On the Isle of Rapidity
Not all of our neighbors followed us. Some asked — demanded? — that we send back supplies.
We acknowledged their request, but our immediate task was to explore this Isle of Rapidity. What surprises would we discover? What surprises would discover us?
To survive in this strange land, we would have to befriend new neighbors. Living for so long atop Mount Annum, we had almost forgotten how to introduce ourselves.
But we had brought much to share. We had barely opened our packs when the wind seemed to whisper:
Maybe it wouldn’t be so hard to make friends here.
And there was something inexplicably familiar about this island. Was it the scent of the flowers? The rhythmic waves in the distance? The chattering of wildlife, almost a chorus?
Here, a gift to your neighbor is equally a gift to yourself.
We felt a sudden shift in perception: the Isle of Rapidity was home.
August 28th, 2011 at 12:22 am
It keeps bugging me that Mozilla has not made it a priority to make msi-packages ready for corporations as part of the normal release cycle.
If such a package was available in a simple customizable format, I suppose big IT-departments would be much more eager to install or update Firefox.
I’ve followed the bug and offered some help, but nobody with the technical expertise required seems to care enough. And since this has to become part of the normal release process at Mozilla, the lead must come from within the core organization.
This is the no 1 thing to do to keep IT-departments happy. Not evangelism or explanations. Not even more speed or better HTML5 support – which I am not opposed. But for the uptake of Firefox msi-packages are the most critical thing to fix.
August 28th, 2011 at 5:17 am
@lars : We had an interesting discussion about it in the planning ml, see the posts referencing MSI in the “firefox enterprise edition” discussion https://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.planning/browse_thread/thread/c6bfb8eb74bc0a04/0196ab45e59c9552?hl=fr&q=msi&lnk=ol&
At the end of the day, someone must believe in it for it to happen, and I was a bit disappointed to see shaver seeing each problem as a blocker instead of something to overcome.
I believe a number of IT department have actually generated MSIs already, but it ends up an effort which is repeated everytime
Isle to rapidity : stay careful, Thunderbird 5 wasn’t a great story for my mum who encountered a systematic crash at start up, and it’s obvious from the crash-stats comments she wasn’t the only one (“x crash in a row”, “all was right until TB told me to upgrade to version 5, and then it’s completely broken”). Here the enhanced stability effort failed, in the worst way, only a few people concerned, but those one very badly.
August 28th, 2011 at 8:38 am
jmdesp – you raise an interesting point about stability. Even if a new version crashes less on average, releasing it can still cause problems because different users are affected by the crashes. Presumably, the users worst affected by crashes in the old version have found workarounds or switched to other software.
Aurora and Beta testers are great at catching regressions, and our crash-stats system tries to surface them, but it could do better.
Thunderbird might not have enough testers. But it would be a shame to hold back Firefox development because Thunderbird doesn’t have enough testers.
August 28th, 2011 at 4:00 pm
FYI the related bug is 660778 (also 662634, same issue generating a different stack trace, and maybe also 602225), and the various stack traces it generates seem to have occupied most of the top slots in the crash list for TB5.
August 29th, 2011 at 1:12 am
Yeah, the Isle of Rapidity was home — for developers. It is extremely convenient for them to break interfaces any time they need to implement new feature or refactor old code.
Progress is unstoppable and new APIs are necessary. But breaking APIs every 6 weeks is hideous idea (really, headache for addon devs) — one year might be good compromise. Don’t forget about Isle of Stability: Firefox is a king, but addons is retinue.