posted Sep 9, 2010 17:04 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
New firefox requires new xulrunner and rendering libraries, which are not always compatible, and may require recompiling all dependent applications. If it was only firefox and thunderbird, and nothing else used the rendering engine, then sure, you could simply upgrade to the latest version without thinking. But there's other *desktop* apps involved too...
On stability Posted Sep 9, 2010 21:41 UTC (Thu) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link] What do you mean by 'compatibility-busting'?I meant more or less what the article was talking about, at least in part--i.e., the bundling of custom, system-incompatible libraries/toolkits such as Chromium and Webkit. (Other articles have covered Firefox's bundling and occasional forking of system libraries, not to mention its API disaster called "xulrunner.") But beyond that, there's the issue of "self-compatibility," which is what's relevant to the backporting of security fixes. Granted, it's unusual to ding a project on the pace of changes to its internals, but then again, in today's desktop systems there's no greater attack surface than the web browser (and its dependencies). Firefox's never-ending stream of vulnerabilities makes 1990s sendmail look good. I'm not a complete luddite; I get the need for apps that are as central to the user experience as browsers are to innovate, add features, etc. But with that great power comes great responsibility--i.e., to make the browser significantly more secure than the average desktop app--and I'm not seeing an acknowledgment of that responsibility. Indeed, the short support cycles and general level of code churn that limits the ability of others to provide such support are arguably an abdication of that responsibility. (And, for what it's worth, I really don't see a need for the feature cycles to be so rapid. What are the appalling omissions in, say, a 2007 browser--or even a 2009 one--that are blocking the deployment of critical new web stuff?) Note that nothing I've said implies that distributions should not be able to package newer releases if that's what makes sense for them. My beef is with the other end, i.e., development practices that penalize those distros (or end users) that don't want to upgrade more than once every couple of years. Greg
On stability Posted Sep 9, 2010 22:52 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
look at it this way. Google has a master plan for its Chrome browser that quite frankly does not include the needs of other linux distributions or their users. Chromium the project has a codebase which is the leading edge of that plan for Chrome the product.
Do you really think that ChromeOS is going to have a browser with this sort of rate of churn? The rapid rate of development for Chromium right now has a lot to do with Google's overall plan for its own product line. They have real consumer device targets in mind for Chrome and ChromeOS and what you are seeing is the development run-up towards very specific end-goals.
Lets face it, other linux distributions are not the target audience and are not driving the development curve. But the development curve does make sense if you look at stable ChromeOS deployments as the end goal for the rapid development push that is going on now with Chromium. We can get as mad as we want about the reality of that, and its not going to make any difference at all.
-jef
On stability Posted Sep 10, 2010 15:24 UTC (Fri) by nevyn (subscriber, #33129) [Link]
> Do you really think that ChromeOS is going to have a browser with this
> sort of rate of churn?
Yes. Look at the Nexus One, that has had ~4 download and reboot OS upgrades in the 6 months I've had it.
Release engineering and stability is something old people talk about.
On stability Posted Sep 10, 2010 16:57 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Which version of Android are you running? 2.1 as originally shipped or did you upgrade to 2.2?
On stability Posted Sep 10, 2010 21:03 UTC (Fri) by nevyn (subscriber, #33129) [Link]
2.2 now, I guess. I bought it in Feb. and hit the update button whenever it told me to (which, as I said, is like 4 times).
The apps. on it are even worse, it was a significant timesaver when the last OS update now allowed me to turn automatic updates on for them.
On stability Posted Sep 10, 2010 18:31 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
> Release engineering and stability is something old people talk about.
True! I nominate this for a quote of the week.
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